Organizational Communication Commons^™

Communicating Creativity: A Workshop And Communication Tools For Teaching And Consulting In Creativity, Stephen J. Hammond

Creativity and Change Leadership Graduate Student Master's Projects

This project developed tools to support a consulting practice integrating the author’s interests in creative process, design and organizational strategy. The focus is on educating students and clients about creativity, creative thinking, design and innovation. Design thinking concepts of user feedback and rapid prototyping were used during the project. The resulting products are materials for a multi-day graduate level workshop for design students, a creativity website including blogging capability and a four minute educational video aimed at helping establish an Aerospace Technology Center in Northern Illinois.

Cedars, April 2013, Cedarville University

Cedars

No abstract provided.

The D.B. Weldon Library's Instruction Portfolio: A Grassroots, Team-Based Approach, Kim Mcphee, Melanie Mills, Marg Sloan

Western Libraries Presentations

In an effort to address ever-shifting staffing levels and evolving service demands, staff in the Research & Instructional Services department of The D.B. Weldon Library at Western University developed and implemented a new and strategic approach to structuring their work. The ‘Portfolio Model’ provides a framework for organizing the primary functions of the department - collections, instruction and reference - while at the same time preserving liaison at its core. Through a close examination of this grassroots effort and in particular, the achievements realized and challenges faced by the team of librarians and library assistants who together comprise the ‘Instruction …

The D.B. Weldon Library's Instruction Portfolio: A Grassroots, Team-Based Approach, Kim Mcphee, Melanie Mills, Marg Sloan

Melanie Mills

Webmail Crisis 2012: A Case Study Analysis Of The Western Michigan University Webmail Plus Failure, Matthew Vargo

Honors Theses

Background Electronic mail, or email, can trace its origin to Arpanet. Arpanet was a network of interlinked computers created by the Advanced Research Projects Agency (Harrison, 2003). The proliferation of email from Arpanet in the 1970's to modern use has been apparent. Today, over 3.4 billion email accounts exist worldwide with expected growth (The Raticati Group, Inc., 2012). Webmail Plus is the email platform used at Western Michigan University. The system is a third-party cloud based service provided by Merit Network Inc. (Merit Network Inc., 2013). On September 2ih, 2012, five hard drives failed at Merit Network in Southfield, Michigan. …

Portraying Sense Of Community Through Communication: How To Maximize The Benefit Of Social Media For A Community Agency, Julia Walter

Honors Theses

Perceptions of social media networks are changing rapidly. Their purpose, function, effectiveness, and relevance are being widely debated while their global popularity and societal influence escalate. While individuals used the networks to share, manage, and change their personal lives, organizations jumped at the chance to benefit from low-cost public relations, advertising, and market research. Many organizations speedily adjusted their communication strategies to access these low-cost resources. Due to historical marginalization many nonprofit community agencies were slower to integrate this new media costing them the opportunity to compete for audience attention on level with the private industry. Neglecting to integrate these …

President Barack Obama's Commencement Addresses: Revising The Functions Of Ceremonial Rhetoric, Milene Ortega Ribeiro

Graduate Research Symposium (GCUA) (2010 - 2017)

Commencement speakers are typically expected to praise students for their achievements and motivate them for the path that is to come. When the commencement speaker is a President, however, the expectation is different. In times of rhetorical presidency, no presidential address is apolitical, and this project investigated the functions of ceremonial rhetoric in light of the rhetorical presidency doctrine. Close textual analysis of the three most controversial commencement speeches delivered by President Obama, revealed that the challenge of fulfilling the expectations of a commencement address, while also responding to rhetorical problems, required the President to adopt complex rhetorical strategies. The …

Prescribed Reading: April 2013, Centracare Clinic

Prescribed Reading

• Health Care Matters: Are patient lobbies a worthy patient satisfaction effort?
• Nominate a co-worker who Leads with Care
• Employee recognition for years of service
• Patient Satisfaction Scorecard
• Welcome to our new providers!
• Welcome to these new employees
• Attention employees: coders wanted
• Epic production upgrade scheduled May 12
• Learning from our patients’ stories
• Attend Women’s Health 101 and receive Wellness Reward points
• Congratulations to Dr. Leither!
• New name, location — same great people
• Do you have the CCHS Medical Plan?
• What are Pension Hours?
• Double check your HRA claims processing
• Weight Watchers at Work – now half price
• Join the Spring …

Social Media As Technologies Of Accountability: Explaining Resistance To Implementation Within Organizations, Jeffrey Treem

Collaborative Organizations & Social Media Conference

No abstract provided.

