A Discursive Approach to Organizational Health Communication

With the increased interest in communication in the fields of health care and health care management research, it is important to begin to explore and consider the consequences of this engagement with new ideas in communication. In this chapter we describe the expansion of organizational health communication, identifying three distinct types of communication ideas and tools: clinical communication, extra-clinical communication and corporate communication. In order to assess the wider implications of health communication, we elaborate a discursive perspective, illustrated by presenting exemplary analyses of a) the institutionalization of communication ideals, b) the communicative management of meaning and c) communication tools as organising technologies. The discursive perspective highlights that organizations and individual health care providers should not only look for the desired outcomes of communication initiatives but also focus on unintended consequences in terms of changes to management roles, challenges to professional values and the reshaping of demands on patients. Attention to those implications is a key task for health care managers.