Postmodern Theory

06-Mumby.qxd 8/3/2004 7:01 PM Page 113 6 Postmodern Theory Bryan C. Taylor I dedicate this chapter to Leonard C. Hawes, whose voice may be heard throughout this chapter. P ostmodernism is an umbrella term that is used in different ways by different speakers. As a result, this term defies easy summary. Typically, however, speakers invoking “postmodernism” are committed to exploring the complex relationships of power, knowledge, and discourse created in the struggle between social groups. Additionally, postmodernism is intertwined with several other perspectives that challenge the conduct of business as usual. These traditions include feminism (Mumby, 1996), neoMarxism, poststructuralism (Parker, 1995), and postcolonialism. Because many of these perspectives are covered elsewhere in this volume—e.g., chapters 4 (rhetorical theory), 5 (critical theory), and 7 (feminist theory)—I encourage you to refer to these chapters and explore their intersections. My charge is to review for you the relationship between postmodernism and organizational communication. I’m game, but to do this I’ll need to make some strategic choices. Generally, I proceed by mapping this relationship as a convergence of several phenomena. I’ll construct and evaluate this map in six sections. 113 06-Mumby.qxd 8/3/2004 7:01 PM Page 114 114——Engaging Organizational Communication Theory and Research First, I’ll examine the terms modernity and postmodernity as descriptors of the contemporary period characterized by dramatic changes in global politics, economics, and culture. These changes have also been described as postmodernism. Second, I’ll examine how these changes have shaped—and been shaped by—recent changes in postindustrial organizations. These developments have also been described as creating postmodern organizations. Third, I’ll review key assumptions and critical applications of postmodernism as an intellectual resource for theorizing and studying organizational communication. Fourth, I’ll review what are commonly noted as the strengths and weaknesses of this perspective. Fifth, I’ll discuss a specific case from my own research program. In this discussion, I’ll show how postmodern theory can help us to better understand communication in—and about—organizations that have produced nuclear weapons for the United States during the Cold War. I also discuss here my own journey in discovering this topic, and in developing its relationships with postmodern theory. In this section, I hope to illustrate how organizational communication research is both a personal and a professional activity that joins the abstractions of theory with the messy, sensuous, and improvisational qualities of life as it is actually lived. Finally, I conclude this chapter with some questions for your own reflection. In an important sense, postmodernism invites you—and your fellow organizational members—to take over “writing” this chapter at that point. Converging Elements of Postmodernism and Organizational Communication Modernity, Postmodernity, and Postmodernism The term “postmodernism” is an object of celebration and scorn, both in intellectual discourse and in cultural vernacular. Through repeated use and enduring controversy, it has assumed several forms, including a powerful theoretical resource (e.g., used to analyze self-conscious cultural forms), a political lightning rod (usually struck by the Right to discredit the Left), and a cultural cliché (a catch-all to describe anything that seems unfamiliar, innovative, or transgressive). The ambiguity of this term stems partly from the enormous work that we ask it do. That work involves adequately conceptualizing and engaging the phenomena of postmodernity. This term is used to describe the historical period that has, presumably, succeeded modernity. Modernity, in turn, describes a global historical epoch spanning the 16th to mid-20th centuries. Modernity is often characterized as the heir to—and 06-Mumby.qxd 8/3/2004 7:01 PM Page 115 Postmodern Theory——115 fulfillment of—the Enlightenment triumph of Truth and Reason over medieval-era superstition and ignorance (Berman, 1982). Modernity is characterized by several dominant elements. These include • The development of mechanical and electrical technologies, and the associated industrialization of production; • Theoretical revolutions in the physical and social sciences, many of which reflected positivist faith in achieving objective knowledge of phenomena; • Large-scale demographic upheaval, including cataclysmic urban migration that disrupted rural, agrarian, and communal traditions; • The growth of consumer capitalism; • The rise of multinational corporations and the internationalization of markets; • The normalization of “instrumental” rationality (i.e., narrow means-end reasoning) and bureaucracy as paradigms for social life; • The development of powerful mass media systems that enable both totalitarian control of publics and their fragmentation into markets and audiences; • The growth of nation-states projecting ideological influence and military force throughout the globe; and finally, • A drastically fluctuating world economy that binds the fates of nation-states through international trade and loans. Needless to say, the experience of modernity for its affected groups has been marked by fluctuation and contradiction. These experiences include transformation (e.g., following the destruction of traditions and the sensing of new possibilities for identity), organization (e.g., recruitment, integration, and compulsory performance within institutions), differentiation (e.g., the simultaneous management of multiple commitments to various groups), and reflection (e.g., nostalgia and hope created by differences between the status quo and actual or imagined alternatives). Postmodernism, in turn, describes a series of breaks and continuities between modern and contemporary conditions. Although the relationship between modernity and postmodernity is often cast as a dichotomy, this image is not helpful. It implies that each entity is independent and monolithic, when in fact both are marked by contingency and variety. For example, observers have categorized varieties of postmodernism that differ based on their proponents’ reaction to changing conditions. Some postmodernists, for example, affirm and embrace change (although critics have noted that this stance has been appropriated for questionable ends, as in the “creative destruction” of organizational re-engineering). Other postmodernists are more skeptical, seeking to direct change toward the subversion of modern rationality. In this way, it’s best to think of modernism and postmodernism as existing in a mutually constitutive relationship (Mumby, 1997). Neither 06-Mumby.qxd 8/3/2004 7:01 PM Page 116 116——Engaging Organizational Communication Theory and Research form of life is separate or total; each contains the seeds and residues of the other. In fact, each requires the continued existence of the other in order to appear—through opposition—distinct and coherent. In their recent survey of postmodernism, Best and Kellner (2001) argue that “the transition to a postmodern society is bound up with fundamental changes that are transforming pivotal phenomena from warfare to education to politics, while reshaping the modes of work, communication, entertainment, everyday life, social relations, identities, and even bodily existence and life-forms” (p. 2). This is obviously a very broad field to survey. Some of its most famous explorers (many of whom are European) include Baudrillard (1994), Bhaba (1994), Deleuze and Guattari (1987), Derrida (1976, 1978), Foucault (1972, 1973a, 1973b, 1979), Gergen (1991), Jameson (1983), Laclau and Mouffe (1985), Lyotard (1984), Rorty (1989), and Said (1983). These primary commentators—and their numerous followers and interpreters—have consistently noted particular conditions that bridge the 20th and 21st centuries (Foster, 1983). These include • The disintegration of colonial systems historically ruled by imperial nation-states, and the subsequent dispersal of people, traditions, information, and commodities at accelerated rates across geopolitical boundaries (e.g., through immigration). One consequence for U.S. organizations of this globalization involves the “offshoring” of corporate jobs and functions to international subsidiaries and contractors (e.g., located in India). • The decline of industrial capitalism and the rise of a transnational, information-age economy. The imperatives of corporate survival in this economy include relentless consolidation and/or expansion of markets; rapid exploitation of temporary opportunities for improved production, distribution, and marketing created by innovations in computing and telecommunication technologies; and the commodification of symbols (e.g., as brands) and knowledge (e.g., as innovation). • The rise of global media systems whose continuous operations collapse traditional boundaries of space and time. In their cumulative effects, the programs circulated by these systems collapse important distinctions that traditionally have shaped modern cultural identities (e.g., between “high art” and “popular culture,” “public” and “private,” and “surface” and “depth”). These systems create a rapidly shifting phantasm of fragmented, decontextualized information, in which people are encouraged to view themselves as the audience of a flickering spectacle (e.g., the Las Vegas “strip”) that relentlessly stimulates their impulses. This stimulation does not, however, necessarily produce knowledge or wisdom, but rather 06-Mumby.qxd 8/3/2004 7:01 PM Page 117 Postmodern Theory——117 hyper-realities with no “real” referents. These environments are populated by simulations, models, and copies of something else that has no single, original, “real” source. • The rise of new creative and artistic practices (e.g., in literature and television). These practices reject artistic modernism’s reliance on linearity, coherence, realism, and internal consciousness as frameworks for creating plots and characters. Instead, they recycle old cultural forms to create newbut-partly-familiar forms (pastiche), and they combine elements from diverse cultural media and genres in new and unexpected ways (bricolage). • Increasing suspicion and rejection of “foundational” narratives that traditionally have authorized the dominant institutions of modern Western culture (e.g., religion, politics, and science), including positivism, patriarchy, liberal democracy, and Christianity. What is common across these challenges is critical disenchantment with the promise of grand stories to provide absolute, permanent, and universal Truth for their audiences. Alternately, contemporary cultures increasingly embrace the “small” stories of local, situated, and temporary experience. These stories often are produced by marginalized cultural members (e.g., gays and lesbians) and challenge hegemonic values (e.g., of heteronormativity). As they circulate and multiply in culture, these narratives of diversity form potential resources for new and liberating forms of “identity politics” (e.g., the practice of informal “tactics” in everyday struggle against oppression). This form of politics is characterized less by participants’ pursuit of strategic goals than by their continuous, reflective—and serious—“play.” As a result, traditional relationships between dominant, subordinate, and subversive voices in culture have become less formal and predictable. Powerful groups have had to rethink their traditional strategies for maintaining their positions as they respond to challenges posed by other interests using spontaneous, intuitive, dispersed, and theatrical modes of resistance (e.g., the Internet). • The erosion of traditional identities premised on stability and essence. For example, “the individual” has long dominated modern psychology and philosophy as a figure believed to “author” original thought and then express it as intentional speech or writing. Alternate, postmodern models of identity (e.g., the schizophrenic, the cyborg) are characterized by ambiguity, fluidity, fragmentation, partiality, and simultaneity. Personal identity is not viewed as the author or the referent of communication. Instead, it is the effect of discourses that construct and enforce preferred narratives for understanding the self, other, and world. It is one potential form of subjectivity. 06-Mumby.qxd 8/3/2004 7:01 PM Page 118 118——Engaging Organizational Communication Theory and Research If you have found this list disorienting or disturbing, you’re not alone. Postmodernism is, maddeningly, both urgent and playful. It uses the strategies of blankness, irony, and reflexivity to heighten our awareness of paradox, ambiguity, uncertainty, emergence, and difference. It works like a virus to disrupt the tendencies of modernist thinking that “turn verbs into nouns, process into structure, relationships into things . . . and constructs into concrete (reified) objects” (Chia, 1995, p. 589). It reminds us that our knowledge and identities—all of the taken-for-granted elements of human organization—might have been, and might yet be, otherwise. These elements, which we may have viewed as total, transcendent, or permanent, are suddenly vulnerable (Mumby, 1997). They are “problematized”—recovered for the purposes of interrogation, critique, and transformation. Postindustrialism Let’s turn now to the ways that contemporary organizations have both shaped and been shaped by postmodernism. One of the first scholars to analyze this process was American sociologist Daniel Bell (1973), who argued that modern industry was being rapidly transformed by the computerization of information. Bell concluded that this transformation would lead to the decline of the manufacturing sector and the rise of a new class of technicians and professionals known as “knowledge workers.” Because knowledge is inherently abstract and symbolic, and is exchanged through communication systems, this argument was especially relevant for organizational communication scholars. Many of Bell’s predictions were correct. Since the 1970s, organizations have increasingly adopted new structures and cultures described alternately as “postindustrial,” “post-Fordist,” and “postmodern.” Several commentators have surveyed these changes (Cheney & Carroll, 1997; Chia, 1995; Clegg, 1990; Hatch, 1997, pp. 24–27; Horsfield, 2000; Parker, 1992). They note the following characteristics: • Where modern organizations favor centralized authority and hierarchy, postmodern organizations favor decentralized authority, lateral relationships within and between units, and localized autonomy in employee decision making. Networks replace pyramids as the dominant icon of organizational structure. Dynamic, collaborative “team talk” (Donnellon, 1996) replaces the cybernetic drone of authoritarian “command and control.” • Where modern organizations favor mass markets, consistent goals, and predictable strategies, postmodern organizations favor fragmented (niche) markets, evolving goals, and improvised strategies. 