The Sage Handbook of Qualitative Research in Organizational Communication [1 ed.] 1529794633, 9781529794632

Table of contents :
Half Title Page
Editorial Advisory Board
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
About the Editors
About the Contributors
Foreword
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Toward a Methodological Lingua Franca for Qualitative Research in Organizational Communication
Part I: Approaches to Qualitative Organizational Communication Research
1: From Mixed Methods to Mixed Research Approaches for Qualitative Organizational Communication Research
2: Ethnographic Approaches to Qualitative Organizational Communication Research
3: Rhetorical Approaches to Qualitative Organizational Communication Research
4: Pragmatist Approaches to Qualitative Organizational Communication Research
5: Phenomenological Approaches to Qualitative Organizational Communication Research
6: Approaches to Qualitative Research on the Communicative Constitution of Organizations
7: Feminist Approaches to Qualitative Organizational Communication Research
8: Critical Race Theory and Intersectional Approaches to Qualitative Organizational Communication Research
9: Postcolonial Qualitative Research in Organizational Communication
10: Queer Approaches to Qualitative Organizational Communication Research
11: Ethnography of Communication Approaches to Qualitative Organizational Communication Research
12: Autoethnography and Organizational Communication: Tracing their Convergence and Divergence
13: Engaged Scholarship Approaches to Qualitative Organizational Communication Research
Part II: Data Collection in Qualitative Organizational Communication Research: Methods and Issues
14: Research Design in Qualitative Organizational Communication
15: Challenges Faced by Qualitative Researchers in Negotiating Access to Organizational Communication Settings
16: Interviews and Focus Groups in Qualitative Organizational Communication Research
17: Participatory Methods in Qualitative Organizational Communication Research
18: Collecting Digital Data in Qualitative Organizational Communication Research
19: Collecting Visual Data in Qualitative Organizational Communication Research
Part III: Data Analysis and Representation in Qualitative Organizational Communication Research: Methods and Issues
20: Phronetic Iterative Qualitative Data Analysis in Organizational Communication Research
21: Narrative Analysis in Qualitative Organizational Communication Research
22: Rhetorical Analysis in Qualitative Organizational Communication Research
23: Conversation Analysis in Qualitative Organizational Communication Research
24: Ventriloquial Analysis in Qualitative Organizational Communication Research
25: Analysis of Sociomateriality and Affect in Qualitative Organizational Communication Research
26: Critical Discourse Analysis in Qualitative Organizational Communication Research
27: Past, Present, and Future Analysis of Digital Work in Qualitative Organizational Communication Research
28: Analysis of Tensions and Paradoxes in Qualitative Organizational Communication Research
29: A Process Ontology Perspective on Qualitative Analysis in Organizational Communication Research
30: Positionings: Toward a Relational Understanding of Representation and Writing in Organizational Communication Research
Part IV: The Future of Qualitative Organizational Communication Resea
31: Digital Forensics: A Guide to Conducting Qualitative Research on Organizational Communication and Digital Technology
32: Hybridity, Visibility, and Organizing: Globalization and Qualitative Methods in Organizational Communication Research
33: Organizing Postqualitative Research in Organizational Communication
34: Qualitative Research in Organizational Communication Post-COVID-19
Afterword from the Perspective of a Management Scholar
Afterword from the Perspective of Two Organizational Communication Scholars
Index

Citation preview

The Sage Handbook of

Qualitative Research in Organizational Communication

Editorial Advisory Board Brenda J. Allen, University of Colorado Denver, USA Karen Lee Ashcraft, University of Colorado Boulder, USA Laure Cabantous, ESCP Business School, France Ling Chen, Hong Kong Baptist University, Hong Kong Lars Thøger Christensen, Copenhagen Business School, Denmark Joep P. Cornelissen, Erasmus University Rotterdam, the Netherlands Ann L. Cunliffe, Escola de Administração de Empresas de São Paulo da Fundação Getulio Vargas, Brazil Toru Kiyomiya, Seinan Gakuin University, Japan Timothy R. Kuhn, University of Colorado Boulder, USA † Colleen E. Mills, University of Canterbury, New Zealand Dennis K. Mumby, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA Amanda J. Porter, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, the Netherlands Barbara Simpson, University of Strathclyde Glasgow, Scotland Paul Spee, The University of Queensland, Australia Eero Vaara, University of Oxford, England

The Sage Handbook of

Qualitative Research in Organizational Communication

Edited by

Boris H. J. M. Brummans Bryan C. Taylor and Anu Sivunen

1 Oliver’s Yard 55 City Road London EC1Y 1SP 2455 Teller Road Thousand Oaks, California 91320 Unit No 323-333, Third Floor, F-Block International Trade Tower Nehru Place New Delhi – 110 019 8 Marina View Suite 43-053 Asia Square Tower 1 Singapore 018960

Editor: Matthew Waters Editorial Assistant: Charlotte Hanson Production Editor: Gourav Kumar Copyeditor: Clare Weaver Proofreader: Derek Markham Indexer: KnowledgeWorks Global Ltd Marketing Manager: Ben Sherwood Cover Design: Ginkhan Siam Typeset by KnowledgeWorks Global Ltd Printed in the UK

At Sage we take sustainability seriously. Most of our products are printed in the UK using responsibly sourced papers and boards. When we print overseas we ensure sustainable papers are used as measured by the Paper Chain Project grading system. We undertake an annual audit to monitor our sustainability.

Foreword © James R. Barker, 2024 Editorial Arrangement and Introduction © Boris H. J. M. Brummans, Bryan C. Taylor, and Anu Sivunen, 2024 Chapter 1 © Jody L. S. Jahn and Karen K. Myers, 2024 Chapter 2 © Angela N. Gist-Mackey & Cristin A. Compton, 2024 Chapter 3 © Charles Conrad and George Cheney, 2024 Chapter 4 © François Cooren, Philippe Lorino, and Daniel Robichaud, 2024 Chapter 5 © Rebecca J. Meisenbach and Madeline S. Pringle, 2024 Chapter 6 © Theresa Castor, 2024 Chapter 7 © Patrice M. Buzzanell, Spencer Margulies, Evgeniya Pyatovskaya, and Patricia K. Abijah, 2024 Chapter 8 © Jasmine T. Austin and Tianna L. Cobb, 2024 Chapter 9 © Mahuya Pal, Beatriz Nieto-Fernandez, and Silpa Satheesh, 2024 Chapter 10 © Jamie McDonald and Elizabeth K. Eger, 2024 Chapter 11 © Trudy Milburn and Sunny Lie Owens, 2024 Chapter 12 © Kurt Lindemann and Yea-Wen Chen, 2024 Chapter 13 © J. Kevin Barge and Anna Wiederhold Wolfe, 2024 Chapter 14 © Bryan C. Taylor and Ryan S. Bisel, 2024 Chapter 15 © Keri K. Stephens, Craig R. Scott, and Nancy H. Carlson, 2024 Chapter 16 © Brenda L. Berkelaar, 2024 Chapter 17 © Rebecca Gill and Joshua B. Barbour, 2024 Chapter 18 © Jennifer L. Gibbs and Salla-Maaria Laaksonen, 2024 Chapter 19 © Elizabeth Wilhoit Larson, 2024

Chapter 20 © Sarah J. Tracy, Angela N. Gist-Mackey, and Marco Dehnert, 2024 Chapter 21 © Stephanie L. Dailey, Larry Davis Browning, and Jan-Oddvar Sørnes, 2024 Chapter 22 © Chantal BenoitBarné and Mathieu Chaput, 2024 Chapter 23 © Jonathan Clifton and Jakob Rømer Barfod, 2024 Chapter 24 © Ellen Nathues, François Cooren, and Mark van Vuuren, 2024 Chapter 25 © Jennifer J. Mease and Scott E. Branton, 2024 Chapter 26 © Debbie S. Dougherty and Blessing Ekene Okafor, 2024 Chapter 27 © Luisa Ruge-Jones, William C. Barley, and Jeffrey W. Treem, 2024 Chapter 28 © Gail T. Fairhurst and Linda L. Putnam, 2024 Chapter 29 © Consuelo Vásquez, Viviane Sergi, and Anthony Hussenot, 2024 Chapter 30 © Oana Brindusa Albu, Boukje Cnossen, and Chahrazad Abdallah, 2024 Chapter 31 © Mikkel Flyverbom, Paul M. Leonardi, and Nitzan Navick, 2024 Chapter 32 © Shiv Ganesh, Cynthia Stohl, and Samantha James, 2024 Chapter 33 © Kate Lockwood Harris, 2024 Chapter 34 © Kirstie McAllum, Stephanie Fox, Laura Ginoux, Heather M. Zoller, Andrea Zorn, and Theodore E. Zorn, 2024 Afterword 1 © Silvia Gherardi, 2024 Afterword 2 © Eric M. Eisenberg and Patricia Geist-Martin, 2024

Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research, private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, this publication may not be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form, or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, or in the case of reprographic reproduction, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publisher. Library of Congress Control Number: 2023949708 British Library Cataloguing in Publication data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978-1-5297-9463-2

Contents About the Editors About the Contributors Foreword James R. Barker Acknowledgments Introduction: Toward a Methodological Lingua Franca for Qualitative Research in Organizational Communication Boris H. J. M. Brummans, Bryan C. Taylor, and Anu Sivunen

ix x xxvii xxix xxx

PART I APPROACHES TO QUALITATIVE ORGANIZATIONAL COMMUNICATION RESEARCH 1

2

3

4

5

6

7

From Mixed Methods to Mixed Research Approaches for Qualitative Organizational Communication Research Jody L. S. Jahn and Karen K. Myers

3

Ethnographic Approaches to Qualitative Organizational Communication Research Angela N. Gist-Mackey and Cristin A. Compton

23

Rhetorical Approaches to Qualitative Organizational Communication Research Charles Conrad and George Cheney

45

Pragmatist Approaches to Qualitative Organizational Communication Research François Cooren, Philippe Lorino, and Daniel Robichaud

66

Phenomenological Approaches to Qualitative Organizational Communication Research Rebecca J. Meisenbach and Madeline S. Pringle

82

Approaches to Qualitative Research on the Communicative Constitution of Organizations Theresa Castor

103

Feminist Approaches to Qualitative Organizational Communication Research Patrice M. Buzzanell, Spencer Margulies, Evgeniya Pyatovskaya, and Patricia K. Abijah

122

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THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF QUALITATIVE RESEARCH IN ORGANIZATIONAL COMMUNICATION

8

Critical Race Theory and Intersectional Approaches to Qualitative Organizational Communication Research Jasmine T. Austin and Tianna L. Cobb

142

9

Postcolonial Qualitative Research in Organizational Communication Mahuya Pal, Beatriz Nieto-Fernandez, and Silpa Satheesh

161

10

Queer Approaches to Qualitative Organizational Communication Research Jamie McDonald and Elizabeth K. Eger

181

11

Ethnography of Communication Approaches to Qualitative Organizational Communication Research Trudy Milburn and Sunny Lie Owens

200

Autoethnography and Organizational Communication: Tracing their Convergence and Divergence Kurt Lindemann and Yea-Wen Chen

220

Engaged Scholarship Approaches to Qualitative Organizational Communication Research J. Kevin Barge and Anna Wiederhold Wolfe

239

12

13

PART II DATA COLLECTION IN QUALITATIVE ORGANIZATIONAL COMMUNICATION RESEARCH: METHODS AND ISSUES 14

15

16

17

18

19

Research Design in Qualitative Organizational Communication Research Bryan C. Taylor and Ryan S. Bisel

261

Challenges Faced by Qualitative Researchers in Negotiating Access to Organizational Communication Settings Keri K. Stephens, Craig R. Scott, and Nancy H. Carlson

279

Interviews and Focus Groups in Qualitative Organizational Communication Research Brenda L. Berkelaar

297

Participatory Methods in Qualitative Organizational Communication Research Rebecca Gill and Joshua B. Barbour

319

Collecting Digital Data in Qualitative Organizational Communication Research Jennifer L. Gibbs and Salla-Maaria Laaksonen

339

Collecting Visual Data in Qualitative Organizational Communication Research358 Elizabeth Wilhoit Larson

Contents

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PART III DATA ANALYSIS AND REPRESENTATION IN QUALITATIVE ORGANIZATIONAL COMMUNICATION RESEARCH: METHODS AND ISSUES 20

21

22

23

24

25

26

27

28

29

30

Phronetic Iterative Qualitative Data Analysis in Organizational Communication Research Sarah J. Tracy, Angela N. Gist-Mackey, and Marco Dehnert

381

Narrative Analysis in Qualitative Organizational Communication Research Stephanie L. Dailey, Larry Davis Browning, and Jan-Oddvar Sørnes

400

Rhetorical Analysis in Qualitative Organizational Communication Research Chantal Benoit-Barné and Mathieu Chaput

418

Conversation Analysis in Qualitative Organizational Communication Research Jonathan Clifton and Jakob Rømer Barfod

438

Ventriloquial Analysis in Qualitative Organizational Communication Research Ellen Nathues, François Cooren, and Mark van Vuuren

454

Analysis of Sociomateriality and Affect in Qualitative Organizational Communication Research Jennifer J. Mease and Scott E. Branton

471

Critical Discourse Analysis in Qualitative Organizational Communication Research Debbie S. Dougherty and Blessing Ekene Okafor

492

Past, Present, and Future Analysis of Digital Work in Qualitative Organizational Communication Research Luisa Ruge-Jones, William C. Barley, and Jeffrey W. Treem

511

Analysis of Tensions and Paradoxes in Qualitative Organizational Communication Research Gail T. Fairhurst and Linda L. Putnam

531

A Process Ontology Perspective on Qualitative Analysis in Organizational Communication Research Consuelo Vásquez, Viviane Sergi, and Anthony Hussenot

551

Positionings: Toward a Relational Understanding of Representation and Writing in Qualitative Organizational Communication Research Oana Brindusa Albu, Boukje Cnossen, and Chahrazad Abdallah

569

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THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF QUALITATIVE RESEARCH IN ORGANIZATIONAL COMMUNICATION

PART IV THE FUTURE OF QUALITATIVE ORGANIZATIONAL COMMUNICATION RESEARCH 31

32

Digital Forensics: A Guide to Conducting Qualitative Research on Organizational Communication and Digital Technology Mikkel Flyverbom, Paul M. Leonardi, and Nitzan Navick

589

Hybridity, Visibility, and Organizing: Globalization and Qualitative Methods in Organizational Communication Research Shiv Ganesh, Cynthia Stohl, and Samantha James

607

33

Organizing Postqualitative Research in Organizational Communication Kate Lockwood Harris

625

34

Qualitative Research in Organizational Communication Post-COVID-19 Kirstie McAllum, Stephanie Fox, Laura Ginoux, Heather M. Zoller, Andrea Zorn, and Theodore E. Zorn

643

Afterword from the Perspective of a Management Scholar Silvia Gherardi

664

Afterword from the Perspective of Two Organizational Communication Scholars Eric M. Eisenberg and Patricia Geist-Martin

671

Index681

About the Editors Boris H. J. M. Brummans (PhD, Texas A&M University) is a Professor in the Department of

Communication at the Université de Montréal in Canada. His research interests include agency, mindful organizing, organizational communication, organizational ethnography, and process philosophy. He has contributed chapters to several edited books and his articles appear in international peer-reviewed journals such as Communication Monographs, Human Relations, Information, Communication & Society, Management Communication Quarterly, Organization Studies, and Qualitative Inquiry. His edited volume, The Agency of Organizing: Perspectives and Case Studies (Routledge), received the 2018 Outstanding Edited Book Award from the Organizational Communication Division of the National Communication Association and he served as an Associate Editor of Management Communication Quarterly from 2015 to 2019. Moreover, he served as Chair of the International Communication Association’s Organizational Communication Division from 2022 to 2024. Bryan C. Taylor (PhD, University of Utah) is a Professor in the Department of Communication

at the University of Colorado Boulder in the USA. His research and teaching interests include qualitative research methods, organizational culture, and critical security studies. His qualitative research has been published in journals including Communication Research, Culture and Organization, Journal of Applied Communication Research, Western Journal of Communication, Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, Management Communication Quarterly, and the Romanian Journal of Communication and Public Relations. He is the co-author of three editions of Qualitative Communication Research Methods (Sage), and co-editor of Nuclear Legacies: Communication, Controversy, and the U.S. Nuclear Weapons Production Complex (Lexington Books), as well as The Routledge Handbook of Communication and Security. Anu Sivunen (PhD, University of Jyväskylä) is a Professor in the Department of Language and

Communication Studies at the University of Jyväskylä in Finland. Her research focuses on new forms of organizing, such as remote and flexible work arrangements, communication processes and identity issues in global teams, and organizational communication technologies and their affordances. Her research interests also include employees’ work-life boundary management and organizational space. Her qualitative and conceptual work has appeared in international publications from a variety of disciplines, such as Academy of Management Annals, Human Relations, Information Technology and People, International Journal of Communication, Journal of Applied Communication Research, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, Journal of the Association of Information Systems, and Small Group Research. This work has earned awards from the National Communication Association, International Communication Association, and Hawaii International Conference on Systems Sciences. Anu has been a Visiting Scholar at University of California, Santa Barbara and at Stanford University in the USA.

