The 20 Years Paradigmatic Research Of Organizational Communication In The United States

The organizational communication has been formed with multi-layered complex social and environmental phenomenon. When people strive to be objective and accurate or study it just from a limited perspective, it must lead some kind of subjectivity. As a result, organizational communication research needs to understand the function, value and characteristics of research objects from the general point of view and then describe and explain the strong individuality, value, customary and contingency which spread out from the performance of the organizational communication, and finally provides a specific set of thinking patterns in the form of conceptual framework. Therefore, the organizational communication research needs to use the method of human culture science paradigm which based on the principle of understanding and explanation to explore the culture world, human world and spiritual world in organizational communication.The United States, as the birthplace of organizational communication, has developed the organizational communication into a mature subject. The reform or subtle changes of U.S. organizational communication in the aspect of ontology, methodology and epistemology reflect this discipline's overall directional changes. Recognize the paradigmatic transformation of U.S. organizational communication in recent 20 years will find a new breakthrough for organizational communication and become a strong inspiration to the development of Chinese domestic organizational communication.This article uses content analysis approach to analyze the development and change of research themes, research methods and theoretical models of U.S. organizational communication in recent 20 years. And based on the criticism, this article summed up the paradigmatic transformation of U.S. organizational communication from 1988 to 2008.And this study also found that any kinds of organizational communication research paradigm are not perfect. The focus of attention on the paradigm of information transfer in new media is only the data which in the process of information transmission. So this study reveals a kind of unitary feature which can not explain the complex human relationship behind the surface in the specific course of study. The multi-contextual paradigm often overlooks one thing that the knowledge of organizational communication needs to apply into practice to earn its values. And the paradigm of reflection and dialogue can not find a simple way to get a definite absolute truth which consistent with the facts through the mutual effect of the researcher group.