Week 2 - Classical Approaches

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Welcome to week two, pals, this week you’re going to recognise some classical approaches that have been utilised at least a decade ago in organisations. Even if we might see these approaches are quite obsolete, it is undoubted that these classical approaches construct the models of contemporary organisational communication.

It is introduced in the lecture and textbook that there are four classical communication approaches that had been widely employed in traditional organisations:

a)   The Machine Metaphor (Summarised by Katherine Miller)

b)   Classical Management (Developed by Henri Fayol)

c)   Bureaucracy (Developed by Max Weber)

d)   Scientific Management (Developed by Frederick Taylor)

It is also notable that the foundations of the cultural perspective and the emergence of cultural understanding are critical to nowadays organisational communication processes.

The pith of these classical approaches are still adopted in many organisations, communication in these organisations is characterised as predominantly top-down, formal, task-related, and written. But compared with traditional organisations, workers are not as interchangeable as cogs, they are instead an emotional beings exist in an organisation. They expect to be recognised and rewarded rather than to be seen as cogs of machine.

The company in which I did my internship for is pretty much like a type of organisation by which classical approaches have been widely employed. Here, I take Weber’s bureaucracy into consideration. Read carefully, see how I could correlate theories with practice.

When worked as internship in the organisation, I was assigned to deliver marketing contracts, which were in hand-written form, level-to-level for censorship and signature, from the most basic level (marketing manager) to the highest level (director of that enterprise).

The communication flow is shown below:

End in with…  President of the Parent Company

(Her signature is required if total amount of the contract over 100,000 RMB)

Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the Organisation

Regional Principal of the Organisation

Chief Financial Officer (CFO) of the Organisation

(Authorised and Supervised by the Parent Company)

Manager of Finance Department (Treasurer)

Manager of Legal Affairs

Start with…     Department Manager

It is clear that this route of contract censorship and signature copes with the principles suggested by Weber, that bureaucracies as working through a system of authority, power and discipline. Each of the person in the route are hierarchically distributed and arranged from employee level to management level. Each of those has a specific power in the department and organisation and all of them are responsible for every cent of cost. Hence, Weber’s theory of bureaucracy is somehow in operation in contemporary organisational functioning.

Here is a little tip for you guys, if you try to write an in-depth audit, textbook reading is just a beginning, go find a job, experience it, observe it and summarise what you get.

Wit once bought is worth twice taught.