The expanding territory of organizational communication in China

Abstract

The field of organizational communication has been dominated by the Euro-American intellectual tradition. In order to create a multicultural field, this study proposes a Chinese-centered perspective to examine organizational communication in Mainland China. Based on a search of the Chinese National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI) database using the key words “organizational communication,” the authors collected 129 articles that were published from 1996 to 2014. Using a Chinese-centered perspective, the authors then developed a codebook based on the thematic analysis of the collected articles. A content analysis was employed to analyze year-to-year distributions, definitions of organizational communication, topical areas, theoretical orientations, and methods that were reported in the articles. The results were used to map the current trajectory of organizational communication studies in China. Based on our findings, we recommend that organizational communication scholars acknowledge local philosophies and build local frameworks in order to promote the global inclusivity of the field of organizational communication.