Discursive Positioning and Collective Resistance: How Managers Can Unwittingly Co-Create Team Resistance

Abstract

This ethnographic study describes how authority figures may unwittingly invite and co-create a team’s collective resistance in response to their actions. The study documents two pivotal organizational communication episodes experienced by two separate teams within a Collegiate Division I Athletic Department. A positioning analysis of the episodes revealed how a specific speech act (what we label “managerial inquisition”) partially facilitated athletes’ collective resistance to coaching staff. Our analysis suggested that coaches’ directives implicated team members’ identity needs and moral obligations to one another, which either encouraged or discouraged collective resistance to emerge within the unfolding discourse. This essay contributes to the team and organizational resistance literature by documenting how resistance can be co-created by management during control attempts.

Keywords

positioning theory speech act collective resistance identity

Team and organizational resistance are a reality of modern, team-based organizing (Ezzamel & Willmott, 1998). Many scholars agree resistance, an opposition to organizational control, occurs in virtually all organizing (Fleming & Spicer, 2007, 2008; Zoller, 2013). Collective resistance, in the form of coordinated acts of group members’ resistance, has drawn the attention of organizational communication scholars (Conrad, 2011; Zoller & Fairhurst, 2007). Whereas anecdotes of collective resistance in teams and organizations involving labor unions, disputes, and strikes abound in the news and scholarship (e.g., Burawoy, 1979; Edwards, 1979; Gabriel, 1999; Sewell, 1998), the micro and localized conversational moves that can facilitate collective resistance remain largely underexplored.

Important insights have been generated about how workers communicate to develop spaces of autonomy to resist managerial control. For example, workers are known to use irony, humor, and cynicism to resist hegemonic meanings of work and their identity (Fleming & Spicer, 2003; Tracy, 2000) with one another in backstage talk (e.g., Murphy, 1998; Scott, 1990) and also during front-stage interactions with management (e.g., Graham, 1995). These insights tend to highlight workers’ social constructions and communicative activities without necessarily considering how managers’ own control attempts help create the conversational ground on which subsequent resistance or compliance by members is experienced. A discursive positioning perspective toward collective resistance can help address this limitation by directing our attention to how the micro and localized conversational moves of management can implicate identities and moral obligations of members in ways that limit their viable options for subsequent action.

Managers and subordinates’ conversational moves are a site of ongoing identity negotiation that shape their experience of organizational reality (Alvesson & Kärreman, 2000; Barge, 2012); yet, little is known about whether or how specific identity positions created in management’s discourse facilitates subordinates’ collective compliance or resistance. To that end, this study applies a discursive positioning perspective to two episodes that were significant in the histories of two different teams: “the cream cheese episode” and “the spring break episode.” The cream cheese episode is the centerpiece of the analysis and describes how a collegiate football team came to resist a coach in the wake of a specific managerial speech act (later defined as a managerial inquisition). The spring break episode describes a similar situation where members of a collegiate track team broke team rules, but came to comply with versus resist a coach’s threat. The spring break episode is used as a relevant comparison to clarify and support our inductive theorizing regarding the co-creation of collective resistance (Christians & Carey, 1989).

Team and Organizational Resistance and Communication

Organizational resistance is a popular topic in organizational studies generally and organizational communication specifically (e.g., Mumby, 2005; Putnam, Grant, Michelson, & Cutcher, 2005). Contemporary communication scholars have demonstrated the importance of communication and social interaction in understanding control and resistance (Zoller, 2013). For example, organizational communication scholars have theorized the role played by macro-narratives and hegemonic discourses in subjugating marginalized groups in work settings (Fleming & Spicer, 2008). Furthermore, research has also documented how organizational members use specific rhetorical devices, such as resistant humor and stories to facilitate spaces of autonomy and develop a sense of shared identity (Fleming & Spicer, 2003). In addition, several researchers have focused on how individual organizational resistance might unfold and be influenced by social forces in unexpected ways (Fleming & Spicer, 2008; Kassing, 2011; Tucker, 1993).

Prasad and Prasad (2000) explained that resistance is “both planned and accidental, strategic and spontaneous, often retrospectively constructed, but always emerging out of the local interpretations and discourses of multiple actors” (p. 402, italics added). Despite the recognition that resistance emerges from the interpretations and discourses of multiple actors, only a few empirical accounts have studied the communicative emergence of collective resistance at the micro-level within organizations (e.g., Graham, 1995). However, even these few instances do not explain how members create, combine together, or otherwise scale-up their individual resistance efforts to produce collective resistance within their organizations. Moreover, despite these insights about organizational resistance and communication, little is known about how power holders’ own discursive moves can “contribute to the very reactions they label as resistance” (Ford, Ford, & D’Amelio, 2008, p. 363). Positioning theory offers one approach for examining the micro-level dynamics of control and resistance, how speakers co-create these dynamics through sequences of speech acts, and how individual resistance can scale-up to collective resistance.

Positioning Theory and Collective Resistance

A discursive positioning perspective of collective resistance focuses analytical attention on the micro, local, and situated conversational moves individuals take to create and challenge social arrangements. When power holders engage in control attempts in the course of conversation, they position their own and others’ identity implicitly or explicitly. The negotiation of participant positions is accomplished through individuals’ use of language in everyday conversation defined here as “discourse” (see Alvesson & Kärreman, 2000). Harré and van Langenhove’s (1999) positioning theory provides one account of how identity comes into being in talk. In contrast with the static notion of roles (Biddle, 1979), positioning theory explains that individuals position their own and others’ contingent identities within discourse episodes (Harré, Moghaddam, Pilkerton Cairnie, Rothbart, & Sabat, 2009). Episodes are interactions that contain a principle of unity, which come into existence sequentially, and are often based on individuals’ application of previous positioning scripts (i.e., sequences of expected turns) learned during socialization. Positioning structures the formulation and selection of subsequent acts by individuals. Harré and van Langenhove (1999) explained “positioning can be understood as the discursive construction of personal stories that make a person’s actions intelligible and relatively determinate as social acts” (p. 16). For example, if a manager asks an administrative assistant to order lunch, the request assumes an identity location of authority and the moral right to make such a request from that identity location. To apply positioning theory as an analytic lens and tool, Harré and van Langenhove (1999) recommended investigating three conversational elements: (a) moral positioning (i.e., the rights and duties to make moral claims), (b) conversational history (i.e., sequence), and (c) actual sayings (i.e., speech acts, illocutionary force, and perlocutionary effect).

