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The field of study known in North America as organizational communication only emerged as a serious scene of academic research in the 1960s (Redding, 1985; Redding & Tompkins, 1988). Text-- books began to appear in the 1970s (Farace, Monge, & Russell, 1977; Johnson, 1977). Sage initiated a yearly compendium of research abstracts as early as 1975. But it was the generation of young scholars that came to maturity in the late 1970s and early 1980s who were to collectively give the discipline its personality and establish its intellectual focus. The Alta (Utah) conference at the beginning of the 1980s was a watershed event that indexed the growing selfconsciousness of the field (Putnam & Pacanowsky, 1983). McPhee and Tompkins's (1985) collection of essays soon followed. By the mid- I980s, publishers had become well aware of the field, and in 1987 (Jablin, Putnam, Roberts, & Porter, 1987) and 1988 (Goldhaber & Barnett, 1988), two exhaustive collections of reviews of research appeared (the first published by Sage, the second by Ablex), both bearing the same title: Handbook of Organizational Communication.
This new handbook, again published by Sage, is a thorough revision and update of the 1987 volume. The editors, Jablin and Putnam, have chosen to retain the titles of the original four sections largely as they were-Theoretical Issues, Context, Structure, and Process-but although many of the same researchers serve as authors in the current version as in the previous, the difference between the two handbooks could hardly be more striking. By comparison, the earlier collections of reviews look tentative and exploratory. The field has visibly matured in the past decade or so, and it now takes on the character of a fully developed academic discipline. Significantly, for example, the subtitle of the 1987 publication was "An Interdisciplinary Perspective." The new subtitle is "Advances in Theory, Research, and Methods." The shift from cautiously interdisciplinary to explicitly disciplinary may seem of no great import, but in fact, it speaks volumes about the coming of age of the field.
For example, in the earlier handbook, two of the four chapters included in the theory section were written by professors from schools of business, and neither of their reviews centered on communication as such. Of the other two chapters, one was...