Review: A Grounded Theory of Organizational Communication and Technology (OCT) of COVID-19 Before Delta and the Vaccine

In this final chapter we performed a grounded-theory analysis of the 19 content chapters of this book. We identified 18 grounded theory categories that summarize major themes in the book and grouped them accordingly. The core element of grounded theory is a focus on the emergence of theory from the data (here, the data are chapters) while remaining open to all possible meanings and interpretations of data (Treem & Browning. Grounded theory. In C. Scott & L. Lewis (Eds.), The international encyclopedia of organizational communication. Wiley, 2017). We looked for likenesses among the 19 content chapters and linked them to one or more of the 18 categories elaborated in this final chapter. A fairly disparate group of scholar-researchers began off with exactly the same set of research questions and produced a pleasingly varied—and pleasingly complex—set of answers. Yet the chapters also illustrate the concept: equifinality—namely, they all eventually arrive at pretty much the same place. Important for our purposes here, they have integrative complexity, in which chapter complexity can be represented by the number of different positions created to represent them and the order necessary to integrate them. Our conclusion is that organizational communication technology (OCT) serves as the integrator for the complexity surrounding work life during early stages of coronavirus.