General patterns in the field of Organizational Communication reflect many of the same issues applied to small group communication, but with a stronger focus on rhetorical traditions and message transmission. As a field of study, organizational communication evolved from older organizational and management studies. During and after the industrial revolution, most organizational studies were focused on top-down communication practices and worker productivity. Utilizing systems theory, studies were conducted of organizational structure and limited the conception of individuals within the organization to a “cogs in the wheel” ideology. The goal of these early studies was to see how effective and productive organizations were; the resulting focus on communication practices within organizations was focused on organizational control and management.
As more cultural themes began to merge into communication studies, views from the bottom-up in organizations began to become recognized. The role of individual employees within organizations, and how to maintain a strong organizational culture become focal points.
Organizational communication developed as a specialized field within communication studies to investigate both how management should effectively communicate to employees and how employees can communicate with the organizational structure.
Classical Approaches to Organizational Communication
Most early studies of organizational communication were dominantly behavioral studies which looked at communication within organizations and were from a systems perspective. As in group communication, this perspective looked at organizations as a wholistic system with components all meant to function as part of the system. Organizational studies were particularly influenced by what came to be known as the machine metaphor: that machine overall functions as whole and each part of the machine serves to complete a specialized task in the system (Miller & Barbour, 2014; Mumby, 2013). The machine metaphor also implies mechanical standardization, which itself implies the idea that individual parts of the machine are replaceable if they fail to function appropriately (Miller & Barbour, 2014).
An early 20th century organizational theory built from the machine metaphor had a great deal of impact on organizational communication. This theory was Frederick Taylor’s (1911) Theory of Scientific Management or Taylorism. Taylor's theory was designed to instruct managers in maintaining high levels of productivity from a body of workers who were primarily deemed “draft animals.” While many of the organizational studies that arose in the first part of the twentieth century took care to avoid that power-laden language, the overall argument that clear instruction and precise rules for employees must be maintained prevailed. Studies focused on management, particularly mid-level management practices. If the workers, who were treated mostly as drones, were ineffective then management needed to be updated or changed.
Management communication styles in this body of work included reward-punishment tactics, limited employee access to decision-making policies, and a generally authoritative style of management. Taylor’s authoritarian approach was challenged multiple times, including by a U.S. House of Representative’s investigation into Taylorism-style management practices for being abusive to employees (Investigation of the Taylor System, 1911-1912). By the 1930s the Human Relations Management style had evolved as an alternative (Thompkins, 1965). However, some organizations still practice forms of Taylorism today (Miller & Barbour, 2014; Mumby, 2013).
The Human Relations organizational approach focused on individual’s needs and how employees communicate and relate to each other. This approach evolved from Elton Mayo’s studies into how to encourage the highest levels of worker productivity by encouraging a healthy workplace culture (Mayo, 1949). While studying workers at the Hawthorne Electric Plant in Chicago, the researchers determined that changing the workspace did not matter as much as the fact that the researchers were there, and employees were being given a chance to express their concerns.
This study provided what researchers continue to call “The Hawthorne Effect”: that paying attention to workers and addressing their needs increases productivity (DeKay, 2013; Smith, 1987).
Communication was studied in these early models as communication within organizations. This view was divided into four basic component areas: 1) messaging content, 2) the direction of communication flow, 3) the channel or mode of communication, and 4) the communication style (Miller, 2012).
Cultural Approaches to Organizational Communication
In the 1960s the field incorporated systems theory approaches and was back to studying employees as parts of a system, yet with an understanding that balancing corporate needs with employee incentives would lead to the most productive organizations. By the 1980s, all of these approaches had been adopted into organizational management and organizational communications literature. However, influences and theories from the neo-Marxist Frankfurt School and the field of Cultural Studies would have a profound impact on how organizational communication is studied (Cloud, 2001; Mumby, 2013).
At this point the field, like many other areas of communication studies, moved into new critical and cultural approaches, with the integration of ethnographic methodologies and critical theory. This shift generated new insights into organizational studies. Scholars began looking at organizational cultures as entities created and maintained between employees and management.
Communication became a means of exploring how the organization seeks to control itself and its components (Deetz, 1982, 1995, 2000; Mumby, 2013), reflecting the rhetorical construction of reality. Communication studies from this perspective look particularly at organizational culture. Organizational culture shapes how work and goals are achieved within an organization because it uses a rhetorical construction process to shape attitudes, understandings, and control mechanisms. This culture is negotiated through the interaction of the members of the organizational structure.
