Decolonizing Organizational Communication

Mahuya Pal and Heewon Kim

We engage with ideas and practices of decolonization in this forum to interrogate dominant structures and colonial processes, challenge hegemonies and privileges in academia, and envision a more inclusive and just world. Our goal in this forum is to present our collective thoughts as a sharp provocation to decenter our organizing principles in academia and beyond. We argue that the dominant neoliberal organizing principles spawn different modes of structural violence globally—economic, social, and cultural (Banerjee, 2008). It is necessary that we engage in decolonial politics to make visible other organizing principles of social life that exist not in isolation but in their engagement with dominant models. A recovery of alternative rationalities disrupts not only our ontological realities but also the Eurocentric intellectual tradition that subjugates the native/indigenous/other forms of organizing within organizational research. It is in the fervor of engaging with emancipatory politics that we bring into conversation different conceptual categories important for rethinking the relationships between the economy, the polity, and the institution (Banerjee, 2008). For the purpose of this forum, we define decolonization as transformative struggles that grow out of dominant organizational spaces—political, economic, cultural, and, indeed, epistemological (Mamdani, 2016). We say epistemological because other knowledge systems are often refracted through the knowledge structures of the West (Jack et al., 2011). For instance, the authors argue that the dominant epistemic spaces are incommensurable with various indigenous epistemologies, particularly those that have been erased or marginalized by Western intellectual imperialism. We argue that fundamental lessons from decolonizing projects a) uncover and challenge Eurocentric organizing principles, b) re-envision alternative organizing principles, and c) dismantle (or offer a pathway to dismantle) institutional barriers (Mignolo, 2007).

The decolonial impetus in these lessons lies in their capacity to unsettle dominant ideas and practices enabling different forms of liberation. Our forum complements the recent forums published in Management Communication Quarterly (Ballard et al., 2020; Linabary et al., 2021a, 2021b) in offering a critique on the history and legacy of organizational communication. More importantly, it joins the sparse conversation on decolonization and social justice (Broadfoot & Munshi, 2007; Cruz & Sodeke, 2020; Pal, 2016). Significantly, our forum attempts to decentralize the ways we think of the world in terms of its forms of organization and its social life in the neoliberal political order (Dussel and Ibarra-Colado, 2006; Mignolo, 2007). In doing so, we broaden the unit of analysis in organizational research, where the focus does not necessarily have to be on one organization, but on the organization of the political economy (Ganesh et al., 2005). While such an emphasis broadens the scope of the forum beyond organizational communication, it also turns the analysis inward to dismantle the hegemony that has persisted within the discipline of organizational communication. Our forum makes unique contributions to the field by engaging with such analytical approaches from diverse standpoints. In turn, the forum also examines how to put epistemological and ontological decolonialities into practice that might lead to a more inclusive and just world.

Even as we engage in transformative possibilities, we remain attentive to the contested nature of the idea of decolonization and the very ground where we stand. As Tuck and Yang (2012a, 2012b) argued, the seemingly easy adoption of decolonizing by academic advocacy discourse often reinscribes logics of settler colonialism and turns decolonization into a metaphor. The authors argue that decolonization cannot be offered as a metaphor as it cannot be an interchangeable term for any form of oppression. Decolonization is a distinct project challenging settler colonialism. It is concerned with indigenous struggles and sovereignty. We acknowledge that not all our forum essays explicitly address issues of revitalizing indigenous sovereignty. Yet, we believe they are commensurable with disrupting settler colonialism as they disrupt intersecting forces of power such as colonialism, race relations, class, and capitalism. The forum essays interrogate ideas of a) systemic violence tied to inequitable distribution of rest (Harris), b) capitalist logics in social and organizational justice (Kim), c) colonial logics of academic writing (Long, Linabary, & Larson), d) erasures and complicity with colonial structures (Jensen), e) linguistic hegemony of English language (McDonald), f) hierarchy and white supremacy (Gist-Mackey), g) decolonization and research methods (Nieto-Fernandez & Pal) settler logics and university land (Jiang, Misra, & Dempsey). In sum, the decolonial imperatives in the forum essays are anchored in a liberatory praxis committed to reimagining and rebuilding a new political economy. We hope our arguments contribute toward challenging dominant intersecting ideologies, enable a praxis for inclusion, and discuss possibilities of a new (academic) world order.