First, “positions are moral, specifying what people can” and cannot do (Barge, 2012, p. 125). Positions may be offered or challenged in discourse. These discourses imply who has the right to enact a participant position (e.g., a leader gives a command), and who has the duty to submit to the positions that others place them (e.g., a subordinate complies with a command). Individuals can be thought of as performing themselves and others as characters in a drama and these presentations create discursive positions from which subsequent acts arise (Goffman, 1959; Harré et al., 2009; Hollway, 1984). Individuals may choose to take up, refuse, or create a position, as well as alter, defend, or appropriate others’ positions. Thus, a focus on positioning gives attention to how moral rights and duties are co-created alongside identity in talk (Harré, 2012).

An example of the application of positioning theory is offered by Barge and Fairhurst’s (2008) theoretical explanation of systemic constructionist leadership, which emphasizes that positioning is central to understanding ethical leadership. They argued that through communication, leaders and followers co-create and sustain “particular moral orders” (p. 244). As conversations unfold, communicators can mismanage one another’s identities by limiting or narrowing the number of identity-maintaining positions they can take up within the unfolding storyline (Barge, 2012; Harré & Slocum, 2003). Their approach suggests that ethical leadership communication involves “relationally-responsive” identity management that affords the other opportunities to maintain dignity (Barge & Fairhurst, 2008, p. 244).

Second, positioning theory states that focusing on the interactional sequence is important because positions and positioning evolve over time and through the performance of speech acts. Harré and van Langenhove (1999) explained,

the meanings of speech-acts and other forms of behavior derive from the behavior itself as it occurs within the confines of a mutually agreed upon context . . . which itself derives from the mutual construction of the persons in question. (p. 9)

Patterns of sequence allow characters to act characteristically within a given storyline (Kelley & Bisel, 2014) or interpret when they or others change the storyline. Individuals position themselves, or take up alternative positions, sequentially in the conversation using speech acts, which come to “mutually determine one another” (Harré & van Langenhove, 1999, pp. 16-17).

Third, positioning theory highlights Austin’s (1962) distinction between illocutionary force (i.e., action taken in speech) and perlocutionary effect (i.e., the consequence of a speech act). For example, if a football coach asks a player to follow him to his office, the illocutionary force of the question is probably more of a directive than a request. The perlocutionary effect would be whether or not the player followed the coach to the office. This distinction is important for understanding the organizational control–resistance interplay. Speech acts may not result in intended perlocutionary effect because actors may reject another’s positioning if the participant position is unattractive or ego threatening. Moreover, Harré et al. (2009) explained that some interactions may force individuals into positions they would not have occupied voluntarily—a point relevant to the control-laden communication typical of teams and organizations. Given the distinction between illocutionary force and perlocutionary effect, respondents can accept or challenge a position, and even attempt to generate a new sequence to manage identity within the unfolding conversation. Imagine if a football player resisted a coach’s request by responding with a simple public utterance of “no.” This utterance changes the player’s and coach’s participant positions in terms of power-in-use as well as modifies the subsequent storyline of the episode because the coach’s options are narrowed.

Positioning theory has been fruitfully applied to answer a variety of scholarly questions regarding the gendered performance of management (Katila & Eriksson, 2013), experiences with planned organizational change (Bisel & Barge, 2011), and small group decision making (Hirvonen, 2013). Yet, the emergence of collective resistance in teams and organizations has not been explicitly investigated from a positioning perspective. Conceptualizing collective resistance from the perspective of positioning theory directs attention to the ways resistance can be co-created in talk between communicators. For example, Jorgenson’s (2002) interview study of women engineers revealed that participants were reluctant to, or ambivalent about, being positioned by the researcher as part of a marginalized group within their occupation. Jorgenson explained individual participants attempted to resist to the interviewer’s positioning of them as feminists—a presumed position they did not identify with simply because of their feminine gender and engineer occupation. These findings suggest that participant positions can precede resistance. In this case of female engineers, resistance was created by the presence of (what participants deemed to be) an unfavorable identity into which the interviewer placed them (Jorgenson, 2002). Similarly, positioning theory was also used to explain how a leader’s messaging implied unfavorable identities for individual employees that positioned them as untrustworthy, which triggered their negative experiences of planned changes (Bisel & Barge, 2011). Taken together, these two studies support the notion that managerial messages can position individuals in ways that co-create and trigger their resistance attempts. Yet, it remains unclear whether managerial positioning of others’ can facilitate collective and team-based resistance.

The Control–Resistance Relationship and Discursive Positioning

A number of theoretical and empirical works have grappled with articulating the relationship between organizational control and organizational resistance. Early scholarship implied that control and resistance were opposites and their co-presence was not well conceived (Watson, 1971). Mumby’s (2005) review of the resistance literature argued cogently that the relationship between control and resistance is dialectic in nature—suggesting a deep oneness and co-presence of opposites. The co-presence of opposites was empirically demonstrated by Bisel, Ford, and Keyton’s (2007) case study that illustrated how the unobtrusive control of group memberships on political decision-making was strongly resisted by the unobtrusive control of other occupational, community, and civic group memberships. Similarly, borrowing from structuration theory (Giddens, 1979), Bisel et al. (2007) described the control–resistance relationship as a duality of structure—again suggesting a deep oneness and co-presence of opposites (Conrad & Hayes, 2001). Finally, Larson and Tompkins (2005) documented how middle managers’ ambivalence about planned changes encouraged lower level employees to resist changes. Both managerial control and resistance were observed within middle managers’ communication about changes.

Collectively, these research studies suggest that the control–resistance relationship is highly complex and demonstrates a deep oneness and co-presence of opposites. Applying a positioning perspective to how control and resistance unfolds within sequences of conversation holds the potential to supplement current research into the control–resistance relationship with more fine-grained empirical examples at the level of actual situated language use. Furthermore, a discursive positioning perspective may offer a vocabulary for describing the oneness and co-presence of opposites within the situated action of a single, but important, leader–member conversation.

Research Context

This study is a part of a larger program of research on leadership, resistance, and control. The inspiration for this study came from a field observation of a resistance episode within a Division I (DI) National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) football team. Later, a similar episode within the women’s track team at the same university was also included in the positioning analysis as a relevant comparison. Initially, the first author proposed to study the topic of emergent resistance leadership (Zoller & Fairhurst, 2007), in which individuals without hierarchical authority lead others to resist management. Once on scene, however, the first author was told by football athletes and coaches about a significant communication episode that occurred weeks earlier. In the episode, a strength and conditioning coach purchased cream cheese from his personal funds for football players. Upon discovering the cream cheese was missing, the coach demanded from the team to know who took it. Despite threats and collective punishment, no teammate confessed. Given that weeks later the episode was still being retold, even though the researchers did not ask about it, the researchers decided to change the focus of the investigation to understand how the coach’s messaging was implicated in the emergence of the team’s collective resistance. Thus, we asked,

Research Question 1: What positioning processes preceded a team’s collective resistance?

