Abstract
Twenty-first-century capitalism has been characterized by chaos and rapid change, including global consolidation of ownership, financialization, economic crises, and eco-system collapse. Slow economic growth (outside of finance) coupled with increased market pressure have motivated continuous corporate re-organization involving outsourcing, contract employment, part-time labor, and similar cost-reduction practices. Consequently, workers in Western economies have fewer economic opportunities and American economic pessimism deepens (O’Connor, 2014) as too many workers and university graduates face temporary and/or part-time low-wage service jobs. As such, if the ways we teach organizational communication are to become more influential, the content and methods of our teaching must be expanded to offer meaningful critique of economic discourses influencing the constitution of organizations while providing useful ways to critically engage the complexities of contemporary organizational life. Although critical organizational communication research has addressed many workplace changes shaped by characteristics of late U.S. capitalism, the discipline has been less attentive to corporate communication and communication about corporations extending beyond employer–employee interactions. Without this guiding research, organizational communication education has been less inclined to focus on economic communication constituting the political systems that shape organizational structures, operations, and employee–employer relations.
In response to this lacuna, we propose extending critical pedagogies by offering an expanded conceptualization of “organizational communication” that includes economic communications circulating within and across organizations, both constituting and transcending traditional notions of organizational communication. Introducing students to the economic circulations shaping the contemporary workplace will expand understandings of the complex forces that must be recognized and contested for meaningful political re-engagement by human citizens in a democracy now disproportionately influenced by corporate citizens. Broadening the conceptual scope of organizational communication facilitates students’ capacity to re-imagine the relationship between important events (such as the financial crisis) and their personal economic opportunities or employment–employer relationships. However, such expanded attention must also anticipate and respond to the pedagogical challenges of futility and alienation that often arise when students are confronted with seemingly overwhelming macro-social forces. Therefore, our teaching must also identify and share practices of engagement fostering democratic deliberation upon issues and trends shaping organizational life. By encouraging active questioning of economic discourses and sponsoring engaged participation in transforming the ways we organize, we can inspire students to move from critical “thinking” to critical “being” and further contribute to the continued relevance of organizational communication for practitioners and scholars alike.
Broadening Organizational Communication
Where do we draw the boundaries of organizational communication when our pedagogical goals include critical workplace engagement, and democratic deliberation more broadly, with respect to issues and trends impacting workplace experiences? Although today’s organizational communication students are well-prepared to understand institutional dynamics of identity, gender, and race they have less understanding of economic and financial discourses that shape workplaces, often homogenizing and instrumentalizing their operations within networked global systems. Indeed, “economy” and “organizational communication” are severed in our typical disciplinary patterns of inquiry, resulting in a body of research and related pedagogical practices which upon reflection might be regarded as less focused on important economic events and trends than ideal. This is not to argue that organizational communication has entirely ignored systems that circulate. Clearly, examples abound of research that examines how global forces shape conduct and communication in very localized ways (e.g., Ganesh & Zoller, 2014). However, our teaching can expand this openness to multi-systems analysis by more directly attending to communication about economic markets, trends, and events.
Thus, we begin with a recommendation to expand our understanding of what counts as organizational communication by including within its domain economic communication more broadly conceived. Economic communication generally concerns itself with the nature and operations of markets—whether financial markets, commodity markets, arms markets, labor markets, or other systems of exchange. Economic communications are produced by diverse agents in diverse locales, but the codes and discourses that govern and contest economic communications circulate globally. For example, the “neoliberal, monetarist” communication code (or organizing discourse) produced by corporate and government authorities structures the operations of workplaces across the globe (see Nadesan, 2011). We see its operations today in media coverage of “activist investors’” call for corporate “inversions” through acquisitions of foreign holdings designed to move headquarters out of the United States and into lower tax rate nations, a practice that has grown from 1% of outbound U.S. deals in 2011 to 66% in 2014 (Raice, 2014). Economic communications are produced by corporations of all kind (e.g., industrial, news, financial, pharmaceutical), governments, think-tanks, academics, and activists and can be accessed in venues outside typical data-collection locales for organizational communication scholars, including corporate annual reports, economic policy papers, corporate press releases, statements made by public officials, news coverage, mass-mediated popular culture, Internet blogs, and other forms of financial or corporate communication.
What is important when teaching economic communication is focusing students’ attention to the nature and circulation of hegemonic and resistant codes and/or discourses, which are often organized in binary fashion, as illustrated by the profit/non-profit code that dominates much neoliberal economic communication and colonizes other communication systems. For example, neoliberal economic codes shape public discourse about the family, including the intimacies of health and child rearing. Students can be encouraged to evaluate economic communications with respect to their degree of responsiveness to other societal communications, particularly those that challenge dominant logics, such as the discourse of meaningful work that rejects the instrumentalized conception of organizational communication. If our teaching attends to the circulation and entrenchment of dominant and alternative codes of economic communication that shape the materiality of the economy, we can help create conditions of possibility and change for the work-a-day communications typically examined in organizational communication classrooms.
