Organizational Communication and Security
Document Type
Book Section
Publication Date
1-1-2019
Publication Title
The Handbook of Communication and Security
Publisher
Routledge
Edition
1
First page number:
136
Last page number:
152
Abstract
This chapter examines the interconnections between organizational communication and security. Using metadiscursive and topical lenses, it reviews how scholars have used organizational communication concepts to study security-related topics. It identifies the contexts, texts, artifacts, and events that these scholars have engaged. A focus on organizational communication helps explain how the meanings of security are created, maintained, or transformed in crucial meso-level and institutional settings. The chapter presents a case study of how organizational communication concepts can illuminate opaque facets of the formulation, circulation, and influence of national security strategy documents. This chapter focuses on organizational communication studies that take security as a primary conceptual concern or context. Normative studies tend to adopt instrumental and functionalist values, which lead them to address apparent problems of organizational (in)efficiency and (dis)order. Interpretive scholars subsequently demonstrate how everyday talk produces and maintains reality, and they see organizations as places where communities create and maintain shared values and practices. A critical metadiscourse goes beyond understanding organizational life and instead uses a priori theoretical commitments to critique domination. In sum, normative, interpretive, critical, and dialogic metadiscourses, along with the facets of organizational structure, process, culture, and power, provide a useful way to understand and categorize communication and security scholarship. The tenor of National Security Strategy (NSS) documents changes with each administration. Differences in the tenor of NSS documents across administrations have compelled communication scholars to undertake singular and comparative assessments as part of broader investigations of foreign policy.
Keywords
Organization communication; Security-related topics; National security strategy documents
Disciplines
Communication | Organizational Communication | Social and Behavioral Sciences
Language
English
Repository Citation
Bean, H.,
Rice, R.
(2019).
Organizational Communication and Security.
The Handbook of Communication and Security
136-152.
Routledge.