The Work of Communication

Relational Perspectives on Working and Organizing in Contemporary Capitalism

Timothy Kuhn, Karen L Ashcraft, Francois Cooren

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351333504
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Communication
• Index: Business

The Work of Communication: Relational Perspectives on Working and Organizing in Contemporary Capitalism revolves around a two-part question: "What have work and organization become under contemporary capitalism—and how should organization studies approach them?" Changes in the texture of capitalism, heralded by social and organizational theorists alike, increasingly focus attention on communication as both vital to the conduct of work and as imperative to organizational performance. Yet most accounts of communication in organization studies fail to understand an alternate sense of the "work of communication" in the constitution of organizations, work practices, and economies. This book responds to that lack by portraying communicative practices—as opposed to individuals, interests, technologies, structures, organizations, or institutions—as the focal units of analysis in studies of the social and organizational problems occasioned by contemporary capitalism.

Rather than suggesting that there exists a canonically "correct" route communicative analyses must follow, The Work of Communication: Relational Perspectives on Working and Organizing in Contemporary Capitalism explores the value of transcending longstanding divides between symbolic and material factors in studies of working and organizing. The recognition of dramatic shifts in technological, economic, and political forces, along with deep interconnections among the myriad of factors shaping working and organizing, sows doubts about whether organization studies is up to the vital task of addressing the social problems capitalism now creates. Kuhn, Ashcraft, and Cooren argue that novel insights into those social problems are possible if we tell different stories about working and organizing. To aid authors of those stories, they develop a set of conceptual resources that they capture under the mantle of communicative relationality. These resources allow analysts to profit from burgeoning interest in notions such as sociomateriality, posthumanism, performativity, and affect. It goes on to illustrate the benefits that investigations of work and organization can realize from communicative relationality by presenting case studies that analyze (a) the becoming of an idea, from its inception to solidification, (b) the emergence of what is taken to be the "the product" in high-tech startup entrepreneurship, and (c) the branding of work (in this case, academic writing and commercial aviation) through affective economies. Taken together, the book portrays "the work of communication" as simultaneously about how work in the "new economy" revolves around communicative practice and about how communication serves as a mode of explanation with the potential to cultivate novel stories about working and organizing.

Aimed at academics, researchers, and policy makers, this book's goal is to make tangible the contributions of communication for thinking about contemporary social and organizational problems.

1 Encountering Working and Organizing Under Contemporary Capitalism

DOI: 10.4324/9781315680705-1

Introduction

Viewed through history’s rearview mirror, modernity has never seen a period when work wasn’t undergoing dramatic change. Whether transformations in the workplace are seen as the result of demographic, technological, political, or competitive forces, shifting work arrangements have always drawn scholarly attention. The claims are everywhere: social critics, politicians, and management gurus proclaim a new era of capitalism, a “new economy” promising a working life characterized by either a utopian freedom and self-determination or a dystopian servitude produced by constant surveillance, competition, and insecurity (including the threat of job loss because of automation—a risk not only for so-called blue-collar workers) amid weak global economic growth (e.g., McDonough, Reich, & Kotz, 2010), with few pronouncements falling between those extremes.

By way of illustration, consider the consulting and accounting firm PwC’s recent publication, The Future of Work: A Journey to 2022 (Rendell & Brown, 2014). After noting that “disruptive innovations are creating new industries and business models” (1) and challenging readers—it targets human resource managers in for-profit enterprises—to consider what this means for their businesses, the report paints three scenarios, three prospective “worlds of work.” What it calls the “Blue World” is where large multinational corporations dominate, where firms refine employee measurement and management efficiencies, and in which employees trade personal data for job security. In the “Green World,” companies are portrayed as developing a social conscience and sense of responsibility such that firms offer ethical values and work-life balance in exchange for employee loyalty. Its “Orange World” speaks to the decline of large corporations and the ascendancy of small, nimble, networked, and technologically sophisticated firms. Here, job security disappears and in its place are the flexibility, autonomy, and attractiveness of new challenges that accompany the contract-based work of “portfolio careers.” Of course, these worlds ignore a good deal of organizational forms, and all three are prevalent today; the lesson offered by the report, however, is that constant and thoroughgoing change is on the horizon—change that threatens the viability of existing organizing practices.

