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The Emergence of the Cultural Approach to Communication

By the 1970s, the large, bureaucratic, and homogeneous organizational form that had dominated the post–World War II era of unprecedented growth and stability had started to show its age. As such, a number of economic, political, and social factors came together that provided the impetus to look for new ways of approaching organizational life. This economic, political, and social transformation provides the frame for a number of research-related reasons why the cultural approach emerged as a new way of studying organizational life. In particular, some researchers were becoming critical of that dominant paradigm, which attempted to show causal relationships between various communication variables and organizational outcomes, such as effectiveness and productivity. Such an approach, it was argued, reflected a managerial conception of what was important to study in organizations. In other words, because managers were primarily interested in knowing how changes in organizational communication could lead to greater efficiency and productivity, that’s what researchers studied. As such, the cultural approach started from the notion that one should study organizations not just to improve their efficiency and make people better employees but also because they are interesting and complex communication phenomena in their own right. Understanding how they operate thus provides greater insight into an important element of the human condition. Of course, the idea of culture as a metaphor for the study of organizations did not originate in the field of organizational communication. The interpretive study of culture involves thick description—that is, the development of narrative accounts that provide rich insight into the complex meaning patterns that underlie people’s collective behavior.