ABSTRACT
All large organizations are “media organizations” because they must use media to manage meanings for organizational symbols held by members of the internal and external environment. This commentary discusses a theory of organizational media, presenting results from two studies of the 100 largest U.S. corporations and from seven studies of 199 Chicago organizations. The theory accounts for why organizations use space- and time-shift media, and what relationships these media have to the status of communication management, to shared meaning for organizational symbols, to the abstractness and orgocentrism of meanings, to cultural convergence after merger/acquisition, to organizational time perceptions, and to financial valuation in the marketplace. Although it is assumed that an adequate theory should explain all kinds of organizations’ media use, some observers wish to isolate the media industry for study. Accordingly, the theory is used to generate a set of 20 hypotheses about organizational changes in the media industry.
