This study offers a thematic analysis of the advice from a sample of bestselling popular press books on the subject of communication during implementation of organizational change. This analysis uncovered themes concerning the communicative role of change agents, general strategies for communicating and introducing change, and tactics for communicating during implementation of change. Themes within each of these general categories are presented and discussed in terms of their prevalence and general character. Implications for how practitioners can make the best use of this advice and how it compares to empirical findings in the scholarly literature are then discussed. Further directions for organizational communication scholarship are suggested.

As Van Dijk (2007) proposed in the first issue of Discourse and Communication , the main purpose of this journal is to bridge the two cross-disciplines of communication and discourse studies. Given this goal, this article sought to help clear the ground for such interdisciplinary development by investigating how organizational researchers use the terms `discourse' and `communication' and cast discourse—communication relationships. By reviewing 112 organizational discourse studies from major journals in communication, organizational studies, and interdisciplinary journals published between 1981 and 2006, this study identified diverse conceptualizations of these basic concepts. The findings help dispel some of the misunderstandings that scholars from one research field may possess toward the other and sort through some, if not all, the confusions regarding the terms `discourse', `communication', and their relationships.

An ancient Chinese story goes as follows:In the Tang Dynasty, Chang Jian, a local poet, heard the news that the famous poet Zhao Gu was to visit a local temple. Before Zhao Gu's arrival, Chang Jian came to the temple and composed two stanzas on the wall, intentionally leaving the poem unfinished. Seeing half of a poem when visiting the temple, Zhao Gu completed it with two more stanzas and created a poem everlasting. Later, people coined an idiom to describe Chang Jian's act: attract jade by laying a brick.

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