06-Mumby.qxd 8/3/2004 7:01 PM Page 119 Postmodern Theory——119 • Where modern organizations favor bureaucratic structures that formalize roles, rules, and procedures, postmodern organizations favor democratic processes that are informal, emergent, and based on consensus. In this process, authority that is traditionally tied to rank and position is rearticulated with personal or group possession of situationally relevant knowledge. • Where modern organizations favor differentiation of units, identities, and functions, postmodern organizations favor de-differentiation of those elements. In this process, they create multiskilled employees and holistic, flexible work processes. Traditional boundaries—such as those between suppliers, competitors, and customers—become more permeable and unstable (e.g., in the contexts of joint ventures and industry-wide integration of quality standards). • Where modern organizations favor standardized systems of reward and punishment (e.g., those tied to job descriptions and performance contracts), postmodern organizations favor general and continuous empowerment enabling employees to be proactive (i.e., successfully anticipate and respond to change). • Where modern organizations favor employee conformity to goals and policies, postmodern organizations favor complex, negotiated relationships in which employees cultivate dedication, reflexivity, and creativity in the service of organizational performance (e.g., by recognizing and innovating ineffective procedures). In this process, externally imposed organizational discipline is replaced by internally sustained self-discipline. • Where modern organizations favor unity and similarity, postmodern organizations favor diversity and difference as resources for increasing useful knowledge and effective performance. • Where modern organizations favor technologies designed for routine, mass production, postmodern organizations favor sensitive and interactive technologies enabling customized, certified production. Paradigms of quality and innovation replace the brute benchmarks of output rate and volume. Competitiveness and efficiency, however, are sustained as “new” values of service and responsiveness (e.g., in the organizational imposition of quotas for and monitoring of phone calls processed by employees of customer service centers). • Where modern organizations favor coherent cultures grounded in stability, tradition, and custom, postmodern organizations favor “agile” cultures that unfold dynamically in conditions of paradox and uncertainty. Employees gain new flexibility—and responsibility—in fashioning consistent identities amid controlled chaos (e.g., as “entrepreneurial” change agents). 06-Mumby.qxd 8/3/2004 7:01 PM Page 120 120——Engaging Organizational Communication Theory and Research Although this list is not comprehensive, it suggests how the organizational and cultural conditions of postmodernism are related (Carlone & Taylor, 1998). Specifically, we see that the experience of speed, flux, image, style, emergence, connection, and ambiguity cuts across these two spheres. In organizational theory, postmodernists pit these experiences against the reassuring verities of functionalism. They note that organizational communicators must find shared grounds of meaning even as conditions conspire to question cherished certainties, and to offer replacements that are alternately compelling, dubious, and exhausting. We can conclude this section with two caveats. The first is to recall that although it may be useful to identify exemplars of modern or postmodern organizational communication (Horsfield, 2000; Pacanowsky, 1988), these forms and processes typically coexist in organizations as tendencies. The pure type is probably the exception, not the rule. If for no other motivation than to seem current with their competitors, for example, most contemporary organizations reflect some postmodern tendencies. The second point is that these changes create ambiguity surrounding the term “postmodern organizational communication.” One meaning for this term is “communication occurring in postindustrial organizations.” We have partly characterized these forms and processes in this section. A second meaning, however, is “theories and studies of organizational communication that are produced using postmodernism as an intellectual resource.” This meaning emphasizes how postmodernist scholars view and engage organizational communication. It implies that “postmodern organizational communication” is not necessarily tied to postindustrial organizations. One might conduct, for example, a postmodernist study of a thoroughly modern organization (e.g., in challenging its preferred history by recovering suppressed narratives; Boje, 1995), or vice versa. As a result, to avoid misunderstanding, we can recall this distinction when we are using this term. Postmodernist Theory: Key Assumptions and Critical Applications We arrive now at our main focus: how scholars make use of postmodernism to theorize and study organizational communication. Understanding this process requires, first, a brief history of how organizational studies assimilated postmodernism. Intensive discussion of postmodernism in organizational studies flowered shortly after the field’s adoption of interpretivism (e.g., as the “organizational culture” movement) during the 1980s (see Putnam & Pacanowsky, 1983). Crucial here was a series of articles published in the international 06-Mumby.qxd 8/3/2004 7:01 PM Page 121 Postmodern Theory——121 journal Organization Studies by Gibson Burrell (1988) and Robert Cooper (1989) (see also Cooper & Burrell, 1988) that reviewed the relevance of postmodern figures and theories for organizational research. The appearance of these primers was accompanied by an explosion of related activities: formal discussion of postmodernism at the meetings of professional groups such as the Academy of Management; the creation of informal networks among dedicated postmodern scholars, such as those attending the Alta (Utah) Conferences on Organizational Communication; special journal issues (Boje, 1992); authored (Clegg, 1990) and edited (Boje, Gephart, & Thatchenkery, 1996; Hassard & Parker, 1993) volumes devoted to postmodernism; and the uncoiling of arguments between organizational scholars about its significance and consequences (e.g., Chia, 1995; Feldman, 1997; McSwite, 1997; Parker, 1992). As investments of scarce professional resources (e.g., conference panel slots, journal pages), these developments indicated the emergence of a new theoretical “market.” Because it is a multidisciplinary field, organizational communication has always been sensitive to intellectual sea changes. As a result, its scholarly forms and practices (e.g., dissertations and conference panels) increasingly reflected and reinforced this trend. Landmark works appearing during this period include Browning and Hawes’s (1991) analysis of “consulting” as exemplary postmodern organizational communication; Deetz’s (1992) analysis of postmodern theories of representation, subjectivity, and power; May’s (1993) review of the implications of postmodernism for organizational theories of subjectivity, textuality, and audiences; Mumby’s (1987, 1988) exploration of connections between neo-Marxist and Foucauldian theories of narrative, ideology and power; and Smircich and Calas’s (1987) deconstruction of discourses about organizational culture. By the turn of the millennium, discussion of postmodernism had been normalized—if not legitimated—in the field, demonstrated by its inclusion in canonical texts such as undergraduate textbooks (Eisenberg & Goodall, 1993) and disciplinary handbooks (Jablin & Putnam, 2001). Let’s proceed by discussing five claims that have proven central to organizational communication scholars as they work through the implications of this perspective. Organizations Are (Inter-)Texts Postmodernists take discourse to be central and primary to all organizational processes. They view all human understandings and relationships to be constituted and mediated by language. This has led them to adopt the metaphor of (inter-)text to study organizational communication. 