To be sure, there are good reasons for skepticism about claims of grand, sweeping changes in the workplace, particularly when proffered by a company peddling its consulting services. One such reason is that we may be experiencing a break less radical than proposed. A key lesson offered by observers of capitalism over time (e.g., Boltanski & Chiapello, 2005) is that newness is ever present; there is always a contemporary set of unique arrangements that calls upon analysts and observers to develop conceptual schemes to illuminate, describe, and explain prevailing modes of production and accumulation. Capitalism modifies itself to respond to challenges to its legitimacy and, in so doing, protects itself from transformative change. Examining the mutable texture of capitalism is crucial for the field of organization studies, since what we take to be its key foci—work and organization—are being re-configured and re-understood in this “new economy.”

A similar argument can be seen in Marxist discussions about work and labor, where the notion of “periodizations” speaks to changes in the economic, political, and ideological conditions, which may—or may not—be associated with shifts in the mode of production. As Fine and Harris (1979, p. 109) observe,

The effects of the development of the forces and relations of production on the form of social relations within a mode [of production] define the transformation from one stage of a mode to another… such a periodisation will reveal itself through transformations in the methods of appropriating and controlling surplus value.

Given capitalism’s fluidity and capacity to adapt, changes in patterns of social reproduction may well be indicative of deepening long-standing patterns rather than dramatic alterations in the underlying mode of production. In other words, it is probably impossible to determine, definitively, whether changes in the mode of production and accumulation are occurring.

An inability to substantiate claims of dramatic change occurs not merely because of capitalism’s protean shape-shifting; nor is it because there exists no Archimedean point from which such a definitive statement about economic change could be advanced. Rather, the very notion of an economy existing “out there” as if objective and external to scholarly analysis is misguided. We—students and scholars of organization (a group we take to be the primary audience for this book)—attend to particular issues, write about them, teach them, present them as factual. In so doing, we tell a story about a “new economy” that is performative in its effects: It participates in the enactment of the reality it seeks to describe. We shall say more about performativity in Chapter 2, but in the main part of this chapter, we depict some of the most repeated stories told about sea changes in the terrain of working and organizing under contemporary capitalism.

Our Guiding Question and the Pursuit of Novelty

The aim of this book, then, is to examine how developments associated with contemporary capitalism—as well as the stories we tell about them, which are part of the developments themselves—bear consequences for how work is both accomplished and organized. Our particular concern is the extent to which customary frames and tools of scholarship in organization studies are up to the vital task of addressing social problems associated with shifts in capitalism. Rather than assessing those frames with a desire to judge their (in)adequacy, however, we ask in this chapter about what our stories are doing. Where are they leading, and where do they become stuck? Are there other fruitful stories to be told? Accordingly, our guiding question is this: What have work and organization become under contemporary capitalism, and how should organization studies approach them?

Addressing this question should begin, of course, with a consideration of how the field of organization studies has taken up capitalism, contemporary and otherwise. There are two dominant approaches. The first has been to treat capitalism as background, an uninterrogated frame for the conduct of work and organizing. Research of this sort often is functional-ist in orientation, as seen in scholarship on entrepreneurship, for instance. Although there is a growing body of scholarship that critically examines entrepreneurship’s antecedents and unintended consequences, the lion’s share of research here considers the characteristics (of individuals, firms, and markets) associated with entrepreneurial success, processes through which new ventures emerge, and how states, communities, and even universities might foster greater entrepreneurial activity. This work tends to be guided by the assumption that entrepreneurship produces economic and social utility, often invoking the Schumpeterian notion of disruption, though it rarely examines that assumption’s veracity (Shane, 2009). A market-based system of exchange, a system of economic relations, is the implied (but rarely interrogated) background upon which entrepreneur-ship unfolds; if it is invoked at all, it is to point to the ways the system enables and constrains the phenomenon of interest.

