New Communication Media and Organisational Change

Information technology has long been recognised as a cause of organisational change. Recent developments in information technology (IT) media have stimulated considerable interest in how they will impact business organizations. Studies have largely examined the role that IT plays in improving information efficiency and synergies, in promoting collaboration and information sharing both inside and across organizations and in facilitating the passage to new forms of organising. Most such studies take organisational aspects as their units of analysis (such as decentralisation, formalisation, structure, decentralisation, size, etc), the new IT media as a variable, and the causal link is usually abstract and couched in psychological, economic or rational terms. This view tends to overlook that new IT media are significant only to the extent that they involve novel ways of communicating and that organisational aspects are organisational in nature. A communicational approach to organisation would suggest that organisational aspects are in the realm of communication—where communication is not only the transfer of meaning but also of intention among interactants. Organisation is also the context in which social relationships and social agency emerge. The present paper uses a communicational approach (based on Jakobson’s 1960 semiotic model and ideas from Taylor 2000) to show how the implementation of the Intranet by an organisation has impacted upon various aspects of the organisation. The paper seeks to show that the link between the communicational and the organisational is a purely linguistic one, based on the various aspects of meaning that can be encoded in any communication exchange.