Rebecca J. Meisenbach

The Good Working Mother: Managerial Women’s Sensemaking and Feelings About Work–Family Issues

We use a sensemaking lens to explore how women managers experience and articulate work–life concerns upon their return to paid work following maternity leaves. We focus on 11 women who held different types of managerial positions, including vice presidents, circulation managers, and human resources experts. We found that our participants re‐framed the good mother image into a good working mother role that fit their lifestyles and interests. To accomplish this reframing, participants engaged in three thematic processes supportive of the good working mother image: (a) good working mothers arrange quality child care; (b) good working mothers are (un)equal partners; and (c) good working mothers feel pleasure in their working mother role. These themes and image were both ironic and fragile constructions of working motherhood. Because these themes and images enable participants to make sense of and establish the worth of working motherhood to family members, friends, acquaintances, organizational members, and community members, they provide a reason why middle‐ or upper‐class working and stay‐at‐home mothers may be in conflict about work and family choices.

Working With Tensions Materiality, Discourse, and (Dis)empowerment in Occupational Identity Negotiation Among Higher Education Fund-Raisers

The increasing time requirements and perceived value of occupations raises concerns about creating and managing positive occupational identities. The author explains how individuals pursue moments of micro emancipation and empowerment as they negotiate the positive and negative discourses and material realities of occupational identity within the fund-raising occupation. Interviews with higher education fund-raisers reveal six power-laden and discourse-influenced ways of understanding (framing) fund-raising. The findings suggest that the potential for an empowered occupational identity resides in an individuals ability to shift among framings, managing and maintaining material and discursive tensions surrounding the framings rather than eliminating or avoiding these tensions. Implications of these identity negotiations for various occupations and particularly the nonprofit sector are discussed.

Keeping patients safe in healthcare organizations: a structuration theory of safety culture.

AIM This paper presents a discussion of the use of structuration theory to facilitate understanding and improvement of safety culture in healthcare organizations. BACKGROUND Patient safety in healthcare organizations is an important problem worldwide. Safety culture has been proposed as a means to keep patients safe. However, lack of appropriate theory limits understanding and improvement of safety culture. DATA SOURCES The proposed structuration theory of safety culture was based on a critique of available English-language literature, resulting in literature published from 1983 to mid-2009. CINAHL, Communication and Mass Media Complete, ABI/Inform and Google Scholar databases were searched using the following terms: nursing, safety, organizational culture and safety culture. DISCUSSION When viewed through the lens of structuration theory, safety culture is a system involving both individual actions and organizational structures. Healthcare organization members, particularly nurses, share these values through communication and enact them in practice, (re)producing an organizational safety culture system that reciprocally constrains and enables the actions of the members in terms of patient safety. This structurational viewpoint illuminates multiple opportunities for safety culture improvement. IMPLICATIONS FOR NURSING Nurse leaders should be cognizant of competing value-based culture systems in the organization and attend to nursing agency and all forms of communication when attempting to create or strengthen a safety culture. CONCLUSION Applying structuration theory to the concept of safety culture reveals a dynamic system of individual action and organizational structure constraining and enabling safety practice. Nurses are central to the (re)production of this safety culture system.

Habermas's Discourse Ethics and Principle of Universalization as a Moral Framework for Organizational Communication

The author argues for the potential of discourse ethics as a framework for guiding and assessing ethical action in organizational communication. Habermass discourse ethics offers an intersubjective procedure for developing and challenging ethical norms through reasoned public communication. After examining the development of discourse ethics and reviewing existing organizational applications of Habermass ideas, the author then forms the principle of universalization into five steps necessary for an organization to enact a discourse ethic. These steps are used to assess the ethical problems and to identify alternative courses of action relating to the American Red Crosss Liberty Fund case.

“They Allowed”: Pentadic Mapping of Women's Maternity Leave Discourse as Organizational Rhetoric

This study expands applications of Burkean pentadic mapping from traditional rhetorical texts, such as speeches and written documents, to interview discourses. This methodological adaptation assists scholars in understanding openings and closings, that is, opportunities and constraints, in discourses in a variety of communication areas. In particular, pentadic mapping is a way of discovering discursive paths for empowerment and transformation. This study examines the interview discourses of 21 nonmanagerial women who have taken at least one maternity leave. Pentadic mapping of the discourses suggests that leave-takers in pink collar occupations primarily (re)create an organization-as-scene dominated pentad favoring organizational motives. The discourses suggest alternative pentads, terms, and ratios that represent potentials for feminist transformation for leave-takers.

