Exploring Organizational Communication and Control: A Comprehensive Guide
Chapter 1: Organizational Communication and Control
Organizational Communication = the process of creating and negotiating collective coordinated systems of meaning through symbolic practices oriented toward the achievement of organizational goals.
Organizational Control = the dynamic communication process through which organizational stakeholders (employees, managers, owners, shareholders, etc.) struggle to maximize their stake in an organization.
- Direct Control (Supervision)
- Technological Control = controls the speed of work, exemplified by Ford’s moving production line, affecting both workers and customers.
- Bureaucratic Control = a system of rules and formal structures, a defining feature of modern organizations, such as city hall.
- Ideological Control = where values, beliefs, and norms are shared, forming a ‘Corporate Culture’.
- Disciplinary Control = focuses on ‘self’ as a project, a ‘Bottom-up’ form of control, where self is both ‘subject’ and ‘object’ of knowledge.
Organizations can pursue multiple forms of control, existing along a continuum from most to least coercive.
Metatheoretical Framework = allows us to examine underlying assumptions on which different theories are based.
Crisis of Representation = refers to knowledge claims that researchers make about the world (epistemological) and the issue of ‘voice’.
Chapter 3: Management and Rationalization
Scientific Management = a systematic attempt to develop a set of principles regarding the management of workers, transforming how control was exerted.
Process of Rationalization = the process by which all aspects of the natural and social world become increasingly subject to planning, calculation, and efficiency, leading to the ‘Iron Cage of Bureaucracy’ where people feel imprisoned by rationalization.
Week 3: Organizational Culture
Cultural Pragmatist = views organization and culture as separate; an organization has a culture which is a key element in efforts to increase employee commitment and performance.
Week 4: Influence and Control in Organizations
The Mobilization of Bias = exemplified by Wal-Mart in debates, shaping discussions and addressing only issues that benefit them, influencing other people’s ideas.
Hegemony = the ways a dominant group can get other groups to actively consent to the former’s conception of reality.
Normative Control = attempts to elicit and direct the required efforts of members by controlling the underlying experiences, thoughts, and feelings that guide their actions.
Week 5: Economic Challenges and Worker Identity
Precariat = refers to workers in segments of the workforce who are in a precarious economic environment and are constantly under threat of losing their jobs, often outsourced to other companies in other countries.
Week 6: Leadership and Power Dynamics
Critical Communication Perspective = rejects the traditional separation between leader and follower, viewing leadership as co-produced among organizational members, socially constructed, and central to understanding power relations within an organization.
Resistance Leadership = about employees determining leadership through dissent, not about the person in charge but about how one or more actors engage the community in collective action.
Glass Cliff = the precarious situation women find themselves in once they have succeeded in breaking the glass ceiling.
Outsider Within = the position acquired as a result of reflecting white patriarchal norms in the thinking and actions of colleagues.
Invisible Knapsack = a set of privileges and practices that white people carry around with them that largely protect them from everyday injustices.
Week 7: Branding and Consumer Influence
Branding is primarily a communicative process that involves the efforts of corporations to shape human identity and influence the cultural and social landscape in order to sell consumer products.
Brand = the total constellation of meanings, feelings, perceptions, beliefs, and goodwill attributed to any market offering displaying a particular sign.
- Floating Signifier Effect = any meaning or quality can be attached to any object or product, including dirt and water.
- Brand Extension = leveraging the meaning and emotions associated with the company to a variety of different products.
- Emotional Branding = connects products to the consumer in an emotionally profound way, focusing on the aspirational desires underlying human motivations.
- Murketing = erases the distinction between programming and advertising, requiring sophisticated marketing strategies as consumers exercise more freedom in product choice.
- Brand Ethnography = examines how people interact with and use products in their everyday lives.
- Sovereign Consumer = the consumer determines the production of goods and services, creating a new intimate relation between brand and consumer; brands meet the most important identity needs and desires.
- Nag Factor = the power children possess in pestering their parents to buy certain products.
Week 8: Cultural Intersection and Innovation
Cultural Hybridity = a process in which two or more cultures intersect, producing cultural artifacts that did not previously exist in either culture.