Cynthia Stohl

Participatory Processes/Paradoxical Practices Communication and the Dilemmas of Organizational Democracy

This article brings together previous research efforts by the authors and reviews a wide range of relevant literatures to explain and analyze paradoxes of employee participation and workplace democracy. Although the authors do not take the position that all or even most of these paradoxes are necessarily harmful, they do maintain that there are a variety of practical avenues for dealing with them. The heart of the essay analyzes several main categories of participatory paradoxes: those of structure, agency, identity, and power. Following that, the authors offer practical suggestions for the management of paradoxes (and related tensions and contradictions), linking those recommendations to relevant theoretical and empirical propositions.

Power and Discourse in Organization Studies: Absence and the Dialectic of Control

This paper argues for a postmodern conception of power in which discourse is conceived as the principal medium through which power relations are maintained and reproduced. Specifically, power is identified as a pervasive characteristic of organizational life which constitutes the identity of organization members. Discourse, as a structured social practice, creates meaning formations rooted in a system of presence and absence which systematically privileges and marginalizes different organizational experiences. By way of exemplification, three organizational texts are subject to a deconstructive analysis in order to explicate the processes through which meaning structures are produced and reproduced organizationally.

Disciplining Organizational Communication Studies

The authors argue that, although ostensibly organizational communication as a field of study appears fragmented, one can make the case for its status as a discipline. This status is rooted in four central problematics that implicitly frame a sense of community and identity among organizational communication scholars. These are: (a) the problematic of voice, (b) the problematic of rationality, (c) the problematic of organization, and (d) the problematic of the organization-society relationship. Together, these problematics articulate a conception of organizational communication that defines it as both object of study and discipline in a way that is radically different from other fields that study organizational phenomena.

Bona fide groups: A reconceptualization of groups in context

This study culminates in the identification of what can be called “bona fide groups,” a theoretical category proposed for future small group research. In some respects an answer to the various calls and critiques in the previous papers, the article begins with an examination of differing research approaches to naturalistic groups, including discussions of groups in field settings, the use of descriptive‐exploratory designs, full‐fledged and intact groups, and naturally emergent groups. Next, a review of the literature on naturalistic groups provides both a framework for identifying bona fide groups and a rationale for future research to focus on such groups.

The role of memorable messages in the process of organizational socialization

This study examines the structure, form, and nature of the content and context of memorable messages exchanged within an organization. Based on the work of Knapp, Stohl and Reardon (1981) an analysis of interviews conducted within a small company indicates that all members were able to recall precisely a specific message which had a lasting influence on their work lives. The messages capsulized how one “should” behave in the organization and functioned to assimilate individuals into the work culture. The socializing and memorable nature of the messages were enhanced by several recurrent features in their form and structure, the receptivity of the respondent, the content, and the context.

Modeling the Structure of Collective Action1 This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 0352517. The authors are equal contributors to this article.

We propose an improved theoretical approach to the rich variety of collective action now present in public life. Toward this end, we advance a conception of collective action as communicative in nature, and offer a two-dimensional model of collective action space, comprising dimensions for (a) the mode of interpersonal interaction and (b) the mode of engagement that shapes interaction. We illustrate the perspective by describing the location of a variety of contemporary collective action groups within it and by an explication of the space that reveals its utility for making sense of modern collective action efforts. Specifically, we apply the collective action space to illustrate the changing presence of collective action groups over time, deviations in collective action groups through changes in size, shape, and location, and variations in the experiences and motivations of people engaged in collective action efforts. Finally, we show how our communicative approach to collective action can integrate the insights of several theoretical traditions, including collective action theory, social capital theory, and aspects of organization theory.

Social support messages and the management of uncertainty in the experience of breast cancer: An application of problematic integration theory

This article synthesizes past studies of illness, stress, coping, and social support and offers a model of communicative support, based on problematic integration theory, that emphasizes two major dimensions of meaning in the breast cancer experience. The model suggests that supportive messages are designed to help the breast cancer patient manage both perceptions of the likelihood (e.g., uncertainty) of various illness experiences and evaluations of those experiences. Support messages are designed to facilitate coping by reducing, maintaining, or increasing the supportees level of uncertainty; variations in message design are expected to be related to perceptions of the supportees pre‐message uncertainty about and evaluation of the potential experience. These expectations were tested by asking breast cancer patients to formulate supportive messages in response to several hypothetical scenarios. The same patients were then asked to judge the likely junction of their messages. These judgments were assess...

Topics and Sources of Memorable Breast Cancer Messages and Their Impact on Prevention and Detection Behaviors

Often, people are able to recall a message on a particular topic for a long period of time. These memorable messages have the ability to influence behavior when they are recalled from memory long after initial exposure. Knowing the topics and sources of the messages that are remembered about breast cancer can improve the efficacy of future breast cancer outreach. To this end, 359 women completed an online survey about memorable breast cancer messages. Most women (60%) recalled a memorable message, described it, identified its source, and noted whether it had resulted in prevention or detection behaviors. Four categories of message topics emerged: early detection (37.3%), awareness (30.9%), treatment (25.8%), and prevention (6%). Furthermore, five categories of sources of these memorable messages were found: media (35.5%), friends (22.2%), family (21.6%), medical professionals (15.2%), and others (5.5%). The media were a major source of all four topics of messages, although family members, friends, and the medical community were major sources for particular message topics as well. Memorable messages originating from medical professionals were substantially more likely to motivate detection behaviors than prevention behaviors. This research demonstrates that message topic and source both play roles in determining message recall as well as in determining how memorable messages impacted behavior.

Secret Agencies: : The Communicative Constitution of a Clandestine Organization

This special issue challenges scholars to consider the theoretical, methodological, and practical implications of viewing organizations as ‘constituted in and through human communication.’ Interrogating the work of one of the most influential approaches to the study of the constitutive nature of organizing, the oeuvre of James Taylor and his colleagues or what has become known as the Montreal School, we identify an implicit assumption of organizational transparency. We suggest that unpacking ‘the transparency principle’ helps build a richer framework that builds upon the foundations of the Montreal School, facilitates empirical inquiry, and highlights several aspects of the social context which are typically taken for granted within organizational studies. Expanding Taylor et al.’s orientation to clandestine organizations, we address the question posed by the editors in the call for papers: ‘How does a communication-as-constitutive of organization’s perspective shape understandings of the organization’s embeddedness in social contexts?’ Clandestine organizations embody secret agency and intriguing possibilities for understanding the ways in which social actors communicatively constitute organizations. The metaconversations of clandestine organizing take place in a complex socio-political historical context, and exploration of these metaconversations not only furthers our understanding of illicit and clandestine systems but also provides new insights into the communicative constitution of contemporary organizations in general.

Participating as participation: A network approach

This paper adopts a network approach to the study of worker participation in an attempt to capture the inherent communicative nature of participating within an organization. Although complex, dynamic, interactive processes are the very essence of participation, it has most often been conceptualized as a unidimensional, static variable, typically assessed at the individual level. The network study focuses attention upon the communicative activities and patterns that emerge as 148 line workers participate within a large sociotechnical system. The data indicate that the degree to which workers become involved and empowered in the communication system are differentially related to levels of workers’ satisfaction and managerial assessments of worker performance.