David Carlone

Democracy, Participation, and Communication at Work: A Multidisciplinary Review

This review essay examines a broad multidisciplinary literature on democracy and work, highlighting issues of theory and practice of special interest to communication scholars. The essay treats relevant and selective research from the following fields (in addition to communication studies): the sociology of organizations, political science and public administration, comparative and labor economics, management and organizational behavior, cultural anthropology and organizations, industrial and organizational psychology, labor and industrial relations, and feminist studies of organizations. The following communication-related themes are used to organize the essay and to derive conclusions from the relevant literatures: (a) the boundary-spanning potential of organizational democracy, (b) multiple rationalities and motivations in employee participation programs, (c) the microprocess features of workplace democratization, (d) the structural aspects of participation and democracy at work, (e) the issue of “voic...

Meaning/ful Work and Organizational Communication: Questioning Boundaries, Positionalities, and Engagements

As organizational communication scholars, we routinely orient ourselves to organizations as places of work while often ignoring the diverse forms of communicative work and communication about our working lives that underpin such locales. In this essay, we consider how the study of meaningful work problematizes the boundaries of organizational communication. Specifically, we reflect on how definitions of meaningful work are very much caught up in our contemporary milieu. Organizational communication scholars, then, must be willing and able to work within and across traditional boundaries, perhaps redefining them in the process. We illustrate these claims in three parts. In the first part, we consider the rise of communication work and how it calls into question common notions of meaningful work. In our second section, we argue that what counts as meaningful work often stems from the raced, classed, and gendered assumptions guiding our practice. Finally, in part three, and with these elements of our milieu in mind, we describe ways in which scholars can begin to investigate meaningful work by examining tensions between description and prescription and microlevels and macrolevels of discourse and experience to uncover the strategies and tactics available to individuals as they craft meaningful working lives.

Manifestations of neoliberal discourses within a local job‐training program

The purpose of conducting this study was to understand how neoliberal discourses manifest within the local context of a short‐term, job‐training program offered at a two‐year college in the USA. Ethnographic data were collected at the local site through interviews, observations and document analysis. We then situated these data within a global context represented by a corpus of purposively selected national and international policy texts. Focusing on three components of discourse as social action—genres, representations and identities—the data analysis illuminated three interrelated themes relating to how institutional actors translated neoliberal discourses available at the global scale into practice. The ideological consequences for learners as well as examples of counter‐hegemonic resistance are discussed.

Growth and Transformation of Communication Studies in U.S. Higher Education: Towards Reinterpretation.

Systematic data on the recent history of communication studies in U.S. higher education are much needed. Statistical data can mislead, however, when numbers are reported without careful attention to the shifting classification schemes that underlie them. The work that is needed in order to understand the recent emergence of a communication discipline is at least as much theoretical and interpretive as it is empirical. To illustrate this point, we explore two types of indicators of growth and transformation of communication studies: statistics on degrees granted and trends in the classification of books and serials. For each type of indicator we show that the emergence of communication as a category has involved qualitative transformation of the category itself as well as quantitative growth within the category. This categorical transformation, and its deeper roots in the evolution of communication as a cultural practice, will be basic to any adequate interpretation of our disciplines increasing centralit...

Security, Dignity, Caring Relationships, and Meaningful Work Needs Motivating Participation in a Job-Training Program

Researchers asked 17 participants in a job-training program to describe their personal struggles following an economic restructuring. Examined through a critical theoretical lens, findings indicate that the learners enrolled in the program to reclaim security, dignity, meaningful work, and caring relationships. Program planners at community colleges are therefore urged to employ democratic program planning models, ask learners about their educational needs as they see them, and listen compassionately to their responses.

The ambiguous nature of a management guru lecture: Providing answers while deepening uncertainty

Each year, managers and employees spend billions of dollars retaining management consultants, buying business books, and attending seminars to regain certainty. Some of this quest occurs in the lectures of star management consultants, such as Stephen R. Covey. For his audience, a Covey lecture is a liminoid event, that is, a middle phase in a secular rite of passage from “ineffective” to “effective.” Viewed through the lens of liminoidity, the lecture (a) disrupts the ontology of business subjects, (b) gains force by blending sacred wisdom and technical instruction, (c) makes permanent a transitional stage, and (d) situates the lecturer as guru and audience members as neophytes through their interaction with one another. Despite the quest for certainty, Coveys lectures simultaneously ease and deepen uncertainty and anxiety.

The Contradictions of Communicative Labor in Service Work

Boundaries dividing communication and culture from economy are fluid. The US services economy, with broad and deep growth, illustrates this fluidity. This paper applies theorizations of the relationship between communication and capitalism to a customer service job-training course for dislocated workers. A site of communication education, the course teaches students to be successful customer service representatives. Customer service communicative labor bridges production and consumption and, thus, is contradictory. The communicative labor translates the communication commonplace of mutuality into a self-other technology to affirm customers, and also requires a technology that objectifies customers. Job-training students resist this contradiction.

Enablement, constraint, and The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People

Popular management writing and discourse fascinates me for two reasons. First, it makes me ask the questions, “Why did this writing and discourse ever become „popular??” and “Why would someone ever want to read popular management literature?” Second, popular management writing and discourse fascinates me because so much of it professes new forms of organizing and methods of managing when in fact quite a bit looks suspiciously familiar. In fact, the question of popularity may be linked to the content of the genre.

Silicon communication: A reply and case study

In their contributions to this forum, Nadesan, Cloud, and Weaver have critiqued and extended our argument for the benefits of collaboration between organizational communication and cultural studies. Originally (Carlone & Taylor, 1998), we argued that communication scholars should integrate the resources of these fields to fashion new ways of engaging the convergence of organization and culture in the post-industrial, hyper-capitalist new economy. In response, Nadesan has distinguished a variety of arguments concerning the nature and consequences of “post-Fordism,” Cloud has asserted the enduring relevance of materiality and class, and Weaver has called for public relations practitioners and scholars to reflect on the “worldly” affiliations of their work with the hegemonic interests of profit, efficiency, and progress. In this short article, we address these responses and advance our project through a case study of a particular object.