06-Mumby.qxd 8/3/2004 7:01 PM Page 122 122——Engaging Organizational Communication Theory and Research In this process, postmodernists extend traditional usage of the metaphor organization-as-“text” by interpretivists (Westwood & Linstead, 2001). Historically, interpretivists have invoked this metaphor to study organizational culture as-if the symbolic document of a structured life-world, and its communicative reproduction. This metaphor has legitimated the use of hermeneutic methods to unravel the nature and significance of communication by focusing on its modes of production and interpretation. In this view, textualization occurs as organizational members use discourse to define, clarify, and manage the conditions of their organizational lives. In this process, they draw upon cultural ideologies that prescribe the use of particular norms, values, and beliefs as resources for sensemaking and expression. Organizational communication, subsequently, can be “read” as a text whose “surface structure” (its stable, conventional patterns of action and understanding) reflects traces of determination by “deep structure” (core organizational rules and metaphors). This metaphor extends the significance of organizational communication beyond its immediate, situational reference and productivity. It allows scholars to reconstruct how subjectivity and social reality are (re-)produced in the organizational milieu. It foregrounds how dominant organizational interests invite participation in systems of discourse that nonetheless constrain the expression of experience. In this process, distinctions between “meaning” and “politics” collapse (Brown & McMillan, 1991; Taylor, 1990). Postmodernists extend this metaphor in several ways. Most importantly, they argue that, although organizational texts are collaboratively authored, they are not singular, stable, or consensual. Rather, the potential meaningfulness of organizational texts is both precarious and prolific. This position reflects a postmodernist view that texts are situated in a continuous “infinite intercourse” (Cheney & Tompkins, 1988) of discourse. It alerts us to the presence of multiple and competing narratives (e.g., of subcultural experience) within organizations that are hierarchically distributed and moralized (e.g., as “official” vs. “illegitimate”). It suggests that organizational members are simultaneously oriented to and by multiple discourses. Communicators use these discourses in both prescribed and unofficial ways to make meaning (e.g., in supplementing their reading of official corporate statements with participation in systems of gossip and rumor). As a result, organizational communication can be viewed as intertextual. Postmodernists use this metaphor to conceptualize organizations as fluid entities that are situated within a broader cultural “economy” of textual interaction (e.g., between popular-cultural images of work, and the actual performance of work in organizational settings). In this metaphor, organizational communication is meaningful because it is variously configured 06-Mumby.qxd 8/3/2004 7:01 PM Page 123 Postmodern Theory——123 with other cultural and historical discourses—such as when employees are constructed using the language of “character” (Jacques, 1996) and “enterprise” (du Gay, 1996). Postmodern scholarship examines how these potential relationships between texts are constructed. Organizational cultures are viewed, subsequently, as entangled textualities (Carlone & Taylor, 1998; Taylor, 1999). It is important to note that postmodernist use of this metaphor differs from that of interpretivists. Specifically, while those theorists interpret organizational texts to reveal the concealed truths of domination, postmodernists defer such claims. Instead of generating single or final claims about truth, they prefer to juxtapose and relativize competing organizational texts, focusing on how their relationships destabilize taken-for-granted claims and reveal the dynamic interaction of domination and resistance (Boje, 1995). Organizational Cultures and Identities Are Fragmented and De-centered Postmodernists argue that organizations are marked by irony, ambiguity, contradiction, and paradoxes that oppress their members by prematurely foreclosing options for (self-)understanding and action (Trethewey, 1999; Wendt, 2001). As a result, postmodernists adopt the image of fragmentation to characterize some organizational cultures and identities (Martin, 1992). This condition is presumed to result from several factors. One is that organizational members are subject to dominant narratives promoting modernist values (e.g., of efficiency and rationality) as imperatives for performance. Although these narratives—and their associated identities—are at least partly effective, they are nonetheless constructed “fictions” that are arbitrarily imposed on the chaos of organizational life. In their ongoing activities, organizational members continually register the gap between these ideals and their actual situations (e.g., in confronting unsolvable problems). In this process, they alternately accept and reject preferred identities, and they form competing interpretations. As these interpretations proliferate, “fragmentation results from multiple voices and interpretations that separate rather than coalesce into a consensus” (Putnam & Fairhurst, 2001, p. 114). Although this condition may sound dire, it is not necessarily so. By taking fragmentation seriously, we are better able to appreciate the skillful efforts (the artfulness) of organizational members as they coordinate their actions and create shared meaning—however fleeting these accomplishments may be. We may cheer for identity entrepreneurs who overcome objectification and reclaim their potential for self-determination. 06-Mumby.qxd 8/3/2004 7:01 PM Page 124 124——Engaging Organizational Communication Theory and Research Postmodernists use a related term, de-centered, to challenge modernist theories of identity and agency. These theories generally assume that individuals are the original source of their intentions and actions, that they exercise these capacities through free will, and that identity is co-extensive with the material body (i.e., as a unique “personality”). Alternately, postmodernists—particularly those affiliated with the theory of poststructuralism— argue that human experience (including that of the self and the body) is never direct, pure, or immediate. Instead, it is always-already structured by language. This is because the structure of language (e.g., syntax and semantics) creates a cultural technology that is utilized by institutions to shape the processes of human development. In this process, potential human subjectivity is structured through discursive operations as an actual orientation (or interpellation) of the knowing subject toward Self, Other, and the World as objects. Because language is the medium for the reproduction of ideology, this process also means that the particular identities (or subject positions) we are “hailed” to assume by organizational discourses are prestructured to facilitate actions that are ideologically productive. For example, the discourse of “professionalism” hails organizational consultants to assume identities whose corresponding performances may include advising corporate clients on “effectively” communicating the results of their downsizing decisions to affected employees. When, finally, we note that multiple ideologies operate simultaneously and unpredictably to overdetermine organizational identities, then we have grasped the postmodernist view. In this view, the organizational subject is