mindfulness and metaphors

Chapter 11 is sort of a catch all for the topics the authors haven't addressed earlier in the text, a chance to revisit some concepts, and a look to the future of organizational communication. The authors again discuss dialogue, linking it with mindfulness when they note that thinking is the essence of authentic dialogue. Communication research suggests that organization members interact mindlessly most of the time. Mindless communication can be useful because the brain reserves energy for more challenging interactions. But being mindful is nonetheless an important aspect of competent organizational communication, requiring communicators to adapt messages to their listeners.

The most interesting part of this chapter for me is the section on new logics of organizing. While the dominant metaphor is organizations as machines, it's often not the best way to organize. Viewing management as poetry suggests that managerial tasks are motivated by story and metaphor. For example, I've learned a lot about how to chair a department from the stories that others have told. In addition, viewing management as poetry recognizes that organizational behavior is seldom rational; people do the things they do and say the things they say for all sorts of reasons and motivations.

New metaphors for organizing include organizational communication as discourse, which focuses attention on organizations as texts. Organizational communication as voice highlights who is allowed to speak in an organization and who isn't. For example, reflect on how much say CSU students get in fee increases, courses offered, and graduation requirements. Organizational communication as performance suggests that organizational life is best understood as a drama--some aspects are fairly scripted, but others are more like improv.

~ Professor Cyborg

organizing and technology

The most interesting aspects of Chapter 10 for me are those focusing on organizations and new communication technologies. I don't think the authors fully grasp the degree to which the internet, cell phones, the like have impacted organizational communication, organizations, and organizing. For example, internet communication researchers have rejected media richness theory and embraced notion of a communication imperative, which I discuss in the Technology & Teams web lecture.

This imperative is related to Mouritsen and Bjorn-Andersen's argument that one concern in analyzing communication technology is humans are agents, which means that humans are able to work around the prescribed system. Consider the kinds of strategies employees will use to avoid surveillance technology. In identifying concerns in analyzing communication technology, Mouritsen and Bjorn-Andersen argue that technology is politically ambiguous, which means that technology can be used to both promote and constrain dialogue. Another concern in analyzing communication technology according to Mouritsen and Bjorn-Andersen is understanding is partial, which means that organization members' behaviors may lead to unintended consequences.

Eisenberg et al. observe that many social relationships within and between organizations involve mediated interpersonal communication, or the use of email, fax, telephones, and other forms of new communication technologies. I find this terminology rather quaint. What work relationships doesn't involve some sort of mediated communication? The telephone is a mediated form of communication and organization members have used phones to communication for over 100 years. As I discuss in the Technology & Teams web lecture, there's no virtual vs. real world--it's all real. Organization members use whatever forms of communication are available to meet their communicative goals.

~ Professor Cyborg

leading and organizing

Leadership has never been one of my interests as an organizational communication scholar. I've always felt it should be, but I tend to be more interested in the view from the bottom of the hierarchy. Nonetheless, leadership does function at all levels in an organization. Rather than looking to "a" leader, organizations generally work better when leadership and leading are more distributed.

In Chapter 9, the authors of your text discuss various approaches to leadership. The trait approach to leadership provides the insight that physical attractiveness is a key component of effective leadership. An early version of the leadership approach to leadership posited autocratic, democratic, and laissez-faire leaders. From the situational approach to leadership, leaders’ behaviors can be categorized as delegating, participating, selling, or telling. The transformational approach to leadership stresses the importance of leaders communicating a vision that resonates with followers.

After serving as acting chair of the department for six months last year, I could relate to the section in the chapter on effective leadership habits. Habits of mind essential for effective leaders include sensing, presencing and realizing. Habits of character include accessibility, decisiveness, and valuing individuals. Habits of authentic and compelling communicative performance include creating a vision for the future and developing a credible life story. In leading the department, I found the habits of character to be the most important in securing faculty enthusiasm and productivity. For example, faculty could easily contact me via email, phone, or in person. There are some decisions I made myself, such as setting up a faculty wiki. And I made sure to thank and acknowledge faculty members for their efforts in completing essential departmental tasks.

~ Professor Cyborg

teams and organizations

Chapter 8 focuses on teams and networks. Much of my research has examined teams, with special attention to interdisciplinary health care teams. I've blogged about this research in my graduate seminar in organizational communication (democracy and health care teams, organizational communication patterns, emotions in organizations, organizing and hospice care teams).

