-Part Communication

The Work of Communication

The Work of Communication: Relational Perspectives on Working and Organiz- ing in Contemporary Capitalism revolves around a two -part question: “What have work and organization become under contemporary capitalism —and how should organization studies approach them?” Changes in the texture of capitalism, heralded by social and organizational theorists alike, increasingly focus on communication as both vital to the conduct of work and as imperative to organizational performance. Yet most accounts of communication in organization studies fail to understand an alternate sense of the “work” of communication in the constitution of organizations, work practices, and economies. This book responds to that lack by portraying com- municative practices —as opposed to individuals, interests, technologies, structures, organizations, or institutions —as the focal units of analysis in studies of the social and organizational problems occasioned by contemporary capitalism. Rather than suggesting that there exists a canonically “correct” route communica- tive analyses must follow, The Work of Communication: Relational Perspectives on Working and Organizing in Contemporary Capitalism explores the value of tran- scending longstanding divides between symbolic and material factors in studies of working and organizing. The recognition of dramatic shifts in technological, eco- nomic, and political forces, along with deep interconnections among the myriad of factors shaping working and organizing, sows doubts about whether organization studies is up to the vital task of addressing the social problems capitalism now creates. Kuhn, Ashcraft, and Cooren argue that novel insights into those social problems are possible if we tell different stories about working and organizing. To aid authors of those stories, they develop a set of conceptual resources that they capture under the mantle of communicative relationality. These resources allow analysts to profit from burgeoning interest in notions such as sociomateriality, posthumanism, performativ- ity, and affect. It goes on to illustrate the benefits that investigations of work and organization can realize from communicative relationality by presenting case studies that analyze (a) the becoming of an idea, from its inception to solidification, (b) the emergence of what is taken to be “the product” in high -tech startup entrepreneurship, and (c) the branding of work (in this case, academic writing and commercial avia- tion) through affective economies. Taken together, the book portrays “the work of communication” as simultaneously about how work in the “new economy” revolves around communicative practice and about how communication serves as a mode of explanation with the potential to cultivate novel stories about working and organizing. Aimed at academics, researchers, and policy makers, this book’s goal is to make tangible the contributions of communication for thinking about contempo- rary social and organizational problems.

Timothy Kuhn is a Professor in the Department of Communication at the Univer- sity of Colorado at Boulder, USA.

Karen Lee Ashcraft is a Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Colorado at Boulder, USA.

François Cooren is a Professor in the Department of Communication at the Uni- versité de Montréal, Canada.

Routledge Studies in Management, Organizations

and Society

This series presents innovative work grounded in new realities, address- ing issues crucial to an understanding of the contemporary world. This is the world of organised societies, where boundaries between formal and informal, public and private, local and global organizations have been displaced or have vanished, along with other nineteenth century dichoto- mies and oppositions. Management, apart from becoming a specialized profession for a growing number of people, is an everyday activity for most members of modern societies.

Similarly, at the level of enquiry, culture and technology, and litera- ture and economics, can no longer be conceived as isolated intellectual fields; conventional canons and established mainstreams are contested. Management, Organizations and Society addresses these contemporary dynamics of transformation in a manner that transcends disciplinary boundaries, with books that will appeal to researchers, student and prac- titioners alike.

Recent titles in this series include:

Dance and Organisation

Integrating Dance Theory and Methods into the Study of Management Brigitte Biehl

How Speech Acting and the Struggle of Narratives Generates Organization Thorvald Gran

Governance, Resistance and the Post -Colonial State Management and State Building Social Movements

Edited by Jonathan Murphy and Nimruji Jammaulamadaka The Work of Communication

Relational Perspectives on Working and Organizing in Contemporary Capitalism

Timothy Kuhn, Karen Lee Ashcraft, and François Cooren The Work of

Communication

Relational Perspectives on

Working and Organizing in

Contemporary Capitalism

Timothy Kuhn, Karen Lee Ashcraft,

and François Cooren

An electronic version of this book is freely available, thanks to the support of libraries working with Knowledge Unlatched (KU). KU is a collaborative initiative designed to make high quality books Open Access for the public good. The Open Access ISBN for this book is 978**********. More information about the initiative and links to the Open Access version can be found at www.knowledgeunlatched.org.