About the Contributors Chahrazad Abdallah (PhD, HEC Montréal) is an Associate Professor in Management at the Université du Québec à Montréal, Canada. She is interested in organizational ethnography and ethnographic writing, and in decolonizing approaches to knowledge production. Chahrazad’s most recent publications appear in Standing on the Shoulders of Giants: Traditions and Innovations in Research Methodology, The Routledge Companion to Qualitative Research in Organization Studies and The Sage Handbook of Qualitative Business and Management Research Methods. Patricia Kakra Abijah (MA, Illinois State University) is a PhD student at the University of South Florida. Her research focuses on organizational communication, feminisms, and identities. Patricia is passionate about anti-period poverty advocacy in Ghana. Oana Brindusa Albu (PhD, Copenhagen Business School) is an Associate Professor at Copenhagen Business School, Department of Management, Communication and Society. Her research is situated at the intersection of social movements, science and technology, and organizational communication studies. Her research has been published in international journals such as Business & Society, Management Communication Quarterly, Organization, and Accounting Forum. Jasmine Austin (PhD, University of Oklahoma) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Texas State University. As a scholar-activist, she promotes social justice, advocacy, decentering colonialism, and (re)centering blackness and marginalized identities. Her two main areas of research are socialization and marginalized identities. This includes theorizing about Black women and examining the impact of early racialized conversations between group members (e.g., supervisor/member, parent/child) on future interactions, experiences, and identity development. She is the co-author of Communication Theory: Racially Diverse and Inclusive Perspectives (Cognella) and the co-author of Communication and Organizational Changemaking for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion: A Case Study Approach (Routledge). Her works are also found in scholarly journals, such as Management Communication Quarterly, Communication Studies, Communication Teacher, and Journal of Health Communication. Joshua B. Barbour (PhD, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) is a Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA. He studies macromorphic communication, the institutional moorings of communication and organizing, and practitioners’ strategic communicative efforts to navigate those structures. His work has appeared in the Journal of Communication, Communication Monographs, and Management Communication Quarterly, and his record numbers over fifty publications including articles, book chapters, and an organizational communication textbook. Jakob Rømer Barfod (PhD, Copenhagen Business School) is a serving officer in the Danish Defence Force. Besides a doctorate from Copenhagen Business School, Dr. Barfod also holds a master’s degree in Psychology in Organizations from Roskilde University, Denmark. His current research interests include leadership in high-risk contexts, communication and research methodology with a special emphasis on in situ interaction in military teams, and how leadership

About the Contributors

xi

can be observed as a relational and collective phenomenon. He is a faculty member and course director at the Royal Danish Defence College where he teaches courses in leadership in a military context. He has presented his research at several meetings of the Academy of Management, and military conferences such as IMTA (International Military Testing Association) and IAMPS (International Applied Military Psychology Symposium). He frequently consults for defense and private organizations on leadership and human resource issues. J. Kevin Barge (PhD, University of Kansas) is a Professor of Communication at Texas A & M University and an Associate with the Taos Institute. He is the 2016 recipient of the Gerald M. Phillips Award for Distinguished Applied Communication Research given by the National Communication Association as well as the 2017 recipient of the Central States Communication Hall of Fame Award. His research interests center on developing a social constructionist approach to leadership, articulating the connections between appreciative practice and organizational change, as well as exploring the relationship between discourse and conflict management. He has a strong commitment to engaged scholarship having served as a member of the planning team for the Aspen Conference, a community of engaged organizational communication scholars focused on developing practical theory and collaborative research that bridge academic-practitioner interests. James R. Barker (PhD, University of Colorado Boulder) is the Herbert S. Lamb Chair in Business Education and Chair of the Department of Leadership and Organizations in the Faculty of Management and Faculty of Medicine at Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. He is the Lead Scientist of the Safe Assured research consortium and directs research initiatives in organizational complexity, leadership, safety, and public policy. He is also a Founding Fellow of the MacEachen Institute on Public Policy at Dalhousie and a former Editor of Management Communication Quarterly. Professor Barker’s general research interests concern developing safe and sustainable organizational leadership and change initiatives and on identifying the consequences of these initiatives on organizational governance systems, markets, and practices. William C. Barley (PhD, Northwestern University) is an Associate Professor of Communication at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. His research explores communication dynamics as individuals work across complex technical and experiential boundaries, primarily in science and engineering contexts. Specifically, he is interested in revealing the communicative labor involved in cross-boundary collaboration, and in building policies and structures that acknowledge and incentivize that labor. Chantal Benoit-Barné (PhD, University of Colorado Boulder) is an Associate Professor at the Université de Montréal, Canada, where she is the Chair of the Department of Communication. Her research centers on the constitutive scope of rhetorical practices in organizational and political contexts. She is particularly interested in the communicative accomplishment of authority and the process of representation by spokespersons. She publishes in both French and English, and her work appears in international journals such as Communication Monographs, Quarterly Journal of Speech, Management Communication Quarterly, Réseaux, and Communication & Organisation. Brenda L. Berkelaar (PhD, Purdue University) works as Principal Researcher in the tech industry, and as a Senior Instructor in the School of Information at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research examines how people adopt, adapt, and make sense of evolving technologies and work. Her publications include chapters in edited books and articles in peerreviewed journals including Communication Monographs, New Media & Society, Management

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Communication Quarterly, and Human Relations; and presents at international conferences including the Academy of Management, Association of Computing Machinery, IEEE, International Communication Association, and SXSW. Ryan S. Bisel (PhD, University of Kansas) is a Professor of Organizational Communication in the Department of Communication at the University of Oklahoma. His research interests focus primarily on issues surrounding leadership communication, organizational culture, and behavioral ethics. Dr. Bisel’s (2018) book titled, Organizational Moral Learning: A Communication Approach (Routledge), was honored with Book of the Year Awards from two divisions of the National Communication Association. In addition to several book chapters, Dr. Bisel’s research has been published in communication and management journals including Communication Monographs, Communication Theory, Management Communication Quarterly, Communication Research Reports, The Leadership Quarterly, Business Communication Quarterly, Health Communication, Communication Studies, Journal of Management Education, International Journal of Business Communication, Western Journal of Communication, Southern Communication Journal, Small Group Research, and Human Relations. Scott E. Branton (PhD, University of Missouri-Columbia) is an Assistant Professor at the University of Arkansas. His research explores how ordinary practices materialize, assume social order, and produce inequity in both work and organizational contexts. His work deploys a relational approach to diversity, inclusion, and difference with a particular focus on the sociomaterial and affective constitution of communicative practice. Larry D. Browning (PhD, The Ohio State University) is an Emeritus Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at The University of Texas at Austin. Dr. Browning’s research areas include the study of narratives, complexity, the role of lists and stories in organizations, and grounded theory as a research strategy. Browning’s current work emphasizes narrative theory and risk taking, including the risk a leader takes to blow the whistle on their boss, and Royal Norwegian Air Force (RNOAF) pilots’ risk in bombing the shores of Tripoli in 2011. Recent books include, Svenkerud, P. J., Soernes J.-O., & Browning, L. D. (Eds.). (2022). Whistleblowing, Communication and Consequences: Lessons from The Norwegian National Lottery. Routledge; Soelberg, F., Browning, L. D., & Sørnes, J. O. (Eds.). (2019). High North Stories in a Time of Transition: Gutsy Narratives and Wild Observations. Routledge; Sørnes, J. O., Browning, L. D., & Henricksen. J. T. (Eds.). (2015). Culture, Development and Petroleum: An Ethnography of the High North. Routledge; Browning, L. D., & Morris, G. H. (2012). Stories of Life in the Workplace: An Open Architecture for Organizational Narratology. Routledge. Patrice M. Buzzanell (PhD, Purdue University) is a Distinguished University Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of South Florida. Her research coalesces around career, work-life policy, resilience, gender, and engineering design in micro-macro contexts. Her NSF funding focuses on engineering ethics scales and everyday ethical processes as well as design thinking for the professional formation of engineers. Nancy H. Carlson (MA, The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley) is a PhD student at The University of Texas at Austin. Her research interests intersect environmental, health, and risk and crisis communication. Her most recent work focuses on preventative disaster communication related to natural hazards such as flooding and community-engaged work in underrepresented, under-resourced, and marginalized communities that face repeated and chronic stressors. Nancy holds a BS in Psychology and an MA in Disaster Studies.