Kate Lockwood Harris

Today, one block from where I live in Minneapolis, the prosecution and defense rested their cases after trying the policeman who murdered George Floyd. The state protected its capacity to rest with thousands of soldiers wielding assault rifles, concrete bunkers, miles of fencing, and razored wires (Reeves, 2021). Meanwhile, about 10 minutes from here, BIPOC neighbors could not rest. Following the murder of Daunte Wright, the state interrupted their sleep for days as armored vehicles drove onto their lawns, troops of heavily armed police shot rubber bullets and tear gas at protestors, and the carcinogens leaked into their apartments (Shockman & Frost, 2021).

In this context, I think about organizational communication’s preoccupation with work and how little academics learn about/to rest through this profession. What transformation might occur given more attention to the relations that organize (un)rest? I ask this question assuming that who gets to rest, with whom, where, how, and when is determined through colonialism, especially its settler iteration, and its gendered/raced/sexualized formations that actively exterminate indigeneity and otherness. Rest’s inequitable distribution and uneven accessibility uphold systemic violence.

Related, as colonialism condemns rest as laziness, its racism hides global labor disparities. As Fine et al. (2008) asserted, “Revisionary history and whitestream Eurocentric culture. . .with law and reason on its side, makes the colonizer capable of sleeping at night” and undermines indigenous people’s rights (p. 171). In one such whitewashing maneuver, Minneapolis spent millions preparing for post-trial “unrest,” a term whiteness deploys to erase its violent exploitations and exacerbated capacity to sleep and dream. Organizational communication’s terms for labor inequities under-theorize this colonial and racist apportioning of rest. Scott (2017) noted how the white feminist concept second shift flattens the politics of respite:

In recent years the United States has experienced an increase in police killings of unarmed Black women and men fueling social justice work, activism, and advocacy; emphasizing how “survival” for people of African descent remains painful and exhaustive. Socializing Black children to exist in a world where racial violence still exists . . . adds another layer and dimension to the “second shift”. (p. 74)

Amidst such flattening, the field writes much about white work-life relations, and even critical analyses of that literature remain Eurocentric: words like inemuri (Steger, 2003) and Qai’lullah (BaHammam & Gozal, 2012) rarely appear. The balance metaphor, which presumes individuals can find equilibrium between work and other aspects of life, further obscures how colonialism differentially shortens lives. As Wrigley-Field (2020) showed, the high rate of white death during the COVID-19 pandemic is lower than the lowest-ever recorded pre-pandemic death rate for Black US Americans. Among the queer community, conversion and its supporting alt-right violences continue to sever trans relations and lives (LeMaster, 2017). Moreover, the lifespans of people native to Minnesota are far shorter than those of white settlers (Waziyatawin, 2008). Historic rest theft continues into the present. As Hersey (2020), who asserts rest as reparations for women of color, said:

I am disgusted by our racist health system that has been this way forever. Black, Latino, and Indigenous People are dying at higher rates from COVID-19 due to this sick system. I am sitting in this grief and will not look away. I want to mourn and lament and realize this culture is not set up with systems of care to allow others to stop long enough to rest. (para. 2)

Globally, the grief intensifies. Vaccine apartheid lets many US Americans and Europeans rest easy. The jab is in their arms, yet thousands in the global South die daily. TallBear (2019) described this extermination process succinctly:

Settler-state dreaming is predicated on the extraction of resources from Black bodies, until they are dead, and from Indigenous lands, thus requiring our death, either literally or symbolically, in order to dispossess Indigenous peoples of our life-giving relations with these lands. (p. 35)

Discussing work–life balance amidst these genocides risks effacing how colonizers enjoy a restful life by lowering BIPOC life expectancy and relying on forced, deadly labor.

Compounding these abuses, colonizers criminalize rest to exercise domination and control. Across the US, 53% of cities prohibit sitting and lying down in some public places; nearly half have laws against sleeping in vehicles; in about 30% of cities one cannot sleep in particular areas; and in another 18% one cannot publicly sleep anywhere in the city (Robinson, 2019). Such laws target people without homes, and, thereby indigeneity and otherness. In Minnesota, the Dakota comprises a disproportionate segment of the population without permanent shelter because settlers occupy their homes: The courtroom housing the trial of Chauvin, along with the University of Minnesota where I work, both “rest” on stolen Dakota land.

This criminalization, policing, and forbidding of rest also patterns settler sexuality. When English-speakers say that we “sleep with” people or “sleep together,” we gloss the arresting power of sexual intimacy. Colonialism prohibits certain people from sleeping with and together by imposing a violent gender binary, monogamy, and state-sanctioned marriage. As TallBear (2021) detailed, these colonialist infringements are directly tied to land: The number of acres the settler state “gave” to indigenous men was based on their marital and parental status. Colonizers marshal rest around sexual relations.