Method

The authors employed a case-based ethnographic method of data collection to answer the proposed research question. A case study is an empirical in-depth examination of contemporary phenomena where the investigator collects data from a single case through a variety of primary and secondary sources (Lindlof & Taylor, 2011). Case-based research has been fruitful elsewhere in providing insight into the ephemeral and often hidden acts of resistance and control (e.g., Murphy, 1998; Tucker, 1993). Given that resistance and control are socially constructed phenomena, it is imperative that the researcher understand the taken-for-granted cultural assumptions that make organizational members’ resistance sensible for them, making case-based ethnographic methods appropriate for answering the proposed research question.

Football Participants

All participants were coaches or athletes within the same athletic program at a NCAA DI university located in a mid-major conference in the southern United States (N = 54). Data were collected during two rounds: (a) 3 weeks during August at the start of football training camp, and (b) 2 weeks at the end of the regular football season in October. This research site was purposely chosen based on researcher access, suitability to the theoretical issues, yield of data, and feasibility (Tracy, 2013). As part of the larger program of research, the authors first solicited members from the football team at the university to participate in an ethnographic study about resistance leadership, which included direct observation of participant interaction, as well as informal and formal interviews. Players and coaches held a variety of formal positions and informal roles within the organization. Football coaches (n = 9) were male and ranged in age from 27 to 57 (M = 36.5, SD = 10.05). Football players (n = 31) were male and ranged in age from 18 to 23 (M = 20.3, SD = 1.46). Players varied in length of involvement in the team from 2 weeks to 3 years (M = 75.1 weeks, SD = 1.08).

Data Collection: Discovering the Cream Cheese Episode

After obtaining consent from the appropriate Internal Review Board, the first author traveled to the research site at the beginning of the fall season. Participants were solicited through face-to-face recruitment (Lindlof & Taylor, 2011). During the first week, the researcher focused on building relationships with participants, observing their interactions, recording field notes, and conducting informal interviews. During this time, the author learned of a collective resistance episode, which occurred a month earlier (i.e., “the cream cheese episode”) through informal conversations with athletes and the strength and conditioning coach as well as overhearing athletes retell and joke about the episode to each other. Using a method of abductive inquiry (Charmaz, 2006), the authors discussed and examined these initial field notes iteratively, returned to theory, and again returned to examine the data (Tracy, 2013). Participants were asked about the episode during interviews to understand how members were constructing the meaning of this resistance episode. Given that researchers discovered the retelling of the story by organizational members, rather than soliciting members about resistance stories, the findings and analysis presented in this research section are emergent and data driven, a hallmark of high-quality qualitative research (Tracy, 2013).

Interviews

During the first 3 weeks of data collection, the first author conducted 34 formal interviews with players (n = 20), trainers (n = 5), and coaches (n = 9). Interviews were conducted in a private office. Interviews followed a semi-structured protocol, which could be adapted to participant responses. Interviews asked about reasons for playing football; injury treatment and compliance; the values of coaches, athletes, and trainers; and how each participant understood their relationship with one another. Participants were also asked to recount their perceptions of the “cream cheese episode.” Each interview was recorded and ranged from approximately 14 min to 75 min in length (M = 28.92, SD = 12.31). Recordings were professionally transcribed and checked for accuracy. The primary round of interviews yielded 556 pages (double-spaced, 12-point font) of verbatim transcripts.

Time away from the scene

After the first phase of data collection, the first author spent the subsequent 2 months listening to interview recordings and reading transcripts. Data reduction and open coding were conducted concomitantly by engaging in an iterative process of writing memos, reading literature, and re-reading data (Lindlof & Taylor, 2011). Several conversations between the first and second author aided in crafting the next steps of data collection and analysis. Lucas and D’Enbeau (2013) described this process as an early intervention. Specifically, these analytic processes guided the revision of the second interview protocol for the authors to seek areas of disconfirmation or nuance in the preliminary coding scheme, negative cases, and a relevant comparison with the phenomenon observed within the “cream cheese episode.” Overlap between qualitative data collection and analysis demonstrates findings were emergent and data driven (Tracy, 2013).

Two additional weeks on site

In late October, the first author returned to the research site to conduct a secondary phase of data collection. She spent 2 weeks on site attending one home game, training room treatments, and conducted additional informal and formal interviews with members of the football team and included a relevant comparison from the track team described in the next section (n = 24). Informed by the initial analysis, the authors sought cases that might disconfirm or nuance initial theorizing through additional interviews with football team members. The first author conducted four secondary formal interviews with football players and coaches, and solicited 10 more participants from the football team who were present during the cream cheese episode to recount the event. The second round of semi-structured interviews focused on issues of control and resistance pertaining to each of the resistance episodes specifically. Interviews ranged approximately in length from 8 to 71 minutes (M = 26.46, SD = 17.11). Additional interviews yielded 372 more pages of transcripts. Transcripts were professionally transcribed and checked for accuracy.

Relevant comparison: Discovering the spring break episode

One issue raised during the peer-review process (i.e., discussion of initial data and analysis among the authors and other organizational communication scholars) was whether or not the football team’s resistance episode was especially novel or unique. While on site in the preliminary phase, the first author had the opportunity to interact with women’s track team athletes. In these informal conversations, athletes revealed a similar resistance episode that occurred within the women’s track team 3 years earlier. The women’s track team resistance episode is labeled “the spring break episode” as a shorthand. The first author retold the comparable story during a peer-review conversation, which was later pursued as a relevant comparison with the theoretical explanation she was building from the football team’s resistance episode. Christians and Carey (1989) explained that a “judicious” choosing of comparisons groups “improves the substance and explanatory power of our interpretations . . . by clarifying gross features and making conceptual categories more precise” (pp. 366-367). To that end, the authors included a relevant comparison to enhance the clarity and precision of the initial analysis. During the second round of data collection, athletes on the women’s track team and the head coach were solicited to participate in formal interviews (n = 10). The female athletes ranged in age from 20 to 22 (M = 21.12, SD = 0.64). Athletes’ specialties varied including throws, distance running, and sprint events. During interviews, participants were asked to recount the resistance episode. These data were included in the corpus of data from the second round of collection (i.e., part of the 372 pages of transcripts). The relevant comparison episode was helpful for inductive theorizing because participant positioning within the track team’s resistance episode unfolded differently from the football team’s resistance episode.

