RealitiesAnyone planning a career f

Realities
Anyone planning a career faces three realities. First, organizations permeate
almost all aspects of our adult lives from providing careers to controlling our
choices in goods and services. Even the smallest independent group of highly
creative individuals must have some form of organization. We must interact
with all sizes of organizations, ranging from Microsoft with its predominance
in the electronic world to the local coffee, pizza, bagel, Internet café, or grocery
store. This omnipresence in our postbaccalaureate careers means understanding
organizations is synonymous with the pursuit of rewarding employment
and achieving our goals. Except for the unusual and most likely unemployable
individual, the need to operate effectively with and within organizations is as
real a skill and an occupational necessity as knowing how to find a job or learn
a vocation.
How we interact leads to the second reality. Later in this chapter and
throughout this book, we demonstrate the importance of communication. For
now, it is sufficient to state that communication is both a primary perspective
for understanding how organizations function and a guide for how we should
behave in organizations if we are to advance and enjoy our careers. Changing
organizations are the third reality and we focus on these changes shortly.
The key concepts covered in this chapter include:
The ever-changing world of organizational communication—the
digital age, change, diversity
Communication in organizations—importance to the organization,
leaders, individuals
Understanding organizational communication
Perspectives—communication as process, transactional perspective
Organizations as systems
Complex systems—second-order change, learning organizations,
sense-making, self-organizing
The Ever-Changing World of Organizational Communication
The changes impacting organizations are the third reality. As you will discover,
organizing and communicating involve ongoing changes. “Change is
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• Applied Organizational Communication
a ubiquitous phenomenon in organizations, and communication is a central
process in planning and implementing change” (Jones, Watson, Gardner, &
Gallios, 2004, p. 735). Although change has always existed, the speed, breadth,
and impact of change are truly different as we travel through the new millennium.
The Internet and globalization force innovation requiring organizations
to be more efficient and “rewiring them for creativity and growth”
(McGregor, 2006, p. 64). The dynamic nature of organizations is examined
throughout this text. At this point, we will consider three forces—the digital
age, speed of change, and diversity.
Digital Age
First, we are in the digital age. The massive growth in electronic communication
has created a revolution easily as great as the Industrial Revolution that
began in the late 1800s. The rivers of electronic 1s and 0s that computers create,
move, process, store, retrieve, shape, and reshape are the basic elements
of the postindustrial age. This information revolution reaches through innumerable
circuits criss-crossing cyberspace. “In the 21st century, information
technology will drive economic wealth. The innovations developed by the
computing, telecommunications, consumer electronics, and electronic media
industries will affect every business large and small—and dramatically change
our home lives as well” (Katz, 1997, p. 1). Over the past 25 years, the Information
Revolution has boosted productivity by almost 70% during that period
(Mandel, 2005). The technology of information, or infotech, makes knowledge
a vital commodity requiring the effective utilization of the distinctly human
elements of an organization such as communication, culture, and leadership
(Colvin, 1997). Google is so ubiquitous that it has become its own verb (Weise,
2005). In October 2005, for example, of the 5.1 billion Internet searches, 2.4
billion used Google, which, in many cases, “is taking the place of not only
a trip to the library, but also a call to Mom, a recipe box, the phone book
and neighborly advice” (Weise, 2005, p. 1D). However, as many individuals
have found with the online Wikipedia, not all Internet information is correct
because much of the available data is supplied by users who may not be
experts on the topic (Weise, 2005). Another impact of the digital revolution is
that we no longer depend on others to do many of our everyday tasks. “With
digital cameras, we print our own photographs. With ATMs, we do the work
bank-tellers used to do for us. We track online the packages we ship” (Toffler,
2006, p. 8). You can add numerous other web-oriented activities such as college
registration, paying income taxes, doing searches, and so on.
This is a relatively new phenomenon. Integrated circuits have been around
for about 40 years and microprocessors for a little more than 30 years. During
those 30 years, microprocessors’ performance has multiplied by a factor
of more than 10,000. The first PC (1974) operated at 2 MHz and contained
Adopting a Perspective •
256 bites of RAM. Today’s newest PCs run at 500 MHz+ and have 3 million
times as much RAM.