fragmented, partial, and discontinuous. He or she is the site of struggle between often-conflicting ideological narratives seeking to reproduce their associated interests through the interpellation of subjectivity. In this process, the subject continually draws upon discursive resources to interact with others, and to reflect upon those actions. He or she continually shifts between multiple, discontinuous, and scripted voices that have been internalized and assimilated—stitched together—as the self. Significantly, this view assumes there is no original, transcendent “person” standing behind or outside discourse to accomplish these actions. All identities spring from the capacities of language to organize subjectivity. In affirming this “death of the subject,” Calas and Smircich (1987, p. 4) conclude, “We are nothing but the discourses through and in which we live. In a sense, we are nothing more than transgressing points in networks of discourses.” Postmodernists subsequently focus on how particular discourses of identity inevitably constitute their coherence and effectiveness by marginalizing alternate discourses. In this view, the apparently unified subject is a productive—but potentially dangerous—entity. Organizational members act 06-Mumby.qxd 8/3/2004 7:01 PM Page 125 Postmodern Theory——125 repeatedly in ways that are familiar, consoling, and at least partly or temporarily effective. They lack, however, a memory of their own contingency that would open them to alternatives producing different outcomes. They “do what is called for,” but they are not always aware of who is “calling,” or how. Again, although this condition may sound dire, it is not necessarily so. While postmodernism is sobering in identifying discourse as the means of ideological reproduction, it also locates the potential for personal and organizational transformation in the micro-practices of mundane interaction. As we help each other to reflect on the costs and consequences of our complicity in organizational identification, we gain a new sense of alternatives—forms of identity that, while never finished, might nonetheless be other-wise (Hawes, 1998). Organizational Knowledge, Power, and Discourse Are Inseparable; Their Relations Should Be Deconstructed The literature on organizational power and control is vast indeed (Hardy & Clegg, 1996; Mumby, 2001). Postmodernists draw heavily in their orientation to these topics on the work of French philosopher and historian Michel Foucault. Foucault’s arguments were complex and counterintuitive, and they evolved significantly over the course of his career. They centered consistently, however, on the relationships between knowledge, power, discourse, and identity (Burrell, 1988; Marsden, 1993). Generally, Foucault was committed to rejecting visions of history that emphasized coherence and progress. Instead, his histories (e.g., of human sexuality) emphasized the role of ruptures and repetitions in the development of social life. They argued that apparent truth was the contingent product of systems of discourse. Additionally, he was committed to de-centering the dominant images of subjectivity that were produced by institutions and theories. Foucault focused on diagnosing the relationships between power, knowledge, and the body. He argued that, throughout modernity, indirect and subtle discipline—in which individuals internalized customs of speech and deportment—had replaced direct, coercive punishment as the dominant system of organizational and cultural power. Under regimes of discipline, Foucault argued, individuals adopt “technologies of the self” (e.g., programs of diet, exercise, and time management) to reflectively manage their potential productivity (e.g., their sexuality and labor). Although individuals may experience these acts of subordination as voluntary and empowering, Foucault argued that they are not necessarily or completely so. This is partly because individuals subsequently mobilize their productivity in ways that are not in their interests (e.g., in working longer hours to maintain the apparent 06-Mumby.qxd 8/3/2004 7:01 PM Page 126 126——Engaging Organizational Communication Theory and Research freedom and privilege of working as consultants; Deetz, 1998). This is also true because the forces of discipline are systematically coordinated between multiple institutions. Even though they appear to be diverse, institutions are commonly invested in channeling and exploiting human productivity in particular ways. One example of this type of research is Barker and Cheney’s (1994) analysis of apparently progressive, peer-based systems of team management. Ironically, those systems can lead team members to develop increasingly “concertive” control practices (i.e., those that are indirect, implicit, and focused on the development of premises for decision making). Foucault’s work holds several implications for studying organizational communication. First, it means that, instead of residing in specific organizational positions or actors, power is pervasive and fluid. It “resides in the discursive practices and formations themselves” (Deetz, 2001, p. 35). In this view, power circulates multilaterally and unpredictably throughout organizations. By successfully enlisting the self as an agent of its reproduction, “power reaches into the very grain of individuals, touches their bodies and inserts itself into their actions and attitudes, their discourses, learning processes and everyday lives” (Foucault, quoted in Marsden, 1993, p. 117). Power is manifest in the capacity of organizational discourse to produce and maintain distinctions that produce identities and differences that form the objects of power relations (e.g., surrounding “productive” vs. “unproductive” employees). Instead of focusing on the relative power of groups (e.g., reflected in their possession of resources), postmodernists argue that we should study how their distinctions are produced in and through discourse. Secondly, this view emphasizes that knowledge is inextricably tied to power. This is because it is inevitably produced through, and serves the interests of, discipline. For postmodernists, the organizational production of knowledge (e.g., of technologies, regulations, clients) is a central, normalized practice through which particular groups establish their authority and legitimacy over other groups. As a result, facile organizational claims to objectivity, neutrality, and consensus (i.e., when it is characterized as the undistorted alignment and voluntary resolution of individual wills) are no longer tenable. Instead, through its capacities to objectify phenomena and normalize those very objectifications, knowledge serves power by shaping the boundaries of what may legitimately be thought and spoken in organizational settings (Fletcher, 1992). Against the organizational nexus of power-knowledge-discourse, postmodernists pose the technology of deconstruction. This term formally describes the literary-critical process of disassembling a text and uncovering its tensions, contradictions, absences, and paradoxes. In this view, meaning is not contained in the superficial content of the text, but dispersed throughout 06-Mumby.qxd 8/3/2004 7:01 PM Page 127 Postmodern Theory——127 various relationships activated by its component signs. These relationships include those between textual signs and their multiple connotations, between the text and all other texts from which it draws its significance (i.e., its intertextuality), and between the text and its readers, created as they apply differing frameworks of interpretation that are shaped by their relationships to the text’s encoded ideologies (a condition known as polysemy). The goal of deconstruction is to reveal