Reframing Difference in Organizational Communication Studies

Research, Pedagogy, and Practice

Dennis K. Mumby

• Publisher: SAGE Publications, Inc
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781483343051
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Bringing together prominent scholars in the field of organizational communication to examine the relationship between difference and organizing, this book explores the concept in a comprehensive and systematic way. Part I explores numerous ways in which difference can be critically examined as a communicative phenomenon; Part II addresses how best to teach difference, including pragmatic recommendations for explaining the topic and making it relevant to students' lives; and Part III broadly examines difference as a central construct in applied organizational communication research. Ultimately, the book serves to carve out a new agenda for studies of difference and organization, and it challenges instructors and students alike to think about and explore difference in a more complex and productive manner.

Part I

Theorizing Difference and Organization

1

Knowing Work Through the Communication of Difference

A Revised Agenda for Difference Studies

Karen Lee Ashcraft

Like many critical theorists of organization, scholars of difference seek to illuminate and revise institutionalized relations of power. They recognize identity as political and central to the configuration and experience of power relations in contemporary organizational life. The distinctive turf of difference research is demarcated by its claim that, however idiosyncratic identity may appear in certain circumstances, it revolves in large part around key cultural formations of difference-sameness, such as gender, race, and class. While this chapter assumes that basic understanding of scope, it aims to establish grounds for a major shift in the current research agenda.

The tacit question guiding most organizational communication scholarship on difference asks: How can diversity be enhanced in professional workplaces? I argue that this is the wrong underlying question, premature and insufficient at best, misleading and self-defeating at worst. I propose an alternative point of departure that asks how communication organizes work through difference—or how we come to know work individually, relationally, organizationally, and culturally through the communication of difference. Accordingly, I advocate shifting our conception of difference from an individual, group, or organizational property (e.g., so-called women’s ways of leading, gendered bureaucracies) to an organizing principle of the meaning, structure, practice, and economy of work (i.e., the cultural organization of work via difference). The first section of the chapter builds a rationale for this shift in focus, while the second considers how to do so by confronting theoretical, practical, and political challenges entailed in such a shift.

THE QUESTIONS GUIDING INQUIRY

Difference and “The Workplace”: The Current Question

As with most areas of academic study, difference research in organizational communication is characterized by a rich variety of empirical questions. Without minimizing this variety, I suggest that a common underlying question or guiding motive threads through much of it: How can diversity be enhanced in professional workplaces—or elongated, How are various kinds of control based on formations of difference fostered at the workplace, and how might we facilitate greater inclusion and equity? If this is a fair characterization of shared focus, it is also not surprising. It reflects, for example, the critical orientation of most difference scholars, for whom the purpose of research is not merely to document, describe, or interpret relations of power and difference, but also to transform those relations and move toward some kind of emancipatory vision, however partial and provisional (Alvesson & Willmott, 1992).

My purpose is to examine this guiding question more closely—to consider how relations of difference are already embedded within it, affecting its transformative potential. I seek to reveal key limitations of a shared focus that, at first glance, seems both predictable and appropriate. Toward this end, I take up three key elements that frame the common question, all of which revolve around its focus on “the workplace,” variously emphasized. After briefly characterizing each element, I weigh their broader consequences.

A first element entails attention to the workplace. Organizational communication scholars have mostly analyzed difference at the level of organization, conceived in terms of an actual site that contains interaction. This trend reflects dominant disciplinary interpretations of the ontology of organizational communication. Much has been said about the limits of the container metaphor of organization historically steering those interpretations (e.g., Putnam, Phillips, & Chapman, 1996; Smith, 1993). It is worth noting, however, that different meanings of contain are in circulation among difference researchers. Elsewhere, for example, I have identified two broad strands of gender studies in organizational communication: (1) gender in organizations, where the spotlight falls on gendered people and interactions within organizational settings; and (b) gender of organizations (also known as gendered organization), where the setting itself (i.e., organizational forms, cultures, systems) is scrutinized as a consequential agent that facilitates individual identity and interpersonal interaction in particular ways (Ashcraft, 2005, 2006a). To some extent, both approaches retain a sense of organization-as-container, but whereas the container is largely taken for granted in the former, it becomes an object of keen interest in the latter. In other words, research on the gender of organization examines the gendered constitution and constituting force of organizational systems. Rather than treat organizations as inert, neutral containers that house lively interactions, this second strand regards organizations as active and political and problematizes their containing function with respect to interaction. Neither branch, however, has yielded much insight into the actual work of organizations, or the jobs and tasks members perform (Ashcraft, 2006a).