Positioning Analysis of a Team’s Communication Episode

To answer the research question, the authors conducted a positioning analysis of the two resistance episodes (Harré, 2012; Harré & van Langenhove, 1999). After completion of the second phase of data collection, the authors reduced the data (Bisel, Barge, Dougherty, Lucas, & Tracy, 2014; Lindlof & Taylor, 2011) by retaining those instances in which participants recounted either of the two resistance episodes. Interview questions encouraged participants to narrate the communication episode. These first-person retrospective accounts implied participants’ felt subject positions (e.g., “It’s not like ‘hey I am going to do this and be the villain’ . . . more like ‘hey here is the cream cheese, I will take it’ and then all of a sudden ‘oh no’ everybody thinks it is a big deal.”) and their conjectures about others’ motives for communicating (e.g., “[Coach Smith] was pissed he was furious it was so funny you know. He was so mad ’cause he didn’t even get none of the cream cheese”). Participants’ narratives were charted for major sequences of events and how their own and others’ actions and speech acts positioned their identities within the conversation (see Table 1; Harré & Secord, 1973; Tompkins & Cheney, 1983). The analysis clarified how the teams’ resistance (or compliance) was co-produced by leaders’ discursive positioning of others. Whereas positioning theory has been helpful in providing insights into leader–member communication in the past (Bisel & Barge, 2011), this article is one of the first to employ positioning analysis to investigate leader–member communication. Therefore, it contributes methodologically to the study of leadership by providing a unique analytic strategy for investigating critical turning points in the history of an organization, during which struggles over identity and participant positions become manifest in discourse. Findings were evaluated by member checking during the writing stages by soliciting feedback about the accuracy of findings from athletes, coaches, and trainers (Lindlof & Taylor, 2011). Reactions were largely supportive; all suggestions for improvements were integrated into the presentation of findings.

Table 1.

Managerial Inquisition in the Cream Cheese Episode.

Storyline sequence	Coach Smith’s vs. players’ perspectives	Transcript examples
1. Coach purchases cream cheese	Coach Smith	“The cream cheese thing was just frustrating, ’cause I’ve—see, you’re not supposed to buy cream cheese for ’em, so I used my own money to buy it . . . ”
1. Coach purchases cream cheese	Player	“So he usually leaves that stuff out and . . . ‘I am going to treat the fall players and leave some cream cheese out’ and then you know they can have all of that stuff.”
2. Missing cream cheese	Coach Smith	“So, I go in the locker room afterwards, I’m like, there’s no cream cheese.”
2. Missing cream cheese	Player	“ . . .then when we came for that workout session he was complaining about somebody had stolen the cream cheese.”
3. Collective questioning [Managerial Inquisition]	Coach Smith	“‘Okay, guys, who took the cream cheese?’ Nobody knows anything.”
3. Collective questioning [Managerial Inquisition]	Player	“He was muttering all kinds of word to himself—he’s—curse words, everything. Says, ‘who took the cream cheese?’ Like, he was going crazy over the cream cheese.”
4. Laughing at coach’s anger	Coach Smith	[Not Available in Interview Data]
	Player	“And we was like, it was more like we was laughing, we was like somebody took the man cream cheese before he gets some, so he’s mad.”
	Player	“Yeah he was pissed he was furious it was so funny you know. He was so mad ’cause he didn’t even get none of the cream cheese.”
5. Collective questioning with threat from coach	Coach Smith	“I’ll tell you what, if the cream cheese doesn’t end up back on that table by 9:00, everyone’s doing stadium on Monday.”
5. Collective questioning with threat from coach	Player	“He snapped on it. But, like, we’re talking about like he had a real temper tantrum. Like, damn, very serious over cream cheese? . . . he was trying basically to get us to snitch on people.”
6. Silence from team	Coach Smith	“Okay, so, Monday rolls around, ‘who took the cream cheese?’ Nobody says anything. ‘Okay, let’s go out in the stadium.’”
6. Silence from team	Player	“He did ask us again, he was saying anybody know where the cream cheese is? Ain’t nobody say nothing so we all went outside . . .”
7. Punishment and team silence [Collective Resistance]	Coach Smith	“So, I made ‘em all go up to the top of the stadium and sit down in every single bleacher seat for an hour and a half.”
7. Punishment and team silence [Collective Resistance]	Player	“Nobody’s any snitch, so he had we’re going sittin’—sitting down on every stadium seat, every stadium seat until somebody fessed up. Never happened.”
8. Lying to protect teammate	Coach Smith	“[name], put your hand on this Bible and say that you took the cream cheese.’ ‘I can’t do that.’ ‘Well, then, I can’t let everybody stop doing this workout.’”
8. Lying to protect teammate	Player	“So, of course, everybody’s like, ‘I did it, I took the cream cheese.’ ‘Put your hand on the Bible.’ ‘Oh, no, I didn’t take the cream cheese.’ It was funny to see how teammates really, like, stuck up for each other.”
9. Punishment termination	Coach Smith	“‘See you all tomorrow’ after the hour and a half was done.”
9. Punishment termination	Player	“After the fact they was like uh I mean hey just bring us close as a team ain’t nobody gonna rat nobody out. Ain’t nobody, they just all gonna stick together.”
10. Post-action sensemaking	Coach Smith	“I don’t mean to sound like preachy here, but like, I don’t think the guys realize how much stuff is done for them.”
10. Post-action sensemaking	Player	“Then, that let us know that we can trust each other. Then that right there was a big step cause that let the person know who took it like ‘they my brothers, I trust them.’”

Findings

A comparison of accounts from participants on the two athletic teams revealed consistent incongruence between their sensemaking and positioning within each team-based collective resistance episode. Whereas the football and track resistance episodes are similar, each group’s meaning-making about the episodes differs greatly. The following sections summarize each episode based on participant descriptions and provide an in-depth analysis of positioning in each episode to explain the processes that triggered concertive control systems as well as collective resistance. Names are replaced with pseudonyms to ensure confidentiality.