Linda Putnam and George Cheney (1985) established a set of 4 criteria or standards for the study of organizational communication. In creating these standards, Cheney and Putnam both summarized the organizational communication studies that had been conducted to that time, and outlined focal goals for the future. The first standard is communication channels: looking at both top-down and bottom-up message flow within an organization. The second standard is communication climate: whether or not two-way communication is fully welcomed and appreciated within the organization. Third is network analysis: how the message flows through the system, and what gatekeepers are present along the message channels. Finally is superior-subordinate communication: management and leadership communication styles.
Because, unlike most group studies that focus on task oriented groups moving through the process of completing the task, organizations seldom start and end with a particular set of individuals, studies ventured into looking at newcomers to an organization and how they become or fail to become an accepted member of the culture. Other scholars also began looking at the impact of individuals’ cultural frameworks within an organization, such as ethnicity, race, gender, and sexuality. For example, Brenda Allen (1995, 1996, 1998) looks at the bicultural identities of black women in dominantly white organizations, explaining that these women have to act as black women in their home spaces while acting as white males in their work spaces. She further argues that these women are relegated to specific and stereotypical roles in many organizations.
These and other arguments focused on work-life balance became a dominant theme of organizational communication studies in the 1990s and early 2000s. Gendered discussions about the different expectation for women and men in the workplace, especially as tied to breadwinner myths and expectations about childcare options, as well as patriarchal language and power structures within organizations began to rise in prominence. One of the earliest was Dennis Mumby and Linda Putnam’s (1992) argument regarding bounded emotionality. This theory is a discussion of how women’s communication styles and the societal expectations that women are emotional do not function well in corporate structures. Theories like these discuss not only the constraints on minority groups and women, but also on the restrictions and expectations of men and masculine communication in organizations.
Work-Life Consumption: Corporate Colonization
According to the International Encyclopedia of Organizational Communication:
Corporate colonization refers to the unobtrusive ways corporate meanings, instrumental logics, and managerial values dominate the ways we understand, think, and act in everyday life. Concern for corporate colonization arises with increased participation in corporate forms of organizing and renewed appreciation for communication as a sociohistorical political practice that constitutes social reality and individual identity. Interest in corporate colonization directs attention to issues of systematically distorted communication and discursive closures maintaining corporate disciplinary power. Researchers interested in corporate colonization focus on revealing suppressed conflicts of meanings and encouraging participatory forms of collaborative meaning creation (McLellan, 2017).
This communication theory, created by Stanley Deetz (1992, 1995), discusses how individuals and families make decisions that actually benefit the organizations for which they work rather than themselves. Deetz built this concept on Habermas’ (1987) concept of colonization of the lifeworld. In a sense, the employee becomes the property of the corporation, even in their home life, as corporate work bleeds into constant overtime and home-work hours. The constant growth in digital communications technologies has furthered that colonization, as workers are essentially on-call to their corporations in a 24/7 type of working lifestyle. The challenge of work-life balance as a reflection of corporate colonization has become so prevalent, that in France a 2017 law was established to give workers the legal right to ignore work emails after hours (BOSS, 2017).
Corporate colonization echoes Foucault's (1975/1977) panopticon theory, that there is often punishment associated with aberrant behaviors or non-conformist performances. As discussed in previous modules, according to this theory we police ourselves into behaving according to social expectations. Similarly, we police ourselves and behave according to corporate gender and identity norms when we are in a constantly on-call capacity at work.
Habermas' (1962, 1987) theory of public and private spheres also plays a role in how we understand corporate colonization. This theory sets up the premise that Female spaces are generally found in the private sphere, and male spaces in the public. This removes female spaces from the normative structures of society, which generally contains them and limits their significance and impact on patriarchal structures; clearly contained and confined by hegemonic, patriarchal norms.
The corporate system itself generates rules to reinforce the differences between gender roles, as well as the differences between employee and management roles. Corporate colonization becomes a means of empowering the system to limit people's opportunities to advance while privileging both home and work, both the private and public spheres. Furloughing, cutting wages, limiting family leave, and other attempts at saving corporate monies are also viewed as forms of corporate colonization (Fraher & Gabriel, 2016). Salaries also don't have as much buying power as in previous generations, complicating expectations for both men and women seeking stronger work-life balance (Blithe, 2015). There has also been a great deal of research into work/life balance issues impacting women in relation to re-productive labor vs productive labor, and how "women's work" (Jarrett, 2014), labor generally performed in the home or private sphere, added to the gender wage gap, and has limited women's potential and impacted corporate glass ceilings.