First published 2017

by Routledge

711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017

and by Routledge

2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

© 2017 Taylor & Francis

The right of Timothy Kuhn, Karen Lee Ashcraft, and François Cooren to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

The Open Access version of this book, available at www. taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging -in -Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested

ISBN: 978 -1 -138 -93015 -5 (hbk)

ISBN: 978 -1 -315 -68070 -5 (ebk)

DOI: 10.4324/978**********

To Joan, Dick, Sophia, Ella, and Sam

To Peter D. and the many lives of Z

À Bruno, Sylvie et Mathieu, avec tout mon amour

Contents

List of Figures

Acknowledgments

viii

ix

1 Encountering Working and Organizing Under

Contemporary Capitalism 1

2 Relationality: Cultivating Novelty in Explorations of Working and Organizing 29

3 Communicative Relationality 67

4 Creativity and Relationality: Following the Becoming of an Idea 95

5 Speculative Value: Articulating and Materializing the

“Product” in High -Tech Startup Entrepreneurship 133 6 Branding Work: Occupational Identity as Affective Economy (aka The Glass Slipper, Take Two) 160

7 Conclusion: The Value(s) of Communicative

Relationality 184

References

Index

196

219

Figures

4.1 The first plenary session 99

4.2 Participants sticking and reading ideas on flipcharts 101 4.3 Eva writing on the wooden sign where the

idea/project is described 105

4.4 The working table with the roll of paper. The word

“historytelling” appears at the bottom of the roll in the middle 111

4.5 The two artworks noticed by Eva during their visit: on the left, the 18th -century woman, on the right, the 17th -century man 121

4.6 Pierre showing Bruno where a speaker could be located 125 4.7 Pierre and Eva working on the sound box and the final result 127

4.8 Visitors experiencing the final device 130

5.1 AmpVille’s central workspace (the left half of the main room) 139

5.2 Continually amended artifacts on the wall of the AmpVille workspace 147

Acknowledgments

We would like to express our sincere appreciation to all the agencies that have played important roles in the development of the ideas contained in the pages to follow. The participants we studied at Museomix and AmpVille, along with the airline pilots and aviation museum curators who shed light on occupational identity, were tremendously generous. And we are also grateful to the spaces we inhabited in these projects, the recording and computational devices we employed in data collec- tion and analysis, the financial support of our universities and the social Research and Humanities Council of Canada (SSHRC 435–2013–0977), the infrastructure enabling our presence at the research sites, and the communication technologies that enabled the three of us to exchange ideas and the (nearly incalculable number of) drafts of these chapters. But back to people. We thank the graduate students who participated in a seminar as well as a colloquium at the University of Colorado Boulder, where we gave many of these ideas a “test run,” and attendees at talks at Aalto University (Helsinki), Lund University (Sweden), University of Texas at Austin, Université de Montréal, St. Mary’s University (Canada), and Massey University (New Zealand), as well as the ninth Organization Studies Summer Workshop (Greece).

We also are grateful for our colleagues, both at our universities and across the globe, for conversations that aided in the progress of these ideas, or for those who have read drafts of chapters: Will Barley, Gerald Bartels, Nicolas Bencherki, Boris Brummans, Chantal Benoit -Barné, Pascale Caïdor, Mathieu Chaput, Maurice Charland, Joëlle Cruz, Stan Deetz, Vincent Denault, Stephanie Fox, Lise Higham, Jody Jahn, Dan Kärreman, Matt Koschmann, Paul Leonardi, Thomas Martine, Frédérik Matte, Kirstie McAllum, Dennis Mumby, Amanda Porter, Linda Putnam, Jens Rennstam, Daniel Robichaud, Dennis Schoeneborn, Pete Simonson, Bryan Taylor, James Taylor, Jeff Treem, Elizabeth Van Every, and Consuelo Vásquez. And thank you to Dave Varley, Megan Smith, and Brianna Ascher at Routledge for their support and encouragement throughout the project.

