The authors provide nine propositions regarding the function and effects of supervisor-subordinate communication to encourage business communication researchers to go beyond a unidimensional view of this workplace relationship. Taken together, these propositions represent an argument that connects and clarifies the associations between micro-level supervisor-subordinate communication behaviors and macro-level organizational learning. We explain how command structures produce relational contexts that create consequences for communication behaviors between subordinates and their supervisors. Specifically, we explain how subordinates’ reluctance to disagree with supervisors results in silence or equivocation—what the authors label the hierarchical mum effect. In turn, we describe how this organizational suppression of dissent produces a barrier to organizational learning and adaptation.

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Writing as an organizational communication scholar, I provide a brief description and history of theories encapsulated by the phrase communication is constitutive of organizing (CCO). Then, I explain that CCO theory would benefit from an explicit differentiation between which conditions are prerequisite to and which conditions ensure the constitution of organization. Specifically, I argue that communication may be better thought of as a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for organizing. CCO TheoryCCO theories articulate a communicative ontology of organization. Although the specific mechanisms and processes by which communication is associated with organization are debated hotly among theorists, one premise remains constant across the tradition: Communication calls organization into being. A Brief HistoryDuring the interpretive turn in the 1980s, some organizational communication scholars began to change their focus from "communicating in organizations"

This study uses discursive positioning theory to explore how planned change messages influence organizational members' identity and the way they experienced organizational change. Based on an in-depth case study of a home healthcare and hospice organization that engaged in a multiyear planned change process, our analysis suggests that workers experienced salient change messages as constituting unfavorable identities, which were associated with the experiences of violation, recitation, habituation, or reservation. Our study also explores the way discursive and material contexts enabled and constrained the governing board's change messages as they responded to external and internal audiences. We highlight the importance of viewing messaging as a process of information transfer as well as discursive construction, which has important implications for the way change agents approach issues of sense making, emotionality, resistance, and materiality during planned change processes. Keywords emotion, materiality, organizational communication, organizational discourse, planned change comunication, positioning theory Planned change research has given little attention to the way that employees make sense of messages about change and how their sense making subsequently positions them to act in the future (Bartunek et al., 2006). The dominant focus of planned change research has emphasized the importance of creating messages that enable a shared understanding

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This language production experiment investigates communication's role in defending, and therefore giving sense to, organizational wrongdoing. The study suggests identification may possibly reduce organizations' moral learning capacity by encouraging highly identified members to engage in ethical sensegiving of their organizations' wrongdoing in defensive ways. Working adults (N = 318) responded to an organizational outsider regarding a gender discrimination lawsuit filed against their organization in one of two scenarios, which presented the organization's guilt as either ambiguous or certain. Highly identified members used more linguistic defense mechanisms and reported more intense feelings. Additionally, participants in the ambiguous condition used more linguistic defense mechanisms than those in the certain condition. Veteran members reported higher levels of organizational identification and used more linguistic defense mechanisms than newcomers.

In this language production experiment, working adults (N ¼ 226) were asked to respond to unethical business requests. Our objective was to advance a communicative understanding of unethical organizational behaviors by analyzing the linguistic adjustments workers employ to deny unethical requests. Specifically, we measured responses to unethical requests on a continuous coding scheme, which captured degrees of denial directness. We hypothesized that command structures produce a hierarchical mum effect in which subordinates are more indirect in denying an unethical request than supervisors and coworkers. Results confirmed the presence of a hierarchical mum effect; data also indicated that females, younger workers, and those with the least work experience are most indirect in denying an unethical request.

The forum guest editor Ryan Bisel in this issue takes on the topic of big data and presents a round table that grew out of a conference panel. Five scholars engage in a discussion of the social and cultural trend of big data and implications to qualitative organizational communication research. The contributors respond to questions and delve into a number of issues, from theoretical, to institutional, to operational, to practical, by sharing thoughts and experiences about definition, assumptions, theory building, execution at every stage of a big data project and reflections beforehand and afterward. Opening Remarks The phrase "big data" refers to a trend in corporate and academic circles to utilize increasingly available stores of structured and unstructured