ABSTRACT
Commands are important because they are a day-to-day manifestation of organizational power. A command issued in the absence of power tends to be ineffective and can even incite an aggressive response. Knowledge of face-to-face communication comes from the disciplines of ethology, social psychology and elements of sociology and anthropology. In the same way that organizational psychology draws on psychological disciplines for methods and theory, organizational ethology derives its methodological and theoretical apparatus from the biological sciences of behaviour. An important contribution to organizational ethology was made by Vernon Reynolds (1973) in his discussion of the ethology of social change leading to early civilization. He argued that all societies are limited in the possible range of cultural adaptation by the inheritance of behaviours and psychological predispositions adapted to the hunter-gatherer milieu. This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book.