Although notable exceptions have long appeared beside these two strands, only recently have organizational communication scholars commenced sustained research on difference “at work” beyond conventional workplace boundaries—for example, in scholarly representations (Calás, 1992; Calás & Smircich, 1991), popular culture (Carlone & Taylor, 1998; Holmer Nadesan & Trethewey, 2000), occupational associations and public discourse about the professions (Cheney & Ashcraft, 2007), and labor union or social movement activity (Cloud, 2005; Ganesh, 2007). This emerging strain of research—which, for purposes of contrast, might be called the organization of work and difference (as opposed to difference in or of organization)—begins to foreground work itself and cultural notions about it, rather than only the formal sites in which it is conducted. In the process, this research begins to challenge conventional ontologies and epistemologies of organizational communication, revealing multiple sites where work happens (Ashcraft, 2007, 2008).

Although the latter point is explored more fully in the final section, for now I turn to a second element of the common question, latent in the preceding discussion: a focus on the workplace. Certainly, the scope of organizational communication includes interest in organizations whose primary aims are not economic (e.g., Lewis, 2005) and whose primary activities are not designated “work.” Indeed, early organizational communication scholars were careful to make this distinction, in part as a way of distancing the field from managerial, business, or corporate biases (Redding & Tompkins, 1988). Simultaneously, the majority of organizational communication scholarship and textbooks representing it accentuate organizations in which employment is the defining relationship and work the defining activity (Ashcraft & Kedrowicz, 2002), even though—as noted above—the spotlight tends not to illuminate work per se. This is all the more true in difference research, wherein arguments for significance often hinge on work in a generic sense: for instance, (a) the central role of work in contemporary formations of identity and power (see Alvesson, Ashcraft, & Thomas, 2008); (b) the growing phenomenon and significance of diversity at work (e.g., invoking the infamous “Workforce 2000” report of demographic trends), and (c) the coordination and productivity implications of diversity as well as other aspects of a so-called business case for difference (for more on the latter two rationales, see Ashcraft & Allen, 2003).

A third key element of the guiding question involves its focus on the workplace, by which I mean its tacit assumption about which sort of workplace is most pertinent. To date, the majority of difference research universalizes professional or so-called white-collar settings, as evident when “the workplace” becomes the typical shorthand referent (Ashcraft & Allen, 2003). In gender and organization studies, for example, managerial and professional work/places (i.e., work and formal organizational locations thereof) are often taken as the natural or obvious site of women’s labor difficulties and empowerment potential (e.g., Buzzanell, 2000). The enormous literatures (in and beyond communication studies) devoted to women in leadership and management and masculine and feminine professional communication styles provide a telling example. Here, problems associated with particular forms of Western, white, middle-class, heterosexual femininity tend to be normalized, taken as representative of women’s workplace struggles (for a critical review of these literatures, see Ashcraft, 2004). Yet women of all racial identities are overwhelmingly clustered in other kinds of labor, as documented by the extensive literature on so-called women’s work (e.g., Cotter, Hermsen, & Vanneman, 2001). Similarly, research premised on increasing racial diversity at work refers implicitly to demographic changes in white-collar settings. After all, men and women of color have long been present—not to mention disproportionately concentrated—in sites and forms of labor deemed un- or semi-skilled, menial, dirty, and otherwise undesirable (Tomaskovic-Devey, 1993).

With notable exceptions (e.g., Gibson & Papa, 2000; Holmer Nadesan, 1996), difference research in organizational communication has largely neglected such labor sites and forms. It is worth pausing to ask; Why have we stressed “desirable” work/places—the ladder up, the ticket out—rather than also engaging difference in the less enviable work/places where other bodies are historically concentrated, or at least investigating difference in a range of work contexts? Unless one expects a radical redistribution of available jobs, would not the diversification of professional work/places depend on the diversification of others as well?

