Gossip and Organizations

Gossip is a complex and ubiquitous phenomenon, widely found and variously practiced. 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. While there is undoubtedly a dark side to gossip, Kathryn Waddington argues that paying closer attention to gossip as organizational communication and knowledge enables exploration of other ways of seeing, interpreting and understanding organizations. Gossip is not merely an impediment of organizing, it is a form of organizing which shapes perceptions and actions, and can forewarn managers of future failure in organizational systems.

The complexity of gossip is such that a of range inter-disciplinary explanations is necessary in order to account for this form of communication and knowledge across multiple levels and spaces in and around organizations. Waddington provides a new evidence-based framework incorporating ethics, emotion, identity, sensemaking and power as a guide future research, theorizing and critical reflective and reflexive practice in the field of organizational gossip.

Kathryn Waddington is Senior Lecturer at City University London and Director of Interprofessional Practice Programmes. Her primary research interests are organizational communication and knowledge, emotion, employee engagement and leadership. She has a PhD in psychology from the University of London and has published widely, including a contribution to the recent 2nd edition of The Sage Handbook of Organizational Culture and Climate.

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