Today, though, I'm going to talk about why I'm currently in Long Beach attending the California Web Accessibility Conference (CalWAC4). As the authors of your text note, team-based organizations view all employees as able to decide how to manage their work. A project team in an organization is typically assigned to address a specific issue or problem. A work team in an organization is responsible for an entire work process that delivers a product or service to a customer. A quality improvement team in an organization is typically concerned with work-related issues such as customer satisfaction and reducing costs. I'm currently part of a project team that's been set up to help faculty make all their instructional materials fully accessible to all students. This includes, for example, having all syllabi and handouts in screen-readable digital format, close-captioning for video, and accessible digital slides.

Class websites have to be accessible as well (that's why CSU schools will be using blackboard only through the next academic year--it's not fully accessible). I'm in Long Beach attending the conference to learn more about how to make web instructional materials more accessible. Today, I'm taking three courses: how to test websites for accessibility, how to mentor others in accessibility, and accessibility issues in online learning. A few others on my team are attending as well, but have enrolled in different courses. At my team's first meeting in the spring semester, we'll report back on what we learned. Participating in CalWAC4 provides an example of Senge's notion of team learning as balancing inquiry and advocacy. When we report back to the other team members, we'll be practicing dialogue as the free flow of meaning.

~ Professor Cyborg

identity and organizations

Chapter 7 discusses identity and diversity in organizations with a special focus on gender. The authors note that liberal feminists advocate changes to government and company policies to create greater equity in the workplace for women. In contrast, radical feminists are interested in replacing traditional organizational structures with nonhierarchical ones.

A good portion of the chapter is devoted to discussing Ashcraft's four frames of identity associated with the workplace. The gender differences at work frame proposes that the communication styles of women and men stem from their gendered socialization. The gender identity as organizational performance frame posits that gender is performed, or something individuals do rather than something they are. The gendered organizations frame portrays organizations as agents that produce and are products of gendered discourse. The gender narratives in popular culture frame underscores the notion that how we understand organization stems from the media we consume, such as movies, books, and magazines.

For me the most interesting section in the chapter is on emotion labor, or the idea that organization members must enact certain emotions and refrain from enacting other emotions. Flight attendants, servers, sales clerks, and other service workers are not allowed to have a bad day--they must be upbeat and happy if they want to keep their jobs. This requirement always to be cheerful and positive no matter what can be quite stressful, especially when customers, supervisors, and others don't have to follow the same rules. Maybe that's why my waiting tables career lasted only two weeks.

~ Professor Cyborg

hegemony in organizations

A primary criticism of early work in organizational culture was the lack of attention to power in the organization. That is, while all organization members participate in the creation of organizational culture, some have greater influence in the process than others. In addition, cultural norms typically reinforce the status quo and cultural artifacts, such as stories and practices, convey values in implicit ways that are difficult to critique. As I mentioned in my entry yesterday, much of my work in organizational communication has focused on culture. My early research took an interpretive approach, but later work took a critical approach.

As the authors of your text point out in Chapter 6, he roots of critical theory are in the writings of Karl Marx and the scholars associated with the Frankfurt School. Critical approaches advocate for working people. A social trend in the U.S. that has contributed to increased interest in critical approaches to organizations is more resources being given to larger corporations. A recent example is the banking industry bailout in which billions of dollars were given to financial institutions with essentially no strings attached or oversight, while people directly affected by the collapse of the real estate market and mortgage system were for the most part left to fend for themselves.

Hegemony occurs when organizational rules developed by top management are adopted and enforced by those at lower levels of the hierarchy. Reification occurs when organization members view organizational reality as objective and fixed. Concertive control occurs when employees create and enforce their own rules. For example, SJSU administration requires that faculty give a final examination (of some sort) during finals week. As a learning and assessment tool, finals do a poor job, especially concentrated in just a few days. But SJSU has always had finals week (at least since anyone I know here can remember). It's viewed as something that can't be changed. Faculty have developed their own rules associated with finals week and enforce those rules. Some of us have questioned the rationale beyond finals week, but the questions are ignored.

According to Stan Deetz, a noted critical organizational communication scholar, critical research is a way of life that involves being filled with care, which means trying to understand others on their own terms. He also argues that critical researchers should be filled with thought, which means identifying the political implications of personal stories. Finally, being filled with humor for the critical researcher means accepting uncertainty and recognizing life's ironies.