1 Encountering Working

and Organizing Under

Contemporary Capitalism

Introduction

Viewed through history’s rearview mirror, modernity has never seen a period when work wasn’t undergoing dramatic change. Whether trans- formations in the workplace are seen as the result of demographic, tech- nological, political, or competitive forces, shifting work arrangements have always drawn scholarly attention. The claims are everywhere: social critics, politicians, and management gurus proclaim a new era of capitalism, a “new economy” promising a working life characterized by either a utopian freedom and self -determination or a dystopian servitude produced by constant surveillance, competition, and insecurity (includ- ing the threat of job loss because of automation —a risk not only for so -called blue -collar workers) amid weak global economic growth (e.g., McDonough, Reich, & Kotz, 2010), with few pronouncements falling between those extremes.

By way of illustration, consider the consulting and accounting firm PwC’s recent publication, The Future of Work: A Journey to 2022

(Rendell & Brown, 2014). After noting that “disruptive innovations are creating new industries and business models” (1) and challenging readers —it targets human resource managers in for-profit enterprises — to consider what this means for their businesses, the report paints three scenarios, three prospective “worlds of work.” What it calls the “Blue World” is where large multinational corporations dominate, where firms refine employee measurement and management efficiencies, and in which employees trade personal data for job security. In the “Green World,” companies are portrayed as developing a social conscience and sense of responsibility such that firms offer ethical values and work -life balance in exchange for employee loyalty. Its “Orange World” speaks to the decline of large corporations and the ascendancy of small, nimble, networked, and technologically sophisticated firms. Here, job security disappears and in its place are the flexibility, autonomy, and attractiveness of new chal- lenges that accompany the contract -based work of “portfolio careers.” Of course, these worlds ignore a good deal of organizational forms, and all three are prevalent today; the lesson offered by the report, however, is DOI: 10.4324/9781315680705-1

2 Encountering Working and Organizing

that constant and thoroughgoing change is on the horizon —change that threatens the viability of existing organizing practices. To be sure, there are good reasons for skepticism about claims of grand, sweeping changes in the workplace, particularly when proffered by a company peddling its consulting services. One such reason is that we may be experiencing a break less radical than proposed. A key lesson offered by observers of capitalism over time (e.g., Boltanski & Chiapello, 2005) is that newness is ever present; there is always a contemporary set of unique arrangements that calls upon analysts and observers to develop conceptual schemes to illuminate, describe, and explain prevailing modes of production and accumulation. Capitalism modifies itself to respond to challenges to its legitimacy and, in so doing, protects itself from transfor- mative change. Examining the mutable texture of capitalism is crucial for the field of organization studies, since what we take to be its key foci — work and organization —are being re -configured and re -understood in this “new economy.”

A similar argument can be seen in Marxist discussions about work and labor, where the notion of “periodizations” speaks to changes in the economic, political, and ideological conditions, which may —or may not—be associated with shifts in the mode of production. As Fine and Harris (1979, p. 109) observe,

The effects of the development of the forces and relations of produc- tion on the form of social relations within a mode [of production] define the transformation from one stage of a mode to another . . . such a periodisation will reveal itself through transformations in the methods of appropriating and controlling surplus value. Given capitalism’s fluidity and capacity to adapt, changes in patterns of social reproduction may well be indicative of deepening long -standing pat- terns rather than dramatic alterations in the underlying mode of production. In other words, it is probably impossible to determine, definitively, whether changes in the mode of production and accumulation are occurring. An inability to substantiate claims of dramatic change occurs not merely because of capitalism’s protean shape -shifting; nor is it because there exists no Archimedean point from which such a definitive state- ment about economic change could be advanced. Rather, the very notion of an economy existing “out there” as if objective and external to schol- arly analysis is misguided. We—students and scholars of organization

