Organizational Communication Division

Meet the New Officers

Ted Zorn is the division's Vice Chair, effective October 15, 2010. Ted is Professor and Chairperson in the Department of Management Communication at the University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand. His teaching and research interests are organizational change processes, such as IT implementation, change-related communication, and enhancing workplace well-being. Ted has received more than $3M in research grant funding, is past editor of Management Communication Quarterly, past chair of the Organizational Communication Division of the National Communication Association, USA, and the 2006 recipient of the ICA Organizational Communication Division's Frederic Jablin Award.

Boris Brummans is the division's new Secretary-elect. He will assume the role of Secretary at the conclusion of the 2011 conference in Boston. Boris is Associate Professor in the Département de Communication at the Universite de Montréal in Canada. His research looks at Buddhist organizing in different parts of Asia; the role of framing in intractable environmental conflicts; and the communicative constitution of Doctors Without Borders/Medecins sans Frontieres (MSF). He has received several awards, among which the 2009 ICA Outstanding Article Award and the 2008 Article of the Year Award from NCA's Organizational Communication Division. Currently, he is conducting two funded research projects on, respectively, Buddhist non-profit organizing in The Republic of China (Taiwan) and MSF's everyday decision making in several African countries.

Congratulations to the President-Elect-Select

Congratulations to Organizational Communication Division member and former Division Chair Cynthia Stohl, who was elected as President-Elect of ICA! Cynthia will assume her duties at the conclusion of the 2011 conference in Boston.

Sneak Peak at the Doctoral Preconference

The division will hold a 1-day doctoral preconference for the 2011 Boston conference. Codirectors Joann Keyton and Ted Zorn are hard at work finalizing the design and details of the day, but here is a preliminary glimpse. The event is titled "Developing a Meaningful Career in Organizational Communication Studies." It will focus on important early career decisions and dilemmas encountered by scholars as they move from graduate student to faculty roles. The preconference will be led by a group comprising both senior members of the field and early career scholars. The session are targeted to doctoral students nearing completion of their course work, or who have completed course work and are writing their dissertations. Students from all conceptual and methodological perspectives are encouraged to attend.

Who Are We?

For those who may not know us, here is a brief sense of our division:

Organizational Communication Division members seek to expand our understanding of the processes, prospects, and challenges of communicating and organizing in a global society. We examine how communication shapes and is shaped by organizing across a range of contexts, including health care, community cooperatives, government and non-government agencies, global corporations, profit and not-for-profit organizations, and virtual and geographically colocated work. We study a variety of multilevel phenomena including: discourse and discursive practices, communication of emotions, leader-follower communication, democratic communicative practices, negotiation and bargaining, group processes and decision making, socialization, power and influence, organizational culture, organizational language and symbolism, communication and conflict, identity and identification, adoption and appropriation of communication technologies, emergence of organizational and interorganizational networks, and new organizational forms. Please visit our website to learn more about us: http://www.icahdq.org/divisions/orgcomm/index.htm.

Janet Fulk, Chair
fulk@usc.edu

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Political Communication Division

ICA Political Communication Graduate Student Preconference. As we've discussed in our annual business meeting in Singapore, the division will be dedicating a preconference to the mentoring of graduate students. The preconference will bring together a select group of graduate students working on political communication projects and provide them with the opportunity to present and discuss their projects in a constructive atmosphere. The event will take place at the College of Communication at Boston University, on May 26, 2011. The full call for abstracts for the preconference is available on our website at http://www.politicalcommunication.org/announcements.html. Please forward the call to relevant graduate students and encourage them to apply.

Cosponsored conferences. Two additional exciting events are on the horizon. The division will be cosponsoring a conference titled "Transnational Connections – Challenges and Opportunities for Communication and Public Opinion Research" which will take place for the second year in Segovia (Spain) March 17-18, 2011.  We will also cosponsor a conference titled "Political Communication in the Era of New Technologies" to take place in Warsaw (Poland), 22 - 23 September 2011. The calls for these conferences are pasted below, and on our website at http://www.politicalcommunication.org/announcements.html.

Yariv Tsfati, Chair
ytsfati@com.haifa.ac.il

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Popular Communication Division

Interested in popular culture and communication, media and everyday life, or critical approaches to production, reception, textuality and technology? Then the ICA’s Popular Communication Division (known fondly as ‘Popcom’) is here to put you in touch with like-minded scholars and their work. As a medium-sized division within the ICA we are sufficiently small to be fluffily communal and unintimidating, but large enough to encompass a variety of approaches and topics at ICA conferences. We also have a reputation for organizing delicious and mildly intoxicating social gatherings, at what we are assured are the hippest local venues, to bring to a merry conclusion those long – though fulfilling - conference days. Add to that our official journal, Popular Communication (Taylor and Francis), published four times a year and free to division members (see below), as well as our biannual newsletter, and you can probably understand why Popcom is quite so…..well, popular. Thus: if you are not yet a member – or if you are lapsed – it makes obvious sense to join up now, while stocks last.

Popcom at Boston 2011
Submissions - of which there are a great number - are still underway (at the time of writing) for the forthcoming ICA conference in Boston. Attractions being organized by your dedicated Popcom crew currently include a one-day pre-conference snappily entitled Placing the Aesthetic in Popular Culture: Quality, Value, and Beauty in Communication and Scholarship, which is cosponsored by Philosophy of Communication and the Visual Studies Division. We are also planning a special screening - cosponsored by the Feminist Studies of Division - of the Media Education Foundation’s Codes of Gender, directed by Sut Jhally, who will also present and discuss the film at the screening. Popcom members will be receiving more information about these events in due course. If you are not a member please read the last line of the first paragraph again, this time with feeling.

Those Popcom Election Results in Full!
It is with great pleasure that we announce the election of Stijn Reijnders (Erasmus University, Rotterdam) to the position of division Secretary, and Ranjana Das (London School of Economics and Political Science, er…. London) to the position of Graduate Student Representative. Stijn and Ras will assume their awesome powers and responsibilities at the end of the Boston conference. A hearty congratulations to them both.

Popular Communication: The International Journal of Media and Culture

Popular Communication recently published a special issue on "Media and the Global Recession," including analysis of the recession’s effects on various media industries internationally, and on coverage of the recession, from a collection of twenty-two scholars. Our forthcoming special issue in mid-2011 will be on African Media Mobility, guest-edited by Sean Jacobs of the New School.

We continue to welcome open submissions to popularcommunication@surrey.ac.uk, and are proud to be publishing some of the best scholars of popular communication globally. We also remain committed to publishing reviews of recent books in the fields of film, media, and communication studies. If you are an author of a title that would be of interest to our readers, or are interested in contributing a review to the journal, please contact our book reviews editor Max Dawson: max@northwestern.edu.

Paul Frosh, chair
msfrosh@mscc.huji.ac.il