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

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