Militarized policing, pilfering homes, abusive interruption of dreams, sexual violence, enslavement, and genocide—each of these colonizing processes organizes inequitable repose. To re-vision organizing principles around relations of (un)rest, I close with these questions:

Heewon Kim

Any critical theories or constructs are subject to co-optation, which is a colonial tactic. Justice is no exception. The notion of organizational justice has been increasingly appropriated by a capitalistic logic as a way to unlock the potential of underutilized human resources. Management gurus laud the virtue of “just workplaces” that can enable employees to “get the sh*t done fast and fair” (Scott, 2021). They contend that, by eliminating unnecessary conflicts and delays, organizational justice would essentially deliver increased efficiency and productivity to businesses.

Through the normalization of corporate colonization (Deetz, 1992), our day-to-day life in both public and private spaces can be subsumed to sustain capitalism. In a world fraught with uncertainty and precarity, the meanings of justice, equity, and fairness have also been appropriated to support neoliberal, individualistic demands. In fact, the logics of meritocracy and comparative rules have been frequently used in the name of “fairness” as a way to protect one’s own merit and effort during the pandemic. In the United States, the idea of student loan forgiveness was criticized by drawing on the very notion of fairness: canceling student debt is a violation of fairness for those who did not go to college or did pay off their debts through enduring hard work. In South Korea, when contingent workers who had been on a year-to-year contract were finally hired, permanent employees organized a protest invoking equity and fairness. They argued that contract workers were not entitled to permanent positions because those workers did not go through pre-employment testing as they did. Hence, contract workers must pass the same test (ignoring the fact that those contract workers were already trained on the job for a decade).

Facing old and new calamities, people are increasingly turning to individualism, competition, and comparative rules, which ostensibly could secure fair, legitimate, and immediate rewards. As the ideas of meritocracy and “fair competition” govern our everyday life, people in all classes work ceaseless hours to survive and succeed (Markovits, 2019). Many individuals willingly or unwittingly embrace an entrepreneurial spirit (Bröckling, 2016) to constantly reconfigure a fitting self that can outdo others. As Gay (2020) eloquently puts, our society is deeply plagued by competitive and capitalistic ideologies, ranging from the emphasis on personal responsibility (“If you assume a debt, it’s your fault”) to the bootstrap mentality (“If I have achieved success, surely you can too”) and to the sufferance doctrine (“If I have experienced hardship, you must experience hardship, too”). Our mindset is deeply entrenched in comparative equity rules.

Gay’s (2020) argument, “Americans are concerned with fairness only when they think someone else might get something they won’t get,” (para. 6) captures the essence of comparative principles in the current society. Of course, it is true that the basic theorem of comparative justice is built on the requirement of fair treatment. Namely, people generally compare the ratio between compared claims (e.g., one’s input) and the ratio between compared treatments (e.g., one’s reward). This equity rule essentially refers to the comparison of input–outcome ratios. While this calculative logic of comparative justice has served as a dominant paradigm, such disproportionate attention to comparative justice fails to capture the changing conditions of human lives and alternative visions for radical equality and liberation.

I propose noncomparative justice as a decolonial tool and vision to reimagine a world of equality and liberation. Originally conceptualized by Feinberg (1974), the concept of noncomparative justice has not been advanced much. However, Feinberg (1974) delineated its principles and conditions in detail, which invite further explorations particularly given the current sociomaterial conditions. Noncomparative justice fundamentally differs from a rule of equity (i.e., comparative justice); that is, it suggests that one’s due is determined independently of that of other people. Everyone deserves to enjoy basic rights, goods, and treatments to preserve their dignity, regardless of their merit or performance. This approach is squarely in contrast with a capitalistic logic while expanding our discussions on the meanings and principles of justice.

From this perspective, one’s fundamental right to their dignity and well-being does not need to rely on the subsequent knowledge of the conditions of others. Once basic needs are determined in a society, everyone should receive their due to lead a decent life. Although Feinberg’s (1974) work was geared toward establishing philosophical distinctions between various forms of justice, I argue that his construct can be revisited to build an account of radical equality, which is deeply rooted in the idea of dignity, interdependency, and community accountability. The idea of noncomparative justice helps us reclaim our imagination of a just world where no one’s life is threatened because of unmet basic living standards.

Envisioning noncomparative justice, we can develop a uniquely radical practice to address ever-increasing inequalities. How can we preserve everyone’s life and dignity in a world without work? When automation and artificial intelligence devalues or replaces human labor (whether it is manual, intellectual, or creative), how can we protect the workers who were already in a precarious condition? What does the current system do for the unnecessariat (Greenfield, 2017) who would be continuously replaced by robots equipped with evolving skills? Is it fair to determine one’s due based on their production and merit when machines outperform us? As the conventional meritocracy fails to function, it is critical to propose different rules of distributive justice.

