Knowledge worker communications and recipient availability: Toward a task closure explanation of media choice

The authors further extend the study of media choice by incorporating concepts of social presence and recipient availability. Availability is of growing interest in the study of organizational communication, particularly as firms become mon geographically distributed. At least two aspects of availability are of interest, given multiple media alternatives 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 Martha Feldman, will further explore the availability concept.