Table Of ContentReframing Difference
in Organizational
Communication
Studies: Research,
Pedagogy, and
Practice
Dennis Mumby
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Reframing difference in organizational communication studies: Research,
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1. Communicationinorganizations. 2. Organizationalbehavior. I. Mumby,
DennisK.
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Contents
OrganizingDifference:AnIntroduction vii
DennisK.Mumby
PARTI:THEORIZINGDIFFERENCEANDORGANIZATION 1
Chapter1:KnowingWorkThroughtheCommunicationof
Difference:ARevisedAgendaforDifferenceStudies 3
KarenLeeAshcraft
Chapter2:IntersectingDifference:ADialecticalPerspective 31
LindaL.Putnam,JodyJahn,andJaneStuartBaker
Chapter3:TheorizingDifferenceFrom
TransnationalFeminisms 55
SarahE.Dempsey
Chapter4:LeadershipDiscoursesofDifference:Executive
CoachingandtheAlphaMaleSyndrome 77
GailT.Fairhurst,MartheL.Church,DanielleE.Hagan,and
JosephT.Levi
PARTII:TEACHINGDIFFERENCEANDORGANIZING 101
Chapter5:CriticalCommunicationPedagogyasa
FrameworkforTeachingDifferenceandOrganizing 103
BrendaJ.Allen
Chapter6:“ButSocietyisBeyond___ism”(?):Teaching
HowDifferencesare“Organized”viaInstitutional
Privilege↔↔Oppression 127
Erika Kirby
Chapter 7: Teaching Difference as Institutional and
Making it Personal: Moving Among Personal, Interpersonal,
and Institutional Constructions of Difference 151
Jennifer Mease
Chapter 8: Difference and Cultural Identities in
Aotearoa New Zealand: Pedagogical, Theoretical, and
Pragmatic Implications of the Josie Bullock Case 173
Shiv Ganesh
PART III: APPLYING DIFFERENCE TO
ORGANIZATIONAL CHANGE 191
Chapter 9: Different Ways of Talking About
Intervention Goals 193
John G. McClellan, Stephen Williams, and Stanley Deetz
Chapter 10: Intersecting Differences: Organizing
[Ourselves] for Social Justice Research With People in
Vulnerable Communities 219
Patricia S. Parker, Elisa Oceguera, and Joaquín Sánchez, Jr.
Chapter 11: Problematizing Political Economy Differences
and Their Respective Work-Life Policy Constructions 245
Patrice M. Buzzanell, Rebecca L. Dohrman, and Suzy D’Enbeau
Chapter 12: The Worlding of Possibilities in a Collaborative
Art Studio: Organizing Embodied Differences With Aesthetic
and Dialogic Sensibilities 267
Lynn M. Harter and William K. Rawlins
Author Index 291
Subject Index 295
About the Editor 303
About the Contributors 305
Organizing Difference
An Introduction
Dennis K. Mumby
T
his volume appears at a propitious moment in the evolution of
the field of organizational communication. Over the last two
decades the field has struggled mightily with how best to
address the ways that organizing, power, and communication
processes intersect in the context of everyday meaning construction
and sense-making practices. This struggle has taken many forms,
including interpretive, critical, post-structuralist, and feminist efforts
to unpack the processes through which systems of meaning, power,
and institutional forms are structured. At the heart of this effort has
been the recognition—sometimes explicit, frequently implicit—that
difference is both medium and product of the relations of power that
organization members communicatively construct. Put in more
Batesonian terms, critical organizational communication scholars have
for a long time been exploring the ways that “the differences that make
a difference” are produced, reproduced, and challenged in organiza-
tional life. Difference, as many have argued, is by no means fixed and
existing “out there” in the external world, but rather arises through the
ability of particular interest groups to marshal discursive, political, and
economic resources in order to privilege one system of difference over
another. In this sense, it is only through difference that—in the
Saussurian sense—a meaningful world becomes possible at all.
However, while difference may be arbitrary, it never arises by accident.