How do we envision noncomparative justice to emancipate us from inequalities, colonization, and exploitation? How can we dismantle the systems of competition and meritocracy? How should we challenge the norms of comparative rules that justify wealth disparities as “fair” distribution based on individual efforts and investments? I urge us to delve more into radical equality that highlights interdependency, communities, and the common good. We must engage in higher standards for noncomparative justice to achieve redistribution of sociomaterial resources and protect everyone’s dignity, safety, and life chances. Building on noncomparative justice, we can strengthen an egalitarian vision that treats everyone equally but uniquely meaningful, seeing no need for comparison.

Ziyu Long, Jasmine R. Linabary, and Elizabeth Wilhoit Larson

Authors’ note: We would like to problematize the individualism and hierarchical order embedded in the authorship line. We want to emphasize that we produced this work as a collective as we drew ideas from our long-term collaboration and engaged in collective brainstorming and writing. We also want to acknowledge that although we are listed as the authors, we are heavily influenced by others whose work has challenged us and the colonial structures in academic knowledge production, including others in and beyond this forum. We see this piece as a venue to bring forward some of these thoughts.

“Be careful of co-authoring too much.” “What percentage of this did you actually do?” These are statements we have often heard related to our academic work. In this essay, we seek to disrupt traditional notions of what is valued within academic writing practices and instead imagine alternatives centered in and on relationship. Specifically, we build upon efforts to dismantle patriarchal, Eurocentric, and colonialist approaches to academic writing (and life) centered on individualism, competition, hierarchy, dualism, and scarcity (e.g., Cruz et al., 2020; Cruz & Sodeke, 2020). Such approaches are marked by colonial logics of boundary-making around what is and is not legitimate (communication) scholarship and space-claiming related to particular areas of research as if they were previously “uncharted,” “discovered” by the researcher, and/or found “deficient.” These traditions, which are reinforced through institutional structures (e.g., graduate education, disciplinary awards, promotion, and tenure processes), celebrate the individual “conquering hero” by upholding the solo-authored manuscript as the “gold standard” and dismissing collaborative work.

In contrast, we embrace relational approaches based on a fundamental understanding that we are intimately connected in a network of relations (human and non-human) in which there is no “individual accomplishment” in knowledge production. With roots in Indigenous, non-Western, decolonial, and feminist ways of knowing and being, a relational praxis strives toward equity and mobilizes organizing values of collectivity, care, accountability, reflexivity, and holism (e.g., Cruz, 2015; Long et al., 2020; Rowe, 2005; Todd, 2016). We see our academic work as necessarily interwoven with those who have come before, those who are contemporaries, those who we are mentoring and are next —and not just those in academic spaces. Under this view, engaging in “boundary-making” and “space-claiming” can be seen as forms of onto-epistemological violence that cut those threads. In practice, a relational approach to doing scholarship necessarily involves an acknowledgment of and accountability to others.

One way to enact a relational ethic is to organize intentional collaboration informed by these values. We imagine collaboration not as a practice of “divide and conquer,” but as a process through which something is accomplished that could not be done alone. In our own collaboration, we have sought to enact these values. From the start, we talked about how we wanted to be in a relationship with each other, including discussing past collaborations and what “success” looks like beyond publishing (e.g., personal growth). In doing so, our collaboration has been marked by an ethic of care that prioritized our well-being and full selves over academic deadlines or timeframes. It took nearly 2 years from the start of our collaboration to a journal submission so that we could prioritize life events, academic schedules, and the additional (emotional) labor that came from COVID-19. Yet, our collaboration has still produced what we consider to be meaningful outcomes. Our collaborative work has led to transformations within and beyond the bounds of our research project, leading us to approach research and writing in new ways, reshaping relationships with others, and offering new directions for our teaching. Examples of such collaborations can challenge the idea that the best and most “productive” work is done individually and prompt changes to academic reward systems.

A relational approach can also be applied to academic writing itself, encouraging us to reflect on the relations present (and absent) within our academic writing. We see academic writing as a political act that can privilege/marginalize certain knowledge claims/contexts/authors and reproduce disciplinary boundaries (Ahmed, 2017). For us, a relational approach has necessitated practicing collaborative reflexivity (Linabary et al., 2021a, 2021b) to understand how our positionalities shape our research and relationships, interrogate power relations, and be intentional in our citational practices and our engagement with the work that has come before us. In co-writing this forum piece, we discussed whose work to engage with to foreground work by scholars from the margins. We have sought to be intentional in our language, rejecting the “no, but” model where scholars start by denigrating what others have done or seeking out the “gap” in the literature to claim space. Instead, we aim to adopt a “yes, and” mode to affirm and extend others’ work as we create new knowledge (Walker & Muñoz Rojas, 2021).

