Redundancy

This bibliographic essay presents two divergent approaches to information theory—one quantitative and one qualitative—that provide fundamentally different orientations to the concept of redundancy. The bridge between these two orientations is the linking of information and probability theory to semantics. The mathematical and behavioral approaches provide the basisfor the systematic classification of redundancy: information theoretic redundancy, true redundancy, internal and input memory redundancy, and between-channel redundancy. Cost-benefit considerations of redundancy in business communication focus on the variables of time; space; and noise, the ultimate limiter of effective communication The authors report that, because noise exists in all communication channels and because humans have limited capacities as information-processing systems, the goal of eliminating redundancy is not a practical one. Three research implications for redundancy are (1) national and international business communication, with special emphasis on dual- or multi-channel corporate teleconferencing; (2) error-detecting and correcting systems in artificial languages designed for man-machine communication; and (3) assessing communication efficiency in terms of different degrees of corporate culture development.