Week 8 — Cultural Studies and Critical Theory

We’re picking up cultural studies of organizations from the thread we started last week, and we’ll wrap up the week with some introduction to critical theory.

So, cultural studies. My Life in Four Cameras is a great episode to watch with this section of the book. It examines the relationship between culture and organization when the staff learns that one of their patients is a comedy writer. Especially about half way through, there’s an interesting scene between Perry, The Janitor, and Jordan where Perry is figuring out who to fire in order to make the budget work. The Janitor (interestingly, the character’s actual name) tells him brief stories about cafeteria staffers and then claims to have read personnel files. What does it say about the culture of the organization that Perry doesn’t know people’s stories at all, The Janitor knows them but because he’s been reading private files, and that the three of them talk cavalierly about this? What about Perry’s struggle to make personnel decisions?

In the outside-the-book reading for this week, you were asked to read an article that presents a model of socialization. Moreland and Levine first proposed the model in 1982, and the article assigned is essentially a revisiting of that model. In include the main figure from both papers here to invite you to comment on the stages of socialization and your own experience. I’m especially interested in whether you’ve exited organizations and how that process unfolded. Moreland and Levine are interested in the social context in which trust happens (in this later paper), and they ask us to consider when and how various trusts operate. For instance, how do seasoned members of organizations come to trust newcomers? I assign this the same week as the Scrubs episode because the budgeting challenges Perry faces interact with trust at some level. The cafeteria workers and medical staff trust the hospital to responsibly manage its finances and to have continuous employment. What happens when that’s not the case?

Critical theory here is used in the sociological sense rather than the literary sense. To use critical theory in understanding organizational communication for us means to explicitly attend to issues of power and ideology. I linked to Wikipedia back there because the overview it provides of critical theory is decent and serves as a useful extension of the discussion of Marxism and post-Marxism that’s in our textbook.

French and Raven (1968) suggest 5 types of social power. In each case, Person A has some control over an outcome Person B desires:

1. Reward power
2. Coercive power
3. Referent power
4. Expert power
5. Legitimate power

Critical theory extends this work by exposing hidden types of power, and power that is exercised by organizations rather than just individuals. What examples of hidden power can you think of? Or, when have you experience one of the 5 types of power above where “Person A” was really an organization and not just an individual? When does the analogy between individuals and organizations break down for you?

The other key terms this week are hegemony and ideology. We hear a lot about ideology in political news coverage, and the term as used here is roughly the same. Basically, an ideology is a system of ideas. It is often infrastructural in the sense that it operates without us actually attending to it and that it pervades our experience. Mumby (1989) in analyzing power focused on ideology and illustrated four functions:

1. Ideology represents sectional interests to be universal. — ideologies convince those who hold them that their concerns are everyone’s (or that they should be). We operate as though our own interests are actually everyone’s interests.
2. Ideology denies system contradictions. — the textbook’s example here is about democracy where the “rule” is that “one person = one vote” but we often operate as though only a few vote. So the system contradicts itself between rule and practice.
3. Ideology naturalizes the present through reification. — to reify means to make real. Ideologies make us think that the world just is and that we did not have active roles in constructing our realities.
4. Ideology functions as a form of control. — by reifying the world, ideologies exert control over our behaviors and deny some of our individual agency. They make it seem like we have little power because the world “just is” where critical and constructivist approaches like we’ve been reading tell us we have power to change the world through our communication and organizing choices.

We will pick it up here next week and start talking about resistance and how we, both individually and collectively, defend ourselves in the face of conflict or oppression.

Watchings

I haven’t seen The Big Short, but I’d be interested to hear from any of you who have about how that movie (or the book on which it’s based) relates to this section. The Inside Job provides some jumping off points to discuss ideology and hegemony, labor standards, and power.