Communication in Organizations: Structures and Practices

Communication is nowadays more and more frequently considered an essential parameter in the construction, maintenance and change of organizations. This has resulted in a growing importance of qualitative conceptualizations in organization theory and of perspectives on organizational communication in sociolinguistics. Nevertheless, overlaps in the research between the qualitative branch of organization theory and the sociolinguistic research of businesses have been to date very sparse. Difficulties in tying both academic perspectives together seem to be related to the lack of theoretical assumptions which could bridge the gap between linguistics and organization theory, for example, as far as the construction of macrostructural models out of the analyses of interactive behavior is concerned. This collection develops suggestions on how to set starting points for an interdisciplinary research program.