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

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.