Internationalizing Organizational Communication

In his well-known essay, “Stumbling Toward Identity,” W. Charles Redding (1985) charts the rather capricious and serendipitous emergence of organizational communication as a coherent field of study. Those of us who passed through Purdue while Redding was still very much a presence in the program will fondly recall his rather fanciful portrayal of the “geography” of organizational communication, in which all roads led to West Lafayette, Indiana—the center of the universe, org. comm.-wise. One of the characteristics of this map was that its boundaries were the two coasts of the United States. The idea that the field of organizational communication extended beyond the shores of the United States was not something that was frequently imagined, even in the late 1980s/early 1990s when Redding guest lectured in my graduate-level “Theories of Organizational Communication” course.

Now, a happy irony of Redding’s map of the field is that one of the scholars who has had a significant impact on its geography was teaching and doing research in the same department. Even more ironically, Linda Putnam arrived at Purdue in the fall of 1977, fresh from her PhD program at Minnesota (where she was an advisee of Ernie Bormann’s) knowing little about the field of organizational communication and actually hired to teach small group communication. In fact, Linda audited Redding’s Organizational Communication survey course as a way to develop the background to teach in the area.

I begin my brief tribute to Linda in this way because for me it provides important context for her significant—arguably defining—role in shifting both the conceptual and geographical boundaries of the field of organizational communication. The reality is that for decades organizational communication scholars toiled away in relative isolation from researchers in other, cognate fields—management, sociology, organization studies—who were studying similar phenomena. Management and organization studies researchers rarely cited our research, except when it was published in their journals (to this day my most-cited article is the “Politics of Emotion” essay, cowritten with Linda, which was published in Academy of Management Review in 1992). Of course, the blame for our field’s apparent isolation cannot be laid solely at the feet of scholars in other fields and their inability to recognize the merits of our work! We have, historically, been a rather insular field, and it has taken the hard work of a relatively small group of scholars—Linda Putnam perhaps first among them—to move us away from a rather parochial view of organizational life.

Indeed, writing in 2012, it’s sobering to think that organizational communication was ever so insular, either geographically or theoretically. While there are some scholars who bemoan the U.S.-centric character of organizational communication (Broadfoot & Munshi, 2007; Prichard, 2006), the field has become increasingly international in at least three ways: (1) In its increasing enmeshment in an interdisciplinary network of scholars who are based on almost every continent; (2) In its increasing focus on organizing processes that are confined neither to U.S. organizations nor to for-profit (typically U.S.-based) corporations; and (3) In the leadership role of the field’s flagship journal—Management Communication Quarterly—in publishing scholarship that is international in authorship and subject matter.

Linda has been in the vanguard in all of these endeavors. However, given the limited space here let me focus on points one and three above (because in many respects they coincide). Linda has played a pivotal role in internationalizing our field by virtue of her connections to a network of scholars in management and organization studies. While a number of us who call organizational communication our intellectual home have a similarly large (and certainly overlapping) network of connections in these cognate fields, we have not had the same internationalizing influence that Linda has had. Why?

I think part of the answer is that Linda is comfortable speaking in multiple organizational discourses and voices. She came of age in the field when variable-analytic research was hegemonic, but was present at the birth of the interpretive turn (Putnam & Pacanowsky, 1983). She pointed the way toward the feminist/gender turn way before many of us were writing about it (Putnam & Fairhurst, 1985) and then helped to develop its conceptual apparatuses (Mumby & Putnam, 1992; Putnam & Mumby, 1993). Moreover, she was instrumental in what might be termed the “discursive turn” in the field—the conceptual shift that really cemented our connection to our colleagues in management and organization studies (Fairhurst & Putnam, 2004; Grant, Hardy, Oswick, Phillips, & Putnam, 2004; Putnam & Fairhurst, 2001). In this sense, Linda is an epistemological polyglot who moves easily among different academic communities, making friends and connections along the way in her own inimitable style!

