READ ALL DIRECTIONS VERY CAREFULLY. You will prepare a paper with a minimum that uses core principles discussed in this class. In this paper you will (1) briefly identify a specific, actual communication problem experienced by at least some people in their everyday lives, (2) briefly summarize ONE specific communication theory that could be applied to the problem, (3) apply the theory to the problem drawing clear, logical, and well supported, insightful conclusions about the problem, and (4) suggest a possible solution to the problem. For parts 1 and 2 above, you will be required to properly cite credible sources in You should think of a specific, narrow communication problem.
The Organization
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How do the elements of climate develop in an organization? We know already from a structurational perspective that the climate is produced by the practices of
organizational members; in turn, climate affects and constrains those practices.
Thus, climate is not static but is constantly in the process of development. Three
interacting factors enter into this developmental process.
The first is the structure of the organization itself. Because structure limits the
kinds of interactions and practices that can be engaged in, it limits the kind of climate that can result from these interactions and practices. For example, if the organization is highly segmented with strong differentiation among employees and
departments, individuals will have a limited pool of coworkers with whom they
can communicate, which increases the chance of a “restrained” climate.
The second factor that affects climate is various climate-producing apparatuses, or
mechanisms designed to affect employee perceptions and performance, such as
newsletters, training programs, and the like. The third factor is member characteristics-the skills and knowledge of the members. For example, if employees are sufficiently intelligent and reflective, they may challenge existing authority and “see
through” apparatuses. Member characteristics also include the degree of agreement or coordination within work groups.
The structure and climate that is produced in everyday communication mean
that organizational members cannot do anything they want. In other words, structuration creates control. The theory discussed in the following section adds organizational culture to our understanding of structuration; the culture constructed in
an organization can be thought of as another way of exerting control.
Organizational Culture
Theories of organizational culture emphasize the ways people construct an
organizational reality. As the study of an organization’s way of life, this approach
looks at the meanings and values of the members. It examines the way individuals
use stories, rituals, symbols, and other types of activity to produce and reproduce a
set of understandings. 39 The organizational culture movement has become incredibly broad, touching on almost all aspects of organizational life. 40
Within this tradition, organizations present opportunities for cultural
interpretation41 ; the organizations create a shared reality that distinguishes them
from organizations with other cultures. Gareth Morgan explains: “Shared meaning,
shared understanding, and shared sense making are all different ways of describing
culture. In talking about culture we are really talking about a process of reality construction that allows people to see and understand particular events, actions,
objects, utterances, or situations in distinctive ways. These patterns of understanding also provide a basis for making one’s own behavior sensible and meaningful.” 42
Work on organizational culture marks an important shift from functionalism
to interpretation-from the assumption that the organization has preexisting elements that act on one another in predictable ways to the assumption that there is a
constantly changing set of meanings constructed through communication. At the
same time, however, the interpretive approach to culture is counterbalanced by a
management approach that looks at ways in which culture can be manipulated, or
controlled, in a functional way. Managers who take a cultural approach think strategically about how to manage employees’ values and beliefs.
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Chapter Nine
John Van Maanen and Stephen Barley outline four “domains” of organizational
culture, and these provide a useful starting point for understanding the organizational culture approach. 43 The first domain, the ecological context, is the physical
world, including the location, the time and history, and the social context within
which the organization operates. The second domain of culture consists of networks,
or differential interaction. Then there are the common ways of interpreting events, or
collective understanding. This is the “content” of the culture-its ideas, ideals, values,
and practices. Finally, there are the practices or actions of individuals, which constitute the individual domain. Few large organizations comprise a single culture. In most
cases, subcultures identified with particular groups will emerge. You can imagine an
organization as a set of Venn diagrams or overlapping cultural circles.
Organizational culture is something that is made through everyday interaction
within the organization-not just task work but all kinds of communication.
Michael Pacanowsky and Nick O’Donnell-Trujillo in their work on culture ask
particular kinds of questions designed to uncover cultural patterns in an organization. Following the lead of Victor Turner (chapter 11), they note that “performances are those very actions by which members constitute and reveal their
culture to themselves and others. ” 44 They explain the difference between this
approach and traditional methods: “We believe that an intriguing thing about communication is the way in which it creates and constitutes the taken-for-granted reality of the world. Social activity, as we see it, is primarily the communicative
accomplishment of interrelated actions. ” 45
What do organizational members use to create and display their understanding of events within the organization? According to Pacanowsky and O’DonnellTrujillo, there are many indicators, including: relevant constructs and related
vocabulary; perceived facts, practices or activities; metaphors; stories; and rites and
rituals. All these are performances because they display the lived experience of the
group. However, performances, like stage plays, are also accomplishments. They
bring about the reality of the culture: “performance brings the significance or
meaning of some structural form-be it symbol, story, metaphor, ideology, or
saga-into being. ” 46
Pacanowsky and O’Donnell-Trujillo outline four characteristics of communication performances. First, they are interactional, more like dialogues than soliloquies. In other words, they are social actions, not solitary ones. Organizational
performances are something people participate in together. Second, performances
are contextual. They cannot be viewed as independent acts but are always embedded in a larger frame of activity; the performance, in other words, both reflects and
produces its context. Third, performances are episodes. They are events with a
beginning and an end, and the performers can identify the episode and distinguish
it from others. Finally, performances are improvised. There is flexibility in how a
communication episode is played out, and although the same performances may
be given again and again, they are never repeated in exactly the same way.
