W. Charles Redding

W. Charles Redding (April 13, 1914 – June 10, 1994) is credited as being the "father" of organizational communication. Redding played a significant role in both the creation and study in the field of Organizational Communications. Redding described communication as "referring to the behaviors of human beings, or the artifacts created by human beings, which result in messages being received by one or more persons."

Redding was born on April 13, 1914 in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Throughout his life, Redding attended schools in Grand Junction, Colorado Springs, Denver, Jersey City and in Los Angeles. He earned two degrees from the University at Denver and a doctorate from the University of Southern California. Growing up, Redding had a passion for integrating Latin and logic ideas into his work, whether it was in one of his many speeches or papers. During an interview, Redding confessed that while attending the University of Denver, he had taken only one undergraduate course in speech communication and argumentation. After completing graduate school, taking courses more in psychology than in communication, Redding started teaching. Within his first six years he taught a lot of literature and composition courses. Redding was even an instructor of communication skills for the Navy- Marine officer training program. Throughout his early career, Redding saw the importance and the application of speech and communication in organizations. According to Redding, speech communication started as a skill-based work geared toward personal effectiveness and moved into theoretical issues and social science methods.

W. Charles Redding has been accredited for being one of the first people in the 1950s to develop organizational communication into a field of study within universities and as a departmental major. At that time, the field of interest was becoming known as "business speech" and "industrial communication." Departments at schools such as Northwestern University, Ohio State University, University of Southern California, and Purdue University were developing their departments in industrial communication. Redding believed that the academic development of the field was as result of things such as a NASA-sponsored conference on organizational communication and the development of the Organizational Communication Division of the International Communication Association.

...
Wikipedia