About the Contributors

xiii

Theresa Castor (PhD, University of Washington) is a Professor of Communication at the University of Wisconsin-Parkside, USA. She teaches courses in organizational communication, professional communication, and health communication, among other areas. Her research centers on organizational decision-making, crisis communication, and language and social interaction. She is the author of Climate Risks as Organizational Problems and co-editor of Water, Rhetoric, and Social Justice: A Critical Confluence. In addition, she is a Board Member of the International Association for Dialogue Analysis and an Editorial Review Board Member of Management Communication Quarterly. Dr. Castor has published in Management Communication Quarterly, Language and Dialogue, Journal of Pragmatics, Critical Sociology, Communication Research and Practice, and Journal of Business Communication, among other journals and edited collections. Mathieu Chaput (PhD, Université de Montréal) is Professor in the Département Sciences humaines, Lettres et Communication at Université TÉLUQ, where he teaches organizational communication and public relations. His research focuses on the communicative constitution of organizations, rhetoric, food technology, animals in public life and organizational identity. His research has been published in journals such as Communiquer: Revue de communication sociale et publique, Communication & Organisation, Economy and Society, Management Communication Quarterly, as well as in numerous edited books. Yea-Wen Chen (PhD, The University of New Mexico) is a Professor in the School of Communication and Director of the Institute for Dialogue & Social Justice at San Diego State University. Her research agenda focuses on communicating cultural identities from the margins in the contexts of immigrant women faculty in U.S. academia, pan-Asian organizing, and critical intercultural communication pedagogy. She is the winner of 21 top paper awards at regional, national, and international communication conferences, and also a co-recipient of the 2020 Exemplary Teacher Award by the Communication & Instructional Interest Group, Western States Communication Association. She has published over 50 works, including four books and peer-reviewed articles in Communication Monographs, Journal of International and Intercultural Communication, Communication Education, Journal of Applied Communication Research, and Journal of Family Communication, and more peer-reviewed journals. George Cheney (PhD, Purdue University) is Professor Emeritus of Communication at the University of Colorado Colorado Springs. Previously, he held positions at a number of other public universities in the United States and has visited or held associate positions at universities in Western Europe, Latin America, and New Zealand. Among his administrative positions were service as Director of Graduate Studies (at several institutions), the coordinator of an interdisciplinary PhD in Communication and Information, and the Director of a human rights center along with a peace and conflict studies program. George has published numerous academic articles, reviews, opeds, and newsletter pieces. His interests range from organizational rhetoric (as represented in this volume) to applied ethics to economic, social, and environmental issues. Currently, he is serving as an independent consultant and facilitator, focused on local food systems, affordable housing, and equitable/inclusive land access. He lives in Cortez, Colorado, in the Four Corners region of the USA. Jonathan Clifton (PhD, Antwerp University) is an Associate Professor at the Université Polytechnique Hauts-de-France in Valenciennes, France. He is also an Associate Editor for the International Journal of Business Communication. His research interests focus on workplace

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interaction, and more specifically discursive approaches to leadership. He has published widely in such journals as Management Communication Quarterly, Leadership, and Human Relations. He has also co-authored two books: Narratives of Leadership: A Social Practice Perspective and Master Narratives, Identities, and the Stories of Former Slaves. Boukje Cnossen (PhD, Tilburg University) is a Professor of Entrepreneurship, Organization, and Culture at Leuphana University Lüneburg in Germany. She investigates the role of space and discourse in organizations and organizing, specifically in creative contexts, drawing on research on the communicative constitution of organization as well as various practice perspectives and often using ethnographic methods. Her research has appeared in various journals including Organization Studies and Human Relations. Charles Conrad (PhD, Kansas University) is a Professor of Organizational Communication and Organizational Rhetoric in the Department of Communication & Journalism at Texas A&M University and a past Editor of Management Communication Quarterly. His research focuses on the interface among organizational discourse, power, and politics and has appeared in the Quarterly Journal of Speech, Journal of Applied Communication Research, Communication Monographs, The Journal of Manufacturing Systems, and Management Communication Quarterly. His books include Global Engineering, Organizational Rhetoric, and Strategic Organizational Communication. Tianna L. Cobb (PhD, University of Oklahoma) is a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Health, Behavior, and Society Department at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. She is a dedicated applied research scientist with expertise in health and organizational communication. Her program of research broadly aims to increase health equity for underserved populations from an organizational lens. She has most recently led and collaborated on projects to destigmatize Black mental health, improve community safety through a community-centered leadership program, and improve equity in palliative and end-of-life care. Her publications appear in Journal of Family Communication, Journal of Behavioral Medicine, Communication Teacher, Mental Health Rhetoric Research: Toward Strategic Interventions, and Communication and Organizational Changemaking for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion: A Case Studies Approach. Cristin A. Compton (PhD, University of Missouri) is an Associate Professor in the School of Communication Studies at Kent State University. Her scholarship centers on power, identity work, and organizing processes. Specifically, Dr. Compton’s work critically examines how power communicatively intersects with identities and identity work to organize people and their lived experiences. Her research has been published in journals such as Journal of Communication, Management Communication Quarterly, Journal of Applied Communication Research, Gender, Work, and Organization, and Human Development Resource Review. Dr. Compton teaches courses in qualitative research, organizational communication, and gender and identity. François Cooren (PhD, Université de Montréal) is a Professor at the Université de Montréal, Canada. His research focuses on organizational communication, language and social interaction, and communication theory. He is Past President of the International Communication Association (ICA, 2010–2011), Past President of the International Association for Dialogue Analysis (IADA, 2012–2021), and former Editor-in-Chief of Communication Theory (2005– 2008). He was elected ICA Fellow in 2013 and NCA distinguished scholar in 2017. He has published 15 volumes and authored 85 peer-reviewed articles as well as close to 60 book chapters.

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He is one of the founding members of what is today known as the Montreal School of Organizational Communication, one of the main branches of the Communication as Constitutive of Organization (CCO) approach. Stephanie L. Dailey (PhD, The University of Texas at Austin) is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Texas State University. Her research seeks to advance research at the intersection of organizational socialization and organizational identification scholarship. Specifically, her theory-driven program of work spans three contexts: organizational membership, wellness, and social media. In addition to research, she teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in organizational communication, social media, consulting, and research methods. Marco Dehnert (MA, Arizona State University) is a doctoral student in The Hugh Downs School of Human Communication at Arizona State University-Tempe. He is a multi-method scholar who studies human-machine communication, artificial intelligence, and the social impact of communication technologies. His work integrates methods, concepts, and theories from a variety of disciplines and areas including communication studies, critical/cultural studies, human-computer and human-robot interaction, as well as sexuality studies. Marco’s research has appeared in Human-Machine Communication, Human Communication Research, and the International Journal of Social Robotics, among others. He is also part of the Relationships and Technology Lab at ASU. Debbie S. Dougherty (PhD, University of Nebraska) is a Professor of Communication at University of Missouri. Her research focuses on power and organizing, particularly as it relates to sexual harassment, social class, and emotions. Her work has been published in journals such as Harvard Business Review, Human Relations, Journal of Communication, Human Communication Research, Communication Monographs, Management Communication Quarterly, Journal of Applied Communication Research, and Sex Roles. She has also provided organizational communication training and development in a number of organizations and has been extensively utilized as a resource for news sources such as The New York Times, Newsweek, Forbes, and The Oprah Magazine. Dougherty has received a number of awards, including the NCA Applied Communication Scholar Award, The Jack Kay Award for Engaged Research, the Management Communication Quarterly Article of the Year Award, the Norman K. Denzin Qualitative Research Award, the Excellence in Education Award, and the Gold Chalk Award for graduate student mentoring. Elizabeth K. Eger (PhD, University of Colorado Boulder) is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Texas State University, USA. Her qualitative and critical communication research, pedagogy, and service explore intersectional organizing and difference; LGBTQ+ work, organizing, and health; how collectives coconstruct organizational identities; and how work shapes our lives, identities, and health. Examples of her recent published research appear in Management Communication Quarterly, International Journal of Business Communication, Departures in Critical Qualitative Research, Feminist Media Studies, Behavioral Sciences, and The Oxford Encyclopedia of Queer Studies and Communication. Eric M. Eisenberg (PhD, Michigan State University) is a Professor of Communication at the University of South Florida. Eisenberg graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Rutgers University in 1977 and received his doctorate in organizational communication from Michigan State