A few years ago I wrote an essay for MCQ about Stewart Clegg’s contributions to the field of organizational communication in which I described him, using his own words, as engaged in “nomadic theorizing with a power compass” (Mumby, 2004). In some ways I think it’s accurate to describe Linda’s contributions to internationalizing the field as a form of “nomadic theorizing with a communication compass.” Linda’s conceptual cosmopolitanism has enabled her to travel the highways and byways of the field, stopping in various academic discourse communities to proselytize about the power and productivity of communication modes of explanation for understanding the process of organizing. And her influence has been felt in numerous locations. For example, for years critical management and organization studies scholars have examined the intersections of meaning and power, but often their conceptions of discourse and communication as the medium and outcome of this intersection have not been adequately theorized. Frequent resort to a psychological and/or subjective conception of communication as meaning-producing has been a characteristic feature of this work. Organizational communication scholars, with Linda at the forefront, have done yeoman work in shifting critical management and organizational discourse scholars away from psychological models toward a conception of meaning that locates it in communicative practice; that is, as intersubjectively and dialectically produced at the level of everyday organizing.

Again, let me briefly highlight just a couple of ways in which Linda has put her “communication compass” to work in ways that have internationalized and—as a consequence—strengthened the field. First, back in 2004 three organizational communication scholars—Karen Ashcraft, Linda Putnam, and myself—were invited to present our research at a 2-day workshop at the University of Sydney in Australia, organized jointly by Cynthia Hardy from the University of Melbourne and David Grant from the University of Sydney. We were the only three organizational communication scholars among a large contingent of management and organization studies researchers. Craig Prichard’s (2006) “creative accounting” of the event notwithstanding, the workshop was a resounding success and resulted in a special edition of MCQ devoted to the topic of the workshop—workplace resistance.

It’s actually quite instructive to read Putnam, Grant, Michelson, and Cutcher’s (2005) introductory essay in that special issue, because it provides some insight into how Linda has helped to reshape not only our relationship to our international colleagues in cognate fields but also to reorient those colleagues’ thinking about the place of communication and discourse in organizing processes. Early on in the essay the claim is made that “Discourse analysis of organizations is familiar terrain for communication researchers” (p. 6), followed shortly thereafter by the following assertion: “There is a . . . long history of research that focuses on worker resistance to management strategy and practice in organizations. . . . For the most part, discourse has played a secondary role in this work” (Putnam et al., 2005, p. 7). The special issue, then, is devoted to essays that explore the dialectical intersection of discourse and workplace resistance, driven by a decidedly communicational conception of organizing.

While it might be a fanciful claim on my part, I think it is no accident that, in the wake of this special issue, the discursive analysis of workplace resistance has taken center stage in critical management and organization studies (e.g., Contu, 2008; Fleming, 2009; Fleming & Spicer, 2007; Gabriel, 2008; Zoller & Fairhurst, 2007), including a subsequent second special in this journal edited by two Critical Management Studies scholars (Fleming & Spicer, 2008). We now have much more nuanced ways of talking about the control-resistance dialectic that draws significantly on the work of discourse and communication scholars.

Let me briefly mention a second context in which Linda’s communication compass has expanded the international scope of the field. Brazil has emerged in the last few years as an increasingly significant site for organizational communication research. Indeed, what’s exciting about the scholarship produced there is that it has a critical orientation almost by default, building a concern for democracy and social justice into the very conception of organizational communication as a field of study. Moreover, the relative insularity of U.S. scholars from their practitioner counterparts is not replicated in Brazil, with scholars and practitioners working together to address social, political, and economic problems. In some ways, the Brazilian story of organizational communication research narrates precisely the kind of critical engagement that U.S. scholars have applauded, but not always practiced, for years.

Again, Linda has been a catalytic figure in developing connections between Brazilian and U.S. organizational communication scholars. The annual Abrapcorp (Association of Brazilian Organizational Communication and Public Relations Scholars) conference in Brazil—established in 2007—has regularly showcased North American scholars, and Linda gave the keynote address at the very first meeting. Her trailblazing led to similar invitations to other organizational communication scholars in subsequent years. And as is usually the case when Linda gets involved with anything, a special issue of MCQ on the development of organizational communication in Brazil soon followed (Putnam & Machado Casali, 2009). More recently Brazilian researchers have edited scholarly collections featuring the work of both North American and Brazilian organizational communication scholars (e.g., Marchiori, in press). In short, a solid and generative connection between Brazilian and North American scholars is now established, with Linda, as usual, greasing the wheels of interaction.

It’s hard, then, to underestimate Linda’s role in internationalizing our field; and the ever-increasing profile of MCQ has gone hand in hand with that increased international presence. I know Linda is intensely proud of the ways in which MCQ has grown over the last 25 years, just I am immensely proud to be a friend and colleague of Linda’s, and to have been one of the many recipients of her mentoring over the years. I know I’m a much better scholar for it.