The Cream Cheese Episode

Over the summer, the football strength coach, Coach Smith, led a 6:00 a.m. and 4:15 p.m. weight workout to accommodate athletes’ work schedules. He also managed a small budget to purchase “snacks” for the players to eat before or after they workout. Whereas the NCAA does not allow teams within the Football Championship Subdivision (FCS) to provide full meals to athletes over the summer, the NCAA does allow teams to provide “snacks” to athletes. Specifically, the NCAA handbook states “an institution may provide fruit, nuts and bagels to a student-athlete at any time” (NCAA, 2015, p. 232). To aid athletes in covering their expenses and to ensure they ingest sufficient calories, Coach Smith told players that they can take as much food as they want after each workout. On Fridays, athletes were permitted to take leftover food after everyone had the opportunity to eat. One Friday, Coach Smith supplemented the bagel snack by purchasing cream cheese for the team. He purchased the cream cheese with his personal money because the university was not allowed to provide this type of snack to athletes during the summer, per NCAA regulations.

As usual, before the 6:00 a.m. weight session, Coach Smith arranged a folding table in the football locker room with bagels, fruit, jelly, peanut butter, and cream cheese. According to the coach and multiple player accounts, he then left to facilitate the workout in the weight room. When he returned to the locker room approximately 90 min later, the cream cheese was no longer on the folding table. Coach Smith recounts, as players showered and dressed, he asked loudly where the cream cheese was and who took it. Players recalled that a few teammates responded with laughter—unsure about the seriousness of Coach Smith’s request. Coach Smith responded aloud that even if the person who took the cream cheese is no longer in the room, someone on the team knows who took the cream cheese and should come forward. Players recount that Coach Smith explained he was not upset because the cream cheese was “stolen,” but was upset over the principle of the act, in that taking the cream cheese is like “stealing from the team.” No player responded to Coach Smith’s request for information. Coach Smith told the team that if no one comes forward and reveals who took the cream cheese, then the team will have a “punishment workout” on Monday morning. The players left for the weekend.

At 6:00 a.m. on Monday morning, players arrived for their weight workout. Coach Smith asked the team again if anyone knows who took the cream cheese. The players remained silent. Coach Smith told the players that because they were unwilling to be “accountable for their teammates,” they are all going to have to do a punishment workout. He led them outside to the stadium bleachers and explained that each of them will rotate sitting in every seat in the stadium, unless someone tells him who took the cream cheese. The players remained silent and began the punishment workout. The following dialogue is an amalgamation of Derrick and Coach Smith’s interviews. Several other players discussed the dialogue in their interviews, which is evidence that Derrick retold the story to his teammates.

After thirty minutes of the punishment workout, Derrick, a junior lineman on the team raises his hand and said, “Coach, I did it, it was me.”

Coach Smith eyed Derrick and said, “Alright, son come with me.”

He led Derrick into the coaching office and retrieved a Bible from the shelf.

Coach Smith turned to Derrick and said, “Put your hand on this Bible and swear to me you’re the one who took the cream cheese.”

Derrick smiled, shook his head and said, “Aww coach I can’t do that.”

Coach Smith shook his head and said, “Well then I can’t let everybody stop doing this workout.”

They returned to the stadium bleachers. Silently, each player rotated through the entire stadium until they sat in every seat. Several months later (at the time of the second round of data collection) the coaching staff was still unaware of who took the cream cheese.

Did the players know who took it?

A common question asked after retelling the cream cheese episode is whether or not players knew who took the cream cheese. Based on interview data, at the time of the punishment workout, the majority of the players knew which player took the cream cheese and at the time of the interviews all players interviewed knew who took it. During interviews, some players offered to disclose the player’s name. This offer of disclosure supports the idea that players chose not to comply with a managerial directive to tell on their teammates. Players’ aversion to comply with a managerial directive—in participants’ words “snitch”—on teammates is apparent within this episode. When asked to define snitching, participants described the act as “telling somebody’s business that ain’t got nothing to do with you,” “telling on somebody for the benefit of yourself,” and “like the hood word for a tattletale.”

Retelling the Cream Cheese Story

After the cream cheese episode, the players and Coach Smith resumed their normal practice schedule. However, because the incident was a dramatic event in the team’s organizational life—humorous to players and frustrating to Coach Smith—the cream cheese story was told and retold to other players, coaches, trainers, and athletic administrators. This retelling allowed members to make sense of and interpret the incident (Weick, 1995). Two salient and conflicting themes emerged within member sensemaking: Most players made sense of the incident as solidifying team cohesion, whereas a few players and Coach Smith made sense of the incident as demonstrating the team’s lack of respect for each other, for him, and for the program in general.

Collective resistance and team cohesion

The majority of players described the incident as fostering team cohesion and team bonding, not only because they suffered through a physical punishment for each other, but also because they were willing to sacrifice physically to remain loyal. For example Kyle, a senior right-tackle, interpreted the incident by contrasting the team’s behavior to previous seasons. He stated,

. . .The year before when I first got here, yeah, somebody would have told then. But nobody told this year and it was just, like, [the cream cheese episode] kind of made me feel like, “snap, we gotta a nice little team, now.”

In his comparison to previous years, Kyle explained that the cream cheese episode meant he could trust his teammates to function cohesively. Other players explained that they also saw the incident as a sign they could trust their teammates in more serious situations (e.g., a fight breaks out at a party). For example, Aaron, a senior linebacker, stated, “[The cream cheese episode] was something little, had it been something bigger like, I’m pretty sure like we would have all stuck together you know, so how I took it like, I saw that as a sign.” Here, Aaron not only rejects the idea that taking the cream cheese was a major indiscretion (i.e., the episode “was something little”), but he also ascribes a positive meaning to it and speculates how the team might behave cohesively in the future. Aaron constructs the episode, retrospectively, as a coalescing moment in the team’s history. Similarly, Chuck, a freshman strong safety, described the team before and after the cream cheese episode. He stated,

Yeah, before [the cream cheese incident] happened, you know, we was kind of like always at each other neck like ’cause we was from different places. So we really didn’t know about each other, but then when that happened everybody was real close together. ’Cause like “he came from the same background I came from.” He ain’t said, he ain’t saying nothing. . . . “So maybe he not like a bad guy,” . . . everybody closer.

In this excerpt, Chuck attributes the conflicts the team was having in the summer to being “from different places” and not really knowing “about each other.” He constructs the cream cheese episode as a moment of solidarity in which he was able to see his teammates “true” identifications (i.e., “he came from the same background I came from”) based on their behavior within the episode (i.e., “he ain’t saying nothing”). Given that Chuck was a freshman and this episode occurred early in his interactions with the team, he constructs it as a turning point that fostered team cohesion. Players’ interpretations reveal that their behavior was both structured by their overlapping identifications and helped foster their co-identifications within their larger organizational identification to the football program. Through the lens of discursive positioning (Harré, 2012), this insight demonstrates the ongoing, layered, and temporal process of identification, and how one resistance episode—especially a collective resistance episode—might change organizational member relationships in unexpected and unintended ways.

