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CHAPTER 23
Methodological issues for corporate
communication research
Richard J. Varey
This chapter contributes a review of typical methodological commitments in corporate
communication research, highlighting significant limitations and biases in the general
field of applied communication ‘research’ in the corporate situation. The purpose served
by management research with its particular outcomes is scrutinized. Popular ‘theories’
commonly in use in UK business and management schools are identified as are other theories
that are obscured or omitted from research practice when ‘human communication’
is treated as no more than an informing control technology. The orthodoxy of instrumental
managerialistic empiricism is characterized, highlighting the constraining dogma,
and challenged. A balanced (or alternative) social science is proposed.
The epistemic domains of
communication theory in
management studies
When management researchers make claims
to warranted knowledge, they necessarily
make epistemological commitments with implicit
or explicit theories of what constitutes
appropriate description and explanation of
what goes on in people’s lives. Such claims,
although often not actually ‘spoken’, tell the
‘reader’ to ‘listen’ and to take the work seriously
as legitimate, justified and authoritative.
Wilber (1996) shows that we make claims
to know internal ‘things’ (intentions) and
external ‘things’ (behaviour) about individuals
(personal, cultural things) and collectives
(communal, social things). The warrants to
know ‘good’ knowledge are, respectively,
truthfulness, truth, mutual understanding
and functional fit. Validity is conferred by pursuing
and demonstrating, through method,
respectively, integrity, a correct account of
nature, a right worldview and system functionality.
The phenomenon of people communicating
is generally treated as an ‘I’ or ‘It’
occurrence. Yet, only in the cultural domain of
intersubjective production of a right worldview
can we truly speak of the ‘We’ action of
communicating.
But, almost all managerially applied communication
theory is rooted in a cognitive
© 2004 Sandra Oliver for editorial matter and selection;
individual chapters, the contributors