Some might rightfully interpret the pattern as evidence of the persistent class bias of organizational communication studies (e.g., Cheney, 2000). On the one hand, I concur that the overwhelming focus on professional work/places reflects scholars’ (i.e., our own) reproduction of cultural notions about what work is more valuable and worthwhile, what sites are more alluring and potent, and so forth. However, this focus blends relations of difference—not merely of class, but also of race and gender—in a troubling way. Here, I suggest a proposition substantiated below: Gender and race shape the class of work/place; that is, the nature and value of tasks and the sites and systems in which they are accomplished are organized around difference (Ashcraft, 2008). Putting the claim in hypothetical terms for now, what if work/places are assessed at least in part on the basis of the bodies with which they are symbolically and materially associated?

If so, then there is an irony in current efforts to enhance relations of difference in professional work/places: namely, to the extent that they are effective, these efforts are likely to induce character and value erosion as well. Consider, for instance, the devaluation of various fields (e.g., clerical and librarian work) that women have entered in a critical mass—a phenomenon suggesting that cultural notions of worthwhile work/places stem at least in part from the historical inclusion and exclusion of certain people (for a review of related issues, see Wright & Jacobs, 1994). It follows that gendered and raced assumptions about the class of work—the labor to which “we all, of course, would aspire”—may be embedded in well-meaning efforts to diversify white-collar work/places. Put bluntly, emphasizing how diversity can be enhanced in professional settings, in the absence of common questions about other labor sites and forms, ironically perpetuates sexist and racist evaluations of work/place. My argument, then, is that despite its evident appeal, the current guiding question may be the wrong one; at least, it is premature and cannot stand alone. The more pressing question seems to be, How does difference play into the organization of work in the first place?

DIFFERENCE AND THE ORGANIZATION OF WORK: AN ALTERNATE QUESTION

Turning difference inquiry toward the latter question requires shifting the conception of difference, from (a) an individual or group feature (as in gender in organizations research—for example, so-called feminine styles of leadership communication) or (b) an organizational property (as in gender of organization research—gendered bureaucracy, for instance) toward (c) an organizing principle of the meaning, structure, practice, experience, and economy of work itself (as in emerging research on the organization of work through difference, mentioned previously). On what grounds might we make such a shift, and how far does it stretch organizational communication as a field? Addressing the first half of that question is the subject of this section, while the second half occupies the remainder of the chapter.

Grounding the Alternative Question

Here, I wish to substantiate the claim that work is known (i.e., its nature, character, and value—in a word, class—understood) in large part by the gendered and raced bodies with which it becomes aligned. Supporting empirical evidence continues to mount. Most of this research emphasizes material effects of bodily associations and conceives of gender and race in rather basic ways, stressing the habitual social coding of anatomy (e.g., sex categories) or other physical and/or hereditary markers of fixed social identities (e.g., race classifications). Early on, for instance, Phillips and Taylor (1980) showed how institutionalized skill classifications were derived in large part from the sex of those doing the task. In an extensive research program, Tomaskovic-Devey (1993) demonstrated that wage and institutionalized features of the labor process—such as degree of supervision and autonomy, task complexity and routinization, and promotion opportunities—develop around the gender and race profile of the people doing the work. Weeden (2002) also offered compelling evidence that occupational earnings are more affected by social closure (i.e., restricting an occupation to those of a particular gender and race profile) than by the complexity of the occupation’s knowledge base.

More recently, symbolic approaches have demonstrated that—alongside, and at times regardless of, gender- and race-coded physical bodies—gender and race discourses are invoked to craft work in consequential ways (for a fuller review, see Ashcraft, 2006a). Studying the prestige of specialties in the medical profession, Hinze (1999) found that medical personnel in diverse physical bodies invoke gender symbolism to explain specialty complexity and value, such that surgical work linked to forceful hands and “sizeable balls” is ranked above the work of pediatrics and psychiatry, which are depicted as softer, easier, and emotionally sensitive. Reversing the usual emphasis on women’s exclusion from the professions, Davies (1996) argued that women have long been included as silent partners (e.g., semi-skilled support staff) who enable professions in a dual sense: performing the adjunct labor that streamlines professional-client interaction while serving as the ready embodiment of what professionals are not. In this way, she indicte...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Organizing Difference: An Introduction
• PART I: THEORIZING DIFFERENCE AND ORGANIZATION
• PART II: TEACHING DIFFERENCE AND ORGANIZING
• PART III: APPLYING DIFFERENCE TO ORGANIZATIONAL CHANGE
• Author Index
• Subject Index
• About the Editor
• About the Contributors