Because women's work is historically unpaid, the concept of arranging time for it out of a workday has always been in conflict with the corporate model. With corporate work bleeding into home life, the distance between women's work and corporate work has become challenged, and the ability of women and men to complete both versions of work successfully in the same spaces is challenged in feminist and organziational research.
The separation of public and private, as discussed by Ferguson (1984), Kanter (1977, 1989), Martin (1990), Nippert-Eng (1996), Somerville (2000), and others, has presented the separate spheres as gendered, exclusive realms. In addition, the concept has been extended to include keeping employees’ personal life out of the workplace. One must always don a professional image at work and never bring personal matters to work. Employers expect employees to take work home, to meet with clients after hours and on weekends, and to be available by telephone, email, or pager any time the boss needs to reach them. This is a form of corporate colonization of the lifeworld (Habermas, 1987) as the employer’s needs take precedence over the needs of the individual and the family.
Martin (1990, 1994) argues that the boundaries separating the public and private spheres are a false dichotomy, meaning one that is or has become untrue. Kanter (1977, 1989) refers to the concept as “the myth of separate spheres.” In actuality we never leave one sphere and enter another. We exist on a continuum in which we traverse the false boundaries of either/or distinctions while being immersed in both worlds simultaneously. Employees do not shed their roles of parent, sibling, daughter or son when they enter their workplaces. Nor does work necessarily end when an employee goes home. Hochschild (1997) suggests, work becomes home and home becomes work as we engage in emotional labor in home/work.
One way of resisting this false dichotomy, as Deetz (1992) argues, is when both men and women reject the discourse of managerialism by choosing “balanced lives, and they pay for it primarily in the financial code favored by management. But they are happier people” (p. 337). Thus, employees often reject the workaholic experience in favor of a more comfortable work-life balance, yet suffer because they don't advance up the salary schedule as quickly as those who focus on work more fully. Hochschild’s (1989, 1997) concepts of the second and third shifts are another means of balancing work and family. In her 1980s research Hochschild found women engaging in second shift work. She argues that women not only work a paid shift during the day, but they also come home to a second shift of childrearing and housework in the evening. However, women are not the only ones participating in second-shift responsibilities. Men have taken a more active role in childcare and housework in the past decades. The second shift is not as gendered as it was in the 1980s, when Hochschild created the term. The workload is not completely equal, but fathers are doing more, and this can bring grandfathers, uncles, and significant others into the childrearing picture.
Research shows that many men identify their family roles as more significant than their work roles, and they also are worried about not spending enough time with their children (Jacobsen & Edmonson, 1993). Hall (1990) also reports balancing work-life issues is equally important to women and men. Furthermore, Gerson (1993) found that men who find it important to spend time with their children are selecting jobs that allow them to balance family and work responsibilities more easily than other professions. On the one hand, women still report spending significantly more time than men on household chores and parenting responsibilities, men are taking on more parenting roles than Hochschild found in the 1980s. Even former U.S. President Barack Obama discussed the challenge of work-life balance, particularly in terms of paid family leave, as a challenge in U.S. corporate culture, for both men and women at a Working Families Summit (Wallace, 2014).
For generations following the so-called baby boomers, as well as for many single-mothers in that generation, the choice between working and caretaking of home and family is further complicated by income issues. Somerville (2000) argues for the reclamation of the nuclear style family, but with a dual-earner status. She illustrates that the one indisputable fact in current women’s issues is that they have gained an increased number of choices, but that this has taken away the ability for women not to make a choice, or to try to balance more than one choice. Too much emphasis is placed on making a clear choice. Further, economic changes have rendered that choice obsolete for many women, as housing costs rose and continued to rise even through the economic crises, while wages stagnated and, in some cases, fell after economic recessions (Blithe, 2015). Much of this argument is centered on the idea that good jobs are not available, and the jobs that are available do not have good benefits, full-time hours, and they have high turn-over rates, what one scholar refers to as "McJobdom" (Sidler, 1997). The trend towards temporary workers is evidence of this argument. Moreover, professional jobs tend to require more than 40 hours a week. A typical workweek might be 60 hours or more with a great deal of work brought home to finish in the home office or at the kitchen table. Therefore, young earners, both male and female, often find it difficult to be able to balance family and work because they need multiple jobs, as well as have jobs that come home with them, and so they find themselves always at work. Therefore, once again gender is commodified, this time through corporate conscriptions of time and decision-making processes.
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