Communication · Executive Insight Brief · 010
The meeting teaches the culture
Recurring communication does more than transmit content; it assigns roles, legitimizes authority, and sustains an organizational world
Premise
Executives frequently treat communication as delivery: move a clear message from leadership to its intended audience and measure reach, recall, or response. James W. Carey’s ritual view adds a different executive question. What social reality does the recurring act of communication represent, reproduce, or transform?
A town hall, performance review, award ceremony, safety briefing, or daily meeting transmits information. It also teaches who may speak, whose knowledge counts, which responses are legitimate, and what the organization imagines itself to be. Cultural change therefore cannot be achieved by rewriting messages while leaving the communicative practice unchanged.
What the model is: Communication as Culture — Ritual View in Knowledge →
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- The essential model
- Why this matters
- Risks and limits
- Executive takeaway
- Key questions
- Selected sources
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- FamilyModel
- CategoryParadigms, Traditions & Metatheories
- DomainOrganization & Structure
What these mean
Editorial orientation · Family
Model
In this series, Model names the editorial family primarily used to understand and explain communication: theories, frameworks, effects, traditions, principles and other conceptual resources. It is an umbrella for a route into the field, not a claim that every included object is a predictive model.
Editorial orientation · Category
Paradigms, Traditions & Metatheories
Provides a broad intellectual perspective within which multiple concepts, theories or investigations are developed. Traditions carry histories and commitments; metatheories examine how theories themselves are organized or related.