(a group we take to be the primary audience for this book) —attend to particular issues, write about them, teach them, present them as factual. In so doing, we tell a story about a “new economy” that is performa- tive in its effects: It participates in the enactment of the reality it seeks to describe. We shall say more about performativity in Chapter 2, but in the main part of this chapter, we depict some of the most repeated Encountering Working and Organizing 3

stories told about sea changes in the terrain of working and organizing under contemporary capitalism.

Our Guiding Question and the Pursuit of Novelty

The aim of this book, then, is to examine how developments associated with contemporary capitalism —as well as the stories we tell about them, which are part of the developments themselves —bear consequences for how work is both accomplished and organized. Our particular concern is the extent to which customary frames and tools of scholarship in organization studies are up to the vital task of addressing social problems associated with shifts in capitalism. Rather than assessing those frames with a desire to judge their

(in)adequacy, however, we ask in this chapter about what our stories are doing. Where are they leading, and where do they become stuck? Are there other fruitful stories to be told? Accordingly, our guiding question is this: What have work and organization become under contemporary capitalism, and how should organization studies approach them? Addressing this question should begin, of course, with a consideration of how the field of organization studies has taken up capitalism, contem- porary and otherwise. There are two dominant approaches. The first has been to treat capitalism as background, an uninterrogated frame for the conduct of work and organizing. Research of this sort often is functional- ist in orientation, as seen in scholarship on entrepreneurship, for instance. Although there is a growing body of scholarship that critically examines entrepreneurship’s antecedents and unintended consequences, the lion’s share of research here considers the characteristics (of individuals, firms, and markets) associated with entrepreneurial success, processes through which new ventures emerge, and how states, communities, and even uni- versities might foster greater entrepreneurial activity. This work tends to be guided by the assumption that entrepreneurship produces economic and social utility, often invoking the Schumpeterian notion of disruption, though it rarely examines that assumption’s veracity (Shane, 2009). A market -based system of exchange, a system of economic relations, is the implied (but rarely interrogated) background upon which entrepreneur- ship unfolds; if it is invoked at all, it is to point to the ways the system enables and constrains the phenomenon of interest. A second approach has been to suggest that capitalism generates the class distinctions upon which organizing proceeds (Roediger, 1999; Thompson, 1963). Here it is the economic system that produces social ordering, distinction, hierarchy, and distributions of resources that are unequal, but this system is understood as intimately bound up in the pro- duction and valorization of identities, communities, and forms of work. For instance, analysts have studied how the “working class” assimilates members into “blue -collar” values through cultural practices, forms of speech, and practices of (self -)discipline that produce group -based 4 Encountering Working and Organizing

distinctions, construct subjectivities, and assert the superiority of the class against others (Lucas, 2011; Philipsen, 1975; Willis, 1977). As plotlines, these broad approaches have borne significant fruit in the story of working and organizing. In this book, we build upon the solid foundation they have established, but our storytelling employs what we shall call relational ontologies to portray capitalism not as a figure lurking in the background, nor as an external force impelling particular forms of system organization, but as a participant inextricably bound up in socioeconomic practice. In other words, the perspectives we pursue

