Karen Lee Ashcraft

Identity matters: Reflections on the construction of identity scholarship in organization studies

Key tensions underlying much of the identity literature; we foreground identity matters as encountered by individuals, understood as social; durability of identity; identity in its various conceptualizations offers creative ways to understand a range of organizational settings and phenomena while bridging the levels from micro to macro.

1 Constitutional Amendments: “Materializing” Organizational Communication

Abstract This essay aims to “materialize” organizational communication in three senses. First, we seek to make the field of study bearing this name more tangible for North American management scholars, such that recognition and engagement become common. To do so, we trace the development of the field’s major contribution thus far: the communication‐as‐constitutive principle, which highlights how communication generates defining realities of organizational life, such as culture, power, networks, and the structure–agency relation. Second, we argue that this promising contribution cannot easily find traction in management studies until it becomes “materialized” in another sense: that is, accountable to the materiality evident in organizational objects, sites, and bodies. By synthesizing current moves in this direction, we establish the basis for sustained exchange between management studies and the communication‐as‐constitutive model. Third, we demonstrate how these conceptual developments can “materialize” ...

Resistance Through Consent? Occupational Identity, Organizational Form, and the Maintenance of Masculinity Among Commercial Airline Pilots

Recent theories underscore the indefinite, conflicted, and discursive character of labor identity and resistance, highlighting local practices and meanings. This article examines an empirical and political dilemma provoked by such models: what to do when once-dominant voices resist a loss of control. Drawing on interviews conducted with commercial airline pilots, the author examines how privileged professional men engage gendered threats. The analysis demonstrates how organizational efforts to induce crew empowerment threaten pilot identity, as well as how pilots resist emasculation by embracing mandatory changes. The study illustrates ways to grapple more fully with the implications of discursive, dialectical models of resistance. In particular, the author urges attention to tales of declining control as discursive realities that engender emotional resistance to social change.

Special Issue Introduction: Practicing disorganization: the development of applied perspectives on living with tension

Over the last decade, organizational scholars have begun to express avid interest in the dilemmatic character of organizing. Terms like paradox, contradiction, and irony increasingly appear in the literature, capturing a range of tensions that characterize contemporary organizational life. Arguably, the growth of interest in organizational dilemmas—among practitioners (e.g., Abramson, 1997), popular press authors (e.g., Farson, 1996) and scholars (e.g., Stohl & Cheney, 2001)—reflects a common sentiment about our times: As organizational environments become more complex and turbulent, and as diverse institutional forms merge and emerge, organizations and their members are pulled or are purposefully moving in different, often competing directions. Of course, while current conditions seem to intensify conflicting pressures, paradox, contradiction, and irony have long been a part of organizational experience—a point obscured by enduring myths of rationality and order that shape the prevalent logics of organization theory and practice. With this special issue, we aim to challenge those myths and reframe the rising focus on organizational tensions in three ways. First, we cast paradox, contradiction, and irony—in a word, irrationality—as a rather normal condition of organizational life, not as an anomalous problem to be removed or resolved. Second, we point to the ways in which organizational irrationalities are, in many ways, gendered. Finally, we situate organizational irrationality as an applied concern. Organizational tensions become a pressing matter when they are experienced by real women and men charged with negotiating formal and informal systems in everyday practice. To the

Appreciating the ‘work’ of discourse: occupational identity and difference as organizing mechanisms in the case of commercial airline pilots

This article pursues two central goals. First, I seek to advance the sustained study of occupational identity as a pivotal mechanism for organizing work and, thus, as a productive means of integrating the aims of two scholarly movements: 1) the ‘dislocation’ of organization (i.e. beyond container metaphors of site) and 2) the renewed emphasis on work (i.e. ‘bringing work back’) in organization studies. Specifically, I propose the study of evolving relations between occupational image discourse and role communication, and my analysis of US commercial airline pilots enacts the potential of such research. The analysis demonstrates how contemporary pilots draw on the deliberate historical construction of airline pilots as elite, fatherly professionals to make sense of their work, explicitly invoking gender discourse as a rational and emotional warrant for their labor and, in so doing, implicitly articulating sexuality, race, and class discourses. Accordingly, the second major goal of the article is to promote inquiry into how discourses of difference function to organize occupational identity and, thus, to (re)produce the division and hierarchy of labor. With this move, I seek to bring a more constitutive view of discourse and communication, as well as a focus on intersection and interplay among discourses of difference, to the study of occupational identity and segregation.

Organized Dissonance: Feminist Bureaucracy as Hybrid Form

Feminist bureaucracy, a response to a historical tension between feminist theorists and practitioners, merges opposed models of power. Through qualitative analysis of power in practice, I examine t...