A second approach has been to suggest that capitalism generates the class distinctions upon which organizing proceeds (Roediger, 1999; Thompson, 1963). Here it is the economic system that produces social ordering, distinction, hierarchy, and distributions of resources that are unequal, but this system is understood as intimately bound up in the production and valorization of identities, communities, and forms of work. For instance, analysts have studied how the “working class” assimilates members into “blue-collar” values through cultural practices, forms of speech, and practices of (self-)discipline that produce group-based distinctions, construct subjectivities, and assert the superiority of the class against others (Lucas, 2011; Philipsen, 1975; Willis, 1977).

As plotlines, these broad approaches have borne significant fruit in the story of working and organizing. In this book, we build upon the solid foundation they have established, but our storytelling employs what we shall call relational ontologies to portray capitalism not as a figure lurking in the background, nor as an external force impelling particular forms of system organization, but as a participant inextricably bound up in socioeconomic practice. In other words, the perspectives we pursue (we shall offer three conceptualizations of what we term communicative relationality) are not offered to mend gaps created by other approaches, but because their distinctive conceptualizations offer inventive lines by which investigations might proceed. Relational ontologies have begun to garner significant attention in organization studies (Ganesh & Wang, 2015; Orlikowski, 2007; Vosselman, 2014), yet scholars—ourselves included—are struggling to elucidate the implications of this ontological turn for analyses of working and organizing, as well as the methodological claims it makes on our scholarship (see, e.g., Mutch, 2013). This book directly engages with these struggles in order to articulate concrete possibilities whereby relationality can facilitate novel ways of attending to social problems. In this way, we endeavor to tell a meaningfully different story about working and organizing as we (might) know it.

In this first chapter, we initiate pursuit of our guiding question—again, what have work and organization become under contemporary capitalism, and how should organization studies approach them? In the section to follow, we outline key stories scholars have told about the major transformations in working and organizing associated with contemporary capitalism. It is important to stress that, in framing scholarly accounts as “stories,” we do not mean to belittle them. All theories put forth a narrative of things, and we do not take such narratives lightly. This book is simply more interested in their production rather than truth value. In other words, we are less concerned with the extent to which scholarly accounts correspond with some external reality and more concerned with how they participate in the making of certain realities and futures. This is not an abdication of facts in favor of relativism, as we shall see. Rather, it is an acknowledgment that shifts in capitalism are not somehow apart from the theories that punctuate their existence and occurrence. Theoretical stories contribute to the very developments they claim to study. This is precisely why we are so interested in them—in their possibilities and limitations, and in the promise of other stories to be told.

Our review of key stories pays particular attention to communicative forms of work. As we show next, work is increasingly about the analysis and manipulation of symbols, the interactive production of feelings, and the generation of images—forms of work that self-evidently revolve around actors engaging in communication with others. However, working and organizing are not merely symbolic: As we demonstrate, there is a wide (and shifting) array of forces at play, requiring an approach to studying them that foregrounds multiplicity, relationality, and transformation. This book is intended as a contribution to organization studies scholars’ capacities to undertake studies of working and organizing when multiplicity, relationality, and transformation are configured as central features of the scene.

Conceptualizing “Work(ing)”

Before we encounter contemporary currents in working and organizing, we should clarify what we mean by “work.” Certainly, work, as an activity, can take various forms and occurs in and through many domains; it has also been conceived differently depending on the historical circumstance of the writer. Unsurprisingly, then, definitions of work likewise abound. At an abstract level, work is about deeds, tasks, and instances of labor; it is “action or activity involving physical or mental effort and undertaken in order to achieve a result, esp. as a means of making one’s living or earning money; labour; (one’s) regular occupation or employment” (Oxford English Dictionary). It indexes the amount of effort necessary to complete a task or create an outcome; that outcome can involve providing the social/artificial world with things distinct from those found in our natural surroundings.

