Ziyu Long

Legitimizing and Elevating Telework: Chinese Constructions of a Nonstandard Work Arrangement

Telework—the performance of paid labor activities at sites other than conventional workplaces and through the use of communication technologies—has not been considered a legitimate work form in China. Analyzing in-depth interviews thematically, the authors found that teleworkers from the post-80s generation not only legitimized their work form pragmatically and morally but also elevated it as a better choice for more achievement, flexibility, autonomy, efficiency, and professional development. Although they evaluated their choice positively, these teleworkers also acknowledged the unique challenges in cultivating guanxi (building relationships) and careers in China when working remotely. The authors suggest that telework in China offers a contested site for studying the dialectic tensions between traditional Chinese values and Western business discourses.

Mentoring in Academe A Feminist Poststructural Lens on Stories of Women Engineering Faculty of Color

We analyzed the mentoring narratives of women of color in faculty in engineering using feminist poststructural narratological lenses. We found that university mentoring systems were designed to align with master narratives of mentoring but did not coincide with women faculty’s own mentoring stories. Specifically, women engineers regarded their mentee experiences and cultures of mentoring with varying levels of suspicion, ambiguity, vulnerability, and dis/enchantment that became embodied in alternative subject positions, emplotments, and agency. We contribute to greater understandings of mentoring processes as well as difference and inclusion in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) academic workplaces.

Positioning Work Amid Discontinuities and Continuities Chinese Post80s Workers’ Dialogical Constructions of Meanings of Work

This study explicated Post80s workers’ communicative constructions of work meanings guided by the dialogical self theory. Analyzing 33 in-depth interviews, we found Post80s workers constructed their work meanings regarding choice, development, and impact as they invoked individual and collective voices amid the discursive and material discontinuities and continuities of the emerging Chinese socio-economic landscape. Foregrounding meanings of work as dialogical co-constructions of different voices, the study unpacked the complex interplays of self–other, individual–collective processes, and past–present–future work values and experiences in the communicative constitutions of the Chinese paradigm shift of work. Theoretical contributions to meanings of work as tensional, dialogical constructions answer calls to more nuanced scholarly engagement with individual–organization–society problematics and generational cohorts locally and globally in organizational communication research.

Episodic, Network, and Intersectional Perspectives Taking a Communicative Stance on Mentoring in the Workplace

We propose a research agenda to study mentoring as constituted communicatively from episodic, network, and intersectional perspectives. The episodic perspective highlights the everyday communicational events and moments of interactions where actions and meanings of mentoring are co-constructed. The network perspective encourages a holistic analysis of myriad agents, relationships, and evolutions for mentoring at different levels and stages in the form of communicative networks. Finally, the intersectional perspective enables researchers to view men-torship as comprised of complex, politically invested, and socially constructed intersections of identities. We call for communication research and practice on mentoring from these perspectives.

Ventriloqual voicings of parenthood in graduate school: an intersectionality analysis of work-life negotiations

ABSTRACT Taking a ventriloqual approach to intersectionality analysis, this study investigates the communicative constitution of graduate student parenthood and their work-life negotiations. Analyzing 30 in-depth interviews, we found that figures – ideal graduate student worker norms, gender ideologies of work and family, and cultural values of family and child-rearing responsibilities – intersected with one another in shaping the experiences for graduate student parents. These intersectionalities belong to broader structures that constrain graduate students’ career and personal-life choices to fulfill/disrupt roles in navigating parenthood, yet the interplays of various aspects of intersectionality create space for transformation. The study contributes to an emergent grounded-in-action perspective of intersectionality to uncover systems of interlocking oppressions and lived tensions. The theoretical and practical implications of nonhuman agents acting to enable and constrain sustainable work-life communication are presented.

Disciplined freedom, branded authenticity, and dependable independence: how tensions enact flexibility in lifestyle blogging careers

ABSTRACT Analyzing 219 blog posts from 52 self-employed women lifestyle bloggers in North America, this study shows how these digital professionals navigate tensions and communicatively constitute work flexibility. In their narratives, women bloggers employed tension management approaches such as reframing, continual connections, and reflective practice in response to tensions in enacting temporal–spatial, identity, and financial flexibility. Specifically, women followed oxymoronic constructions – disciplined freedom, branded authenticity, and dependable independence – to embrace and transform competing poles of fluidity↔structure, authenticity↔marketability, and independence↔interconnection. Expanding work–life research to the self-employed digital labor context, this study responds to recent calls to uncover more-than tension management strategies in empirical settings and contributes to a tension-centered, contextual, and processual analysis of workplace flexibility construction.

Chinese Post80s Generational Resilience: Chengyu (成语) as Communicative Resources for Adaptation and Change

The combined forces of China’s reforms, resurgent traditional values, and problematic labor market have led the Chinese Post80s generation to reconstruct their careers. Drawing on 33 in-depth inter...

Embracing tensions in feminist organizational communication pedagogies

ABSTRACT Feminist pedagogies hold potential to create more inclusive and transformative classrooms. Adopting a tension-centered approach, we draw on our individual and collective reflections on the design and instruction of a multisection undergraduate organizational communication course to build an autoethnographic account of the tensions associated with enacting feminist pedagogies. Specifically, we unpack the ways tensions emerged as we strove to align our practice with specific feminist pedagogical principles—building nonhierarchical relations, encouraging multivocality, and caring for students—and how we made sense of and discursively managed these tensions. In doing so, we dissect the ways that tensions are communicatively constituted, gauge how to transform our pedagogy by reframing dualisms into dialectics, emphasize the importance of reflexivity, and, finally, offer practical strategies for communication instructors who seek strategies for transforming classrooms.

Rube Goldberg salad system: Teaching systems theory in communication

Courses: Undergraduate Organizational Communication, Communication Theory, and Small Group Communication courses. Objectives: This single-class activity aims to engage students actively in explaining and applying systems components, processes, and properties.