Organizational communication does not have a specific historical reference, however it has managed to evolve from the participation of multiple disciplines that have made business communication a field strongly related to the changes that globalization and the challenges of administration in the 21st century have brought about.
Some authors affirm that organizational communication began in the 1920s with the emergence of radical political events in which public relations began to be managed; however, it must be taken into account that organizational communication goes beyond simple corporate management referring to the macro-environment of organizations. On the contrary, there are those who confirm that organizational communication has its origin in Europe under the phenomenon of the industrial revolution in which studies linked to organizational behavior began to be carried out, given from unidirectional information where senior management assigned tasks and collaborators attended to them without controversy.
The trends that arose from the specialization of work and its consequent formal organization (Henri Fayol, 1900) gave rise to the modern organization of administration (Frederick Winslow Taylor, 1914) where the functional structure by departments was derived from the postulates of the bureaucratic organization, (Maxwel, 1919) allowing communication to find new scenarios for the flow of official information of the so-called management, giving rise to what we know as downward communication.
Later in the United States, starting in the 1920s, sociology, with the support of the qualitative methods used by social psychology, expanded the horizons of the study of communication in companies. The contributions made by
Elton Mayo (1972) and the Hawthorne Effect (1927) in this scenario gave rise to the modern conception of communication in organizations, where through the postulates of the School of Human Relations, communication between collaborators and bosses was addressed, giving rise to the so-called upward communication.
During the 1940s, Abraham Maslow (1943) delved into the motivation-productivity relationship using experimental methods with control groups, where despite criticism from empiricists about the methods used in his research, he made significant contributions to communication in companies, opening the way to the communication-motivation relationship, which would later be one of the pillars of current communication in organizations (Maslow's Pyramid).
Another of the current pillars of communication in organizations comes from the contributions of Chester Barnard (1935), who through his dimensional studies of the organization as a system of cooperation between participating members, identified that each member has by nature the need to relate to his co-workers, opening the way to what we today call horizontal communication.
Subsequently, its postulates gave rise to what is known as the Systemic School, which expanded the boundaries of communication with a view towards the external audiences of the organization.
In this new conception of the organization as a system, Douglas McGregor (1960, Morin 1977, Elías 2003, Rogers 1976, Agarwala1976) through his theses on theory
Twenty years later William Ouchi") (1981), as a complement to MacGregor's postulates, through what he called theory evidenced as a system that produces tensions between its members in accordance with the purposes, benefits and control over results of the organization, which fundamentally depend on the forces of the environment on the systems and subsystems of the organization.
This scenario allows communication to explore the phenomena of the organization's external communication, giving rise to the current
American public relations. However, it would be Lawrence and Lorsch (1967) who expanded the spectrum of the organization's environment, with the multiple cyclical and occasional changes that occurred in the day-to-day life of the company, giving way to the consolidation of contingency theory, demystifying the structure of long-term planning, to impose short-term strategic planning, (Schulz 1996, Tannenbaum 1997) where communication found a new scenario for resolution. of conflicts, for negotiation and practical response to daily crises in the organization's environment.
Currently there are many trends that seek to explain the communicative phenomenon in the organization, however, the contributions made by Manuel Castells from the social structure of information and knowledge are of vital importance for the projection of this line of research, where the need to study in depth the impacts generated in the organization with the implementation of the so-called new communication and information technologies is evident, mainly in the productivity of the company, at work, in human relations and in the formation of a science of communication that can explain, from their own methods and with their own theories, the communicative phenomenon in the organization (Castells 2002, Carnoy 2002 Help 2001, Mcgrew 2001, Golblatt 2000, Perraton 2001).[6].