Team disrespect

In contrast to player’s positioning of themselves within the retold storyline, Coach Smith made sense of this episode by linking it to other instances that were symptomatic to him of a deficit in team accountability and responsibility. He explained that this one incident of “theft” was indicative of deep-seated issues of disrespect and mistrust within the team culture (e.g., incidents of players taking each other’s team-issued water bottles and practice clothing). In his primary interview, Coach Smith explained that he believed the incident was suggestive of major issues within the team and would result in a losing season. He stated, “I think the [the cream cheese episode] is gonna make it very hard for us to be a really, really good football team.” When the author interviewed Coach Smith several weeks into the season at the second round of data collection, the team had won only three of nine games—their final record was three and 12. When asked why he thought the team refused “to be accountable” for their teammates, he reiterated that the episode was indicative of larger issues of team accountability. He stated,

I think everybody . . . genuinely wants to be successful, wants what’s best for the team, but sometimes that requires . . . multiple people to step outside of their comfort zone and call somebody out like “Hey that’s not something that we do around here.” . . . But nobody on our team . . . is willing to do that. I mean that, that day right there told me . . . “it’s gonna be very hard for us to win an [name] Championship, if nobody is willing to step up, ’cause I’m sure somebody had to know something.”

In this example, Coach Smith’s concern about a lack of social pressure from within the group to comply is akin to explaining that concertive control appeared to be absent from the team. He explains that he feels this lack of social pressure or “accountability” is preventing the team from following—or enabling the team not to follow—organizational rules (e.g., nobody is willing to “call somebody out”). In this excerpt, spoken months after the cream cheese episode, he makes sense of the resistance episode as a sign that their team was in jeopardy of having a losing season. He argues that this lack of accountability is related to mediocrity in other areas of team life including tardiness to practice, missing rehabilitation treatments, and missing study hall hours. Taken together, Coach Smith and players differed greatly in how they made sense of the cream cheese episode and its subsequent influence on organizational life and team performance.

Relevant Comparison: Women’s Track Team

As discussed, during the second round of data collection, the authors sought a relevant comparison resistance episode to refine our theorizing regarding the relationship between positioning and collective resistance (Christians & Carey, 1989). During the spring break episode, women’s track athletes “snitched” on their teammates, making the episode a relevant comparison. Whereas the episodes are somewhat similar centering on the violation of team expectations or rules, the way coaches and team members made sense of the episodes and their final outcomes differed.

The Spring Break Episode

During the spring season, the track team traveled to a track meet in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, during spring break. Head Coach Jones extended the trip into the weekend to allow athletes leisure opportunities to tour the city. After the conclusion of the meet on Friday, Coach Jones made an announcement that there was to be “absolutely no drinking on the trip.” She explained that if athletes were caught drinking alcohol on the trip—regardless of whether or not they were of legal age—both she and Assistant Coach Cunningham could lose their jobs. Coach Jones warned the women that “they would be kicked-off the team” if they were caught drinking alcohol on the trip. Moreover, she cautioned the team that “if anyone knew of others drinking” and did not divulge this information to coaches, they would also lose their scholarships and be removed from the team. Coach Jones explained in her interview that at the time she thought this “threat would be enough” to dissuade team members from drinking alcohol.

Friday night after dinner, several women on the team made plans to go to an 18-and-older dance club. Before the team left, Sara and Shelby, senior sprinters on the team, went to a liquor store and purchased alcohol. They returned to their hotel room, poured drinks into paper cups in the bathroom, and drank them conspicuously in front of some of their teammates before leaving with the rest of the team for the dance club (i.e., resisting a managerial mandate). On Sunday, the team returned to campus, without Coach Jones discovering Sara and Shelby’s violation of the no drinking mandate.

Two weeks later, Coach Jones received a conference phone call from Katie, Kristi, and Amanda, all distance runners. They asked to meet with the coach in a location away from campus and the team. In their meeting, the three athletes reported to Coach Jones that Sara and Shelby were drinking on the spring break trip. According to Coach Jones, they felt obligated to tell her about Sara and Shelby’s drinking because they were worried that they might also get in trouble if they did not report it.

The following Monday morning, Coach Jones arranged a 6:00 a.m. team meeting. During the meeting, she asked the team “to raise their hands if they drank on the spring break trip.” No one on the team confessed. Sara and Shelby were later called into a private meeting with Coach Jones and were told that they would have to complete a punishment workout instead of being removed from the team. According to athlete interviews, Sara and Shelby were outstanding athletes and highly ranked in the conference. Thus, they afforded the team a greater opportunity to score a large number of points in the upcoming conference championship track meet. Coach Jones required the team to watch Sara and Shelby complete a 4-hr punishment workout to “hold each other accountable” for breaking team rules.

Positioning Analysis: Triggering a Team’s Collective Resistance

Actors in any social interaction select and formulate alternatives through decision making about how to interact—not only for themselves but for others as well. Moreover, Weick (1995) also argued that individuals retrospectively construct their current realities by interpreting their own and others’ actions within a given context. Building on Weick’s assertions, Harré and van Langenhove (1999) explained that positioning within interactions structures the selection of subsequent acts. Moreover, actors can be positioned or position themselves through speech acts within social interactions. These positionings are especially apparent in the cream cheese and spring break episodes. The following analysis explains how specific managerial speech acts positioned actors in such a way that likely triggered collective resistance.

Inquisition in the cream cheese episode positioning

While Coach Smith’s purchasing of the cream cheese (i.e., act one) and an athlete’s taking of the cream cheese (i.e., act two) set the context for the episode, Coach Smith’s collective questioning of the team (i.e., act three) functions as the turning point that structures all subsequent acts (see Table 1). His collective questioning serves as the first speech act of the episode. We argue the speech act performs an inquisition in that the coach’s questioning presumes others’ guilt, implies a social norm was violated, and punishment is warranted to reinstate balance. Speech acts call social realities into being (Austin, 1962; Searle, 1969). In this case, Coach Smith calls into being the social reality of inquisition, in which he is the investigator of the guilty. An original concept, an inquisition functions differently than a simple threat or warning in that it assumes culpability of those being questioned and implies singular or collective punishment. When Coach Smith demands to know “Who stole the cream cheese?” he frames the severity of the act as stealing—the breaking of a moral norm—and assumes the culpability of an athlete.

