Gossip and Organizations

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  • Price: $130.00 $117.00
  • Hardback: 288 pages
  • Published: October 2010
  • 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 authors' experiences of researching gossip in nursing and healthcare organizations, higher educational institutions, non-government organizations and private sector organizations in Australia and the UK. Co-authors Kathryn Waddington and Grant Michelson aim 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 and Michelson provide 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, Taboo and Ethics 4. Gossip and Identity 5. Gossip and Emotion 6. The Management of Gossip? 7. The Politics of Gossip 8. Conclusion and Reflections

Author Biography

Kathryn Waddington is senior lecturer in organizational psychology in the Department of Applied Psychosocial Sciences and Director of Interprofessional Practice at City University London. Grant Michelson is Associate Professor in the Department of Human Resource Management and Director of Research, Audencia Nantes School of Management, France.