Organizational Communication: A Review and Analysis of Three Current Approaches to the Field

This article examines the study of organizational communication as presently offered by the fields of Organizational Behavior, Organizational Communication, and Business Communication. Concerns, philosophies, and methodologies of the three areas are compared in order to identify the current conceptual framework of organizational communication. The critical issues explored are those concerned with questions of academic respectability, which is centered on the theoretic versus skills orientations of communication; centrality, which reviews the debate on whether communication is a central or peripheral variable in organizations; and the consequences of studying organizational communication in the three fields.