Tag institutional theory

Entries 4 Total

Exploring the Institutional Context of Physicians’ Work

Dec 30, ’10 11:49 AM

John Lammers and I published this book chapter in 2009 in Dale Brashers and Daena Goldsmith’s excellent text Communicating to Manage Health and Illness (there’s even a kindle version). Let me know if you’d like a copy. Here’s a preview of the first few pages.

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An Institutional Theory of Organizational Communication

Dec 30, ’10 2:17 AM

John Lammers and I published this piece in 2006 in Communication Theory. Our goal was to articulate institutional theory for use by communication researchers. Here’s the abstract:

For many years, reviewers have argued that organizational communication research is overly concentrated on microphenomena to the neglect of macrophenomena, but macrophenomena have generally remained unspecified. An institutional theory of organizational communication is proposed to fill that gap. Drawing on institutional theory in organizational sociology and on concerns in organizational communication, we define institutions as constellations (i.e., relatively fixed arrangements) of formalized rational beliefs manifested in individuals’ organizing behaviors. Key concepts for the analysis of institutions include membership, rational myths, isomorphism, and decision hierarchies. Based on our definition and armed with these concepts, the paper formally specifies propositions of an institutional theory of organizational communication. Applying the propositions to a published case of organizational identification demonstrates how an institutional perspective offers additional explanatory power, especially concerning professional roles.

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Organizational Forms of the Provision of Health Care: An Institutional Perspective

Dec 30, ’10 2:08 AM

Our chapter in the 2003 Handbook of Health Communication. Here’s the first paragraph:

Health organizations are among the largest, most complex, technologically rich, and value-infused of any human arrangement. As such, the field of health and medical care in North America—and indeed the world over—provides a diverse and dynamic arena for communication and organizational research. The organizations we refer to as health organizations today include forms whose structures have changed little in one hundred years, such as hospitals. But health organizations also include forms that proliferate today but barely existed one hundred years ago, such as HMOs, hospice, and prepaid multi-specialty medical groups. It is therefore appropriate that we turn our attention to these changing settings.

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Health care institutions, medical organizing, and physicians: A multilevel analysis

Dec 30, ’10 2:02 AM

I’m publishing my research archive as the first posts on the sites so they’re accessible. Here’s the dissertation. Have a look at the abstract:

Managed care—the dominant mode of health care organizing and financing today—may threaten physicians’ satisfaction with practicing medicine, but research has revealed that it is not dissatisfying for physicians in all organizational settings. The institutional theory of organizational communication (ITOC) offers a multileveled explanation of physicians’ reactions to managed care based on their institutional identifications and communication with managed care organizations. A multileveled analysis of data from physicians (n = 1,049) in practices (n = 492) investigates this explanation. The results suggest that institutional identifications moderate the relationship between the experience of managed care and physician satisfaction, and offer evidence for the importance of the communication between managed care representatives and physicians. The results also provide an example of the applicability of multilevel modeling for organizational and health communication research.

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