The practices discussed in this essay represent only a few steps toward disrupting the colonial logics in academic writing and life. We call for continued conversation about the ways to collectively resist these legacies and instead imagine transformative alternatives.

Peter R. Jensen

The purpose of this essay is to examine the potential for a decolonial perspective to challenge organizing norms. I argue that a decolonial approach brings to light normative organizational structures that are often left unexplored in Western and Eurocentric organizational analyses (Cruz & Sodeke, 2020; Jaya, 2001). In particular, the role that Eurocentrism plays in erasure and epistemic violence (Mignolo, 2009) constructs false boundaries of what is possible in organizing by marginalizing and erasing voices that unsettle the comfortable fictions that serve as the bedrock of Western institutions.

The realities of colonialism often lurk just outside my vision, but I am writing this paper in the midst of two tragedies of colonial violence that refuse to remain unnoticed—the ongoing violence in alShaykh Jarrah, and the “discovery” of 215 dead First Nations children in an unmarked grave in an Indian Residential school in British Columbia. While these two tragedies are separated (in some ways) by both time and distance, they bring to the fore the poignant, heart-wrenching, and stark reality of the pervasiveness of erasure as a fundamental building block of the Western world. These two tragedies also display the fluidity of erasure, suggesting that there are many ways to erase, and represent how colonization stretches across space and time. Colonization is never “done” and the past lives in the present, even when it is unacknowledged.

I am intimately connected to this lack of acknowledgment, the erasures. As a white man living in the United States, I am a beneficiary, a product, and a producer of colonialism. An engagement with decolonial politics necessitates a reflection on the spaces I have inhabited. It demands I recognize how those spaces are filled with absences. Reflecting on my education, I recall the comfortable way settling was discussed through elementary school. I grew in a system that showed the necessity of colonization, with little attention paid to the violence that went along with this expansion. When this violence was discussed, it was justified as self-defense as the United States fulfilled its destiny. Thus, indigenous erasure was cast as an unfortunate side effect of necessary progress. This narrative of indigenous death and erasure as an “unfortunate side effect” finds its way into policy-making in settler-colonial nations like the United States and Canada. For example, a 2019 statement by the government of Ottawa admits that residential schools, like the Kamloops Indian Residential School in British Columbia, were meant to assimilate, yet denies a role in degrading First Nations communities in asking them to do so. These degradations were instead deemed a natural consequence of interaction with the “dominant culture” as can be evidenced in the government statement: The “federal government may have contributed to those losses in various ways, such losses were not as a result of any unlawful acts or omissions of Canada or its employees or agents with respect to the operation of residential schools” (Barrera, 2021, para. 15).

The logic of progress is tied to the logic of erasure. A number of development projects demonstrate the modernist goal of moving forward, toward something that is considered better by Western logic. The goal toward progress serves to justify violence and injustices and becomes a hallmark of capitalism, colonialism, and modernism. Often, the spaces that do not adhere to the institutional logic of the West are deemed “voids” (Bothello et al., 2019). As Hanchey (forthcoming) articulates, the violence of colonization leads to a variety of deaths, and the specters of those people and cultures and possibilities haunt the generations that follow. For those that follow, erasure is a turning aside, a refusal to acknowledge the violence for what it was/is. These discursive strategies enable and sustain the myth of progress and continue to serve as a stable foundation for how we live, love, and die.

Therefore, I argue that the institutions rooted in whiteness and colonialism live in constant fear of facing the specter of their own origins. The myths that claim the superiority of their views and their ways of being are necessary for sustaining power relations, and so these institutions turn their gaze away. The possibility of facing our past exists, but to do so threatens to unsettle. To look, much less to acknowledge, creates the possibility of the rocks shifting below our feet, a loss of balance, and a loss of control. The solid ground upon which we tread reveals itself to be an aggregation of countless lies of omission that masquerade as a monolithic truth. The fiction of homogeneity is threatened to be exposed as heterogeneous voices rise (Mignolo, 2009). As the rocks threaten to slip and the façades crumble, the demand for recognition emerges. However, even as we may begin to recognize our capacity to respond, we may shy away because of the enormity of the burden of response. In some cases, this hesitancy may lead to efforts to address wrongs that are based on misrecognition of the problem (Tuck & Yang, 2012a, 2012b) which may, among other things, lead to misdirected efforts or a stated desire to be “on the right side of history.”