Teaching economic communication invites multi-level analysis of the complicated networks of communication codes produced by government agencies, powerful corporations, social activists, and other resistant agents. For instance, the current mass-mediated debates about income inequality provide fertile grounds for students studying economic communication and its circulations in situated work-a-day life. Students might be challenged to respond to the following questions about the “inequality” problem-solution frame to widespread economic malaise:
What assumptions are built into the “problem” of inequality and how do these assumptions shape the range of possible solutions promoted by divergent inequality “authorities”? What economic and political discourses are challenged by the dominant inequality discourse? What alternative discourses explain the same or similar conditions as those emphasized in inequality discourse?
Privileged and alternative discourses about inequality can then be studied in terms of their deployments across a variety of communication contexts, including the workplace:
Do dominant discourses about inequality inform organizational communication policies and communications? How do workers, owners, and entrepreneurs talk about inequality in their daily work-a-day lives and how do their articulations fit within the nexus of dominant and alternative discourses about inequality? How do corporations respond publicly in press releases, corporate responsibility initiatives, and executive testimonials to the inequality discourse? Where are the schisms?
Students can be encouraged to recognize the discursive contours of inequality by identifying key “authorities” in dominant formulations and divulging recurring code(s), logics, themes, metaphors, and so on, in communications about inequality (e.g., Piketty, 2014). Teaching in this way bridges macro- and micro-systems and academic disciplines by revealing to students how dominant and resistant inequality discourses are produced and disseminated by privileged authorities across multiple sites and media, including the micro-dynamics of more traditionally conceived organizational communication.
Transformative Pedagogy
Including economic communication within conceptualizations of organizational communication shifts pedagogical concerns toward regional and global discourses that systematically distort myriad localized forms of organized communication. However, when students begin to appreciate how their daily lives are meaningfully affected by the intrusion of dominant, abstracted economic logics they often become disenchanted with organization or disillusioned about the possibilities for agency, emancipation, and change. As such, our teaching must help students learn to not only appreciate the consequences of economic communication, but become capable of recognizing and resisting the fixidity of meanings maintained in corporate discourses and proficient in transformative political participation.
Accomplishing these pedagogical aims requires attending more directly to the intersections of local organizing practices and larger economic discourses that circulate widely, as well as helping students become more capable of participating in the discursive transformation of organizational structures, practices, and relationships. For instance, if students learn how to participate in communicative action by challenging others’ validity claims (e.g., Habermas, 1987), promote dialogic engagement attentive to “otherness” (e.g., Allen, 2011), engage in generative dialogue inspiring mutually responsive organizing (e.g., Gergen, Gergen, & Barrett, 2004), or practice collaborating in ways that reveal suppressed conflicts of meaning (e.g., Heath, 2007), they can become more capable of critical engagement in their own organizational lives. Including such practices in our teaching can help students become critical workplace participants who regularly challenge existing ways of knowing and promote alternative vocabularies for action not previously considered possible, relevant, or important.
Thus, we offer a second recommendation to include opportunities for critical engagement in the classroom. Specifically, our pedagogies can do better to encourage students’ deep reflexivity about their own moments of communication in ways that help students practice dialogic interactions and re-imagine transformative possibilities. One such semester-long activity begins by asking students to develop a rich narrative account of an actual moment of organizational communication in which they have participated. While moments of communication might be as brief as a text message exchange or as extensive as a job interview process, these narratives can be used for reflexive discussion of topics emerging throughout the semester. For instance, when teaching economic communication students can be challenged to respond to questions such as the following:
How does your communicative moment maintain particular economic codes, logics, or vocabularies? Which corporate or political interests are supported in this moment and whose interests are suppressed or rendered inconsequential?
Furthermore, throughout the semester, students can be offered opportunities to practice democratic deliberation about their moments of communication. Students can form small groups to collaboratively question the taken-for-granted meanings embedded in their moments of communication, challenge implicit validity claims, or consider the perspectives of varied “others” as related to their communicative moments. For example, students can collectively interrogate the economic logics embedded within their own communication and open up possibilities for alternative meanings by responding to the following:
What questions might have been asked during this moment to initiate conflicts of meaning? How might this communicative moment be resisted or rearticulated to sponsor alternative, marginalized, or suppressed meaning formations? How might organizational relationships be transformed by rearticulating economic meanings, logics, or codes?
This semester-long activity can be concluded by inviting students to rearticulate their moments of communication in ways that might animate alternative logics, promote suppressed conflicts, or inspire more mutually beneficial organizational meaning formations. The aim of such an activity is for students to practice the ability to engage in transformative redefinitions.
The pedagogical practice of having students frequently engage each other in dialogic deliberation—especially about their own organizational communication—can address the challenges of futility and alienation often arising when teaching critical perspectives. Specifically, by inspiring the confidence needed to become critically engaged at the intersections of economic communication and everyday communicative practices, students can become better prepared to critique work-a-day communication and discursively engage possibilities for action and transformation.
Conclusion
Our proposal to expand critical pedagogies by broadening the conceptualization of organizational communication to include varied economic communications requires refocused attention to teaching in ways that better prepares students to become critically engaged citizens of our communities and workplaces. Extending our teaching of organizational communication to include economic discourses can promote students’ capacity to recognize the influence of corporate discourses and transform the organizations and markets that shape them. Our hope is that such proposals will further organizational communication’s distinct and meaningful place in the discipline and work-a-day world. Specifically, if our teaching can inspire critically engaged organizational participation, our students will become practitioners looking more frequently to organizational communication theory, research, and practice as the discipline that best helps them understand and negotiate the ongoing challenges of 21st-century capitalism.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.