Moreover, punishment is implied in his inquisition speech act because the breaking of moral norms typically involves sanctioning (Sherif, 1936). At this point, the meaning of taking the cream cheese is open for discursive re-interpretation by other actors within the episode. In response to Coach Smith’s inquisition, the athletes try to minimize or reframe the meaning of the episode by laughing at the coach’s reaction (i.e., act four). From the players’ vantage point, the inquisition narrows and limits their ability to manage positive identity positions within the unfolding discourse. The inquisition speech act presumes their guilt. The coach’s power constrains their ability to deny the presupposition that an act has broken a moral norm. Perhaps, it is not surprising the accused players respond with laughter given the incongruity between their own interpretation of the taking of cream cheese and what is implied by the coach’s speech act. Their laughter positions them as innocent and provides the coach an opportunity to take up a less-domineering position without losing face. However, Coach Smith does not take up the softened position implied by athletes’ laughter. Instead, he interprets the laughing as a rejection of his power performed by the inquisition. In turn, he reiterates his inquisition and links it to an explicit, rather than implicit, threat of sanctioning (i.e., act five, “someone better tell me who took the cream cheese or you will all have to do a punishment workout on Monday”). In doing so, Coach Smith challenges their identity challenge by making power obtrusive and visible through a coercive power base (Rahim, 2009). The discourse between Coach Smith and players produces an identity position for Coach Smith in which either (a) a player is labeled as a moral norm violator (i.e., admit fault or be snitched on) or (b) Coach Smith endures damage to his public face by having his directive go unheeded.

Harré and van Langenhove (1999) explained that forced positioning can sometimes narrow options for actors in that after certain speech acts there are a limited number of ways for characters within the unfolding storyline to act characteristically (Kelley & Bisel, 2014). In this case, Coach Smith chooses to double down on his inquisition, because the alternative would be to give up his attempt to perform a powerful, or one-up position. In sum, his inquisition speech act sets the context for collective resistance to emerge. Part of the illocutionary force of an inquisition is that it positions actors within an interaction as known adversaries, because the other is already deemed guilty without any chance of investigation. Moreover, when one adversarial side is a collective (e.g., a team), an inquisition enables the collective to rally or act collectively against a common adversary (e.g., Coach Smith).

Comparative Positioning in the Spring Break Episode

The inquisition speech act is not present within the spring break resistance episode. However, Coach Jones does engage in a speech act that structures subsequent acts. Specifically, at the beginning of the episode, Coach Jones pairs a warning (i.e., “If anyone drinks or knows of drinking . . .”) with an explicit threat (i.e., “ . . . they will be removed from the team”) making her power obtrusive and visible from the outset. This speech act is different from inquisition in that it functions as an explicit threat against an offense, which has not yet taken place. Coach Jones’s warning contrasts with Coach Smith’s inquisition. Coach Smith’s inquisition is an implicit threat against an offense, which has already taken place, in the near past.

Coach Jones, on the contrary, explains that at the time she “thought the threat would be enough” to dissuade the athletes from drinking on the spring break trip in near future. Coach Jones’s speech act functions as an “if, then” statement, whereas Coach Smith’s inquisition functions as a “now, and” statement because an inquisition presumes guilt and predicts punishment of the party in question. In contrast, a warning is a preventive threat of punishment for a particular behavior that may or may not occur. Coach Jones’s threat of removing anyone from the team who is aware of a behavior violation contextualizes the team’s subsequent actions or surveillance and “snitching,” because all teammates knew the forewarning. Conversely, Coach Smith’s inquisition could not have contextualized football players’ actions in the same way, given that a threat did not precede the labeling of guilt. In this way, an athlete who wanted to speak up to Coach Jones could reason to themselves that all had equal understanding of possible consequences. Football players, however, could not necessarily reason that all other players knew what possible consequences might arise for taking cream cheese. Moreover, the high stakes of the spring break episode (i.e., a threat of removal from the team) contrasts with the lower stakes of the cream cheese episode (i.e., a threat of a punishment workout). This difference in stakes likely influenced athlete positioning and subsequent actions within each episode.

Similar to the positioning in the cream cheese episode, when a few track athletes told Coach Jones about their teammates’ drinking, she takes up the position constituted in her original warning to act in line with the character implied by the unfolding storyline (Kelley & Bisel, 2014). In other words, she is positioned by others to enforce a punishment for the rule violation, given her previous warning. Moreover, her initial warning structured subsequent team interactions (e.g., monitoring each other) and obliged her to follow through with her initial threat. When Coach Jones did not follow through on her initial threat (i.e., not dismissing athletes who drank), her subsequent speech acts often lost perlocutionary force. For example, Jordan explained she was not concerned about being removed from the team for a similar drinking violation, even when Coach Jones told her as much. She explained, “I mean I had too many reasons to come back [and challenge]” Coach Jones’s decision to remove her from the team, given the previous leniency provided to athletes. Ultimately, the speech acts within the spring break episode resulted in the emergence of a system of surveillance—teammates began to monitor each other and team cohesion suffered. Discursive sequences made the difference. Overall, what appeared to be similar managerial speech acts are quite different and likely encouraged different team consequences—collective resistance or compliance.

Discussion

The goal of this study was to investigate the role of discursive positioning in the formation of team resistance. The research question was answered through grounded analysis and the theorizing of an original sensitizing concept: managerial inquisition. Managerial inquisition (MI) is a speech act in which an authority figure questions a subordinate or subordinates’ norm violation and while doing so positions them as guilty. MI was shown to facilitate the rise of a collective’s resistance. This study documents a team’s collective resistance followed from a managerial speech act that mismanaged team members’ identity needs and moral obligations to one another. The findings illustrate how leader messages can create participant positions around which team members’ collective resistance may become more likely. This article makes four contributions to the organizational resistance literature and positioning theory. Practical applications of these findings are also discussed in terms of best managerial practices.

