orgcomania

One of my favorite "theoretical" observations is that communication is "a taken-for-granted" activity. Most of the time most of us communicate with no need to think about our communication at all. We ask questions, give answers, take turns, and generally get involved in conversations with no need to think about what is happening. Imagine if every time you were in a conversational situation you had to think about what you were going to say. I don't know what conversations would sound like but it wouldn't be the way they sound now. For the most part we say thank goodness it is so easy. Given the large percentage of our time that is invested in communicating, human interaction would grind to a halt if it were a necessarily thoughtful experience.

On the other hand, however, the mindlessness of communication has its drawbacks as well. Because we can communicate reasonably well without thinking, we often forgo the opportunity to be highly effective through mindfulness. To be mindfull, as communication practice, means to recognize that we face constant choices in what we say or don't say and in how we say what we say. Being mindful means recognizing that in even the most mundane conversational acts we are making choices. Being mindful is not a simple process. It is not possible to simply flip the "mindful" switch and begin being mindful in our communication. Being mindful is a process of communicating. It is something that must be learned and practiced. To be mindful means making a choice to be engaged in all conversations and to monitor what you are saying and what others are saying to you. The textbook talks about phatic communication and scripts. The mindful communicator certainly doesn't completely eliminate scripts and phatic communication. The mindful communicator does, however, make a choice to use scripts or communicate phatically. The non-mindful communicator is not even aware he or she is using scripts or phatic communication. The bottom line is that to receive the payoff that comes from being a mindful communicator one must choose to work hard at communicating. One must choose to work hard at staying mindful even in communication that can easily be accomplished mindlessly. It's a big challenge but one that pays off handsomely in effective communication for those who make the committment.

To put the issue of mindfulness into a larger framework, I believe we live in a time when thinking is discouraged. We are surrounded by authoritarian messages that reach conclusions for us. In the civic, commercial, and religious realms experts provide us with prefigured conclusions ready to adopt without thinking. The messages from the authorities in all of these areas come to us slickly packaged and wrapped in emotional appeals making it easy to consume them whole without any mental processing. "News" broadcasters offer us pre-formed opinions and reduce debate to off-putting shouting and screaming. The thoughtful consideration of opposing views is never modeled, let alone advocated. Consideration of issues is always put in a "my way or the highway" form. There is no suggestion that there even is a middle ground let alone that one could be or should be created. Commercial messages have blurred information and persuasion to such an extent that it is difficult to even find information presented without a desired end. Product placement and issues management have completely blurred the line between advertisement and content. Identifications appeals are so flawlessly constructed that people advertise for products without even realizing they are advertising. Even religion has pushed followers to be less and less aware of the thoughtful theology behind beliefs. Around the world, religions are becoming more fundamentalist and less ecumenical as they, too, adopt a "my way or the highway" perspective. Twenty or thirty years ago the greater religious movement was to find similarities at the core of belief and for religions to emphasize the common concerns that crossed religious boundaries. Now, it seems, the major religious movements are driven by the desire to use their definitions of what is right or true to condem those with other beliefs. In all three of these areas, the value of thinking, of thoughtful consideration of alternatives, seems to be pushed more and more to the sidelines. Increasingly we hear the skeptic, the person who thoughtfully considers alternative views, ridiculed or reviled being anti- this or anti- that. The growing tendency seems to be to offer dichotomies and suggest that there is no middle ground for thoughtful consideration. The president's well publicized "Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists" dichotomy was one recent example. The recent presidential campaign was an extended case study in either-or thinking being offered as the only way to approach issues.

From this perspective, the material on mindfulness and integrity is a small manifestation of a much larger societal issue. I challenge you to realize that you are the makers of society. It's cliche perhaps, but your generation will be the next to decided what type of world we live in. Don't give up on thinking. It may not be popular but it's the best hope we humans have!!