arbitrary patterns of language use and to open the text to alternative interpretations that are otherwise hidden by dominant meanings. In one example, Calas and Smircich (1991) provide a vivid deconstruction of conventional discourse about organizational leadership. Their reading is controversial because it reveals a suppressed homosocial dimension in that discourse. Specifically, they argue that leadership is shaped by images of communication as “seduction” practiced between male and male-identified members. Leadership may thus be viewed as sexualized interaction, in which potent male authority figures “arouse,” “probe,” and “satisfy” the desires of feminized subordinates for direction and coherence. This analysis is shocking to many readers, and for Calas and Smircich this reaction is exactly the point. By simultaneously evoking and denying this imagery, they argue, leadership discourse accomplishes several outcomes: It mystifies leadership, normalizes the arbitrary relationship between male sexuality and organizational authority, and legitimates itself as an account of that mystery. Although it is apparently rational, leadership discourse is nonetheless shadowed by visceral, sexualized imagery. Additional examples of deconstruction may be found in Boje (1997), Holmer-Nadesan (1997), Martin and Knopoff (1997), and Mumby and Putnam (1992). These studies demonstrate that “deconstruction is used not to abolish truth, science, logic, and philosophy, but to question how these concepts are present in texts and how they are employed to systematically exclude certain categories of thought and communication” (Kilduff, 1993, p. 15). Organizational Communication Involves Complex Relations of Power and Resistance Postmodernists view organizations as sites of intersection between two modes of power. The first mode involves strategic systems that seek control over bodies, thoughts, and voices to ensure their conformity and productivity. The other mode emerges in relation to the first. It arises from the fact that, although organizational members are recruited to actively consent to their domination, that consent is often grudging, partial, inauthentic, and 06-Mumby.qxd 8/3/2004 7:01 PM Page 128 128——Engaging Organizational Communication Theory and Research temporary. As a result, organizational hegemony is precarious, and in continuous need of refreshment. It inevitably provokes tactical exploitation by organizational members of system paradoxes and vulnerabilities (e.g., those associated with discretionary role performances and the formation of alliances). This resistance is often local, subtle, ambiguous, and micropractical (Trethewey, 1997). It is performed by organizational members to increase their margins of freedom, dignity, and pleasure. In this process, they seek to open up the indeterminacy of meaning and action that is foreclosed by organizations in their quest for certainty, progress, and control. There are two counterintuitive implications that follow from this argument. The first is that power is not neatly mapped or conducted in ways that conform to organizational hierarchies (e.g., which imply that senior staff are always more powerful than junior staff). Instead, postmodernists assume that potential modes of power in organizations are multiple and widely distributed, rather than singular and narrowly bounded. As a result, organizational superiors may find themselves subject to ironic and unanticipated disruptions that exceed their official scripts for interaction. It does not follow from this argument, however, that inversions of power relationships will always or totally determine the outcomes of interaction. They are equally likely to be temporarily and partially effective. Instead, the argument alerts us to the simultaneity and unpredictability of actual power flows within the circuits of organizational communication. Secondly, this perspective reminds us that “powerful” and “powerless” are not binary states that occur discretely in organizational communication. Indeed, as Deetz and Mumby (1990) and Shorris (1978) have demonstrated in their analyses of embattled middle managers, organizational figures can experience both states simultaneously and multilaterally. They can exercise agency even as they are being subjected to organizational control—either within a single relationship or across multiple relationships. Indeed, the exercise of power by organizational members does not necessarily spring from a single identity. It may instead result from the subjective articulation of multiple identities whose unpredictable interaction produces the conditions for new forms of action (e.g., through contradiction; HolmerNadesan, 1996). This argument is controversial because we are often encouraged to view the use and experience of power by organizational actors through discrete, limited, and moralized categories—viewing those actors, for example, as “heroes,” “villains,” “oppressors,” and “victims.” Each of these cultural frames possesses an accompanying script that specifies the amount, legitimacy, and consequences of power-use by their associated figures. Indeed, supporting or challenging organizational members who adopt these 06-Mumby.qxd 8/3/2004 7:01 PM Page 129 Postmodern Theory——129 identities for themselves and attribute them to others in contested events forms a significant act of organizational power. Thus, postmodernism encourages us to examine the complex and conflicted relations that organizational members actually have with power. At a basic level, this analysis focuses on the messy, evolving choices that organizational members make in accepting, negotiating, and resisting domination. At a more complex level, it examines how those choices and identifications have been shaped historically by discursive processes (e.g., of organizational socialization). In experiencing these processes, we discover, organizational members come to believe that some choices (but not others) are possible, effective, and legitimate. The questions then become, How did this happen? Why those choices? How would things be different if we made other choices? Potentially, this analysis focuses on how organizational members “hear” converging disciplinary voices (e.g., of family, education, religion, and formal organization) in key moments of interaction. In this process, we can distinguish between asking members to be accountable for their participation in organizational power, and blaming them. We can accept responsibility for changing the undesirable conditions that bind our selves with others. Knowledge of Organizational Communication Is Representational; as a Result, Communication Should Be Reflexive Postmodernism rejects so-called “reference” theories of language that assume symbols have naturally corresponding and preexisting objects. Instead, it focuses on how knowledge is produced as an effect of discourse’s ability to constitute relationships between subjects and objects—for example, in oral storytelling, written memos, or theatrical skits enacted at staff retreats. One theme in this process involves analyzing organizational “language games” (e.g., meeting talk) that are structured according to particular rules and conventions. Becoming aware of how these elements shape our claims about organizational communication can make us skillful players in these games. Instead of narrowly insisting on the objective accuracy of organizational stories, for example, we can realize how these stories—as discourse—activate particular games and produce particular effects (e.g., by reinforcing preferred identities and relationships). This theme is closely related to the theme of organizational (inter-)textuality. discussed above. The connection lies in the