A critical review of how communication scholarship is represented in textbooks: the case of organizational communication and CCO theory

ABSTRACT

A significant issue for any academic field is how key theories are represented in textbooks. Textbooks are important institutional artifacts that organize entire subject areas, and thus key sites for assessing how scholarly ideas are developed and understood. However, the field of communication studies has done little to investigate how the key theories of our discipline are represented in our textbooks. This critical essay seeks to remedy this shortcoming with an exemplar investigation from the field of organizational communication and CCO Theory. We summarize the current state of CCO thinking and explore how this theory is portrayed in organizational communication textbooks, while also discussing implications of textbook representations for the broader field of communication studies.

KEYWORDS:

• CCO
• organizational communication
• textbooks
• pedagogy
• constitutive view of communication

Acknowledgements

A previous version of this manuscript received a top paper award from the Organizational Communication Division of National Communication Association at the 2017 annual convention in Dallas, TX. The authors thank Ryan Bisel for his helpful comments on an earlier draft of this manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. A Google Scholar search of ‘textbook’ in the title and ‘communication’ in the source revealed 118 citations, none of which address the issue of communication theory representation or dissemination in textbooks.

2. This only includes textbooks that are currently in print, but not out-of-print textbooks that still may be available from a used bookseller.

3. To be sure, the implications and applications of these ideas are still debated within the scholarly literature, just not necessarily the premises themselves. For example, there continues to be lively debates about the exact nature of CCO’s ontological claims (e.g. Kuhn, Ashcraft, & Cooren, 2017), but the idea that CCO is making ontological claims about communication and organizations is not debated.

4. These articles motivated a subsequent pre-conference at the 2002 National Communication Association convention called ‘The Communicative Constitution of Organization and Its Implications for Theory, Research, and Practice,’ which resulted in Putnam and Nicotera's (2009) influential book Building Theories of Organization: The Constitutive Role of Communication.

5. We consulted organizational communication colleagues from Europe regarding additional textbooks we should include in our review. We were told that most European universities either use one of the English-language textbooks already included in our review, or use corporate communication textbooks or scholarly handbooks that would not be relevant for our analysis.

6. Every chapter in this textbook is a separate theory attributed to a specific author(s), but not written by that author.