Majia Holmer Nadesan

The Discourses of Corporate Spiritualism and Evangelical Capitalism

“Should your company save your soul?” asks Fortune magazine in 1991. This article explores the growth of literature proposing corporate spirituality as a means of motivating employees. Critical analysis of this literature suggests that it articulates and advocates two entrepreneurial views of subjecthood (i.e., personal identity) that obscure contemporary corporate power by centering the individual as an autonomous agent, fully responsible for shaping his or her destiny. They either strip individuals of all social positioning or elevate a masculine ideal to which women cannot aspire. Although these discourses reinforce social hierarchies of power and privilege, they also provide grounds for critiquing and transforming the contemporary workplace.

ENGINEERING THE ENTREPRENEURIAL INFANT: BRAIN SCIENCE, INFANT DEVELOPMENT TOYS, AND GOVERNMENTALITY

This essay re-situates current neurological research on infant brain development in terms of a matrix of cultural practices and pre-occupations. It contends that infant ‘brain science’ functions – in conjunction with the marketing promises of developmental toy manufacturers – as a form of ‘ritual magic’ (Nelson-Rowe, 1994) that ensures the transformation of ‘normal’ infants into idealized entrepreneurial subjects. Simultaneously, the discourse and practices of brain science extend and legitimize the extension of (Foucauldian) governmentality over lower income populations, which are perceived as threatening social and state security.

Performing the enterprising subject: Gendered strategies for success (?)

For women in contemporary corporate life, negotiating and performing a “professional” identity is a process requiring much time, energy, and self‐surveillance. Yet, many women feel compelled to undertake this project despite the challenges it poses. These women often turn to popular success literature for strategies to help them craft and enact successful identities. In this essay, we analyze the popular success literature and compare its prescriptions for success with the voices of actual, successful career women. We explore the paradoxes and contradictions within and across these discourses in our efforts to deconstruct masculine constructions/performances of professionalism.

The Romance and Science of 'Breast is Best': Discursive Contradictions and Contexts of Breast-feeding Choices

We argue that a womans decision to breast‐feed or not is overdetermined by two discursive complexes we label “the romance of the natural mother” and “the science of breast‐feeding.” These complexes incorporate socio‐historical articulations of motherhood, female sexuality, medicine, science, and advertising. Taken together, they dictate the performative possibilities of “normal” and “moral” breast‐feeding. In problematizing normal, moral articulations, we offer alternative possibilities for conceiving and performing breast‐feeding.

Fukushima and the privatization of risk

1. Introduction 2. Why Nuclear Power 3. Fukushima Disaster 4. Radiation Effects 5. Conclusion

Forum Conclusion: A Response to These Essays and a Prologue to Further Investigations

This forum has explored both the meanings of work and the idea of meaningful work. Recent conference discussions and commentaries indicate that the subfield of organizational communication has begun to interrogate its own subject matter as members engage critically with previously taken-for-granted methodological assumptions and theoretical conceptualizations (e.g., Ashcraft, 2006; Russell, 1996; Tracy & Scott, 2007; Trethewey, 1999). The present set of articles underscores, perhaps above all else, just how vexing are questions surrounding the nature of work, its meanings, and its meaningfulness. Taken as a group, the articles challenge our understandings of work as typically represented in, or circumscribed by, our work as scholars who study work. We wonder if our scholarship fully appreciates the range of work and work-related experiences. At the same time, have we fully accounted for our own biases in studying them? In addition, the set of articles reviewed here helps to move us toward a more fully contextualized study of work that would take seriously the intersection of various aspects of difference, the architecture of material constraints and practices, and the need for thorough international and cross-cultural comparisons. We conclude this series of discussions by considering such complexities and organizing them by key questions or problematics. Among these issues and how they might be termed, we ask, with respect to

Dispossession, Justice, and a Sustainable Energy Future

The World Health Organization’s ‘energy ladder’ illustrates the forms of energy found across the globe today, ranging from scavenged animal dung to electricity as fueled primarily by coal, hydropower, and nuclear energy. In this chapter, we argue that this ladder positions catastrophic risks at every rung, including ecological destruction and human warfare. Ulrich Beck theorized how catastrophic risks are engineered into modern western infrastructures, and then denied or falsely made manageable, as we witnessed with the 2010 Gulf of Mexico British Petroleum oil spill and the 2011 Fukushima nuclear crisis. Such catastrophic crises symbolically eclipse the equally significant—yet less spectacular—injustices and environmental degradation wrought routinely across carbon and nuclear supply chains. The concept of [liberal] ‘dispossession’ is adopted from critical social theory to name the conditions of sustained energy injustice found in western civilizations as its powerful energy complexes knowingly deny the scope and severity of externalized costs, thereby discouraging public awareness of needed change for a sustainable future.

Extending Critical Pedagogies: Attending to Economic Communication and Inspiring Critical Engagement

Twenty-first-century capitalism has been characterized by chaos and rapid change, including global consolidation of ownership, financialization, economic crises, and eco-system collapse. Slow economic growth (outside of finance) coupled with increased market pressure have motivated continuous corporate re-organization involving outsourcing, contract employment, parttime labor, and similar cost-reduction practices. Consequently, workers in Western economies have fewer economic opportunities and American economic pessimism deepens (O’Connor, 2014) as too many workers and university graduates face temporary and/or part-time low-wage service jobs. As such, if the ways we teach organizational communication are to become more influential, the content and methods of our teaching must be expanded to offer meaningful critique of economic discourses influencing the constitution of organizations while providing useful ways to critically engage the complexities of contemporary organizational life. Although critical organizational communication research has addressed many workplace changes shaped by characteristics of late U.S. capitalism, the discipline has been less attentive to corporate communication and communication about corporations extending beyond employer–employee interactions. Without this guiding research,

Why Nuclear Power

Nuclear energy and nuclear weapons have been historically connected in Japan and elsewhere. Japan’s nuclear energy program, particularly, its breeder reactor program and used fuel reprocessing, has been directly linked to its national security. This chapter explores how nuclear energy became an important foundation of Japan’s national security and considers the implications given Japan’s earthquake and tsunami activity.

About Drunkard and the Keys which were Not Found

A drunken person labored long looking for a lost house key under the light of a street lamp. A responding police officer asked the drunk where under the light the key was lost. The drunk replied that he had not lost the key there but it was too dark to search where the key had gone missing..... The current state in molecular genetics and molecular biology in general, involuntarily evoke associations with this anecdote.