We are organizational beings. We go to work, attend college and church, do volunteer work, join social groups, shop at numerous stores, internalize thousands of commercials from large corporations, and participate in social media. Human beings are communicating, organizing creatures, and we define ourselves largely through our various organizational memberships and communicative connections.

The organizations that define who we are—and our relationships to them—have become increasingly complicated. Indeed, as systems of communication, we largely take for granted organizations and their roles in our lives. One purpose is to provide you with a map to navigate the water we all swim in and to figure out the complexities of organizational communication processes. This map is important because in the last 30 years the influence of organizations and corporations in our lives has increased considerably. Indeed, some have argued that corporations in particular have become more powerful and influential than governments.

With the advent of neoliberalism and an organizational form called post-Fordism, corporations significantly expanded their spheres of influence such that work and consumption increasingly define people’s lives. Given the power and influence of organizations in contemporary society, it is important to understand organizational communication as a process that is inescapably linked to the exercise of power. Power is a defining feature of everyday organizational life, and an issue with which all perspectives on organizational communication must grapple.

Indeed, so fundamental is power to our understanding of how organizations function.