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University in 1982. Eisenberg twice received the National Communication Association award for the outstanding research publication in organizational communication, as well as the Burlington Foundation award for excellence in teaching. Eisenberg is the author of more than 70 articles, chapters, and books on the subjects of organizational communication, health communication, and communication theory. Eisenberg served as Dean of the USF College of Arts and Sciences for a decade, responsible for nearly 600 faculty, 18,000 students, and a budget of over $100 million. He played a major role in the university’s strategic efforts to measurably improve student success through transformed pedagogy. In May 2022, Eisenberg was selected as USF’s Interim Provost and Executive Vice President. As the chief academic officer of the University of South Florida, Dr. Eisenberg worked to aid in USF’s mission in delivering competitive undergraduate, graduate, and professional programs to generate knowledge and foster intellectual development to ensure student success in a global environment. In the Spring of 2023, Eisenberg transitioned to a new position as Senior Vice President of university-community partnerships. In the new role, Eisenberg will use his 30 years of experience at USF and the strong ties he’s built within the Tampa Bay area to develop a cohesive and intentional strategy around the university’s community engagement activities. The position aligns with a key strategic goal for USF to be a major social and economic engine through creating robust global, national and regional partnerships that help build a prosperous and sustainable future. Gail T. Fairhurst (PhD, University of Oregon) is a Distinguished University Research Professor of Organizational Communication at the University of Cincinnati, USA. She specializes in organizational and leadership communication processes, including those involving paradox, dialectics, problem-centered leadership, framing, communication constitutes organization, and organizational discourse analysis. She is the author of four books, including The Art of Framing: Managing the Language of Leadership (with R. A. Sarr), Discursive Leadership: In Conversation with Leadership Psychology, The Power of Framing: Challenging the Language of Leadership, and Performing Organizational Paradoxes (with L. L. Putnam). She has also published over 100 articles and chapters in management and communication journals and books, including The Academy of Management Annals, Academy of Management Journal, Academy of Management Review, Organization Science, Organization Studies, Human Relations, Communication Monographs, and Management Communication Quarterly. She is a Fellow of the International Communication Association, Distinguished Scholar of the National Communication Association, and Fulbright Scholar. Mikkel Flyverbom (PhD, Copenhagen Business School) is a Professor of Communication and Digital Transformations and founding Academic Program Director of BSc in Business Administration and Digital Management, both at Copenhagen Business School, Denmark. His work on technology, transparency, governance and the politics of datafication has been published in journals such as Business & Society, Organization Studies, Organization Theory, and Big Data & Society, as well as in his recent book The Digital Prism: Transparency and Managed Visibilities in a Datafied World (Cambridge University Press). He also serves on the Danish government’s Data Ethics Council and Digitalization Council, writes a tech column for the newspaper Politiken, and is a widely used expert on issues related to digital transformations. Stephanie Fox (PhD, Simon Fraser University) is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication at the Université de Montréal, Canada. Her research expertise relates to interprofessional communication and collaboration in health and social care organizations. In her engaged research projects, she often studies how collaborators navigate and make sense

About the Contributors

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of shared problems across professional and other boundaries. Her recent work examines the relational dimensions of collaboration, including team care. Adopting a social constructionist standpoint, she uses qualitative methods such as shadowing, interviews, and observations and often employs thematic, narrative, and interaction approaches to data analysis. Shiv Ganesh (PhD, Purdue University) is a Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at The University of Texas at Austin. He studies communication and collective organi­ zing in the context of globalization and digital technologies. His work has appeared in major journals in communication and organizational studies, and has been funded by a range of bodies including the Royal Society of New Zealand, and the Swedish Research Foundation. His research has received several major awards from the International Communication Association and National Communication Association. Patricia Geist-Martin (PhD, Purdue University) is an Emerita Professor at San Diego State University. Her research examines narratives and the process of storying identity, voice, ideology, and control in organizations and families, particularly in health and illness. She has published five books and over 100 articles and book chapters. Her most recent book (with Sarah Parsloe), entitled Falling in Love with the Process: A Stroke Survivor’s Story, offers a case study of one man’s resilience in recovery from a severe stroke and the advocacy he maintains today. She is finalizing a memoir, entitled The Infinite Now: A Mother’s Past, A Daughter’s Future, and she has begun work on a co-authored book with Lisa Schenk, tentatively titled Wild Women: Leading Beyond Limits. Silvia Gherardi is Senior Professor of Sociology of Organization at the University of Trento in Italy, where she founded the Research Unit on Communication, Organizational Learning, and Aesthetics (www.unitn.it/rucola). She is also Professor II at the School of Business, Society and Engineering, Mӓlardalens University in Sweden. She received Honorary Doctorate degrees from Roskilde University (2005), East Finland University (2010), and St Andrews University (2014). Her research interests include feminist new materialism, entrepreneurship, epistemology of practice, and postqualitative methodologies in organization studies. Recent publications include How to Conduct Practice-Based Studies: Problems and Methods (Edward Elgar, 2019) and in collaboration with Michela Cozza, The Posthumanist Epistemology of Practice Theory (Palgrave, 2024). Jennifer L. Gibbs (PhD, University of Southern California) is a Professor of Communication at the University of California, Santa Barbara with an affiliated appointment in the Technology Management Program. Her research focuses on communication practices that build culture, community, and well-being in global, remote, digital, and hybrid work and the affordances of new technologies for such practices. She recently co-authored two books (Distracted: Staying Connected without Losing Focus and Organizing Inclusion), as well as publishing over 50 peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters in a variety of disciplines. Professor Gibbs is a Fellow of the International Communication Association as well as former Editor of Communication Research and the immediate past chair of the CTO division of the Academy of Management. Rebecca Gill (PhD, University of Utah) is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication at Wake Forest University and the Larry J. and LeAnn E. Merlo Presidential Chair for Communications and Entrepreneurship. She studies entrepreneurial identity and

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practice, including how narrative, networks, and place shape entrepreneurial and occupational identity and vice-versa. Her work has been published in Communication Monographs, Communication Theory, Human Relations, Management Communication Quarterly, and Organisation, among other outlets. Laura Ginoux (MA, Université de Montréal) is a doctoral student and lecturer in the Department of Communication at the Université de Montréal, Canada. Her research is situated at the crossroads between health communication, intercultural interactions, and organizational collaboration. Her current research focuses on family caregiver-health physician interactions and knowledge sharing in indigenous communities. She is also interested in organizational conflict, interprofessional collaboration, and the ways organizing happens in nonprofit contexts and emotions are managed in health care teams. Her methodological choices align with her research focus: She is committed to developing a decolonial approach to research and integrating collaborative principles of co-design and community-based participation into her study of knowledge sharing. Angela N. Gist-Mackey (PhD, University of Missouri) is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Kansas with expertise in organizational communication. She is an interpretive critical scholar who largely researches issues of social mobility and power in organized contexts. Much of Dr. Gist-Mackey’s research is engaged scholarship partnering with local, regional, and campus organizations. Her scholarship about topics such as unemployment, financial insecurity, and social mobility has been published in outlets such as Organization Studies, Communication Monographs, Journal of Applied Communication Research, Management Communication Quarterly, and Departures in Critical Qualitative Research, among others. Gist-Mackey teaches courses about topics including social identity and stigma, organizational culture, relational dynamics in the workplace, destructive organizational behavior, and qualitative methodology. Kate Lockwood Harris (PhD, University of Colorado Boulder) is an Associate Professor of Organizational Communication at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. Her research, which focuses on the relationship between violence and communication, has won accolades from the National Communication Association, the International Communication Association, the Organization for the Study of Communication, Language, and Gender, and the European Group for Organizational Studies. She is the author of Beyond the Rapist: Title IX and Sexual Violence on US Campuses (Oxford University Press, 2019) and is currently finishing a second book on resolving organizational trauma. Anthony Hussenot (PhD, Université Nice Sophia Antipolis) is a Professor in Organization Studies at the Université Côte d’Azur, France. His research interests include process thinking, temporality, event, and alternative ways of working and organizing. He is leading the Alterorganizing research team (CNRS-GREDEG), a team dedicated to studying alternative dynamics of collaboration and organization that are emerging to respond to social, technological, and environmental issues. His research has been published in several academic journals such as Organization Studies, Management and International Journal of Organizational Analysis. His latest book, Pourquoi Travailler? (in French, EMS, 2022) deals with the role and status of work in our society. Jody L. S. Jahn (PhD, University of California, Santa Barbara) is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication at University of Colorado Boulder. Her research examines