Not everything that an organization does is about communication. There are organizational problems that are not communication problems. A good business degree undoubtedly offers insight into organizational function that a communication degree does not. The opposite is also true. It is important for those of us (i.e. you) who are students of communication (I'd go so far as to say communication scholars but I don't want to scare you) to use all that we know about communication to make the relationships and small groups in organizations work to their maximum efficiency and effectiveness. What this chapter stresses is that it is also important to use what we've learned about communication to maximize the communication of the organization itself. I am amazed at the number of times that an organization sends out messages that directly contradict the way the organization wants people to interact with it. We are uniquely able to see these places where there is a mismatch between organizational message and organizational intent.

Here is my example of a tale with a happy ending that begins with a mismatch between an organization and an intent that is very important to it. Back in the days before I had braces I was one of those people who was, to put it mildy, dentally challenged. I have spent much of my adult life working with dentists in the various cities I lived in to save my teeth. With incredibly crooked and crowded teeth it was very difficult for me to keep them up. Several dentists said that my teeth were so bad there was no way I could even have braces. I was determined to figure out a way to get braces and kept taking care of my teeth the best I could. After several root canals, painful periodontic work, and other difficult dental procedures I had grown to really dislike the who idea of seeing a dentist. So here's the story. I visited a dentist office in Salt Lake City one summer. I'd not been to this dentist before and went with some fear. After I got to the office, got checked in and finally saw the dentist I had, for me, what was an unexpected and pleasant experience. The dentists (a husband and wife team) were incredibly caring and sensitive. They were developing a practice that specialized in dentistry for children but it was evident that they truly understood how unpleasant an experience with the dentist can be and went far beyond the extra mile to make the experience as positive and productive as possible. I still remember that they let me choose from about eight flavors of topical anesthetic to put on to numb the gums before they injected novacaine. The dentist laughed that they had so many flavors because it really made a difference to the kids that they could choose a flavor. I laughed too but was secretly thankful that I had found such sensitive dentists.

After they had finished with the dental work we had an opportunity to talk (they were used to listening to people talk with half their mouth novacained up, fortunately) and they asked me what I did. When I told them I taught organizational communication they asked me how their organization communicated. I told them I thought they did a really good job but one thing had been interesting to me. While they clearly were concerned about their patients I told them that I had noticed that the first paperwork you filled out was the insurance and financial responsibility paperwork. After you had completed that you got to the paperwork where you shared your dental history and the problem you were having. I told them that normally it wouldn't have struck me but that it was so different than all the other messages I was getting that it really stood out to me. I had good health care coverage so it wasn't an issue with me but it did seem inconsistent. Many, if not most, organizations would have dismissed this as too small of a matter to worry about. After all, my impression was overwhelmingly favorable. A tribute to these dentists is they took it very seriously. They hadn't even considered that their clipboard with forms communicated a message. I assured them that it wasn't a big deal but that "one cannot, not communicate." (Yes, I used that in the conversation!)

The bottom line is that when I came in several weeks later for my follow up appointment I noticed right away that the paperwork on the clipboards at the front desk had been changed. The form that asked you to describe the reason for your visit was on top, the dental history was second, and the financial forms were on the bottom. That was my last visit to that dentist as I moved back to Texas for the new school year. I have remembered them very clearly (this visit was over ten years ago) and I'm sure they've done very well. To me they embody a concern for organizational communication that truly shapes the organization and, ultimately, helps the organization succeed.

What do you think?

Bad news! No blog for chapter 10. Write a reaction paper or case study for this one. Blogs will be back for chapters 11 and 12.

--Rick

For a very long time the study of relationships in organizations was limited almost exclusively to formal superior-subordinate relationships. It is only in the last 10 years or so that the communication field has begun to first acknowledge and now investigate all of the other types of relationships in organizations. Now it is common for students of organizational communication to recognize the importance of informal as well as formal communication. Relationships between peers are recognized as being an important part of organizational life as well. As you can see from the chapter, management communication is now is balanced with a concern for leadership communication. Organizational communication practitioners are much more prepared to deal with a wide scope of organizational communication problems because the limits on what relationships are important or relevant to relationships have been removed.

