Internal communication, cultural inertia, and knowledge production

Internal communication is central to organizational life through facilitating understanding among employees of how to translate organizational knowledge into action. This paper explores relationships among the concepts of organizational knowledge, internal communication and organizational culture. The goal of the paper is to provide a descriptive model of these relationships based on a set propositions derived from perspectives on each of the concepts. Taking the perspective of organizations as knowledge systems, we argue that cultural selection operating on internal communication acts to decrease variation in the knowledge system during periods of production and maintenance. Based on the proposed model, we discuss implications for public relations theory and practice.