Empowering “Professional” Relationships Organizational Communication Meets Feminist Practice

This article revisits the relationship between feminist and bureaucratic organization. Much feminist critique has denounced bureaucratic impersonality and proposed the reunion of professional and personal. Yet, little is known of what happens when actual organization members merge “private” matters with “public” life. This article turns to feminist practice as a way to enhance feminist organization theory and, thus, to enrich organizational communication studies with pragmatic alternatives to gendered organization. The author reports an ethnographic study of one feminist organization’s efforts to personalize work relations, which ironically reproduced the division of public and private. The case challenges feminist assumptions about the role of emotionality and sexuality in empowering “professional” relationships and extends an alternative, provisional form of theorizing about feminist practice.This article revisits the relationship between feminist and bureaucratic organization. Much feminist critique has denounced bureaucratic impersonality and proposed the reunion of professional and personal. Yet, little is known of what happens when actual organization members merge “private” matters with “public” life. This article turns to feminist practice as a way to enhance feminist organization theory and, thus, to enrich organizational communication studies with pragmatic alternatives to gendered organization. The author reports an ethnographic study of one feminist organization’s efforts to personalize work relations, which ironically reproduced the division of public and private. The case challenges feminist assumptions about the role of emotionality and sexuality in empowering “professional” relationships and extends an alternative, provisional form of theorizing about feminist practice.

Managing Maternity Leave: A Qualitative Analysis of Temporary Executive Succession

The ethnographic study reported here examines executive maternity leave as a succession event that manifests itself in a novel transition pattern that I term “temporary executive succession.” In a study of one entrepreneurial firm, I investigated what happens when a founder takes a maternity leave, specifically, how the initiating force of maternity influences the event and how members respond to a breach in “feminine” leadership. The ethnographic analysis revealed an emergent leadership change in the absence of a formal successor. While firm members professed their “feminine” approach to work, they invoked the founders maternity to increase the firms autonomy and revise the founders role. The study brings critical, participatory qualitative methods to succession inquiry and casts doubt on the validity of dominant assumptions about executive succession, its initiating forces, stages of the process, and control. It also informs research on “feminine” styles of leading and the place of maternity in modern organizations.

Feminist-Bureaucratic Control and Other Adversarial Allies: Extending Organized Dissonance to the Practice of “New” Forms1 A previous version of this paper received a Top Paper award from the National Communication Association's Organizational Communication Division.

This paper reconsiders the usual contrast between “old” and “new” organizational forms, exploring what happens when postbureaucratic control meets bureaucratic formalization. It develops earlier work on “organized dissonance,” first, by recasting postbureaucratic practice as a hybrid of contrary forms. The paper then situates feminist bureaucracy as a usual, rather than exceptional, case of postbureaucratic practice. Through qualitative analysis, it demonstrates how members of a feminist community merged opposing forms of control to manage three tensions endemic to postbureaucratic organizing: (1) homogeneity–heterogeneity, (2) moral–instrumental aims, and (3) formalized/universal–unobtrusive/particular control. Simultaneously, the analysis models an approach to theorizing organizational forms that moves beyond stylized typologies of structural features and toward grounded frameworks that honor the dialectical texture of communication practice. Ultimately, the paper repositions feminist contributions to the study of organizational form by minimizing claims to distinctiveness, emphasizing shared interests across forms of organizing, and considering what all scholars of form might learn from feminisms rich legacy of “practicing” postbureaucracy.

Knowing work: Cultivating a practice-based epistemology of knowledge in organization studies

While knowledge theorists give attention to knowing in practice, two common habits in the empirical literature, which we call knowledge inherency and skepticism, serve to re-center certain practitioners. The sites in which we study knowing thereby remain limited, hindering a fuller practice turn. We argue that this enduring tendency is problematic because it inhibits our understanding of ‘communicative knowledge’ – a form of knowing central to the contemporary economy. Yet communicative knowledge is persistently relegated to secondary status through a logic that is simultaneously gendered and classed. We thus suggest a more thorough shift toward the study of ‘knowledge in work’ (Thompson et al., 2001), wherein such a priori associations are suspended, and all practitioners de-centered, in the interest of understanding specific forms, systems, and relations of knowledge entailed in situated practices of knowing. The second half of the article develops specific empirical strategies for doing so. The strategies are meant to enable grounded analysis of knowing practices in various lines of work to interrogate how these may be different to practices with which we are more familiar, as well as inquiry into similarities between these familiar practices and new ones in order to destabilize the link between knowledge and certain practitioners.