Positive Organizational Communication Scholarship

Abstract

Positive organizational communication (POC) scholarship focuses on how language, interaction, and socially constructed meaning contribute to especially positive processes and outcomes in human organizing. POC, an iteration of positive organizational scholarship (POS), is the scientific pursuit to understand the various forces – processes, human traits, organizational functions, motivations, goals, effects, and outcomes – that contribute to positivity in organizational contexts. Three terms comprise POS: positive , to highlight affirmative, enriching, and generative processes, outcomes, and forces; organizational to delineate the scope of study as human organizing; and scholarship to indicate the social scientific basis for POS claims, theories, and ideas. POC adds the term communication, to demarcate its foci – the ways humans use and understand language to create various social structures, meanings, and processes. One of the central ideas in POC is that human interaction and humans' responses to those interactions are rooted discourses – historical and cultural systems guiding norms, beliefs, and meanings of language use.