One area that is studied much more frequently and where we are gaining a lot of new understanding is romantic relationships at work. If you were to look at a textbook in organizational communication that was published in 1980 you would most likely not find any mention of romantic relationships at work. That is because there were no romantic relationships at work back then---NOT. While it is no doubt true that the mix of men and women in the workplace has changed drastically in the last 25 or 35 years (there is a much more equal proportion of men and women now) there were romantic relationships at work then and there are now. The changing demographics of the workplace have certainly changed the authority relationships between men and women. Men and women are much more likely to have a member of the opposite sex as a co-worker. In the past it would have been more likely that a woman worked for a man in a role such as secretary than with a man as a peer. (This of course mirrors a change in the societal relationship between men and women that was occurring at the same time.)

One of my favorite facts about interpersonal relationships (and romantic relationships in particular) is that for all of our societal notions about "love at first sight" and "searching for my one and only true love" the one consistent factor that predicts the development of interpersonal relationships is proximity. It makes sense really. If you're around someone you have the opportunity to develop attraction. If you're not, then attraction in any meaningful way (we all have our crushes!) is much less likely. If you put a bunch of men and women into relatively close proximity in an organizational setting you are going to have some attraction and that is going to evolve into some interpersonal relationships. Some of those relationships are going to evolve into romantic relationships. If the work place has more women in more equal relationships with men romantic relatioships will be part of the organizational situation.

So here's where I see the problem. First, romantic relationships are very informal, often very messy interpersonal relationships. Organizations are all about control. Most everything we have studied thus far has centered on how the organization can control one or the other aspect of its function. That's why power is such a big issue. That's why we must consider the strategic control model of communication. That's why we seek indicators of cooperation rather than resistance. Romantic relationships resist control. We even feel that as romantic partners. Sometimes the relationship seems to take on a life of its own even we don't know where it is headed. So the organization can't help but be host to romantic relationships--to much proximity--but the organization has no simple or easy way to control romantic relationships. We can ban them, many organizations do. Right. Like that actually stops them from happening. We can regulate them but they tend to seep around the regulations. This is an ongoing and continual problem for organizations. There really isn't any easy way to deal with it. If the textbook sounds a little bit like it is in denial when it talks about romantic relationships I think that's because it is.

And here's the second related problem. Much of what any of us learn about relationships we learn from what we see modeled. We see our parents, relatives, and friends in relatioships. We also watch TV and movies and read Cosmo magazine (or whatever your relational magazine of choice might be). We learn much more from this observation than from anything we learn in a class or from a book (okay, sometimes CST majors are an exception here). The overwhelmingly most prominent model for male-female relationships most of us are exposed to is a romantic model. Books, movies and TV shows aren't written about co-workers. They're written about lovers. We see our friends date and our parents or friends parents divorce. We see men and women enacting romantic relationships (and the other kinds of relationships that romantic relationships turn into). Why does this matter in the organization and the workplace? Because we now have men and women in close proximity who need to develop friendly, appropriate, co-worker relationships. Unfortunately most of us have seen little modeling of these kinds of relationships. We've seen men and women modeling romantic relationships (and the behaviors that create those relationships). So conciously or not, the very inappropriate model of romantic relationships becomes the working model for the workplace co-worker relationship. I often wonder if a good part of the difficulties with sexual harassment in the workplace don't, at some level, have roots in the absence of good models for what an opposite sex, non-romantic relationship looks like. In the movie When Harry Met Sally Harry tells Sally that when a man makes friends with a woman he wants to sleep with her, always. Sally protests but Harry insists. The problem isn't quite as absolute as Harry's view, but many times I think Men and Women are awkward in developing workplace relationships because they only have romantic relationship models to work with. Not always, mind you. But often. Taken to its extreme, this could well be the underpinnings of a significant amount of workplace sexual harrassment.