Curiously enough, however, critical organization scholars have
both embraced difference as a focus of study and held it gingerly at
arm’s length. Taking on difference as a guiding construct and empiri-
cal problematic simultaneously opens up myriad possibilities for
vii
viii REFRAMING DIFFERENCE IN ORGANIZATIONAL COMMUNICATION STUDIES
exploring organizing and leads one up a conceptual cul-de-sac. Put
simply, studying difference in all its complexities is damn hard. We are
taught from early in our graduate training that taking on any theoreti-
cal framework inevitably means that we can construct only partial, per-
spectival views of human behavior. All seeing is theory-laden, to
paraphrase Norwood Hansen (1958), and such a recognition provides
some comfort that we are not expected to do it all; we simply try to
carve out our own carefully delineated area of research and leave the
rest to others, making the usual disclaimers along the way about con-
tingency, partiality, provisionalism, and so forth.
But somehow these same arguments ring rather hollow when it
comes to studying and theorizing difference. Typically, the argument
has gone something like this: In the 1980s,critical organization studies
theorized power in a relatively generic manner, with occasional refer-
ences to class or “sectional interests” (Giddens, 1979)as the underlying
mechanism for the construction of difference and social inequity.
Sometimes there were allusions to the need to expand conceptions of
difference to include, for example, discussions of gender. Hearn and
Parkin’s (1983) review of research on gender and organization,
tellingly subtitled “A Selective Review and Critique of a Neglected
Area,” gives some indication of how marginal the critical study of gen-
der and organizing was back then. Sometimes critical scholars gave
rather elaborate and tortured explanations of why gender was
excluded as a focus of study. Thus, Alvesson and Willmott (1992), in
their widely-read edited collection, Critical Management Studies,stated,
“Arguably, most if not all social phenomena involve a gender aspect,
but it would be reductionistic to capture most aspects of management,
production, and consumption basically in feminist terms...” (p. 9).
Of course, such a sentiment was rather overwhelmed in the course
of the 1990s by efforts to systematically theorize and study the rela-
tionships among gender, organization, and power, spurred in many
respects by Acker’s (1990)landmark essay as well as by early theoreti-
cal essays in organizational communication (e.g., Marshall, 1993) that
saw gender not simply as an addition to extant organizing processes
but as medium and product of everyday organizational sense-making
and meaning formations.
But what goes around comes around. It soon became clear that
while the broadening of critical organization studies to include gender
was a welcome and much-needed move, it also included its own limi-
tations and blind spots. Perhaps most glaringly, little attention was
paid to the ways in which race was encoded in everyday organiza-
tional life. Indeed, in many ways, and for all its talk about gender as
Organizing Difference: An Introduction ix
socially constructed, much of this work has tended to essentialize gen-
der as isolated from other, related constructions of difference.Perhaps
most frustratingly, many of these studies made frequent calls for the
expansion of research to address other difference issues, such as race,
but rarely went beyond the expression of a need for such research.
So we see a pattern emerging here. First, a line of research is estab-
lished that begins to address a neglected aspect of difference; then, the lim-
itations of this work are highlighted as other areas of difference are shown
to be marginalized.In other words, the general approach to difference in
organization studies can be broadly characterized as additive and piece-
meal, with limited efforts to theorize difference in a sustained and coher-
ent manner.Maybe it’s time for a different approach to difference.
I’m not going to make any grandiose claims about how this vol-
ume solves many of the problems associated with existing research on
difference (in any form) and organization. However, I do think that,
taken collectively, the essays represent a sustained effort to do justice to
the complexities and contradictions that characterize difference as a
fundamental and defining feature of organizational life. Moreover,
each chapter explores the relationship between difference and organiz-
ing communicatively, examining how difference is both medium and
outcome of the collective sense-making processes of organization
members. In other words, difference is both the mechanism through
which meanings and identities are organized and the product—
intended or unintended—of everyday organizing and collective sense-
making. In this context, each of the chapters explores, in various ways,
how certain forms of difference are organized into everyday life while
others are organized out or marginalized.
Rather than being organized around different forms of difference
(which, I think, would defeat the object of theorizing difference in a
more systemic, less piecemeal manner), the book is instead structured
in three different, but related, sections. In the first section, “Theorizing
Difference,” contributors explore a number of ways in which differ ence
can be critically examined as a communicative phenomenon; in each
chapter, difference is examined as routinely accomplished through
everyday organizing processes. Thus, the overarch ing goal in this sec-
tion is not to add difference to the list of empirical phenomena that
organiza tional communication scholars must address; rather, the goal
is to demonstrate the importance of “difference” as both a construct—
a sensitizing device—through which the complexities of organiza tional
communication processes can be examined and as a constitutive fea-
ture of everyday organizing. Identities, social reali ties, and power rela-
tions are both medium and outcome of difference.
