COMMUNICATION AND ORGANIZATIONS
Organizational Communication: A Critical Introduction
Chapter 1. What is Organizational Communication?
Human’s relationships to organizations and the communication processes are
essential to our self-definition and sense of being-in-the world, but we navigate them
without really paying much attention to how they give meaning to our lives
- Inescapably linked to the exercise of power
Development of the modern organization
Late 18th century: Emergence of capitalism as the dominant economic system
Middle 19th century criticism: working for an employer rather than for oneself was
called ‘wage slavery’
- Wage slavery: term used in the mid-1800s to describe working for someone
else
- Society consisting of ‘workers’ rather than ‘employees’
- Social norm: self-employed, transportation with natural and organic limitation
Transformation from agrarian to industrial/urban society
Change in kinds of jobs people held, new kind of worker;
Fundamental transformation of collective beliefs, values, and cultural practices
Change in forms of discipline and control to which people were willing to
consent
Emergence of mechanical power: allowed efficient movements of goods, shift
in human experience of time and space
[Thompson] Shift from task time to clock time
Task time: an organic sense of time where work is shaped by the demands of
the tasks to be performed (e.g. farming community shaped by seasons),
Task as dominant
Clock time: time as form of currency, essential to the development of
systematic and synchronized forms of mass production (once time became
commodity, employers used all possible means to extract as much labor as
possible from their workers)
The value of time for which the employer is paying the worker as dominant
The more one is considered a professional, the less one is tied to clock
time and the more one is invested in the nature of the tasks one performs
Organizations as communicative structures of power
- Power as dynamic process of struggle that rests on a complex relationship
between control and resistance; many elements are still relevant but have
been altered
- Tension between employee autonomy and organizational control efforts
through various communication processes (e.g. maximizing salary and
minimizing costs or maximizing leisure time and maximizing work time)
,Communication-organization relationship
1. Communication in organizations/transmission model/information transfer
model/container view: organizations as relatively stable, physical structures
within which communication occurs; mostly about clarity, accuracy, efficiency
x Tends to downplay the significance of communication in the optimal
performance of organizations
x Overlooks the complexity and ambiguity of communication as a meaning
creation process
x Tends to treat organizations as given/taken for granted/fixed, existing
independently from the communication process that occurs within them
2. Organizations as communication/constitutive approach/meaning-centered:
communication constitutes organizations, organizations exist because people
communicatively create the complex systems of meaning that we call
organizations, organizations as complex patterns of communication habits
Communication: the dynamic, ongoing process of creating and negotiating
meanings through interactional symbolic (verbal and nonverbal) practices, including
conversation, metaphors, rituals, stories, dress and space
- Communication does not just describe an already existing reality but creates
people’s social reality
Organizational communication: the process of creating and negotiating collective,
coordinated systems of meaning through symbolic practices oriented toward the
achievement of organizational goals
Three types of communication
Grapevine communication: gossip, informal, ‘during a coffee break’
Line communication: one-way, direct communication; SMCR: Sender, Message,
Channel, Receiver
Parallel communication: newsletters, magazines, websites, videoclips, message
boards; still formal
,
,Key features of organizations [Charles Redding]
Interdependence
Organizations exhibit interdependence: no member can function without affecting,
and being affected by, other organization members
Differentiation of tasks and functions
- Division of labor: members specialize in particular tasks and the organization
as a whole is divided into various departments
- Scientific management: analyzed each organizational task to determine the
most efficient and productive way to work
- Bureaucracy: made sure that each person knew his/her place in the
organization by creating a rational system of ‘offices’ that defined each work
role
Goal orientation
Overarching goals: ‘common purpose’, but company goals and those of other interest
groups can conflict
Organizational control
Direct control: direct employees in explicit ways and then monitor their behavior
to make sure they are performing adequately, close supervision, coercion;
superior-subordinate relation
x Supervisors are not always able to directly control worker productivity
Technological control: implementation of various forms of organizational
technology to control worker productivity (e.g. the moving production line limited
worker’s autonomy and ability to control their rate of production, electronic
surveillance)
Bureaucratic control: systems of formal rules, structures, job descriptions, merit
systems and so forth
Promoted a more democratic workplace
Promoted taken for granted ways of behaving (e.g. smooth running as you
move from class to class on campus)
x Alienation: thwarted by the red tape of bureaucracy
x Experienced as oppressive, constraining, inflexible by both workers and
managers
Ideological control/corporate culture model: the corporate development of a
system of values, beliefs, and meaning with which employees are expected to
identify strongly, developing ‘designer selves’ in employees,
Charging work with meaning and overcoming sense of alienation
employees have a strong sense of connection to the organization’s belief
system
x Oppressive for members: often asks the employee to invest his/her identity
in the company
x Employees often saw through these thinly veiled efforts to manipulate their
feelings
, Biocratic control: attempting to capture the diversity, rather than conformity, of
the organization’s workforce; erased distinction between home or leisure and
work
- Post-Fordist view, post-World War II
- Bios = life itself: ‘just being yourself’ while at work
Bringing personal authenticity to work and autonomous decision making
x [David Brooks] creating of an entrepreneurial self: the self becomes a project
each individual must constantly work on to prepare oneself for a highly
competitive market in which one’s ‘brand’ must be distinguishable
thinking of one’s entire life as framed by work, everything we do becomes an
extension of our desire to be economically competitive
x Difficult to escape because it encompasses all aspects of life and is largely
taken for granted social factory: the notion that work has spilled outside of
the organization, and economic value is created no longer only in
organizations but also by the everyday activities in which we routinely
engage
About the different forms of control
- The forms of organizational control generally emerged as attempt to overcome
the limitations of earlier control methods; so direct control was superseded by
technological control, and so forth
- Organizations use multiple forms of control at the same time
- The forms of control operate with decreasing levels of direct coercion and
increasing levels of participation by employees: control occurs via active
consent
- Direct, technological, and bureaucratic forms of control rely mainly on a fairly
simple understanding of communication as information transmission
Whereas ideological and biocratic forms of control can only be properly
understood through the constitutive conception of the communication-
organization relationship
Contradiction of work
It provides us with the resources we need to purchase both life’s necessities
and the little luxuries that make life more palatable and gives us a sense of
self-worth and achievement
We are heavily invested in work: ‘we live to work’
x A majority are dissatisfied with the work they do: alienation, meaninglessness,
insecurity, contemporary work
x We are consumed by work and committed to an ethic that says that if we are
not working hard and pursuing successful careers, then we are failing to
realize our potential as human beings
Shift towards gig-economy: many people were forced to take multiple, typically low-
paying jobs with few or no benefits; freelance work
Greater work autonomy and lifestyle flexibility
x No job benefits such as health care, pension plan, vacation days
x Less work/life balance