So what do you think? What's your experience with romantic relationships at work? How do you explain how they happen, how they grow, and how they're dealth with.

--Rick

This morning I listened to the author and economist Jeremy Rifkin talking about his new book about Europe. In the book he argues that the "American Dream" is the product of European ideals from two or three hundred years ago. The "American Dream" is that any individual, with sacrifice and hard work, can triumph over their circumstances. It has typically been translated into economic terms and drives Americans toward the individual accumulation of wealth. Rifkin identifies a new European ideal that stresses the value of a balance in life, sustainable economic growth, and inclusiveness of all people. Rifkin recognizes that Europe has not achieved this dream but argues that it is probably a better, more attainable dream than the American Dream in the present world situation.

This strikes me as being very related to the ideas in chapter eight. The thing that strikes me most vividly is that the things that are identified as positive in the world of work seem, at some level, to be in opposition with the American Dream. The things that do seem to be consistent with the American Dream are seen as creating stress and burnout. The new social contract seems to have shifted even more of the burden of success to the individual than ever before. Put another way, the world of work in America has never been defined in terms of community and social support and now the few parts of the world of work that did support interdependence (like the promise of lifetime employment) are becoming more and more scarce. Self-reliance, which has always been at the core of the American Dream, is now a fundamental for survival in the world of work. One must be self-reliant not just within the organization but as a "free agent" selling ones services to various organizations. Certainly the message is clear that it is NOT the responsibility of the organization to "care for" it's members, clients, or stake holders (share holders perhaps, but not other stake holders). The European Community is developing a vision and a model that assumes that there are community goods that have value to the community and should be supported and paid for by the community. In this view, it is the responsibility of the community (often through government and taxes) to provide things like affordable child care and universal health care. In the U.S. we expect individuals to pay for these things and hope that the market can provide them in sufficient and reasonable ways. Mostly that doesn't seem to be working. (And if you think that corporations provide health insurance you should understand that that is part of an individual's compensation package and only social pressure insures that companies provide it.)

As you think about the world of work, what do you think of the "American Dream" and the way it relates to jobs that you you want, your career goals and the life goals you aspire to.

Now where the heck was I?

I've always found it a bit ironic that the university is one of the most hierarchial organizations you can find around anymore. Here we are supposedly teaching and researching on the cutting edge and yet the structure of our organization would be obsolete in a free market setting. No organization that had to compete to survive could afford the layer upon layer that the university (not to mention the system layer above that) uses. I'm not talking about just UWL here. It has been true for virtually all of the eight or so universities and colleges where I have taught.

One of my few dissapointments in this edition of the text is that have revised chapter seven so that it is "alternatives to hierarchy" instead of "postmodern perspectives on organizations" that it used to be. Postmodernity is a conceptually challenging idea but I truly believe that it helps explain the way things are in the world very well.

Karl Marx summed up postmodernity with the short but powerful expression "all that is solid, melts into air." In other words, the authority and certainty that we feel about the world is subject to challenge and sudden, often unexpected, dissapearance. Any and every reality is open to question. Things that seem sure to endure forever don't. Postmodern change is all around us. From the political arena, for example, the traditional view is marriage is between men and women. Quite suddenly this has been called into question. From the social arena, phones were always linked to places--the phone in your home or office, a pay phone booth. Now phones can be anywhere. I saw a cartoon yesterday that makes a joke about this suddenly changed reality. Two vultures are sitting on a cactus in the middle of the desert. Next to them is a car that has obviously broken down from the heat, there is a puddle of water under the radiator and steam coming out of the engine. The driver of the car is sitting with his back against a rock talking on his cell phone. He is saying "yeah, I'm in the middle of nowhere! It will take you two hours or so to get out here." The punch line is one vulture saying to the other "I hate all this technology, it is just ruining nature." Cartoon descriptions aside, the postmodern point is that anything we believe to be true, no matter how obvious it might seem, can change in a moments time.

