{"title":"Managing Visibilities: The Shades and Shadows of NGO Work in Repressive Contexts","authors":"O. B. Albu","doi":"10.1177/08933189221144991","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/08933189221144991","url":null,"abstract":"This study explores how visibilities are produced and managed, and how they transform the work of activists operating in repressive contexts. To advance emerging research, this study blends theoretical perspectives from visibility and activism research and builds on ethnographic methods and fieldwork in a non-profit organization. The contribution of the article to research at the intersection of visibility and activism is twofold: firstly, the article identifies the social and material agencies involved in the production of different dimensions of visibilities (mildly shaded and mostly shadowed). Secondly, the article shows how the three identified relational imbrications of agencies (encryption, obfuscation, and concealment) at times empower and undermine the efforts of both activists and oppressors. The findings provide novel insights concerning the (dis)empowering role of visibilities applicable to many collectives, corporations and institutions that rely on visibility management, as datafication is making it increasingly easy for behaviors to be seen.","PeriodicalId":47743,"journal":{"name":"Management Communication Quarterly","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.5,"publicationDate":"2022-12-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44472571","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Inyoung Shin, Sarah E. Riforgiate, M. C. Coker, Emily A. Godager
{"title":"Communication Technology and Social Support to Navigate Work/Life Conflict During Covid-19 and Beyond","authors":"Inyoung Shin, Sarah E. Riforgiate, M. C. Coker, Emily A. Godager","doi":"10.1177/08933189221144996","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/08933189221144996","url":null,"abstract":"Drawing on a national survey of 447 U.S. workers who transitioned to remote work during COVID-19, this study examined how different types of communication technologies (CTs) used for work and private life were associated with work/life conflicts and perceptions of social support across different relationship types (coworker, family, and friends). Findings indicated that work/life conflicts became aggravated when the use of CTs violated relational norms (e.g., mobile texting with coworkers and emailing with family and friends). On the other hand, uses of CTs that were perceived to offer access to social support (e.g., instant messaging with coworkers and friends) were related to lower work/life conflict. Social media (e.g., Facebook) had a direct relationship to higher work/life conflict, but an indirect relationship to lower work/life conflict through social support. Overall, findings suggest that individuals attempt to create work/life boundaries by selecting specific CTs when physical work/life boundaries are collapsed.","PeriodicalId":47743,"journal":{"name":"Management Communication Quarterly","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.5,"publicationDate":"2022-12-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43541946","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"How Institutions Communicate Change: Casuistry and Loosely Coupled Change in China’s Market Transformation","authors":"Yuan Li, R. Suddaby","doi":"10.1177/08933189221144995","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/08933189221144995","url":null,"abstract":"How do institutions think about change? Building on Mary Douglas’s famous contention that institutions think by means of analogy, we suggest that institutions think about change by means of irony. Irony is pronounced during times of profound change when the rhetoric and the reality of change can be inconsistent. We show that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has enacted what we term loosely coupled change—change in which symbolic meanings and material practices are only weakly connected and retain their independence. The CCP employed the rhetorical form of irony, known as casuistry, to legitimize a change to market systems as being incremental while in practice radically adopting market systems and dismantling socialist practices. We contribute to research on institutional messaging by examining the hermeneutic depth of casuistry. We also contribute to research on organizational change by explicating how casuistry reconciles contradictory ideologies and facilitates loosely coupled change.","PeriodicalId":47743,"journal":{"name":"Management Communication Quarterly","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.5,"publicationDate":"2022-12-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42232467","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Relational Balance in the Workplace: Exploring the Moderating Role of Organizational Commitment","authors":"Brian Manata","doi":"10.1177/08933189221137579","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/08933189221137579","url":null,"abstract":"This paper uses a diverse organizational sample to test portions of Heider’s (1946, 1958) balance framework. First, a review of balance theory is provided, and then theoretical relationships between relational balance and organizational outcomes (i.e., job satisfaction, unproductivity, and depressive symptoms) are explicated. Following this, the role of organizational commitment is also considered as a