First, the MI concept suggests that specific forms of controlling managerial discourse can co-create collective resistance. Jorgenson (2002) demonstrated individual participants’ willingness to challenge the participant positions into which a researcher placed them. Bisel and Barge (2011) documented how individual organizational members were frustrated by their inability to challenge unfavorable participant positions into which management placed them because of power imbalances. The present findings add to these observations the insight that whole teams’ collective resistance can emerge from their willingness to resist unfavorable participant positions into which a leader placed them. Furthermore, these findings illustrate how a team generated power through their resistant solidarity—a form of group-level power, which was made available to them in the unfolding discourse triggered by the inquisition. Here, team-based and collective resistance is conceptualized as emerging from within a single leader–team conversation and the identity needs it implicated. Future studies should explore how resistance leaders, who have no formal authority, employ speech acts and manage identity needs to influence others’ resistance (Zoller & Fairhurst, 2007). Also, in the present case, MI generated social bonding within the team—although that outcome was not intended by the coach. That observation raises the question whether MI could be used intentionally and for positive ends. Future research should consider the ethical implications of managerial speech acts that mismanage subordinates’ identities, yet also encourage forms of collective action.

Second, this article contributes a model for employing relevant case comparisons to clarify and support inductive theorizing in case-based research (Christians & Carey, 1989). Comparative use of the spring break episode helped to crystallize (Tracy, 2013) how the managerial inquisition speech act in the cream cheese episode was distinct from language forms that might appear similar at first blush (i.e., a managerial threat). Furthermore, this comparison between the two similar yet different episodes refined the analytic scheme by highlighting how the moral context and sequential language moves within the episodes had implication for subsequent team member action. Qualitative researchers should explore the use of relevant comparisons to aid theorizing and enhance the quality of evidence to support claims.

Third, these findings contribute to positioning theory by providing an empirical example of how discursive positioning in leadership communication is a co-created moral activity that shapes subsequent collective actions. Barge and Fairhurst (2008) outlined a systemic constructionist approach to leadership communication. In contrast, with action research, a systemic constructionist approach focuses on the “moral dimension of action” . . . “as it determines a set of permissions (what can be done), obligations (what must be done), and prohibitions (what can’t be done) within unfolding situations” (p. 244). This case provides an empirical example of how a leader’s positioning created a dysfunctional moral order in team talk that had consequences for team members’ subsequent actions (Barge, 2012; Harré & Slocum, 2003). The coach’s positioning of team members narrowed the options for them to exercise favorable identities while also upholding moral order in the unfolding storyline. In turn, team members responded by resisting because the alternative would have been to violate their obligations to one another. In short, both coaches described here constructed the very situations to which they then had to respond in subsequent conversational moves—for good or ill (Tourish & Barge, 2010). Thus, discursive positioning can explain how identity (mis)management in leader–member communication is deeply enmeshed with and constitutive of moral obligations and rights that shape the trajectory of members’ actions.

Finally, this article contributes to explanations of the control–resistance relationship the idea that the context for resistance can be unwittingly co-created by management during a control attempt. Scholars have theorized and documented empirically that organizational control and resistance are not mutually exclusive categories, but are related dialectically (Ashcraft, 2005; Mumby, 2005) as a duality of structure (Bisel et al., 2007; Conrad & Hayes, 2001) and typically involve struggles more than meaning (Fleming & Spicer, 2008). No doubt those ideas and observations can somewhat explain the cream cheese episode. However, the present findings elaborate on earlier work by documenting how collective resistance was partially facilitated by the participant positioning implied by a leader’s control attempt. Furthermore, Larson and Tompkins’s (2005) observed that collective resistance among lower level employees was encouraged by middle managers’ ambivalent support of organizational changes. In other words, middle managers’ resistance triggered members’ collective resistance. Yet, in this case, collective resistance was partially facilitated by management’s overt control and the identity threat it presupposed. Thus, these findings add to the control–resistance literature the observation that control and collective resistance can manifest simultaneously within communication in a co-created—not only dialectical—relationship. In other words, the deep oneness and co-presence of control and resistance can be explained, in part, by the idea of discursive co-creation.

This case study also offers lessons about the practice of managerial positioning. First, managers and leaders should avoid making accusations that imply subordinates or team members acted with wrong motives and intentions. Managerial inquisition presumes guilt. This presumption reduced players’ positive identity positions and, as a result, they resisted together. To make the avoidance of such attributions more likely, managers and leaders should seek to maintain trusting relationships with followers by cultivating mutual appreciation and emphasizing shared goals. These communication behaviors would allow for increased discursive space for all members to maintain positive identity positions, even during stressful moments. Second, managers and leaders should work on recognizing opportunities for positive identity repairs during conflict or critical conversational moments with subordinates and team members. In this case, players responded to the managerial inquisition ambiguously with laughter—likely in an attempt to repair the conflict before it escalated. The coach, however, did not take the opportunity afforded by the laughter to affirm identities and relationships. Thus, our findings reinforce Barge and Fairhurst’s (2008) suggestions that leaders should engage with followers in conversational “play” consistently, which can generate the meta-communicative habit of taking alternative, even unexpected, conversational directions. Such conversations can strengthen trusting relationships between subordinates and followers and reduce the sting of identity-threatening positioning before it escalates. Reducing these threats and helping all conversational members to maintain positive identity positions is especially important within asymmetrical power relationships.

Conclusion

The present study has limitations. The researchers were not present to observe the communication episodes themselves. However, details of the communication episodes presented in the findings represent participants’ own retrospective accounts, which corroborated one another strongly. Furthermore, the retrospective accounts provided here constitute the sensemaking, which shaped their ongoing organizational experiences and are therefore the intersubjective details that perhaps matter most (Putnam, 1982; Weick, 1995). Future research in organizational discourse should continue to explore the single, but important, leader–member conversations that shape members’ subsequent actions and the trajectories of teams and organizations. In conclusion, leaders co-create the kinds of collective action that follow from their management of others’ identity needs and moral obligations. In doing so, leaders “make the conversational road as they walk it” (Barge, 2012, p. 118). However, that road can be pleasant or perilous, depending on the kind of conversation being co-created.

Footnotes

Authors’ Note

Data collection was conducted at the University of Oklahoma with permission from the University’s Internal Review Board. Arizona State University is the present address of the first author.

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.

Author Biographies

Alaina C. Zanin (PhD, University of Oklahoma) is an assistant professor of organizational and health communication at Arizona State University. Her research interests include structuration, sensemaking, and framing theories as well as issues surrounding power, control, and resistance. Her work is published in journals, such as Small Group Research, Western Journal of Communication, and Management Communication Quarterly.

Ryan S. Bisel (PhD, University of Kansas) is an associate professor of organizational communication at the University of Oklahoma. His research interests include leadership communication, organizational culture, and behavioral ethics. His work is published in journals, such as Communication Theory, Small Group Research, Management Communication Quarterly, The Leadership Quarterly, and Human Relations.

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