Negotiating Control: Organizations and Mobile Communication.

• Date: 01 August 2019
• Author: Hoff, Samuel B.

Stephens, Keri K., Negotiating Control: Organizations and Mobile Communication. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. xii + 296 pages. Hardcover, $69.57.

The methods by which business employees adopt and utilize mobile communication is the topic of this timely study. Motivated by training in organizational communication, Keri Stephens has written this book "with the hope that people from different backgrounds--scholars, human resource (HR) managers, information systems (IS) professionals, and students--can all understand and learn from the stories and data analyzed here" (p. 5). The material is examined from three distinct perspectives, organizational, power, and human communication. The author, an associate professor of communications studies at the University of Texas at Austin, serves as associate editor of Management Communication Quarterly.

The text contains twelve chapters and two appendices. The initial two chapters furnish background on utilization of cell phones as business tools. Stevens observes that just as cell phone access exploded in the first decade of the new century, so did expectations about their use at work...