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Friday, January 18, 2008

Growth or public interest

Historically, the need for effective communication in management has been noted since

the turn of the century, but few specific works on industrial communica!ion occurred

before the forties. One of the first comprehensive books on the subject, published in

1949, had a

bibliography of 103 titles with only two references dated . before 1940.

The subsequent growth of interest in organization communication can be attributed to:

(1) the marked increase in the size of companies and their

international growth since W orId War I;

(2) the continued specialization of occupations and the

resultant demands for co-ordination; .

(3) the growth of trade union power and its requirements for information about all matters

affecting its member’s work or terms of employment with the result that explanations are

being seen as a right and authoritarian instructions are being rejected;

(4) the growth of national communication networks,

forcing co-ordination in and between firms;

(5) the pressures for increasing occupational mobility which cause the recruit to be

heavily dependent on the organization’s communi-cation system if he is to ‘learn the

ropes’ as soon as possible;

(6) the ‘information revolution’ -through the discoveries and use of automatic information

storage and retrieval, the automation of information search and analysis, instant physical

transmission of information, semi-automatic planning, and decision-making etc.;

(7) the belief that all of these trends seem likely to

continue.

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