About the Contributors

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how members of hazardous organizations communicate to negotiate action, and how members interface with organizational safety policies and documents. She has published in Management Communication Quarterly, Communication Monographs, Journal of Applied Communication Research, Safety Science, and elsewhere. Samantha James (MA, The University of Alabama) is a doctoral candidate in Organizational Communication and Technology at The University of Texas at Austin. Her research focuses on the intersection of affect, digital technology-mediated communication, and globalization. She has publications in outlets such as Seoul National University Press, has presented awardwinning work at national and international conferences for communication scholarship, and is a 2022–2023 Fulbright Research Award recipient. Salla-Maaria Laaksonen (PhD, University of Helsinki) is a Senior Researcher at the Centre for Consumer Society Research and an Adjunct Professor of Media and Communication studies at the University of Helsinki. Her research areas are technology, organizations, and new media, including social evaluation of organizations in the hybrid media system, the organi­ zation of online social movements, and the use of data and algorithms in organizations. She is also an expert in digital research methods with solid experience in computational social science research projects and research use of social media data. Dr. Laaksonen is the Chair Emerita and founding member of the Finnish Research Association of Digital Social Sciences Rajapinta and the former Chair of the Nordmedia Organization, Communication & Promotion division. Paul Leonardi (PhD, Stanford University) is the Duca Family Professor of Technology Management at UC Santa Barbara. His research, teaching, and consulting focus on helping companies to create and share knowledge more effectively. To do this, he examines how implementing new technologies and harnessing the power of informal social networks can help organizations take advantage of their knowledge assets to create and implement innovative products. Paul has published widely on these themes across the fields of Management, Communication, and Information Systems. He is also Fellow of the Academy of Management and of the International Communication Association. Currently, he serves as Chair of the newly created Department of Technology Management—a department focused on organizational studies of technological innovation—in UCSB’s College of Engineering. Paul earned his PhD in Management Science and Engineering from Stanford University. Kurt Lindemann (PhD, Arizona State University) is a Professor in the School of Communication and Associate Dean of Academic Affairs in the College of Professional Studies and Fine Arts at San Diego State University. His research on disability, gender, and sport in organi­ zational contexts has been published in Text and Performance Quarterly, Qualitative Inquiry, Communication and Sport, and Western Journal of Communication, among other journals. His work also appears in numerous edited books on sports, media, organizational communication, qualitative methods, and communication pedagogy. His performance work as a writer, director, and performer has been staged at universities and other public venues across the country. He is the author of Composing Research, Communicating Results: Writing the Communication Research Paper. Philippe Lorino (PhD, Université Paris-Est-Créteil-Val-de-Marne) is an Emeritus Distinguished Professor at ESSEC Business School and adviser to the French Nuclear Safety Authority. He has served as a senior civil servant in the French Government and as finance manager in an

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international manufacturing company. He draws from pragmatist philosophy to study organi­ zations as organizing processes oriented toward the exploration of complex and uncertain futures, rather than organizational structures. He is particularly interested in inquiry-based participative management, semiotic approaches to managerial instruments, and democratic forms of governance and public risk control. He has published articles in top-ranking journals and the book Pragmatism and Organization Studies (Oxford University Press) which won the 2019 EGOS Book Award. Spencer Margulies (MA, University of South Florida) is a doctoral student at the University of South Florida. His research interests include organizational and intercultural communication as these relate to issues of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. Kirstie McAllum (PhD, University of Waikato) is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication at the Université de Montréal, Canada. Her interest in the meanings of nonstandard work and collaboration has led her to examine topics related to volunteering, nonprofit organizing, the care of older adults, and the occupational experiences of non-standard workers in health care contexts, such as volunteers and care workers. Her current project focuses on how workers in long-term care for older adults can look after each other in times of crisis. She has used phenomenological and case study methodologies in her qualitative research and is committed to conducting engaged research developed in conjunction with community partners. Jamie McDonald (PhD, University of Colorado Boulder) is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Texas at San Antonio, USA. His research focuses on identity, difference, and intersectionality in organizational contexts; feminist and queer approaches to organizing; and researcher reflexivity in qualitative research. His work has appeared in peer-reviewed journals such as Communication Theory, Management Communication Quarterly, Management Learning, and Gender, Work, and Organization. He is co-editor of Movements in Organizational Communication Research (Routledge, 2019). Jennifer Mease (also PeeksMease, PhD, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) currently serves as the Assistant Vice Chancellor of Inclusive Leadership and Learning at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln. In this role, she supports the development of programs, resources, networks, and relationships that pursue inclusive excellence for all. She earned her PhD in Communication Studies from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and her MA in Human Communication from Arizona State University. Her research addresses how social bias is built into organizational structures, and how individuals and groups cope with, challenge, and change those structures. In all aspects of her work, she is guided by her commitment to courageous humility and to creating the conditions under which all people can be the best versions of themselves. Rebecca J. Meisenbach (PhD, Purdue University) is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Missouri, USA. She researches issues of identity, gender, and ethics through an organizational lens. Her current research considers how individuals and organizations manage moments of stigmatized identities. She has used a variety of methods in her published research, including hermeneutic phenomenology. Her scholarship has been published in journals such as Communication Monographs, Management Communication Quarterly, Journal of Applied Communication Research, Sex Roles, and American Behavioral Scientist.

About the Contributors

xxi

Trudy Milburn (PhD, University of Massachusetts Amherst) is the Associate Vice President for Academic Affairs at Southern Connecticut State University. Dr. Milburn has authored, edited, and co-authored four books and numerous articles and chapters about cultural communication and organizations using research methods stemming from ethnography of communication, membership categorization, and ethnomethodology. She has been a tenured Associate Professor on the faculties of California State University, Channel Islands and Baruch College/The City University of New York. Karen K. Myers (PhD, Arizona State University) is a Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her research includes membership negotiation (socialization, assimilation); vocational anticipatory socialization; communicative constitution of organizations; emotions in the workplace; and workplace flexibility. She has published in Management Communication Quarterly, Human Communication Research, Communication Monographs, Human Relations, Journal of Applied Communication Research, and elsewhere. Ellen Nathues (PhD, University of Twente) is an Assistant Professor of Organization, Collaboration & Communication at University of Twente in the Netherlands. She is also an affiliated member of the LOST (Leuphana Organization Studies) group and initiator of The CCO Data Collective. Her research broadly focuses on work and organizing processes in pluralistic contexts, including interorganizational teams, experimental spaces, or learning communities. She also has a keen interest in methodological issues related to qualitative research and academic writing. Her work has been published in journals such as Organization Studies, Strategic Organization, and Small Group Research. Nitzan Navick (MA, University of California, Santa Barbara) is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Communication at the University of California, Santa Barbara. With a focus on remote work and the use of information and communication technologies, her research examines how employees establish and maintain work-life boundaries through the utilization of technological affordances. Nitzan has extensive research experience in other areas as well, covering topics such as workplace cybersexual harassment, the adoption of AI in the legal sector, and concertive control in self-organizing online communities. In addition to her academic pursuits, Nitzan has applied her expertise to real-world problems through consulting for various organizations. She has also presented her research findings at national and international conferences in the fields of Communication and Management. Beatriz Nieto-Fernandez (PhD, University of South Florida) is an Assistant Professor of Organizational Communication at Florida Atlantic University. Her current research centers on organizations that provide direct-to-consumer genetic testing, exploring the complex relationship between organizational identity and organizational stakeholders, and the role of organizations in framing racial identification and belonging in the United States. She employs a postcolonial approach to understand corporate media use in the context of biocapitalism, investigating the ways in which direct-to-consumer genetic testing organizations utilize different types of media and rhetorical devices to sell ideas of ancestry, race, and health advocacy to their customers. Blessing Ekene Okafor (MA, University of Lagos; MA, North Dakota State University) is an instructor and a PhD candidate in the Department of Communication at University of Missouri, Columbia, where she specializes in teaching Organizational Advocacy and Public Speaking and