(we shall offer three conceptualizations of what we term communicative relationality) are not offered to mend gaps created by other approaches, but because their distinctive conceptualizations offer inventive lines by which investigations might proceed. Relational ontologies have begun to garner significant attention in organization studies (Ganesh & Wang, 2015; Orlikowski, 2007; Vosselman, 2014), yet scholars —ourselves included —are struggling to elucidate the implications of this ontologi- cal turn for analyses of working and organizing, as well as the method- ological claims it makes on our scholarship (see, e.g., Mutch, 2013). This book directly engages with these struggles in order to articulate concrete possibilities whereby relationality can facilitate novel ways of attending to social problems. In this way, we endeavor to tell a meaningfully differ- ent story about working and organizing as we (might) know it. In this first chapter, we initiate pursuit of our guiding question —again, what have work and organization become under contemporary capitalism, and how should organization studies approach them? In the section to fol- low, we outline key stories scholars have told about the major transforma- tions in working and organizing associated with contemporary capitalism. It is important to stress that, in framing scholarly accounts as “stories,” we do not mean to belittle them. All theories put forth a narrative of things, and we do not take such narratives lightly. This book is simply more interested in their production rather than truth value. In other words, we are less con- cerned with the extent to which scholarly accounts correspond with some external reality and more concerned with how they participate in the making of certain realities and futures. This is not an abdication of facts in favor of relativism, as we shall see. Rather, it is an acknowledgment that shifts in capi- talism are not somehow apart from the theories that punctuate their existence and occurrence. Theoretical stories contribute to the very developments they claim to study. This is precisely why we are so interested in them —in their possibilities and limitations, and in the promise of other stories to be told. Our review of key stories pays particular attention to communicative forms of work. As we show next, work is increasingly about the analysis and manipulation of symbols, the interactive production of feelings, and the generation of images —forms of work that self -evidently revolve around actors engaging in communication with others. However, working and organizing are not merely symbolic: As we demonstrate, there is a wide Encountering Working and Organizing 5

(and shifting) array of forces at play, requiring an approach to studying them that foregrounds multiplicity, relationality, and transformation. This book is intended as a contribution to organization studies scholars’ capaci- ties to undertake studies of working and organizing when multiplicity, rela- tionality, and transformation are configured as central features of the scene. Conceptualizing “Work(ing)”

Before we encounter contemporary currents in working and organizing, we should clarify what we mean by “work.” Certainly, work, as an activity, can take various forms and occurs in and through many domains; it has also been conceived differently depending on the historical circumstance of the writer. Unsurprisingly, then, definitions of work likewise abound. At an abstract level, work is about deeds, tasks, and instances of labor; it is “action or activity involving physical or mental effort and undertaken in order to achieve a result, esp. as a means of making one’s living or earning money; labour; (one’s) regular occupation or employment” ( Oxford English Dictionary). It indexes the amount of effort necessary to complete a task or create an outcome; that outcome can involve providing the social/artificial world with things distinct from those found in our natural surroundings. Work is, moreover, sometimes understood as “the creation of material goods and services, which may be directly consumed by the worker or sold to someone else” (Hodson & Sullivan, 1995, p. 3). In other words, though work is sometimes reduced to a noun —to the thing produced by activity —the term also implies working, the gerund indicating the action of bringing about deeds.

Other conceptions distinguish between forms of work. Bertrand Russell (1935/2004), somewhat playfully, held work to be of two kinds:

“first, altering the position of matter at or near the earth’s surface relative to other such matter; second, telling other people to do so” (p. 3). Still others distinguish work from play, suggesting that work is serious and solemn, whereas play is frivolous and joyful (e.g., Burke, 1981). Thomas

(1999), seeking to capture the central elements of the range of concep- tions depicted here, offers this encapsulation:

Work has an end beyond itself, being designed to produce or achieve something; it involves a degree of obligation or necessity, being a task that others set us or that we set ourselves; and it is arduous, involving effort and persistence beyond the point at which the task ceases to be wholly pleasurable.

