ABSTRACT
Research on globalization spans a variety of disciplines including sociology, anthropology, political science, management, and communication. Organizational communication scholars draw on broader social traditions to study global patterns of interaction and new organizing forms such as global teams, global networks, and global social movements. This chapter proposes a framework of dialectical tensions to frame and integrate the research on globalization and organizational communication. We discuss three broad types of tensions inherent in globalization—ontological, epistemological, and axiological—that highlight differences in how globalization is studied in terms of what it is and how it is impacting organizations and society at large. Taking a tensional approach puts diverse views into dialogue with one another and challenges researchers to better reconcile opposing views in order to better account for the complexities of globalization.
