One thing that I connected with in this chapter is
the idea that organizations base their communication ethics both on the values
that it wants to promote and on “the events and practices that it remembers”
(148). I work for an organization that
has been around for almost fifty years and it has always prided itself on
standing out from other organizations of its type as far as its ability to put
the customer first in a way that its competition does not. For a long time the good that this organization
was based on was very different from the goods that the majority of other
organizations in the same institution were based. Eventually, however, my organization realized
that in order to be relevant in its field it needed to modify its way of operating
in order to stay relevant.
The way that my organization decided to do this is
by focus on the “saying” (the common state of successful organizations within
my company’s institution) and to let that guide their future decisions more so
than the “said” (the values and ideas that have guided them in the past). One sentence from the chapter that is
relevant to this is “Organizations find meaning through their identification as
a particular type of institution” (144).
Instead of maintaining a sense of independence in the way they conducted
business, my organization decided that the best thing to do was to look to what
other organizations within the same institution were doing to guide their
actions. In many instances this is a
good idea, but often what makes an organization stand out in a positive way is
the way in which they are different from other organizations in their
sector. If a successful organization
ignores the “said” in favor of focusing on the “saying” it runs the risk of
alienating its members/employees/customers, etc. This is especially true if this involves
making major changes in how the organization is run.
