Web Lecture 2
Metaphors & Culture
Discusses: the conduit metaphor and its implications for thinking about organizations, participating in organizing activities, and enacting organizational communication; the practical view, interpretive view, and integration perspective of the organizations as cultures metaphor; domination metaphor, hegemony, workplace surveillance, and ideology; and fragmentation approach as a critical view of organizational culture
THEORY, METAPHORS, AND ORGANIZATION
Metaphors help people understand one thing (unknown) in terms of another (known). Typically, different people have different metaphors for the same word, highlighting different interpretations of that word. So, you may view love as a journey, saying things such as, "It's been a bumpy road, but now our relationship is on the right track," or "They took a wrong turn in their marriage." You might also view love as a patient, saying something like, "this relationship needs special care" or "they need to tend to their relationship or it will do poorly." In addition, you may talk about love in ways that suggest a madness metaphor, as with "true love can drive you insane" or "they're crazy about each other." The metaphors you have for more abstract ideas, such as love, influence how you talk about those ideas and your actions associated with them. For example, if you view love as a journey, they you'll expect romantic and other close relationship to progress and change over time. If the relationships don't seem to follow the path you expect, you'll likely take actions to try and change the relationship to better fit your metaphor.
As with love, individuals also have metaphors for communication. Reddy (1979) first identified the conduit metaphor for communication. This metaphor has three parts:
- Ideas and meanings are objects.
- Linguistic expressions are containers for meanings.
- Communication is sending.
Axley (1984) extends on the implications of the conduit metaphor by applying it to organizations (also in Eisenberg et al., Chapter 2). He argues that when individuals apply the conduit metaphor to organizational communication, they assume that meanings can be transferred from speakers/writers to listeners/readers in words. Thus, effective communication refers to those messages that are clearly transmitted and understood.
There are several problems with the conduit metaphor for organizational communication. First, it minimizes the importance of unintentional meaning and the need for redundancy in communication. In addition, the conduit metaphor suggests that successful communication is easy and effortless—communicators just have to find the right words for their ideas.
The implications of such a view of communication for organizations are far-reaching. If you think communication is easy, you can become over confident in your communication skills. The conduit metaphor for communication also ignores the need for organization members to solicit feedback and build redundancy into their messages. In addition, if communication is portrayed as effortless, organizations have little incentive to devote resources to improving employees' communication skills.
Just as metaphors for love influence how you think about and communicate relationships, metaphors for communication have real consequences in how organizations and organization members function. Metaphors frame your interpretations of the world and how you act on your environment.
Theories are rooted in metaphor. For example, classical management approaches reflect an organization as machine metaphor. If your metaphor for organization is machine, then humans are cogs in the machine. What should you do with a "problem" employee? Simply replace her/him. Contrast this with an organization as organism metaphor (systems theory). From this perspective, you'd be interested in how the system contributes to the employee's problems, and how changes in the system might address those problems.
Why study different theories of organization? Your theory (or theories) of organization frame how your interpret organization and practice organizing. There is no one best theory or metaphor. All theories simultaneously reveal and hide aspects of organization.
ORGANIZATIONS AS CULTURES
In Chapter 4, Eisenberg et al. discuss the organizations as cultures metaphor. The culture metaphor represents a distinct shift in understanding and researching organizations. Traditional organizational research takes a scientific approach and assumes that methods are objective. This research led to an attempt to establish a causal link between communication satisfaction and job satisfaction, although there is no empirical evidence to support that relationship. The underlying motive of traditional research is to make organizations perform more effectively and efficiently.
The early move to linking culture and organizations presented culture as an external variable. This is the approach Ouchi took in developing his notion of Theory Z and reflects an interest in the impact of different cultures on an organization. So, researchers might compare organizations based in Japan with those based in Spain. Also, researchers might study how the different cultural backgrounds of organization members influence interactions within the organization.
In the practical view approach, culture is an internal organizational variable that can be manipulated and change to improve organizational effectiveness. Thus, this approach to organizational culture falls within traditional social science models. Deal and Kennedy's book Corporate Cultures and Peters and Waterman's book In Search of Excellence popularized this view of culture. This practical view of culture assumes that it can be managed and changed from the top. However, although some members certainly have more power in the creation of organizational life, all organization members participate in creating, maintaining, and changing organizational culture. So other researchers have questioned the degree to which managers can actually manage and change organizational culture.
The interpretive view of organizational culture is based on the observation that there is more going on in organizations than completing tasks. These approaches to organizational culture seek to understand how organizational life is accomplished through communication. Culture is studied as sensemaking and the aim of research is interpretation. Researchers focus on stories, vocabulary, rituals, and other aspects of culture that reveal how organization members interpret organizational life.
Researchers within the interpretive approach often situate culture within organization members' shared values and beliefs. This research assumes that organization members' cognitions are revealed in members' descriptions of the organization, as well as stories, language use, and rituals. Culture rests not so much in interaction, but in shared cognitions. However, some research suggests that organization members often do not share cognitions (e.g., beliefs, goals, values), yet believe that they do. The key to a coherent organizational culture seems to be the perception of shared cognitions, rather than sharing the same cognitive structures and content.
Interpretive researchers attempt to describe organization members' experiences. Researchers are not concerned with prediction (causal relationships) or evaluation (e.g., effectiveness, appropriateness). Research within the practical view stems from traditional approaches to research, also called functionalist or positivist research. The practical view falls within the integration perspective of culture.