Work is, moreover, sometimes understood as “the creation of material goods and services, which may be directly consumed by the worker or sold to someone else” (Hodson & Sullivan, 1995, p. 3). In other words, though work is sometimes reduced to a noun—to the thing produced by activity—the term also implies working, the gerund indicating the action of bringing about deeds.

Other conceptions distinguish between forms of work. Bertrand Russell (1935/2004), somewhat playfully, held work to be of two kinds: “first, altering the position of matter at or near the earth’s surface relative to other such matter; second, telling other people to do so” (p. 3). Still others distinguish work from play, suggesting that work is serious and solemn, whereas play is frivolous and joyful (e.g., Burke, 1981). Thomas (1999), seeking to capture the central elements of the range of conceptions depicted here, offers this encapsulation:

Work has an end beyond itself, being designed to produce or achieve something; it involves a degree of obligation or necessity, being a task that others set us or that we set ourselves; and it is arduous, involving effort and persistence beyond the point at which the task ceases to be wholly pleasurable.

(p. xiv)

Across definitions such as these, Daniels (1987) argues that work tends to be portrayed as (a) public, rather than private, activity; (b) requiring financial recompense, and (c) gendered, in that traditionally masculine activities are more likely to be considered work. All of these features, she argues, tend to relegate unpaid and invisible labor—not coincidentally, many activities coded as feminine—outside the realm of “work” (as “labors of love,” for instance). In an effort to clarify what we mean by work while remaining open to the kind of activity to which Daniels draws attention, we depict work(ing) as the practice of focusing labor toward the production of “objects” with value. As the scare quotes suggest, objects may take many forms. Moreover, their value may be a matter of contestation; as we will show, value is rarely as simple as that which it is taken to be on its face.

Our aim in characterizing work(ing) this way is to suggest several important elements of contemporary renditions of work and working. This book seeks to understand the processes and products of working (as well as of organizing), acknowledging that work relies upon, and generates, objects that are simultaneously material and symbolic—objects that have the potential to participate in the (re)inscription of the relations of capitalism. Conceiving of work in this way is agnostic as to the sources of influence over the trajectory of the practice, being open to the multiplicity of forces initiating, pushing, and benefiting from work (or, perhaps, considering these issues topics for examination). As we address in the next sections (and in more detail in Chapter 3), we see communication as axial to understanding working, but only if we avoid the common relegation of communication to the realm of the merely symbolic, interactional, and imaginative. We shall argue, instead, that communication is the force that constitutes working (and organizing), which also, in turn, constitutes economic realities.

The Story of the New Economy in Studies of Work and Organization

What stories about the contemporary socioeconomic scene are told in the organization studies literature? To what factors do analysts point, and what consequences, in the sense of social problems, do they note? And, importantly, what are the assumptions about communicating and organizing that mark their thinking? A point to which we turn at the end of this chapter is that organization studies should think carefully about how it conceives of such “factors,” because these conceptual foundations matter for our epistemological and methodological engagement with working and organizing.

The story is often abbreviated as neoliberalism, the ideology that subsumes social and political life into the capitalist logic of accumu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Encountering Working and Organizing Under Contemporary Capitalism
• 2 Relationality: Cultivating Novelty in Explorations of Working and Organizing
• 3 Communicative Relationality
• 4 Creativity and Relationality: Following the Becoming of an Idea
• 5 Speculative Value: Articulating and Materializing the “Product” in High-Tech Startup Entrepreneurship
• 6 Branding Work: Occupational Identity as Affective Economy (aka The Glass Slipper, Take Two)
• 7 Conclusion: The Value(s) of Communicative Relationality
• References
• Index