50 Years in the Making: Reflections on the ICA Organizational Communication Division

Research
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The Organizational Communication Division of the ICA (International Communication Associaction) turns 50 and they made a nice video which I share here for two reasons:

  1. Organizational Communication is one of the research fields in which meetings are being studied, but not every meeting researcher is aware of this. Interestingly (as mentioned in the video), “the tele-conference: an electronic meeting” was a topic discussed at one of the divisions early gatherings in 1975. (If anyone can dig up that paper, I’d be curious to look at it!)
  2. It strikes me that many of the mile-stones in the development of the division that the people in the video recall are new types of communication events during their conferences, i.e. innovations in communication design. It’s not surprising, of course, that scholars of organizational communication come up with new ways of organizing their own communication, but it’s nevertheless worth noting.

Thanks to @f.cooren, a former president of the ICA (and featured in the video at 12:01 for making me aware of the video.

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Interesting! May be we should become a subsection of this club?

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The problem with this is the same as with affiliating ourselves with any of the many existing conferences that we discussed at the symposium last year: the idea of the meeting science symposium as well as with Kunsido is to facilitate exchange and cross-fertilization across existing research fields and disciplines. Becoming a subsection of the OrgCom section of the ICA would mean to say: we study meetings from the perspective of organizational communication. But while this is true for some of us, many of us, I belive, would describe their work quite differently.