In the former case, misrecognition highlights the challenges of addressing deeply embedded problems from the epistemic framework that created those problems in the first place (Jensen, accepted). Perhaps this challenge is nowhere more obvious than in how attempts to address the inherent whiteness of many institutions through diversity trainings that emphasize assimilation of minority organizational members as opposed to critically reflecting on the whiteness of the institution itself (Ahmed, 2017). The latter reflects more a desire to be remembered well than to make the fight for justice a central tenet. To ask to be remembered fondly is as likely to be a sign of retreat, a partial negation of ideas that are no longer popular without the desire to step forward, take ownership, and seek to support the efforts of those who you had pushed to the margins moments before.

Facing the specters that are intrinsic to the myth of Western dominance that fueled colonial expansion is an unsettling process. It unsettles us as it asks for recollection of wrongs that are at best remembered as violence that “occurred” and demands a reckoning with how that violence is actually “occurring.” Facing these specters demands a reflection on how colonial violence has impacted not only the colonized but also the colonizer and their descendants, and how ignoring those impacts have allowed the settlers to settle for a convenient fiction. Finally, this process unsettles because it means that those of us in positions of authority, privilege, and power may have something to lose, beginning (but not ending) with our comfortable fictions.

Angela N. Gist-Mackey

Hierarchy has become the default, status quo organizing practice (Allen, 2011) in Western contexts that is imbued with assumptions of domination and supremacy. As organizational communication scholars, we are uniquely positioned to intellectually debunk and decolonize the hegemony of hierarchy over organizing and organizations. I argue that the ideology of hierarchy (Allen, 2011) has colonized organizing writ large. Fifi and Heller (2019) explained that, “Colonialism was as much a process of deconstructing and reconstructing knowledge systems as much as it was of economic and political domination” (p. 104). Hence, hierarchy has become a knowledge system that has infiltrated contemporary organizations and organizing practices in harmful ways, so much so that it manifests in academic pursuits of knowledge.

Social hierarchy is defined as an “implicit or explicit rank order of individuals or groups with respect to a valued social dimension” (Magee & Galinsky, 2008). Valued social dimensions vary based on context, but they are typically granted stratified levels of power and status. Further, power and status are two self-reinforcing attributes of hierarchies (Magee & Galinsky, 2008), meaning power begets more power and status perpetuates more status. Hence, the self-reinforcing nature of hierarchy often results in opportunity accumulation (Magee & Galinsky, 2008) and resource hoarding (Dougherty, 2011). Hierarchies have been found to function in two fundamental ways: (1) to facilitate coordination and (2) to motivate people to achieve upward mobility on a hierarchical stratification (Magee & Galinsky, 2008). The second function of hierarchy implicitly assumes selfishness, individualistic thinking, and competitiveness.

Hierarchies manifest both explicitly and implicitly since they can be formally delineated by rules, or subjectively understood and taken for granted. The implicit nature of hierarchy subtly, yet powerfully, informs practices of organizing. The mutual existence of hierarchies as both explicit and implicit imbues them with complex manifestations of power that are rooted in notions of supremacy. Supremacy incorporates rank orders, which are always integral to hierarchies, meaning that (de)valuation is the very essence of hierarchical organizing where power and control are centralized at the top and flow down the hierarchy (Allen, 2011). Ideologies like white supremacy have worked to reinforce the hierarchy of whiteness across the globe. Fifi and Heller (2019) explained the connection between whiteness and hierarchy:

Whiteness has to do with having White skin—racially identifying as White—but it is more than that. Whiteness refers to aspects of White people’s racial identity that are often unconscious and invisible to White people, which shape how White people orient themselves in relation to people from other groups. This orientation is hierarchical, based on the assumption that White people are superior to others. (p. 102)

This manifestation of hierarchy is particularly strong in bureaucratic institutions, such as higher education. Yet, the relationship between hierarchy and other harmful ideologies like White supremacy is often obscured.

Hierarchy is often presented as a neutral form of rational, logical organizing, similar to the way that organizational policies are often written in depersonalized, unemotional language and are perceived as neutral (Dougherty & Goldstein Hode, 2016). Divorcing hierarchy from notions of supremacy has colonized our way of thinking and thus our organizing. When we organize hierarchically, we participate in supremacist ranking and organizing in ways that disproportionately (dis)advantage particular groups of people. In order to address how hierarchy is harmful, it is necessary to understand hierarchy as colonial in nature. When people colonize other people, cultures, and spaces they claim supremacy over others. The very act of colonizing is hierarchical because it communicates that one identity, culture, and/or way of life are superior over another. Yet historically, this is the default mechanism of organizing employed in most contemporary Western cultures. For example, Cruz and Sodeke (2020) in their award-winning manuscript, point to the way organizational communication scholars tend to epistemologically privilege Western forms of thinking, knowing, and organizing in our very scholarship. When we fail to understand and name the privilege in our own organizing, we contribute to epistemological segregation (Brekhus, 1998). Thus, the discipline of organizational communication has a pressing opportunity to reimagine how we can decolonize hierarchy in our organizing.