The authors present a number of organizational communication performances.
The first is ritual-something that is repeated regularly. It is familiar and routine,
such as staff meetings or company picnics. Rituals are especially important because
they constantly renew our understandings of our common experience, and they lend
legitimacy to what we are thinking, feeling, and doing. For example, when the general manager of a car dealership opens and personally distributes the mail to
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Here, workers put on performances that make otherwise dull and routine duties interesting or passionate. Perhaps the most common way this is done is by storytelling. Almost everybody tells stories about their work, and the telling is often lively and dramatic. Further, these stories are told over and over, and people often enjoy telling one another the same stories again and again. New members of an organization quickly hear about the time the manager forgot to come to the monthly staff meeting, about how the CEO unexpectedly inherited the company from her grandfather, or the time the boss let everyone go home early one day because he won a big award. We tell stories about ourselves (personal stories), about other people (collegial stories), or about the organization (corporate stories). Another way drama is created on the job is by means of passionate repartee, which consists of dramatic interactions and the use of lively language, which may be quite earthy in some organizations. A third category of performance involves sociality, which reinforces a common sense of propriety and makes use of social rules within the organization. Courtesies and pleasantries are examples. Sociabilities are performances that create a group sense of identification and include things like joking, "bitching," and "talking shop." Privacies are sociality performances that communicate sensitivity and privacy. They include such things as confessing, consoling, and criticizing. The department administrator who tells her manager on Monday morning about the difficulties she had with her teen-aged son that weekend is engaging in privacies. A fourth category of performance involves organizational politics, which create and reinforce notions of power and influence (for example, showing personal strength, cementing allies, and bargaining). These performances typically involve moves designed to position oneself strategically in a certain way within the organization for political reasons. A fifth category is enculturation, or processes of "teaching" the culture to organizational members. Enculturation is ongoing, but certain performances are especially vital to this process. Orientation of newcomers is an example. On a less formal scale, "learning the ropes" consists of a series of performances in which individuals teach others how things are done. Although this can be accomplished by direct instruction ("That's how we do it here"), most often this kind oflearning occurs when people talk about things that happened in a way that helps other individuals learn how to interpret events. A faculty member recently hired in our department asked a colleague whether she was going to the department's graduation. The colleague, who had to be out of town, said no, and the new professor formed the mistaken impression that attendance at graduation was optional. She ended up sitting in her office during the ceremony, thinking it no big deal, and planned instead to attend the reception afterward. 316 Chapter Nine In the police department that Pacanowsky and O'Donnell-Trujillo studied, officer Davis tells rookie Benson how to handle a rowdy drunk. Benson says he heard that Davis almost got in a fight with a drunk, and Davis replies, "Not really. I didn't give the guy a chance to get mad at me." Pacanowsky and O'Donnell-Trujillo interpret this exchange as a unique performance in which one officer tells the other how to understand what happened between him and the drunk. This is a metacommunication, or comment about a communication. 48 Understanding the cultural meanings of organizational performances such as the exchange between the police officers proceeds like any ethnography. The researcher first describes the actions of the organizational members and then constructs an interpretation of them in terms that are not only faithful from the native's point of view but also are understandable by people outside the organization. This is a hermeneutic process, which illustrates the crossover between the sociocultural and phenomenological traditions within the organizational culture literature. All of the theories in this section focus on the outcomes of social interaction in organizations. Something is constructed when people interact, and these theories outline a variety of meanings that are worked out in daily organizational communication. The topic of each theory is somewhat different. Some are broader in describing the overall process of social interaction and its outcomes, while others are narrower in identifying the specific forms that interaction takes as well as what gets made in the process. Notice how consistent these theories are with the tenets of the cybernetic tradition. Indeed, all combine both the sociocultural and cybernetic traditions to some degree. At some level, the theories in this section must rely on data gathered by participants or observers' experiences, which they must interpret in some way. Dennis Mumby believes that this approach has brought forth a series of challenges to mainstream organization theory. One outcome is the emergence of what Mumby calls a "discourse of suspicion," which challenges existing interests and power arrangements in organizations. 49 With this challenge, we move from the sociocultural to the critical tradition. The critical tradition in organizational communication also is concerned with culture but more specifically with the power relations and ideologies that arise in organizational interaction. 5 Critical/ cultural scholars recognize that mainstream organizational research dealing with organizational structures privileges managerial interests such as productivity and effectiveness. Questioning this stance, these scholars began to cast a light on such powerful interests. Dennis Mumby states: "One of the principal tenets of the critical studies approach is that organizations are not simply neutral sites of meaning formation; rather, they are produced and reproduced in the context of struggles between competing interest groups and systems of representation." 51 Critical communication scholars have addressed social realities less as physical sites and more as environments in which competing voices and interests vie for dominance. 52 To suggest the directions of critical organizational communication theory, we describe Dennis Mumby's concern more specifically in terms of how power func- ° tions i, corpor. particu links h so we c Disco De from aJ approa, terns 01 questio and COI neutics surface that lim are sus1 underhIt i: tion, an functior bureauc cess of c or your group oMu hegemo tion inY< sent to , necessar traditior this schc downsiz reflects , poration mg goes long run and deY( profits rn a classic interests Heg( arrangen Power is over othc how the Through and perp, Purchase answer to see full attachment