Eisenberg et al. also discuss critical and postmodern approaches to culture. A central criticism of the organizations as culture metaphor is the lack of attention to issues of power. That is, communicators jointly construct their social/organizational realities, but that construction is constrained to varying degrees. So, while I may work to create an organizational reality of SJSU that facilitates online education, the college dean, the university provost, and the university president have a much greater voice in the creation of that reality.
CRITICAL APPROACHES TO ORGANIZATION
Critical approaches view organizations as instruments of domination that further the interests of a small elite at the expense of all others. Researchers are interested in how domination is legitimized as normal and power relationships are accepted without question by organization members. The goal of critical theorists is to create societies and workplaces that are free from domination.
The domination metaphor turns communication scholars' attention to how organizations use and exploit employees, damaging employees' health and intruding on their personal lives. In addition, the metaphor highlights the ways in which individuals, communities, and countries are abandoned once organizations have used up all the available resources (as in the movie "Roger and Me" and "Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room"). Critical theory also illuminates the privileging of management in decision making.
Central to critical theory is the critique of domination and the ways in which the oppressed participate in that oppression. Hegemony refers to the dominance of one group over another, and the construction of that power relationship such that those who are oppressed accept and contribute to their oppression. For example, during the woman's suffrage movement in the U.S., many women actively campaigned against the right for women to vote. In this way, these women had come to believe that men were better than women at making decisions and governing. Formal and informal organizational routines and policies privilege some groups over others. Organizations are hegemonic systems in which subordinates are not simply oppressed, but participate in their oppression. Hegemony is accomplished through one social group's articulation of worldviews, rules, and practices that are accepted by another group. Thus, subordinates accept, take for granted, and do not question management practices. Further, subordinates may tell stories or engage in other interactions that reinforce the organization's hierarchy and distribution of resources and power.
Workplace surveillance is an example of organizations as instruments of domination. New communication technologies allow organizations to monitor employee computers from the moment those computers are booted up to the moment they're shut down. In addition, cell phones and pagers provide another avenue for organizations to monitor employee behavior and keep employees linked to the organization. Critical theorists argue that such surveillance is intrusive and causes employees' social and mental stress.
In Chapter 5, Eisenberg et al. note the role of ideology in organizational domination. Ideology refers to individuals' assumptions about how things are and how they should be. These are basic, taken-for-granted assumptions about the world that people seldom question. As Eisenberg et al. point out, ideology always implicates power in that these basic assumptions generally privilege the interests of dominant groups and individuals.
From a critical perspective, organizational culture plays an important role in promoting ideology that privileges certain groups over others. Stories, rituals, vocabulary, and other cultural artifacts are infused with an organization's ideology. Because that ideology resides outside organization members' usual awareness, they come to accept and participate in their own oppression.
The goal of cultural/interpretive organizational communication researchers is to understand organizational life. The goal of cultural/critical organizational communication researchers is to understand organizational life and demonstrate how cultural practices perpetuate inequitable power distributions. Thus, critical theory goes a step past interpretive approaches to culture by evaluating and questioning organization members' underlying assumptions.
FRAGMENTATION PERSPECTIVE ON ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE
Below I've included additional information on the fragmentation perspective on culture from Martin's 1992 book,Cultures in Organizations: Three Perspectives, New York: Oxford University Press. Although Martin's work is a bit dated, her work is cited widely and provides useful insight into this perspective on organizational culture.
Recall that an integration approach to culture stresses harmony and similarities; the differentiation approachfocuses on separation and conflict; and the fragmentation approach spotlights multiplicity and flux. Thus, from a fragmentation perspective, there is no one interpretation of meaning and meanings change from moment to moment. The world does not have the order and predictability found in the other two perspectives. The fragmentation approach to organizational culture is clearly rooted in postmodernism.
Martin defines culture from a fragmentation perspective as, "a web of individuals, sporadically and loosely connected by their changing positions on a variety of issues. Their involvement, their subcultural identities, and their individual self-definitions fluctuate, depending on which issues are activated at a given moment" (p. 153). Martin uses the jungle metaphor to stress the unknown and unknowable nature of culture from the fragmentation perspective.
Central to the fragmentation approach to culture is the idea that organizations are infused with ambiguities. These ambiguities stem from social problems such as poverty and pollution as well as the rapid technological changes communicators are experiencing. The problems and changes produce ambiguities because organization members don't fully understand them and can't predict their consequences. Further, organizations in this postmodern time lack a clear center, boundaries are blurred, and the nature of work is undergoing a radical redefinition.
In applying the fragmentation approach to organizational culture, subcultures are no longer clearly defined. Organization members move in and out of subcultures, so insiders and outsiders are less differentiated and subculture boundaries are porous and mutable. Ambiguity is central to organizational life and must be an integral aspect of any study of organizational culture.
According to Martin, "Ambiguity is perceived when a lack of clarity, high complexity, or a paradox makes multiple (rather than single of dichotomous) explanations plausible" (p. 134). Recognizing the centrality of ambiguity in organizations moves you away from oppositional or dichotomous thinking and toward more complex views of organizational culture. So the fragmentation perspective explores multiple meanings of what is present as well as what is absent. For example, in analyzing stories, researchers from the fragmentation perspective seek multiple story interpretations and also consider what stories are not told or which organization members are not part of the story. The fragmentation perspective recognizes ambiguities in symbols, ideology, and action. These ambiguities and multiple interpretations do not necessarily come together as a coherent whole. Organizational cultures are characterized by inconsistency, paradox, and contradiction.