moderator of the aforementioned associations. In the main, the results of this investigation indicate that balance has a substantial, positive effect on job satisfaction. The results also indicate that balance combines non-additively with organizational commitment to impact results, such that the negative effects of balance on unproductivity and depressive symptoms are stronger when members are committed to their jobs. These findings point to the importance of considering the impact of relational patterns within organizations, as opposed to considering the impact of any one relationship in particular.","PeriodicalId":47743,"journal":{"name":"Management Communication Quarterly","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.5,"publicationDate":"2022-11-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41320212","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Blue-Collar and Healthy Worker Identities: How Parallel Ideal Worker Identities Sustain Unobtrusive Control on the Shop-Floor","authors":"E. P. James, Alaina C. Zanin, Zack J. Damon","doi":"10.1177/08933189221134116","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/08933189221134116","url":null,"abstract":"This study examines employees at a metal fabrication plant and their experiences with a workplace wellness initiative, which included on-site CrossFit classes. Interviews with 16 workers and participant observation revealed d/Discourses that rationalized worker compliance and resistance to the wellness initiative. Through a discourse tracing analysis, the authors propose the novel concept of parallel ideal worker identities to describe how organizational d/Discourses (de)valued (a) blue-collar worker and (b) “healthy worker” identities. These d/Discourses created resistance to the wellness initiative because they made salient how the organization privileged the “healthy worker” identity over the traditionally constructed blue-collar worker identity through unobtrusive control.","PeriodicalId":47743,"journal":{"name":"Management Communication Quarterly","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.5,"publicationDate":"2022-10-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49531504","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"“If Something Were to Happen”: Communicative Practices of Resilience in the Management of Work-Life Precarity","authors":"A. Golden, J. Jorgenson","doi":"10.1177/08933189221121323","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/08933189221121323","url":null,"abstract":"A substantial body of literature considers the experience of precarious work in market economies. Only recently, however, have scholars of work begun to consider the impact of precarity in the workplace on work-life interrelationships. This study contributes to that research and expands its focus beyond the form of precarity represented by job insecurity to other forms of precarity that inhere in the management of work-life interrelationships for working families in industrialized nations. Taking a communication as constitutive of work-life interrelationships perspective, we identify four forms of precarity in middle class working mothers’ accounts of work-life, and then examine how these forms are communicatively managed through classed and gendered discursive and material/technological practices of resilience. Using Weick’s organizational sensemaking model, in particular his notion of “partial inclusion,” we discuss the implications that individuals’ practices of resilience to manage work-life precarity have for the individual-organization relationship among middle class working mothers.","PeriodicalId":47743,"journal":{"name":"Management Communication Quarterly","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.5,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48359147","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Fabio Prado Saldanha, Marlei Pozzebon, C. Mailhot, David Le Puil
{"title":"Counter-Narratives Mobilized by Deprived Communities Through Theatre Interventions: Deconstructing and Reframing Master Narratives","authors":"Fabio Prado Saldanha, Marlei Pozzebon, C. Mailhot, David Le Puil","doi":"10.1177/08933189221121345","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/08933189221121345","url":null,"abstract":"Mise au Jeu is a Quebec-based social intervention organization that has been putting on forum theatre – in the Augusto Boal tradition of the theatre of the oppressed – for over 20 years. We investigate how such a non-profit organization creates spaces where members of a deprived communities can elaborate counter-narratives to deconstruct dominant narratives, thereby helping them to make sense of situations of oppression they are living and to act to promote social change. By unpacking counter-narrative strategies and their enabling mechanisms, our study contributes to the narrative tradition in two principal ways. First, while extending Deetz’s work on dominant narratives, we enrich existing understanding of the disruptive power of counter-narratives in situations of social exclusion by bringing to bear the theatrical principles and techniques of Augusto Boal, a missing voice in extant narrative literature. Second, we propose a reflexive discussion related to the political conceptualization of counter-narratives.","PeriodicalId":47743,"journal":{"name":"Management Communication Quarterly","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.5,"publicationDate":"2022-08-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46841479","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Gustavo S. D. Barreto, Patrice M. Buzzanell, C. M. Cipolla