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in undertaking both qualitative and quantitative methods research in organizational communication with a focus on the nature of dissent in the corporate environment. She explores the various expressions of dissent and how employees can effectively communicate in both social and cultural contexts. Her research interests include workplace communication, organizational dissent, organizational culture, power, and identity. Her research has been published in various journals such as Communication Studies, Health Communication, Western Journal of Communication, and Journal of Family Communication. She holds a bachelor’s degree in English Language and Literature from Nnamdi Azikiwe University (Nigeria), a master’s degree in English Language from the University of Lagos (Nigeria), and a master’s degree in Communication from North Dakota State University. Sunny Lie Owens (PhD, University of Massachusetts Amherst) is an Associate Professor of Communication at California Polytechnic University, Pomona. She has authored over a dozen publications, including several peer-reviewed articles on ethno-religious identity and communication, and a co-authored book on Chinese and U.S. American cultural differences in humanmachine interaction. Her current research interests include Chinese diaspora identity, and matchmaking and cultural practices of romantic relating in the USA. Mahuya Pal (PhD, Purdue University) is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication. Her critical organizational communication research explores decolonial politics anchored in organizing of resistance by underprivileged communities against institutional power. She contextualizes her research within the 21st-century concerns about unbridled growth of transnational corporations, displacement and dispossession of communities, ever-widening disparities, and environmental degradation. Using a critical theoretical lens, and methodological frames such as ethnography, self-reflexive fieldwork, focus groups, interviews, and thematic analysis, Dr. Pal’s work specifically explores issues of marginality, imperial formations, poverty, social and environmental justice. Her research has been published in Human Relations, Communication Monographs, Communication Theory, Communication Yearbook, Communication, Culture & Critique, Management Communication Quarterly, and elsewhere. Dr. Pal is former Chair of the Organizational Communication Division, National Communication Association, former Associate Editor of Journal of Applied Communication Research and is currently the Editor-Elect of Journal of International and Intercultural Communication. Madeline S. Pringle (MA, University of Missouri) is a doctoral student in the Department of Communication at the University of Missouri. She is an interpretive, post-structural scholar with an enthusiastic passion for qualitative research methodologies and methods. Her empirical research sits at the intersection of organizational communication and identity, centering on how individuals engage in identity management in different variations of organizing and diverse organizations. Although heavily situated in a discursive approach, Maddy emphasizes the importance of sociomateriality in her work. Her research also investigates the role of place (both discursive meanings and material aspects) and its reciprocal influence with one’s identity(ies) and the identity management process. Linda L. Putnam (PhD, University of Minnesota) is a Distinguished Research Professor Emerita in the Department of Communication at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her research interests include paradoxes and contradictions, negotiation, organizational conflict, communication constitutes organization, and organizational discourse analysis. She is the co-editor of thirteen books and author of over 180 articles and book chapters. Her articles appear

About the Contributors

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in such journals as Management Communication Quarterly, Communication Monographs, Academy of Management Review, Human Relations, Organization Studies, and Negotiation Journal. She is a Distinguished Scholar of the National Communication Association, a Fellow of the International Communication Association, the recipient of life-time achievement awards from the International Association for Conflict Management and Management Communication Quarterly, and the recipient of Honorary Doctorates from the University of Montreal in Canada and Aalto University in Helsinki, Finland. Evgeniya Pyatovskaya (MA, Tomsk State University) is a doctoral candidate at the University of South Florida. Her research interests include organizational, intercultural communication, and feminist perspectives on communication, and organizational leadership and resilience. Evgeniya is a Fulbright FLTA and Atlas Corps alumna with extensive international work experience that she builds on in her scholarly work. Daniel Robichaud (PhD, Université de Montréal) is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication at the Université de Montréal. His recent research focuses on the use of language and communication in interorganizational collaboration and identity construction, as well as on theories of agency. Luisa Ruge-Jones (PhD, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign) is an Assistant Professor of Communication at the University of Dayton. Her research investigates how policies and organi­ zational structures affect and are affected by groups and individual’s interactions. Specifically, her research primarily focuses on contexts of interdisciplinary and interorganizational collaboration, team science, group networks, and higher education. Silpa Satheesh (PhD, University of South Florida) is an Assistant Professor at the School of Social Sciences, Mahatma Gandhi University, Kerala (and affiliate faculty at the School of Gender Studies). Prior to this, she worked as an Assistant Professor at the School of Development at Azim Premji University, Bengaluru. Her teaching and research interests are broadly centred in the fields of political economy, social movements, ethnography, labourenvironmental relation, and just-transition. Her research aims to look into the framing processes and mobilizing experiences surrounding environmental grievances created by neoliberal capitalism. Silpa has published her research in journals and edited volumes including Critical Asian Studies, Sociology Compass, The Palgrave Handbook of Environmental Labour Studies, Diversity and Inclusion in Environmentalism, and Interface: A Journal for and about Social Movements. She holds a PhD in Sociology from University of South Florida, Tampa, an MPhil in Applied Economics from Centre for Development Studies (JNU), and an MA in Economics from University of Hyderabad. Craig R. Scott (PhD, Arizona State University) is the John T. Jones, Jr. Centennial Professor and Chair of the Department of Communication Studies at The University of Texas at Austin. He is also a Senior Faculty Research Associate with the Center for Media Engagement in the Moody College of Communication. Scott’s research and teaching are primarily focused on organizational communication, where he examines issues of anonymity and identity/identification in various organizational settings. His current interests center around “hidden organi­ zations.” Scott is the 2021 recipient of the prestigious Jablin Award for Outstanding Contributions to Organizational Communication. He is co-editor of the International Encyclopedia of Organizational Communication and serves on editorial boards for multiple journals in the field.

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Viviane Sergi (PhD, HEC Montréal) is a Professor in Management in the Department of Management at ESG UQAM in Montréal, Canada. Her research interests include process thinking, performativity, leadership, project organizing and the transformation of work. Her recent studies have explored how communication is, in various settings, constitutive of organizational phenomena. She also has keen interests in methodological issues related to qualitative research and in academic writing. She is a Co-Founder of the Groupe de recherche sur la communication organisante (RECOR). Her work has been published in journals such as Academy of Management Annals, Human Relations, Organization Studies, Strategic Organization, Long Range Planning, Qualitative Research in Organizations and Management, M@n@gement, and ephemera. Jan-Oddvar Sørnes (PhD, Norwegian University of Science and Technology) a Professor at the Nord University Business School of Nord University. Dr. Sørnes’s research areas include the study of narratives, energy management, cross cultural communication, crisis communication, and grounded theory as a research strategy. Sørnes’s current work emphasizes narrative theory, risk, and emergency communication, including the risk a leader takes to blow the whistle on their boss. Recent books include, Peer J. Svenkerud, Jan-O. Sørnes, & L. D. Browning (Eds.). (2022). Whistleblowing, Communication and Consequences: Lessons from The Norwegian National Lottery. Routledge; Soelberg, F., Browning, L. D., & Sørnes, J. O. (Eds.). (2019). High North Stories in a Time of Transition: Gutsy Narratives and Wild Observations. Routledge; Sørnes, J. O., Browning, L. D., & Henricksen. J. T. (Eds.). (2015). Culture, Development and Petroleum: An Ethnography of the High North. Routledge. Keri K. Stephens (PhD, The University of Texas at Austin) is a Professor in Organizational Communication Technology, a Distinguished Teaching Professor, and Co-Director of Technology, Information, & Policy Institute in the Moody College of Communication at The University of Texas at Austin. Her research program examines the role of technology in organizational practices and organizing processes, especially in contexts of crisis, disaster, and health. She has authored over 100 articles appearing in research journals, proceedings, and books. Her two most recent books are the award-winning book New Media in Times of Crisis (2019, Routledge), and the two-time, national-level, award-winning book Negotiating Control: Organizations and Mobile Communication (2018, Oxford University Press). Stephens’ research has received over $6 million of external funding by organizations like the National Science Foundation and she is a former Associate Editor for Management Communication Quarterly. She gave a TEDx Talk about her work on social media and how people were rescued from flooding during Hurricane Harvey. Cynthia Stohl (PhD, Purdue University) is a Distinguished Professor of Communication, an affiliate faculty member of the Technology Management Program, and past Director of the Center for Information Technology and Society at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is also an affiliate faculty member in the Communication and Culture Department of Audiencia Business School in Nantes, France. Focusing on globalization, emerging organi­ zational forms in an era of digital ubiquity, collective action, corporate social responsibility, workers’ rights, and memorable messages, her award-winning books and articles appear in outlets including Cambridge University Press, Communication Theory, Management Communication Quarterly, Journal of Communication, and Journal of Business Ethics. Sarah J. Tracy (PhD, University of Colorado Boulder) is a Professor and School Director in The Hugh Downs School of Human Communication at Arizona State University-Tempe. Her research and teaching focus on qualitative research methods and organizational communication,

