ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the intersection of three strands of research and theory: health communication, organizational communication, and institutional analysis. It also examines the general elements most useful at the intersections of institutions, health communication, and organizations: endurance, fields, and legitimacy. The chapter explains four conceptual tools used in institutional analysis: isomorphism, logics, discourse analysis, and messages. It further review samples of recent health communication research in three areas and offer institutional insights into that research. The chapter then presents the work around the areas of patient-provider, organizational, and mass health communication research, and emphasizes the features of institutional messages, endurance, reach, incumbency, and clarity. In the current age of social networking assisted by a global data network, health communication is taking on new forms and following an almost infinite number of channels. It finally examines the elements of the institutional perspective-endurance, field-level effects, and legitimacy-and conceptual tools-isomorphism, logics, rhetorical analyses, and messages-that apply to health communication phenomena.
