Silence : the reasons why people may not communicate

Title from PDF of title page (University of Missouri--Columbia, viewed on August 29, 2012).The entire thesis text is included in the research.pdf file; the official abstract appears in the short.pdf file; a non-technical public abstract appears in the public.pdf file.Dissertation advisor: Dr. Glen CameronIncludes bibliographical references.Vita.Ph. D. University of Missouri--Columbia 2012"May 2012"This is a dissertation about how and why information does not flow in an industrial organization, and has impacts on owners, managers or employees when such issues as production errors, retention, or corporate survival are the result of missed transmission or reception of information. Each instance when information was not sent or received is called silence. The idea of silence will be explored to reveal its theoretical definition and operation within an ecosystem of multi-dimensional factors. This dissertation is a qualitative foundation for future study by finding a full spectrum of relevant factors. Interviews, discussions, observations and artifacts were collected from two newspaper newsrooms in the northwestern United States in 2007 and 2008. These data add to knowledge in at least five important ways: the range of factors related to silence were expanded, narratives recorded historical changes that may help future researchers understand the evolution of newsroom cultures, synthesized several research streams to show how they interacted with silence, may have expanded concepts related to factor dimensionality in general, and may have been the first to apply factor dimensionality to silence research.Includes bibliographical reference