{"title":"Brazilian White-Collar Employees’ Discourses of Meaningful Work and Calling","authors":"Gustavo S. D. Barreto, Patrice M. Buzzanell, C. M. Cipolla","doi":"10.1177/08933189221121309","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/08933189221121309","url":null,"abstract":"The search for meaningfulness in work is considered a human need, resulting in growing communication and interdisciplinary scholarship. However, most studies are quantitative and situated in Western, developed nations with different discourses and materialities based on whether studies focus on economically mainstream or marginal, but symbolically significant, occupations. Our study explores Brazilian white-collar employees' accounts of meaningful work. Three themes emerged from interview data: being competent, being an explorer, and being a builder of a better world. Participants cast meaningful work as tensional processes within and across themes, reflecting characteristics of Brazilian middle classes and globalized discourses. As participants aspired to meaningful work, they experienced dysfunctional and corrupt work cultures, toxic workplace relationships, and shifts in their worldviews that deflated their sense of meaningfulness, resulting in reported psychological distancing, emotional distress, and turnover intentions. We encourage organizational communication researchers to take up the 2009 MCQ call for further studies in Brazil.","PeriodicalId":47743,"journal":{"name":"Management Communication Quarterly","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.5,"publicationDate":"2022-08-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41576065","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Megan E. Cullinan, Kourtney Maison, Melissa M. Parks, Madison A. Krall, Emily Krebs, Benjamin W. Mann, Robin E. Jensen
{"title":"Seedlings in the Corporate Forest: Communicating Benevolent Sexism in Dow Chemical’s First Internal Affirmative-Action Campaign","authors":"Megan E. Cullinan, Kourtney Maison, Melissa M. Parks, Madison A. Krall, Emily Krebs, Benjamin W. Mann, Robin E. Jensen","doi":"10.1177/08933189221115748","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/08933189221115748","url":null,"abstract":"Organizational affirmative-action programs have often failed to reach their goals, especially in the context of STEM professions and companies. Our study analyzes one of the first internal affirmative-action initiatives, Dow Chemical’s “Know More in ‘74” (KMi74) campaign, to explore discursive components that may play a role in this problem. An exploratory analysis of the campaign’s pamphlets revealed that KMi74 upheld a framework of benevolent sexism. In subsequent analysis, we found that KMi74 communicated benevolent sexism through appeals espousing: (a) vagueness via generalization and absurdity, (b) circularity via redundancy and buzzwords, and (c) disingenuity via bait and switch argumentation. We suggest, given the government’s public recognition of KMi74 as legislatively compliant, these appeals functioned historically as organizational scripts for inclusion initiatives in the years that followed, scripts that upheld (and continue to uphold) the law but not the changes in practice necessary for the achievement of meaningful inter-organizational opportunity and equity.","PeriodicalId":47743,"journal":{"name":"Management Communication Quarterly","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.5,"publicationDate":"2022-07-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43959888","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Mathew L. Sheep, Alexandra Rheinhardt, E. Hollensbe, Glen E. Kreiner
{"title":"“Tearing the Fabric” or “Weaving the Tapestry”? A Discursive Resources Approach to Identity-Implicating Organizational Events","authors":"Mathew L. Sheep, Alexandra Rheinhardt, E. Hollensbe, Glen E. Kreiner","doi":"10.1177/08933189221111911","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/08933189221111911","url":null,"abstract":"How do organizational members discursively construct large-scale organizational events that have identity implications? Whereas previous studies have focused primarily on collectively construed organizational identity threats and, to a lesser degree, identity opportunities, we move beyond past work to examine how individual members construct a single organizational event in divergent and more nuanced ways. Taking a discursive resources approach to members’ discourse in response to a watershed event in the Episcopal Church, we find that members engage in organizational identity work processes as a means of constructing an identity-implicating event. Through their identity work, which involves the construction of (in)coherence among an organization’s multiple identities, members construct an event as aligned with some organizational identities yet misaligned with others. Our study has implications for research on organizational identity and identity work, organizational events, and discursive resources.","PeriodicalId":47743,"journal":{"name":"Management Communication Quarterly","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.5,"publicationDate":"2022-07-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45398035","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"管理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}