~ Professor Cyborg

organizational culture

When I was working on my doctorate in communication at the University of Kentucky, I took a course in organizational culture. There were only four people in the class (that produced some interesting dynamics). The topic of organizational culture was fairly new--the authors of your text note that the first known reference to organizational culture appeared in a journal in 1979. The class greatly influenced my thinking about organizations and since then much of my research in organizational communication has focused on culture.

There are many definitions of organizational culture, as the authors of your text note in Chapter 5. Ouchi defined culture as national standards of organizational performance. From an interpretive perspective, culture is what an organization is and organizations are viewed as storytelling systems. Researchers from the integration perspective on culture generally attend to the stories of those in power and neglect marginalized groups in the organization. The differentiation perspective on organizational culture views organizational cultures as domains that are politically contested. Eisenberg et al. argue that culture is like a religion and that culture involves common recognition or intelligibility among a group of people. Examining organizational culture begins with recognizing the centrality of language in shaping organization members' perceptions.

In past semesters when I've taught this course, I've asked students to identify the different indicators of SJSU culture. Although some communication scholars argue these indicators only get at the surface of organizational culture, they nonetheless provide a useful starting point for examining what's often taken for granted. In identifying metaphors associated with SJSU, students have used the terms zoo, maze, and family. Examples of rituals at SJSU include spring graduation and convocation for first-year students. The MLK Library and statue of SJSU alumni protesting at the Olympics are examples of artifacts. By themselves they don't mean much, but examining several cultural artifacts can reveal organizational values and norms.

~ Professor Cyborg

systems and organizing

The systems perspective provided a radical shift from earlier thinking about organizations and organizing. With roots in biology, the systems perspective views organizations a organisms. Einstein's theory of relativity was a major influence on the development of systems theory. McLuhan's concept of a global information society where perceptions are no longer mediated by static ideas of time and space and Prigogine's work in chemistry suggesting that disorder is a natural part of environmental change and renewal have their roots in systems theory.

I find Karl Weick's application of systems theory to organization the most compelling of all the ways in which this theory has been applied. From Weick's sense-making perspective, decision making in organizations is largely retrospective. That is, organization members make decisions and then come up with reasons for making them. Managers are symbol manipulators who encourage employees to make sense of their work lives.

In identity construction, one property of Weick's notion of sense making, how and what organization members think indicates who they are. Plausibility, another sense-making property, means that sufficiency and probability are more important than accuracy. Continuation suggests that what organization members say competes for attention with other ongoing projects.

Weick argues that organizations are communities that provides sites for socializing and storytelling. I'm especially interested in organizational storytelling and what stories reveal about organizational culture. Listening to the stories faculty told when I first arrived at SJSU helped be better understand the practices and norms in the department and the university.

Systems theory and Weick's sense-making approach encourage organizational communication scholars to examine how members interact in creating organizational life, quite a contrast from earlier views of organization.

~ Professor Cyborg

theory and organizing

Theory is often depicted as dry, boring, and useless, as with "that's just a theory." Yet theory provides a way for understanding and interpreting the world. In Chapter 3, Eisenberg et al. discuss the notion of theory and organization as well as early theoretical approaches to organization and communication.

The authors note that theories are metaphorical and historical as well as goal-oriented stories. For example, the authors use the empire metaphor to describe how organizations in the U.S. functioned from the 1700s to the early 1900s. Because theories are partial, they can never completely explain organizational communication. Theories are partisan in that events in organizations may be interpreted in multiple ways. The problematic nature of theories invites dialogue and questions about organizational communication.

Theories, then, are narratives of organization--theories provide a way of telling the story of organization and organizing. As you read Chapter 3, you'll note that theories focus primarily on management and telling the story of how to get people to do their work. So concern was (and still for the most part is) with theories that will help top management figure out the best way to facilitate employee productivity.

I'm particularly interested in narratives of organization. For example, domination narratives came out of the top-down flow of information in hierarchies found in classical management approaches. Narratives of resistance are told by the less powerful and the powerless who ordinarily have little or no voice in organizations. These narratives are a type of hidden transcript--information known to those who are oppressed but kept from those in power due to fear of reprisal.

