KNOWLEDGE WORKER COMMUNICATIONS AND RECIPIENT AVAILABILITY - TOWARD ATASK CLOSURE EXPLANATION OF MEDIA CHOICE

The authors further extend the study of media choice by incorporating concepts of social presence and recipient availability. Availability i s of growing interest in the study of organizational communication, pa rticularly as firms become mon geographically distributed. At least tw o aspects of availability are of interest, given multiple media altern atives for communication: the impact of new electronic media on people 's availability to communicate with one another, and the influence of a specific level of availability on a sender's media choice. A future paper in Organization Science, by Marjorie Sarbaugh-Thompson and Marth a Feldman, will further explore the availability concept.