Gossip and Organizations

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  • Price: $125.00 $112.50
  • Hardback: 192 pages
  • Published: May 2012
  • ISBN: 978-0-415-41785-3
  • Publisher: Routledge

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Series: Routledge Studies in Management, Organizations and Society.

Gossip is a complex and ubiquitous phenomenon, widely found and variously practiced by different individuals and groups. Gossip and Organizations provides the reader with an analysis of gossip and informal knowledge across different national, organizational and cultural contexts, drawing upon empirical findings and the author's experiences of researching gossip in nursing and healthcare organizations and higher educational institutions. Kathryn Waddington aims to dispel once and for all the myth that women gossip and men have conversations, shattering the illusion that gossip at work is trivial talk.

This book challenges the assumption that gossip is a problem that should be discouraged, arguing instead that paying closer attention to gossip enables exploration of other ways of seeing, interpreting and understanding organizations and people's experience in organizations.

The complexity of gossip is such that a range of psycho-social-cultural explanations are necessary in order to account for human interactions at all levels in organizations. Waddington provides a new framework that synthesizes these elements to further illuminate gossip and/in organizations and guide future research, theoretical development and critical reflection in the field.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction 2. Organizing Gossip 3. Gossip and Ethics 4. Gossip and Emotion 5. Gossip and Identity 6. The Politics of Gossip 7. Sensemaking and the Management of Gossip 8. Future Directions Appendix A Appendix B Notes Bibliography Index

Author/Editor Biography

Kathryn Waddington is Senior Lecturer at City University London. Her primary research interests are organizational communication, knowledge and emotion, and leadership in nursing and healthcare. She has a PhD in psychology from the University of London, and contributed to the recent 2nd edition of The Sage Handbook of Organizational Culture and Climate.