(p. xiv)

Across definitions such as these, Daniels (1987) argues that work tends to be portrayed as (a) public, rather than private, activity; (b) requiring financial recompense, and (c) gendered, in that traditionally masculine 6 Encountering Working and Organizing

activities are more likely to be considered work. All of these features, she argues, tend to relegate unpaid and invisible labor —not coincidentally, many activities coded as feminine —outside the realm of “work” (as “labors of love,” for instance). In an effort to clarify what we mean by work while remaining open to the kind of activity to which Daniels draws attention, we depict work(ing) as the practice of focusing labor toward the produc- tion of “objects” with value. As the scare quotes suggest, objects may take many forms. Moreover, their value may be a matter of contestation; as we will show, value is rarely as simple as that which it is taken to be on its face. Our aim in characterizing work(ing) this way is to suggest several impor- tant elements of contemporary renditions of work and working. This book seeks to understand the processes and products of working (as well as of organizing), acknowledging that work relies upon, and generates, objects that are simultaneously material and symbolic —objects that have the potential to participate in the (re)inscription of the relations of capitalism. Conceiving of work in this way is agnostic as to the sources of influence over the trajectory of the practice, being open to the multiplicity of forces initiating, pushing, and benefiting from work (or, perhaps, considering these issues topics for examination). As we address in the next sections (and in more detail in Chapter 3), we see communication as axial to understanding working, but only if we avoid the common relegation of communication to the realm of the merely symbolic, interactional, and imaginative. We shall argue, instead, that communication is the force that constitutes working

(and organizing), which also, in turn, constitutes economic realities. The Story of the New Economy in Studies of

Work and Organization

What stories about the contemporary socioeconomic scene are told in the organization studies literature? To what factors do analysts point, and what consequences, in the sense of social problems, do they note? And, impor- tantly, what are the assumptions about communicating and organizing that mark their thinking? A point to which we turn at the end of this chapter is that organization studies should think carefully about how it conceives of such “factors,” because these conceptual foundations matter for our epis- temological and methodological engagement with working and organizing. The story is often abbreviated as neoliberalism, the ideology that sub- sumes social and political life into the capitalist logic of accumulation and, according to many analysts, does so in deterministic fashion: “Neoliberalism transmogrifies every human domain and endeavor, along with humans themselves, according to a specific image of the economic. All conduct is economic conduct; all spheres of existence are framed and measured by economic terms and metrics” (Brown, 2015, p. 10). Whereas some argue that neoliberalism is the antithesis of (pure) capitalism, the term tends to direct attention to the reduced role of the state and the increased power of the market in contemporary governance brought on by right -leaning Encountering Working and Organizing 7

Western governments, particularly of the Reagan -Thatcher variety (though, as Harvey [2005] notes, its seeds were planted several decades earlier), which sought to ease restrictions on capital flows and to make privatized enterprises out of what had previously been public services. Neoliberalism is not only about the production of new subjects and their conduct; it also heralds an enlarged corporate power in public life, one in which corporations have been the beneficiaries (and often coau- thors) of laws, policies, and rights that previously had been the sphere of persons and publics, and governments have learned to operate like commercial firms (Coates, 2015). Neoliberalism is a loose and shifting signifier, and a detailed historical account of its origins, emergence, and variations is beyond our scope here. Yet we note that neoliberalism’s pref- erence for capital over labor, management over trade unions, individuals over communities, work over welfare, and markets over governments animates the stories told about contemporary capitalism. With respect to working and organizing, one consequence of neolib- eralism is the rise of the “entrepreneurial self,” a subject who pursues enterprise —monitoring the self, building personal skills, and displaying individual productivity, both within and beyond the boundaries of the organization —not only because work increasingly demands it but also because entrepreneurialism has become situated as the source of personal meaningfulness (Pinchot, 1985). The protagonists in the neoliberal story are rational actors who are granted the right to pursue their economic self -interest by using property as they see fit, and the entrepreneurial self is an archetype of this brand of individualization (Brökling, 2015). Tales of entrepreneurial success are contemporary heroes’ journeys

(Watt, 2016; Whelan & O’Gorman, 2007) in which the individual dog- gedly pursues a vision, overcoming a hostile marketplace (and

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