The idea of narratives of resistance suggests that much of what is known about organizations comes from the top and little is known about the daily work done by the typical member of an organization. Consider all the information produced by organizations: press releases, quarterly reports, year-end financial statements. For me, the most interesting research in organizational communication focuses on revealing the overlooked stories of organizational life.

~ Professor Cyborg

dialogue in organizations

In Chapter 2, the authors discuss the notion of dialogue in organizations. I'm particularly interested in this concept as it provides a foundational basis for a small group text I'm writing. In this entry, I provide a brief summary of the main points associated with dialogue outlined in the chapter.

In the model of communication as a balance of creativity and constraint (depicted on p. 42), communication suggests the possibility of dialogue. The model also suggests that creativity informs new ways of organizing tasks and understanding relationships. The foundations of dialogue frame a large part of working as the interpretation of contexts. Eisenberg et al. identify several approaches to dialogue. In dialogue as equitable transaction all participants are able to voice their opinions and perspectives. Voice is the ability of an individual or group to participate in organizational dialogue. The suppression of employee voice in organizations can result in sabotage and violence.

Dialogue as empathic conversation involves collective mindfulness. Dialogue as real meeting is also called authentic dialogue. One advantage of promoting dialogue in organizations is greater innovation. One disadvantage is that organization members may feel that no right answer can be identified for a problem. The authors of your text observe that dialogue in organizations is rare.

Creating spaces for dialogue can prove challenging, particularly in times of scarce resources. However, organizations ignore dialogue to their detriment. Dialogue is essential for innovation and for encouraging collaboration. If organization members feel they don't have a voice, they will find alternative ways to express themselves, as Eisenberg et al. note.

~ Professor Cyborg

the changing world of work

Welcome to the first official day of class! If you haven't already, complete the Process Tasks so you can keep up to date on what's going on in the class as well as start your own blogging.

The Eisenberg et al. text was published in 2007, which means the authors likely finished writing it in 2006. I'm not sure they could have anticipated all the changes in the changing world of work, but they did identify several directions for workplace trajectories, particularly in terms of the global economy.

In Chapter 1, the authors note the problems with a market economy largely free from government regulation. Although the authors gave the International Monetary Fund (IMF) policies as an example of "an unreasonably optimistic belief in the self-regulating power of a market economy," (p. 8), the current state of the global financial system provides a current weakness with this line of thinking and action. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) lists failed banks and those needing emergency assistance dating back to 1991. The list is long for 2008 and includes IndyMac, Washington Mutual, and Downey Savings and Loan Association. Moreover, because economies world wide are interdependent, the problems have spread to Asia, Europe, the Middle East, and other places around the globe.

The authors conclude the chapter by observing that "traditional ways of doing business--and communicating--are no longer effective" (p. 24). The problems organizations are facing today suggest they haven't quite yet figured out what the news ways should be.

~ Professor Cyborg

turbulent times for organizations

Welcome to the New Year! 2008 was certainly a year in which organizations made front page news and that's probably going to be the case in 2009 as well.

The Eisenberg et al. book begins with the line, "The are strange times for organizational communication" (p. v). The authors go on to note in the same paragraph, "The horrific ethical missteps by corporations such as Enron continue to haunt the current business environment, as a series of denials and plea deals made by key executives in these cases makes the potential for real change unlikely" (p. v). The lack of any sort of ethical code has certainly pervaded the financial industry, where top executives made a lot money while their organizations collapsed and U.S. taxpayer dollars were used for executive bonuses. The continued unethical--and even illegal--behavior of a few have led to turbulent and dark times for many.

The main headline in the Mercury News Business section, "A Loss of Faith in Stock Markets," reflects the lack of confidence people have in organizational decision-makers. Who wants to invest money in companies when leading financial advisors such as Bernard Madoff admit to defrauding clients out of $50 billion? As the authors of the text point out, balancing individual and group goals is essential to effective organizing. It seems that today the balance has tipped in the direction of the individual (at least a few individuals) to the detriment of the many.

So why even bother to take a class in organizational communication? Becoming a more knowledgeable organizational member can help you make smarter professional choices and improve your communication competency across all the organizations in which you're embedded. Taking an organizational communication class may not prevent scandals such as Enron and the recent subprime mortgage debacle, but if more people had such a class, the likelihood of such events might decrease.

~ Professor Cyborg