The labor of communicatively coping: toward an Integrative Theory of Communication Work

There is extensive evidence that when people are experiencing health stressors, they are also coping with communication stressors. Although the literature tends to loosely classify these experiences as “communication challenges,” we propose a more defined way of theorizing how people encounter and manage communicative demands. To that end, this article introduces an Integrative Theory of Communication Work. We first surface and summarize the underlying theoretical principles that support communication work logic. We present the primary assumptions of the theory and a typology of communication work tasks, positioning them in conversation with established scholarship and demonstrating how they are supported by emerging empirical evidence on communication work. Finally, we suggest opportunities to extend research by investigating factors that make communication more or less work.