This project is the culmination of a fieldwork study for a 6-week summer 2024 course at Southwestern University called Organizational Communication. Organizational Communication is a scholarly subdiscipline that analyzes the interpersonal, group, and mediated communication patterns and processes within and among a wide variety of organizations. Our radically collaborative OrgComm course, taught by Professor of Communication Studies Bob Bednar, took a high-impact, inquiry-based approach to studying organizational communication, focusing on learning and implementing the concepts and skills we needed to organize ourselves as a team to collaboratively produce a field-based study of a real-world organization.

For the first 4 weeks of the OrgComm class, we read about and discussed organizational communication theories and developed the critical skills of collaborative research and writing necessary for performing the intensive field research as a group. Most of the readings we did were about critical/cultural organizational communication theories and ethnographic research methods, but we also worked with a set of recent scholarly readings about internal communications, external communications, and DEI issues specifically within healthcare organizations.

Week 5 we spent in the field at Houston Methodist Hospital, with 4 days embedded at Houston Methodist-Willowbrook (HMWB) in Northwest Houston and 1 day downtown at the Houston Methodist flagship hospital in the Texas Medical Center (HMH)--half the day touring the Hospital and the Houston Methodist Institute for Technology, Innovation, & Education (MITIE), and half the day meeting with Branding and Marketing managers at their nearby office building.

For the entire week, the team had breakfast, lunch, and dinner together and witnessed and interacted with everyone and everything at Houston Methodist together. Houston Methodist Hospital has a reputation not only for their innovations in medical treatments and technologies, but also for their emphasis on education at all levels of the organization. Given this, they took us on as their students, so we had extraordinary access to staff at multiple levels of the organization, with a strong balance of observational and direct interview opportunities for us.

We wrapped up the course with a final 10 days of individual and collaborative writing, editing, and project design before handing off the content to one of our teammates, Alexa Delenela, to work with Dr. Bednar to publish the study as the website before you now.

 

Design © 2024 by Bob Bednar and Alexa Delenela All essays are © 2024 by the identified authors or the SU OrgComm Team as a whole Contact: Department of Communication Studies Southwestern University Georgetown, Texas 78626 USA bednarb@southwestern.edu