Normalisation and deviance in change

The act of communication is more than just transferring information; it is change in itself

 
When most people think of communicating, they consider it as an act of transmission. That is, they consider communication to be a process that involves getting a message from point A, to point B. The editor of the Journal of Employee Communication Management once told me that to him, communication meant getting what is in his head into someone else’s head. This is a standard notion and an important one to consider. When a CEO delivers a message about a change in company policy, staffing, orientation – whatever the change might be – the desired outcome is for the varied audiences to understand the change. In other words, get the information from the CEO’s head to the workforce.

Alan Zaremba

Alan Zaremba is the academic director of graduate programmes in corporate and organisational communication at Northeastern University in Boston and an associate professor in the Department of Communication Studies at the university.