Consumer electronics worldwide include 2 billion mobile phones; 1.5 billion
TV sets; 820 million PCs; 190 million Game Boys; 70 million iPods; 50
million PDAs; and 3.2 million BlackBerrys (Conlin, 2006, p. 27). There are
multibillions of microchips in coffee-makers, clock radios, calculators, cars,
and computers and they are used to control airplanes, switch phone calls,
watch weather systems, and track our bills or college grades. Computers control
the power grids, the water plants, and a plethora of other utilities and
public services that work seamlessly to keep homes and offices running. Last
year more microchips were produced (and at a lower cost) than grains of rice
(Conlin, 2006). As important as the internal combustion engine or the electric
motor were as innovations, the microchip amplifies our intellect. Automobiles
allow us to travel greater distances in less time with less strain. The computer
and other digital devices free the mind, increase our ability to connect with
others, and enhance our information resources.
The Internet, originally created to enhance national security and academic
research, is now a mainstay of life for many people and organizations and
impacts every age bracket as shown by this breakdown of who is online: 19–29
= 88%; 20–49 = 84%; 50–64 = 71%; 65+ = 32% (Conlin, 2006). “The Internet
has become ubiquitous, so companies can connect with talent anywhere in
the blink of an eye, inside or outside the company. Open-source software can
be plucked off the shelf to become the foundation of new software programs
or Web sites (Hamm, 2005, p. 71). The World Wide Web (WWW) became a
player in 1989. The Internet moves stand-alone computers from being textprocessors
and number-crunchers to communications devices, which change
the way we use them, and begins “to alter in bold new ways how we work and
live” (Spear, 2000, p. 90). “Technology has sped up economic and social life
with inventions that take off with lives of their own, such as e-mail or gene
manipulation” (Issak, 2005, p. 22). In fact, there are some legitimate misgivings
regarding the digital impact. “The time for human communication is cut
shorter; the means more homogeneous: the mode, cooler: Computer, fax and
cell phone interactions replace face-to-face conversations and the charm and
nuances of body language” (Issak, 2005, p. 27).
The Y2K (Year 2000) problem offers a clear example of computers’ influence
in most aspects of our lives. A great deal of time and energy was spent in
the last few years of the old millennium attempting to correct the millennium
bug, which had the potential to paralyze computers once January 1, 2000
arrived. Early programmers used only the last two digits of the year (e.g., 80 or
91) instead of all four numbers (e.g., 1980 or 1991) when designing the clocks
that monitor and run computers. At the time, the memory required to store
these additional two digits for all potential transactions would have been too
expensive to commit or nonexistent. However, this meant that if the oversight
• Applied Organizational Communication
was not corrected, January 1, 2000 (01.01.00) would be read by the computers
used by banks, air traffic controllers, military defense or at home as 00 meaning
it would be 1900 or the beginning of the last century. In theory, this could
have shut down many organizations. The final cost of correcting this glitch
surpassed $122 billion in the United States and $282 billion worldwide (International
Data Corporation, 2000). As organizations rushed to correct Y2K,
they discovered to their chagrin that billions of embedded microprocessors or
microchips controlling factories, mixing fuel in automotive engines, automatically
flushing some toilets, and operating digital televisions, smart phones,
or video games could also create havoc. Even if an organization corrected
its Y2K problems, it was still connected with numerous other computer-controlled
devices that may not have been corrected by the year 2000. A programming
decision made many years ago had the potential to impact almost
everyone. For our purposes, Y2K underscores the wide-ranging impact of the
digital age and the interdependency of organizational communication systems.
We discuss interdependency later in this chapter and book.
By their very nature, electronics flatten corporate pyramids, change the
competitive picture, redraw communication channels, and alter the traditional
pathways for success (James, 1996). Electronic communication channels
are overtaking memos and other written formats.
Internets, Intranets, CNN, and many other electronic media can connect
almost all employed individuals. Students conduct information searches for
papers, businesses seek competitive information, Web surfers visit chat rooms
and discover unusual sites, an