This decolonization would require at a minimum for us to address power hoarding, which is a cultural characteristic of white supremacy culture and one directly manifested in systems of hierarchical organizing (Fifi & Heller, 2019). Jones and Okun (2001) identified power hoarding as one of thirteen characteristics of white supremacy culture. In the interest of space, I focus on power hoarding because it is inherent to hierarchical organizing. Characteristics of power hoarding occur when: (1) little value is seen around sharing power, (2) power is seen as a limited resource, (3) power is pursued competitively, (4) those with power feel threatened when changes to organizing or leadership are suggested, and/or (5) those with power both assume they have the best interests of others at heart and assume negative intentions of those suggesting change (Jones & Okun, 2001).

In order to address the hegemony inherent to hierarchy and its manifestation of power hoarding, organizational members need to think creatively and innovatively outside Western and colonial norms. The common suggestion is for organizational members to “flatten the hierarchy,” which I argue is wholly insufficient and arguably postcolonial in nature. A flattened hierarchy still maintains remnants of hierarchy and thus fails at addressing the inequity of power hoarding. Decolonial approaches are needed. Radical advances at sharing power are necessary in order to promote equity. Equitable organizing empowers others collectively and requires that one (especially those with privilege) relinquishes their own power by recognizing their privilege and restructuring in ways that mitigate such privilege. When we share power in our organizing practices, we embrace challenges and strive toward the mission of equity. For example, in the academy, hierarchy is embedded in the following phenomena: titles, honorifics, wardrobe, acceptance/rejection rates, impact factors, and various status markers (e.g., ABD, non-tenure track, tenure track, tenured, R2, R1, Liberal arts, private, public, dissertation/thesis committees, peer review, assistant, associate, full, teaching professor, professor of practice) among others. What would the academy and the organizational communication discipline look like if we were able to organize with inherent dignity (Lucas, 2015) as opposed to merit or contribution? Hierarchy inflicts dignity injuries (Lucas, 2015) on those who are disadvantaged, underrepresented, and underserved. Yet, we can choose dignity by more equitably organizing. For example, one instance of more equitable organizing occurred in the development of the forthcoming “Race Matters” special issue of the Journal of Applied Communication Research. As a reviewer, I was able to enter my name and contact information to the authors whose work I reviewed. I commend special issue editors Orbe and Austin for engaging such anti-racist (Anti-racist scholarly reviewing practices, 2021) and collaborative (Dutta, 2006) organizing, which led to dialogue, mutual respect, and relationship building with authors whose work I reviewed. I personally appreciated this opportunity and wondered why we do not make such practices commonplace. I encourage you to think about how else power hoarding and other hierarchical processes could be re-organized in decolonial ways when we communicate with the aim of mitigating hierarchy and promoting dignity.

Jamie McDonald

Over the past several decades, organizational communication scholars have explored difference as a constitutive feature of organizing (Allen, 2011; Mumby, 2011). This research increasingly adopts an intersectional lens to explore how socially significant differences—including but not limited to gender, race, class, and sexuality—intersect with each other to shape organizational experiences in ways that are intertwined with power (Parker, 2014). Although native language and linguistic fluency have received less attention to date, they also have implications for power, privilege, and inequality in organizational settings (Johansson & Śliwa, 2016). These forms of difference are especially important to consider in light of the hegemonic status of English in the globalized world, both within and outside of academia. Indeed, English is widely seen and often uncritically accepted as a universal, global language (Tsuda, 2010).

The hegemony of English has implications for global power relations, as it “gives an additional power to the English-speaking countries and people” (Tsuda, 2010, p. 250). Moreover, failing to interrogate the hegemonic status of English is problematic because it overlooks the key processes through which English became the hegemonic language that it is today, namely, processes of colonialism and imperialism. Colonialism thus lives on through the dominance of English and the ideology of monolingualism, which encourages the use of only one dominant global language (read: English) (Tsuda, 2010). As such, decolonization implies dethroning English from its hegemonic status and embracing linguistic plurality in global contexts and institutions, including in academia.