Blurring the Boundaries: Historical Developments and Future Directions in Organizational Rhetoric

This chapter provides a concise but thorough view of organizational rhetoric. We review how work in organizational rhetoric spans research on propaganda analysis, organizational communication, public relations, and rhetorical social movements, highlighting connections and differences among these perspectives and outlining what organizational rhetoric has borrowed from and contributed to each. We then consider issues of concern to organizational rhetoric scholars: crisis communication, maintenance communication, power relationships, and ethics. In discussing these areas, we address individual theories of organizational rhetoric, including legitimacy, apologia, issue management, identification, and corporate social responsibility. Finally, by reflecting on existing work, we offer our predictions for the future of research in organizational rhetoric. Overall, we call attention to thinking about all organizations as “inherently rhetorical” so that communication scholars and practitioners can understand and explore the utility of applying a rhetorical perspective to their work in various communication contexts.

Exploring Nested Identities Voluntary Membership, Social Category Identity, and Identification in a Community Choir

Although scholars theorize that identities are layered or nested within one another, little is understood about whether, how, and what layers are expressed by individuals. Such understanding could offer insight into organizational membership decisions, particularly within voluntary organizations where financial incentives are not involved. This study used semi-structured interviews to explore how individuals articulate identities and identification sources when discussing their desire to join and continue participation in a community choir, a voluntary leisure organization. The findings highlight how specific individual activities and higher order nested family and music identities, in addition to the more traditional organizational identifications, all play into membership decisions. The results also suggest that identity researchers and voluntary organization managers may benefit from focusing more attention on (a) higher order and cross-cutting social category identities, (b) individual activities in the organizations, and (c) the isomorphism among different layers of identity and identification.

Adopting an Attitude of Wisdom in Organizational Rhetorical Theory and Practice: Contemplating the Ideal and the Real

Research and practice in external rhetoric often fall short of ideals both in terms of widespread use of a rhetorical perspective and in achieving dialogic conditions in the public sphere. In this response, the authors consider potential explanations for this shortfall, focusing on challenges that exist on a theoretical level within organizational rhetoric scholarship and on a practical level as individuals and organizations interact.

Alternative Organizing and (In)Visibility Managing Tensions of Transparency and Autonomy in a Nonprofit Organization

Amid recent attention to alternative and hidden organizations, empirical studies have thus far tended to focus on large, well-known organizations in contrast to lesser known, local, and partially hidden organizations. Organizations that hide face several advantages and disadvantages, and this article seeks to examine how one nonprofit organization manages the benefits and obstacles of being partially hidden. Using ethnographic field methods and semi-structured interviews, we analyze how one homeless shelter’s visibility fluctuates in relation to its goals. We argue that by operating as a shadowed or shaded organization, this shelter is resisting trends toward organizational transparency that are especially powerful in the nonprofit sector. The findings highlight how the organization manages tensions of (in)visibility to maintain autonomy, while still securing support from external organizations. The results have implications not only for studying hidden organizations, but also for alternative and nonprofit theorizing.

Reproducing Whiteness through Diversity: A Critical Discourse Analysis of the Pro-Affirmative Action Amicus Briefs in the "Fisher" Case.

Legal decisions about affirmative action in higher education do more than impact how admissions policies are structured. The discourse produced in these decisions structures how race is talked about, understood, and enacted in the context of higher education and beyond. However, critique of affirmative action rhetoric in the legal realm tends to focus on the anti-affirmative action constructions of race, underanalyzing rhetoric favoring affirmative action. The current project uses critical discourse analysis to explore how dominant interests are challenged, produced, and sustained by pro-affirmative action rhetoric. Specifically, this project engaged Whiteness as a theoretical and analytical lens through which to critique the amicus briefs submitted in support of race-conscious admissions policies in the recent U.S. Supreme Court case, Fisher v. University of Texas (2013). Our analysis revealed that pro-affirmative action arguments engaged the concepts of diversity and race in ways that reproduced the structural power of Whiteness, drawing upon individualism and market-driven rationales as discursive resources. The analysis suggests that even arguments supporting race-conscious admissions may inadvertently contribute to the reproduction of problematic racial hierarchies. The findings also note the potential transformative value of alternative rationales present in a small subset of amicus briefs submitted by African American organizations. Practical applications for pro-affirmative action advocates and policymakers are offered.