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Critical Organizational Communication

Critical organizational communication is concerned with understanding issues of power in organizational settings. Critical organizational communication studies now cover a wide array of more specific approaches to and theories about the study of organizational communication, drawing significantly from critical modernism, post-structural, and feminist scholarship on the subject. Critical approaches to organizational communication first were developed in the 1980s, with the interpretive turn in organizational communication theory. These approaches became increasingly complex as they were influenced by and became mutually intertwined with the emergence of feminist thought, the popularity of poststructural approaches, and ever-widening empirical contexts for inquiry.

The Interpretive Turn

In the 1980s many scholars began to highlight the centrality of subjectivity, meaning, and context in organizational communication, thereby paying attention to the cultural life of organizations. Formerly, scholarship had been built primarily on a container metaphor for organizations, which entailed looking at how communication, in the form of messages, was transmitted “in” preexisting organizations. However, the interpretive turn led scholars to become especially interested in examining connections between communication and the ontology, or nature, of organizations, that is, how communication actually created the apparently solid things that we called organizations. Thus, scholars started taking apart phenomena that were earlier taken for granted and began to look at how they were communicatively constructed. For instance, instead of measuring how much workers participated in decision making in their organizations, scholars interested in studying participation began to study how workers ascribed definite meanings to participation and then acted on those meanings. And so, the interpretive turn led to the demise of the idea of an organization as a container and led instead to an abiding concern with understanding the connections between organizations and the rest of society.

Critical approaches grew quickly with the advent of the interpretive turn because power was such a valuable concept in enabling us to understand why particular meanings came to be dominant, why organizations were constructed in specific ways, and what that had to do with the larger political economy of capitalism. While scholars had always studied power in organizational settings, with the advent of the interpretive approach, power became an altogether multidimensional concept. Researchers became increasingly eclectic, drawing from such sources as the community power debates in sociology in order to explain why individuals and collectives did not agitate against visibly oppressive conditions. As scholars paid attention to such acquiescence to control, they expanded their conception of power to include not just issues of obedience and direct control through such mechanisms as reward and punishment, but also social and cultural norms, discipline, and unobtrusive forms of control. In the process, four terms became particularly important in critical conceptions of organizational life: concertive control, hegemony, systematically distorted communication, and identification.

A First Generation of Concepts

The four terms—concertive control, hegemony, systematically distorted communication, and identification—might be taken as the cornerstones of a first generation of critical organizational communication studies, which still have currency today. The term concertive control was developed by Phil Tompkins, George Cheney, and their associates, as an extension of the work of Richard Edwards, in order to describe a form of organizational control that did not rely on coercion, bureaucracy, or even technology. They described early systems of workplace control as “simple” in that they were based on arbitrary and ad hoc rules set by owners. The advent of the industrial age resulted in the development of more elaborate systems of control that were technical and/or bureaucratic. Technical systems of control were exemplified by the Fordist production line, which rigidly controlled the speed and output of work, even as it deskilled workers, forcing them to learn specific tasks at the expense of developing their knowledge base. Bureaucratic systems of control are exemplified by large modern organizations such as universities, which involve formal, codified, rationalized systems of rules and regulations that govern conduct. Concertive control systems, on the other hand, are epitomized by organizations that involve significant amounts of teamwork, control via a system of informal values, and norms and codes that are constructed by workers themselves and that serve to regulate their behavior. While it is evident that simple, technical, and bureaucratic control systems are made possible through communication processes between superiors and subordinates, it is especially easy to see how concertive control systems are constructed through communicative dynamics among employees.

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