In organizational communication the postmodern aesthetic or approach has led to fundamental challenges to our assumptions about how people organize. The text talks a lot about team based organizations and that is surely one aspect of this view. The previous edition of the text had an extended example of a BMW plant organized on postmodern principles. The plant was organized in a circle so that each group of employees could see the other groups. All employees at all levels (company president to janitor) wore the same white uniform. The sign above the employee entrance read "Welcome to BMW. We are an information-processing and communications company that, as a happy-by-product, shares in the building of fine automobiles for world markets." Not your normal automobile plant by any means. In fact, long held assumptions about how automobiles are built are strikingly called into question.

Another example of postmodern organization removed from this edition of the text is the Nordstrom's employee handbook. The handbook is one page, front and back. The handbook has one rule "Rule 1: Use your good judgment in all situations" then says "There will be no additional rules." Finally, the handbook concludes "Please feel free to ask your department manager, store manager, or division general manager any question at any time." Obviously a lot of longstanding rules and assumptions about employee handbooks had to be tossed out to create this one.
As Marx says "all that is solid, melts into air."

I'm confident your life has been changed by the postmodern aesthetic. Everyone's has. What many people don't know is that the sudden change and upheaval they experience has an organizing explanation behind it!

I'm a little late getting to this blog entry but we'll think about chapter four nevertheless. Systems theory is obviously another in our line of theories for thinking about organizations and organizational communication. In the language of theory some people are realists and some people are instrumentalists. A realist thinks that a theory actually explains what is going on. There is a direct correspondance between the theory and reality. An instrumentalist thinks of theory as a tool. Theory doesn't necessarily explain exactly what is really going on but it provides a way of thinking about what is going on that is useful for predicting, explaining, and controlling. (Guess which I am, realist or instrumetalist?)

Systems theory is interesting looked at this way. Is systems theory trying to say how things are actually organized or is presenting a model that lets us understand the relationships between things and parts of things? At first I think systems theorists were realists, trying to explain the way things really are. Now I think systems theorists are mostly instrumentalists, using the ideas of systems theory to be able to talk about complex interactions about all kinds of stuff. Certainly we (humans) have built organizational structures with so much complexity that we need all the help we can get to understand them. If I think about there is somebody down in Madison (in the UW-System office) who I don't know and will never meet, who has a job that I have never heard of and probably never will hear of, who will make a decision today that will have a direct and almost immediate influence on me. The UW-System is one of those big, human creations that is hard for humans to understand. Systems theory at least gives us a peak.

But I like Weick. Weick is one of those people who comes up with ideas that you look at once and say "this guy must be nuts." Then you go back and look again and you say "of course, it's so obvious, why didn't I always understand that it works like he says." Weick doesn't even try to explain organizations. He explains organizing. His genius is that he focuses on how WE make sense of the world (and organizations) rather than on the sense of the organization. Weick says that the world isn't out there for us to make sense of. He says that as we look at the world we are constantly breaking off little pieces and giving them a meaning and using our sense of those little pieces to help us make meaning of the next pieces we break off. His idea of "enactment," the idea that we actively parse and make sense of the world is a radical way of looking at the order of the world. I love it. His theory explains how people can have experiences that on the surface look similar but can end up with radically different meanings for them. His theory explains how a person or a group of people can engage the world in ways that other pepole look as completely nonsensical. Why do cult members, for example, not take the information that the rest of us use to see the fallacies in the cults beliefs. Many things factor into this of course, but Weicks explanation of enactment, selection, and retention provides a perfectly normal way of engaging the world that can create sense that anyone else cannot hope to understand.

The focus shifts from organization to organizing and that's the key. How are we making this organized behavior not how do we understand this entity, the organization, that stands before us. Different, confusing, but very cool.