ABSTRACT
This chapter uses examples drawn from observation of an Air Force maintenance squadron to illustrate how communication occurs within and across organizations. We draw upon concepts introduced by Mitchell (constitutive complexity) and McPhee and Zaug (the four flows of communication) to reveal how the four flows model identifies communication behaviors and how these behaviors move through the organization to keep communication in dynamic motion. We find that the entrepreneurial action associated with the Air Force technicians we studied exemplified the blending or combination of communication flows in a variety of ways. Moreover, constitutive complexity emerges when two or more of these flows overlap.