The Organization (Re)Invented By Its Blogs, Alex Primo

Collaborative Organizations & Social Media Conference

This article discusses how interactions in organizational blogs participate in the

emergence of the organization itself. Based on the principles of The Montreal School of organizational communication, the paper reflects on how the recursive relationship between texts and conversations in blogs, according to their affordances, mobilizes the organization and contributes to its continuing creation. In order to conduct this argument, the concept of social media, uses of organizational blogs and the main contributions of The Montreal School are analyzed. Finally, this article demonstrates how blogs contribute to the definition of the organization. Beyond their promotional potential, the blog’ role as …

Framing Ict Usage In The Real Estate Industry, Steven Jones

Collaborative Organizations & Social Media Conference

The real estate industry, like many, is one based on a competitive consumer culture in which professionals vie for the business and, ultimately, the loyalty of customers. In this case, those customers are purchasing what, for most, is a significant investment, requiring them to navigate various legal and regulatory processes that might be impossible without the assistance of a knowledgeable, seasoned agent. It is the presence of agency that renders real estate unique from retail and other industries where goods and services trade hands. Furthermore, the rise of various information and communication technologies (ICT) over the course of the past …

Microblogging Practices Of Virtual Organizations: Commonalities And Contrasts, Jing Wang

Collaborative Organizations & Social Media Conference

Microblogging is becoming increasingly pervasive in computer-supported collaboration, attracting various types of users. Organizations, as one type, are willing to leverage this social media service for their operation, but lack guidance of how to effectively manage their organizational microblogs. However, research on microblogging practices at organizational level, especially in virtual organizations, is very limited. To enhance the understanding of how virtual organizations use microblogs in similar and different ways, we investigate microblogging practices of two virtual organizations by examining the content characteristics of their Twitter posts. We identify eleven categories of microblog themes of three dimensions, consisting of both common …

Virtual Communities Don’T Exist: Avoiding Digital Dualism In Studying Collaboration, Pj Rey, Nathan Jurgenson

Collaborative Organizations & Social Media Conference

Effective collaboration in communities requires information sharing. Though digital media may have certain affordances that encourage us to communicate differently than in the past, the communities these media facilitate are no less real than communities bound together by voice or text. In this paper, we argue that idea of “virtual communities” is misleading. Communities and collaboration occur not in some virtual world or a new, cyber, space, but instead they are part of one reality influenced simultaneously by materiality and the various flows of information—digital included. In light of this argument, we implore researchers to take serious the influence of …

The “New” Prosumer: Collaboration On The Digital And Material “New Means Of Prosumption”, George Ritzer

Collaborative Organizations & Social Media Conference

Many of “cyber-utopians” have lauded the Internet, especially social networking sites, for a variety of reasons, including making possible a dramatic and revolutionary increase in social collaboration (Benkler, 2007; Tapscott and Williams, 2006). The goal of this essay is to examine- and, at least in part, debunk- this claim from a new and unique sociological perspective- the relationship between collaboration and the “new means of prosumption”. Such an examination is suggested by the fact that collaboration is, by definition, a form of prosumption. That is, it involves one or more parties “producing” and other(s) “consuming” something of mutual interest and …

Measuring Creative Performance Of Teams Through Dynamic Semantic Social Network Analysis, Peter Gloor

Collaborative Organizations & Social Media Conference

In this project we compare communication structure and content exchanged by members of creative, interdisciplinary teams of medical researchers, physicians, patients and caretakers with their creative output. We find that longitudinal social networking patterns and word usage predict creative performance. We collected the e-mail archives of 60 members of a community of researchers working on 12 projects improving various aspects of the daily lives of patients of Crohn’s disease. Our results indicate that more creative projects show a decrease in group density, while more actors are involved, and more emails are exchanged, suggesting that a more successful project attracts more …

The Future Of Social Movement Organizations: The Waning Dominance Of Smos Online, Jennifer Earl

Collaborative Organizations & Social Media Conference

For scholars interested in the role of information communication technologies (ICTs) in protest and social movements, the importance of organizations doesn’t appear to be as axiomatic. Work over the past decade researching “Internet activism” has raised fundamental questions about SMOs and their continuing importance to protest: Do organizations play the same role in online protest as they have played in offline protest? Are SMOs as necessary for online movements and protest organizing? What role or functions do SMOs play in online protest? In this article, I address these questions by first surveying social movement research on pre-Internet protest to establish …

The Role Of Social Media For Knowledge Sharing And Collaboration In Distributed Teams, Nicole Ellison, Matthew Weber

Collaborative Organizations & Social Media Conference

Social media are providing a medium through which individuals are reshaping how they do many things – finding romantic partners, providing social support, grieving for loved ones, even buying mundane items like toothpaste. They are also reshaping organizations – the way they function, the relationships they contain, and the ways organizations interact with external stakeholders. In this paper, we consider the changes that social media have introduced to organizational knowledge-sharing practices. We believe the social and technical affordances of social media create new challenges for organizations and necessitate research examining the ways in which: (1) technological affordances impact knowledge sharing …

Framing Social Media And Organizations, Dhiraj Murthy

Collaborative Organizations & Social Media Conference

No abstract provided.

Organization Outreach To The Sfa Campus, Julissa Lopez, Wil Mcfarland, Amy Brennan, Trevor Sparks

Undergraduate Research Conference

Ineffective communication between organizations and students leads to misconceptions as well as low organizational awareness, in both their existence and causes. Organizations tend to be too passive in their recruiting techniques. Communication education and training can aid organizations in becoming more effective at marketing to students and bridging the gap between potential members. Organizations fight for the attention of students to increase enrollment but in order to create initial student curiosity and involvement organizations must spark interest. We hoped to reinforce effective ways to communicate to the student body and increase involvement. We aimed to provide research for organizational leaders …

The Role Of Social Media For Knowledge Sharing And Collaboration In Distributed Teams, Nicole Ellison, Matthew Weber

Collaborative Organizations & Social Media Conference

Abstract