The lingua franca of academia is undeniably English (Kitchin, 2005), as is the lingua franca of organizational communication as we know it. Indeed, English is the language of the prominent organizational journals that are commonly considered to have international status. In these journals, it is exceedingly rare to see citations of any works that are not either published in or translated to English. As such, for the work of any scholar to find traction and be cited in international organizational journals, it must be published in English. Even scholars who work in non-English–speaking institutions and in countries where English is not the predominant language are expected to publish in English (Englander & Corcoran, 2019). In the global context of academia, native English speakers from Anglo-American countries are thus privileged in that they are only expected to read and write in their native language, whereas “the ideas and voices of the non-English-speaking scholars are often ignored unless they are very proficient in English” (Tsuda, 2010, p. 250). Moreover, reading and writing English are not enough, as English is also the lingua franca of international conferences where scholars orally present their research and build scholarly networks (Kitchin, 2005). Even when international scholarly associations hold conferences in non-English–speaking countries, English is commonly the only language in which conference presentations are given.

In the discipline of organizational communication, the hegemonic status of English serves as a barrier to both producing and sharing knowledge about organizing outside of Anglo-American contexts. As a result, marginal organizational actors from non-Western and non-Anglo-American contexts are systematically erased from and silenced in organizational communication scholarship (Cruz & Sodeke, 2020). As Cruz and Sodeke (2020) noted, highlighting voices from marginal organizational actors and promoting localized understandings of organizing are crucial to decolonizing organizational communication scholarship. Crucially, this work entails highlighting not just English-speaking voices but also non-English–speaking voices. To enable non-English–speaking organizational actors to express themselves on their own terms and in their own words, we might consider changing publication norms to provide quotes from participants in the original language, rather than only translations.

In addition to relating participant voices in their original language, we might reconsider our citation practices to include more non-English language scholarship. This shift in our citation practices could entail not only citing works that have been translated to English but also reading, valuing, and engaging with research that is published in non-English–speaking venues and that has not been translated to English. Reading research that is published outside of Anglo-American journals can enable organizational scholars to engage with new ideas, further develop scholarly conversations, and learn more about organizing processes in non-Anglo-American contexts. We might also consider changing norms in Anglo-American institutions to give scholars who publish in non-English–speaking venues credit for this work, which can be more impactful in the communities in which the research was conducted.

Communication scholars commonly accept that language and communication do not just represent a pre-existing world. Indeed, the theory of linguistic relativity suggests that the structures of languages shape thought processes and our ways of engaging with and understanding the world (Wolff & Holmes, 2011). Moreover, a widely accepted premise of organizational communication scholarship is that communication does not just express but also constitutes social realities. The language in which we predominantly conduct and present research creates reality in a particular way—one that reinforces the status of English as the hegemonic language of both organizational communication and academia. Decolonizing organizational communication thus requires us to rethink the hegemonic status of English and strive for a field that values linguistic plurality.

Beatriz Nieto-Fernandez and Mahuya Pal

Decolonizing research methods means understanding silences and gaps in dominant narratives as epistemic violence and questioning organizational infrastructures of whiteness that have become expected, implicit, and invisible. We argue that decolonizing methods in organizational research create openings to interrogate alternative rationalities, uncover political domination in the neoliberal economy, and enable subaltern voices/histories to be included in the dominant discourses. Its ultimate potential lies in invoking a radical politics geared toward social change such as land repatriation, conferring citizenship rights, and addressing all forms of political exclusion and uneven sovereignty. We offer illustrations from our research to suggest a few methodological insights relevant for scholarly research within a decolonizing framework. First, we provide an example of deploying a decolonizing lens in reading a set of organizational discourses (Beatriz), followed by an illustration of using a decolonizing method in a fieldwork with a subaltern community (Mahuya).

Jing Jiang, Smita Misra, and Sarah E. Dempsey

Growing calls to decolonize universities must include a fundamental challenge to the material foundations of universities, especially their land relations. Too often, decolonization takes the form of a metaphor, authorizing troubling appropriations that decenter Indigenous knowledge and avoid repatriation of Indigenous land and life (Tuck & Yang, 2012a, 2012b). We build on Tuck & Yang (2012a, 2012b) critique and la paperson’s (2017) framing of the university as settler colonial to underscore university land, labor, and community relations. Joining ongoing efforts by communication scholars (Cooks & Zenovich, 2021; Na’puti & Dionne, 2020), we raise urgent questions about the particularities of how (y)our universities are complicit with enduring settler colonialism. The framework of land, labor, and community relations also brings into focus the multiple, already existing attempts to challenge and refuse these relations. Our own academic institution, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC-CH), provides ample examples of colonizing histories and their continuing legacies. Here, we offer a partial account to stress the urgency of building upon situated analyses and supporting already existing collective forms of action within seemingly unyielding systems.