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Critical Tradition Approach to Organization Communication

The critical tradition in organizational communication also is concerned with culture but more specifically with the power ideologies that arise in organizational interaction.

Discourse of Suspicion
Corporate Colonization Theory

Discourse of Suspicion
Dennis Mumby

Dennis Mumby

Mumbys research focuses on the relationship among discourse, power, gender and communication. Mumby is particularly concerned with the power relations and ideologies that arise in organizational communication

Organizational Communication
The study of effective and participatory communication across business and organizational settings. Communication such as emails, talking on the phone, meetings, presentations and more. Moreover, it is the process of creating and negotiating collective, coordinated systems of meaning through symbolic practices oriented toward the achievement of organizational goals.

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Why study organizational communication?
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. (Mumby) The organizational world creates patterns of domination.

Critical Tradition
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Critical Theory
Views the world as socially constructed through communication but sees underlying systems of power that shape it

Discourse of Suspicion Attitude of questioning about and an examination of the deep structure of ideology, power and control within the organization

Hegemony in organizational communication involves the relations of domination in which subordinated groups actively consent to and support belief systems and structures of power relations that do not necessarily serve (may work against) those interests. (The interest of the corporation clearly are higher in priority than those of its employees.) Hegemony : A group maintains this when it is able to create a worldview that others actively support, even though that worldview may not be their interest or oneencompassing ideology Power is established within an organization by the domination of one ideology over others. Narratives, rituals and other practices form certain kinds of texts that create and perpetuate ideologies. The culture of an organization involves an inherently political process.

Hegemony is a process of struggle rather than a state of domination.

Hegemony is a worked out set of arrangements in which stakeholder buy-in actually contributes to domination.
Resistance vs. Transformation

The introduction of resistance shifts attention away from structures of domination that control to the productive ways organizational members resist Hegemony involves a continuum between a single, all-encompassing ideology at one end and widespread resistance on the other

Hegemony as pragmatic, interactive and dialectical process of assertion and resistance; process of power arrangements emerging as an active process of multigroup social construction