postmodern argument that all depictions of organizational communication—particularly scholarly ones—are always-already shaped by prior texts, and by their encoded logics, procedures, and methods. Under this condition (which has been described as 06-Mumby.qxd 8/3/2004 7:01 PM Page 130 130——Engaging Organizational Communication Theory and Research a crisis of representation; Clifford & Marcus, 1986), we accept that we cannot know a total, final truth about organizational communication—or, for that matter, any truth about it—except through contingent representations such as fieldnotes, interview transcripts, and questionnaires. As a result, we become more sharply attuned to the poetics and politics of these representations. The term “poetics” here refers to the presence and operation of rhetorical elements in these representations (e.g., metaphors). “Politics” refers to the ability of these representations to produce normalized effects (e.g., organizational identities such as “welfare client”) that reproduce and transform existing power relations. As a result, postmodernists encourage audiences of these representations to continuously reflect on—and potentially challenge— the means by which their knowledge is constituted through specific conventions of writing, speech, and performance (Jeffcutt, 1993). In organizational communication scholarship, some researchers have attempted to achieve this goal by producing postmodern ethnographies (Taylor and Trujillo, 2001, pp. 174–181; Van Maanen, 1995). These qualitative studies of organizational communication are uniquely reflexive, improvisational, and dialogic. In completing them, researchers strive to collaborate with organizational members as coproducers of situated, embodied knowledge. They incorporate diverse voices in their research narratives not only to demonstrate the plurality of organizational sensemaking but also to relativize their authority as researchers and narrators. Instead of “capturing” a single, preexisting organizational reality, these representations evoke multifaceted qualities of organizational experience—the whole beautiful, exciting, boring, and horrifying mess. In this process, they remind audiences about the contingency of all such discourse. Prominent examples include Pacanowsky’s (1983) experimental account of a police officer’s unfolding reaction to posttraumatic stress, Brown and McMillan’s (1991) “synthetic” narrative of a new employee’s socialization in a nursing home, and Goodall’s (1989) hilarious and disturbing depictions of organizational and community life in the New South. Evaluation: Advantages and Disadvantages This may be a good point to stop and assess your own reactions so far to this chapter. Do you find postmodern theory exciting, confusing, or outrageous? If so, you’re not alone. This body of theory has generated considerable controversy (Parker, 1995). I’ll review here three of these arguments, beginning with the associated critique and following with its defense. The first—and most frequent—charge is that postmodernism’s radical critique of ontology and epistemology creates a condition in which “anything 06-Mumby.qxd 8/3/2004 7:01 PM Page 131 Postmodern Theory——131 goes,” and therefore no interpretation should assume priority over an alternative. Crucial activities of judgment and evaluation are, as a result, paralyzed by postmodern analysis. Closely associated with these attacks is a spirited defense of modernist communication theory, and particularly elements such as the role of intention in the production of meaning, and the continuous accomplishment by individuals—despite the instability of signification—of shared meaning in their interaction. In this argument, faddish, cult-like, and misguided postmodernists have “fire[d] up the semiosis machine” (Ellis, 1991, p. 223), emphasizing abstract textual contingencies at the expense of appreciating actual and successful language use. Although these charges have enormous visceral appeal, the adequacy with which these critiques represent the breadth of postmodern theory is questionable (e.g., some of them caricature the category rather than examine specific studies). One might reply, for example, that postmodernism does not deny that meaning is possible—indeed, it emphasizes that meaning is accomplished continuously. Instead, postmodern theory reminds us that meaning is never universal, total, neutral, or permanent. It questions how particular meanings are produced in the situated, arbitrary, and interested fixing of relations between signifiers, as well as how those configurations might be changed. Also relevant here is a comment (attributed to Foucault) that postmodern studies are “antihumanist, but not inhumane.” These studies, in other words, may challenge dominant images of human identity, but this does not preclude their appreciation of the experience and creativity of organizational members as they negotiate their ongoing relationships with power. Indeed, by abandoning our unreflective faith in abstract sources of certainty, we may turn anew to each other and gain a renewed appreciation for our interdependency in the ongoing production of meaning—one turn at a time. The postmodernist concession, “I do not know anything, including who I am, for certain,” may mark the beginning of a liberating—even if painful—journey. Second, students initially exposed to postmodern theory often wonder how the theory is supposed to be “practical” or “useful.” Postmodernists typically respond by observing that the point of this theory is precisely to subject these entrenched, modernist criteria to reflection and critique. Joanne Martin (2002) summarizes this defense as follows: The purpose of a social science theory is not to comfort managers with promises of relatively easy solutions but to capture and perhaps even construct organizational experiences, in all their discomforting complexity, conflict, ambiguity, and flux. . . . An oversimplified theory, however comforting and appealing, is not likely to be useful if it ignores important complexities in the world it attempts, imperfectly, to represent. (p. 9) 06-Mumby.qxd 8/3/2004 7:01 PM Page 132 132——Engaging Organizational Communication Theory and Research This response is acceptable, of course, to the extent that one is willing to revise one’s expectations. You may or may not, for example, believe that it is “useful” (or even possible!) to interrupt the dominant power-knowledge regime operating in your organization in order to recover suppressed values. But in reflecting on your response to this invitation, you may learn more about how you are already aligned with various ideologies circulating in organizations. You may sharpen your sense of the malleability of organizational power—for example, its openness to indirect, improvisational, and tactical resistance. You may become more aware of how you are already doing this. Finally, it is not clear in this perspective if and how organizational communication research is supposed to contribute to theory—particularly if “theory” is understood in its traditional, positivist sense as a valid, generalizable explanation of the objective world. One solution to this dilemma involves revising our understanding of “theory” as representations of organizational communication that—now matter how local or specific their scope—support relationships and structures that we feel create positive, rather than negative, consequences for organizations and society. Our criteria for developing postmodern organizational theory, then, would include “intelligibility” and “usefulness,” but only to the extent that these can be developed in an accountable, ethical dialogue between groups holding a stake in the outcome (Hassard, 1993). Case Study: Postmodernism, Communication, and the Nuclear Weapons Organization As one example of how postmodern theory can be applied in the study of organizational communication, I now turn to a brief discussion of my own research on nuclear weapons organizations. Let me begin by disclosing what many communication scholars know but rarely have a chance to say: Our relationship with theory is part of our biography. It is tied up in the specifics of the places and times we have lived and studied, the texts we have read, the lectures we have heard, the students we have taught, the studies we have conducted, and the personal and professional relationships we have developed. Over time, theory merges—at least partly—with our ambitions, our hopes, our questions, and our fears. As we use it, it uses us. It is possible in narratives like this to sift a relationship with theory out of the totality of one’s life. But it is no longer clear that such a ruse is necessary, or even useful. 06-Mumby.qxd 8/3/2004 7:01 PM Page 133 Postmodern Theory——133 As a result, a mildly scandalous confession: I am not a “true” organizational communication scholar who “chose” postmodernism. Instead, I am a cultural studies scholar whose encounter with postmodernism led me—with some ambivalence—to affiliate with the goals and projects of organizational communication. I am, in other words, either a convert or a poacher, depending on whom you ask. Some context will make this clearer. At the University of Utah during the 1980s, many of the graduate faculty in the Department of Communication embraced the interpretive and critical “turns” in theory. Space does not permit discussion of the associated figures or events. Suffice it to say that in this intellectual climate, graduate students were permitted to pursue problems and explore connections in an entrepreneurial fashion. Because my life experience had sensitized me to the relationships between violence and voice (see Taylor, 1997a), I became increasingly interested in rhetoric surrounding the history of U.S. nuclear weapons development. As I tried to conceptualize this topic, I quickly came to appreciate the role played by organizations in shaping knowledge of that history. This mediation occurred in at least three forms. The first involved the basic condition that nuclear weapons are organizational products, manufactured through rational and mundane processes of communication. Adequate understanding of this history required sensitivity to the interrelated organizational scenes of laboratories, government agencies, and factories. The second form involved the historical influence of official agencies such as the Atomic Energy Commission in shaping accounts of nuclear weapons development, and its consequences for public health, worker safety, and the environment. As a result, the organizational history surrounding nuclear weapons development is highly contested between officials and affected stakeholders (Taylor, 1993b, 1997c; Taylor & Freer, 2002). Adequate understanding of this history involved sensitivity to organizations as the corporate authors and audiences of discourse. A final mediation involved the role played by nuclear weapons organizations—such as the wartime Los Alamos (New Mexico) Laboratory, where the atomic bombs dropped on Japan were developed—as significant symbols in historical narratives. That is, I came to understand that organizations like Los Alamos were not just the recurring topic of popular-cultural texts, but that they also functioned as “portals” that textual producers could use to organize audience understanding of the highly complex and ambiguous relationships between the signs of figures, events, policies, institutions, and technologies that constitute the material of nuclear history (Taylor, 1993a, 2002). These organizations, in other words, had been appropriated as narrative devices. In this way, I began to think about nuclear weapons as phenomena that simultaneously involved both organizational culture and cultural 06-Mumby.qxd 8/3/2004 7:01 PM Page 134 134——Engaging Organizational Communication Theory and Research organization. The first process involved the role played by systems of ideology (e.g., involving secrecy, elitism, and patriotism) in shaping the experience and expression of nuclear-organizational members (Taylor, 1990). The second process involved the development of cultural rules and traditions—a discursive apparatus—for representing that organizational activity (e.g., in museum exhibits). What is at stake in both processes, I came to believe, was the possibility of undistorted and democratic deliberation concerning the consequences of nuclear weapons development in post–Cold War culture (Taylor, 1996, 1997b). This recounting is a little deceptive in making it seem like these impressions emerged fully formed (they didn’t). But I hope it helps to show how this conceptualization of the research “problem” was shaped by my growing familiarity with postmodern theory. What I did not anticipate was the way in which the assimilation of postmodernism within organizational communication (described above) would fuel my research, leading me to make deeper and broader connections with the literature of organizational culture and power as ways of explaining what I was “seeing.” Along with some practical career advice from a mentor, this connection led me to market myself in my first job search as an “organizational communication scholar.” Recounting the consequences of that decision would require another narrative. More important is to note how my career demonstrates the opportunities both for bridging fields of study and for expanding traditional conceptualizations of “true” and “real” organizational communication research that were created by the field’s assimilation of postmodernism. I have benefited from— and, I hope, contributed to—the work of my mentors and colleagues who blazed this trail. Conclusion In the spirit of postmodernism, I’ll conclude this chapter not by summarizing its content, but by evoking its implications. These implications include whether—and how—you might choose to further engage postmodern theory in your practice and study of organizational communication. To stimulate your reflection, I’ll suggest these choices by posing the questions below. These questions are not designed to have “right” or “wrong” answers. When, where, and with whom you respond to them is up to you—you, that is, and all the others who participate in your ongoing organization. • How willing are you willing to consider that your “self” is not a unique, coherent individual, but a fragmented collection of multiple, 06-Mumby.qxd 8/3/2004 7:01 PM Page 135 Postmodern Theory——135 diverse, and competing “voices”? If you are willing to engage in this reflection, consider whose voices you speak. Where and when do they come from? Where and when do you speak them? Do they ever speak you? • How willing are you to examine the various texts and discourses on which your organizational communication depends (e.g., for its coherence, authority, and legitimacy)? How might recognizing and questioning these dependencies be useful for you? • How willing are you to consider your different relationships to organizational power and knowledge? In what ways are you powerful in your organization? In what ways are you powerless? How has your communication with others created and maintained these conditions? How could changes in your communication transform these conditions? • How willing are you to reflect on the ways your organizational communication forecloses alternate voices and interpretations? How willing are you to reopen that communication to consider these alternatives? 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