About the Contributors

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with expertise in emotional labor, bullying, compassion, burnout, and workplace flourishing. She is a Distinguished Scholar of The National Communication Association, Distinguished Teacher of The Western States Communication Association, author of more than 100 scholarly publications, and Co-Founder of The Transformation Project, a consortium of faculty, students, and community members who seek to discover and promote creative change processes that encourage healthy communication patterns, collaborative group behavior, and equitable forms of social organization. Jeffrey W. Treem (PhD, Northwestern University) is a professor of Integrated Marketing Communications in the Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications at Northwestern University. His research examines the relationship between technology use and social perceptions of expertise, primarily in organizational contexts. Specifically, this work explores how the material affordances of communication technologies affect attributions of knowledge. Consuelo Vásquez (PhD, Université de Montréal) is a Professor in Organizational Communication in the Département de communication sociale et publique at the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM). Her research interests include ethnography, the communicative constitution of organization, and the epistemologies of the South. Her work has been published in Communication Theory, Discourse and Communication, Human Relations, Qualitative Research in Organization and Management, Organicom, and other international journals. She is Co-Founder of the Groupe de recherche sur la communication organisante (RECOR) and of the Red Latinoamericana de Investigación en Comunicación Organizacional (RedLAco). Mark van Vuuren (PhD, University of Twente) is an Associate Professor of Organizational Communication at the University of Twente, the Netherlands. His research focuses on organizational communication, with a particular interest in positive organizing and the ways professionals make sense of their working lives through their interactions. As a hybrid academic, he aims to combine the rigor of science with relevance for practice. Anna Wiederhold Wolfe (PhD, Ohio University) is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication and Journalism at Texas A&M University. Dr. Wolfe’s research is centrally concerned with understanding how we connect with others across our differences. In pursuit of this goal, she investigates how individuals form collective identities with and against others, how narratives mobilize collectivities for action, and how processes of dialogue and deliberation build bridges between oppositional stakeholders to facilitate deeper shared understandings and more democratic public decisions. Her work has been published in journals such as Journal of Communication, Management Communication Quarterly, and Journal of Applied Communication Research. Her co-authored book, Sex and Stigma: Stories of Everyday Life in Nevada’s Legal Brothels received five disciplinary book awards. Consistent with the commitments of engaged communication research, much of Dr. Wolfe’s work is conducted collaboratively, using communication theory in the service of addressing everyday problems of living in a pluralistic society. Elizabeth Wilhoit Larson (PhD, Purdue University) is an Associate Professor of Communication in the School of Communication and Journalism at Auburn University. Larson teaches and researches in the area of organizational communication. Larson’s research focuses on three areas within organizational communication. First, she studies the role of nonhumans and materiality in organizations, asking questions about how aspects of organizations like

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space, technology, and transportation make a difference in the ontology of organizations. Second, she explores issues of organizing and the question of what is an organization. Third, her research considers gendered careers and organizations, seeking to understand how women gain agency at work. Larson’s research has been published in outlets including Organization Studies, Organization, Communication Theory, Management Communication Quarterly, The Annals of the International Communication Association, Gender, Work & Organization, Western Journal of Communication, Field Methods, Culture & Organization, Journal of Organizational Change Management, Journal of Communication and Religion, Language Under Discussion, and The International Encyclopedia of Organizational Communication. Heather M. Zoller (PhD, Purdue University) is a Professor in the School of Communication, Film, & Media Studies at the University of Cincinnati, USA, and Editor-in-Chief of Journal of Applied Communication Research. Her research focuses on organizing and health politics, including occupational, environmental, and economic health issues. Her work appears in journals such as Communication Monographs, Communication Theory, and Management Communication Quarterly. She also co-edited the book Emerging Perspectives in Health Communication: Meaning, Culture, and Power with Mohan Dutta. She is a member of the U.S. Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine Committee on Personal and Protective Equipment. Andrea Zorn (MA, Massey University) is a PhD candidate and Senior Tutor in the School of Communication, Journalism and Marketing at Massey University in Auckland, New Zealand. Her research interests include the communicative dimensions of organizing challenges faced by women and marginalized communities. Her doctoral thesis uses a culture-centered approach to examine meaningful work within the context of women entrepreneurs experiencing poverty and other forms of hardship with the specific aim of creating space for voices from marginalized and subaltern communities. She has co-authored book chapters on intergenerational communication and preparing communication students for graduate school. She is currently preparing manuscripts from her doctoral research on low-income women in entrepreneurship and their communities of practice. She is on the teaching team for Communication Theory and Practice, with students nominating her for the 2020 Lecturer of the Year. Her work with the CARE centre contributes to multiple research projects on anti-violence and racism in Aotearoa/New Zealand. Theodore E. (Ted) Zorn (PhD, University of Kentucky) is a Professor of Organizational Communication at Massey University in New Zealand. He is former Dean of Massey Business School and former Deputy Vice-Chancellor at Massey University and has held other leadership roles at Massey and at other universities. His teaching and research specialties are organi­ zational communication, organizational change processes, and enhancing workplace wellbeing. He has published widely in communication and management journals and has consulted with a wide range of companies, government organizations and not-for-profit organizations. He is Past Editor of the academic journal Management Communication Quarterly, and a past recipient of the International Communication Association’s Frederic Jablin Award for Outstanding Contribution to Organizational Communication. Ted’s current research is focusing on change leaders’ meanings and unspoken rationales for their work.

Foreword James R. Barker What does qualitative research in organizational communication do for us? A consequential question, a field-defining question, yet one we rarely ask ourselves. Rather, we mostly assume that our qualitative research does something useful. But what is that usefulness? Why do we do qualitative research? Why do we expend the labor to do the work? Why did we spend, and often still spend, considerable time and energy to justify our labor in qualitative research? So then, what does qualitative research in organizational communication do for us? Qualitative research in organizational communication compels us to grapple with the human condition, with the character and consequences of our human communication in complex communicative organizations; organizations that mark, even define, our lives as (hyper)modern people. Qualitative research compels us to engage with the human condition, with our shared humanity in organizations, the good, the bad, the ugly, and the mundane. Organizational communication scholars who first employed qualitative research were keenly focused on telling a better, more sophisticated, more useful, story about humans in organi­ zations than what we could tell at the time. They wanted to delve deeper into that character and those consequences. Their spirit of inquiry, persistence, and determination have carried through across the generations to the present. Now, we have reached the point at which our qualitative research, our collective work, warrants a handbook. Field handbooks are genealogies of sorts, documented accounts of where we have come from, and where we are going next. Accounts that will influence generations to come. Field handbooks are markers, crossroads, pivotal points of assimilating our knowledge and charting a course ahead. A handbook stands as a proclamation of maturity, a signal that a field is ready to do that assimilating of the past and that charting of the future. Which brings us to the present Sage Handbook of Qualitative Research in Organizational Communication, the first of its kind. All of us who have committed ourselves to qualitative organizational communication research deserve to pause and celebrate this moment, this marker of field maturity. We celebrate that our research has progressed to this point of significance, of proven impact, of demonstrated usefulness. Yes! Such a pause is also a suitable time to review how our qualitative research has progressed to this point of significance in our engagement with human communication in organizations. A review of the various Sage Handbooks of Organizational Communication, from the first edition to the latest, sees our qualitative research progressing from precious minimal to rather plentiful presence. If we expand our review out to journals, including our field’s flagship journal, Management Communication Quarterly, we find an amazing and invigorating evolution of sophistication and dynamism in our ability to engage with the human condition, from our earliest engagement with power and oppression to today’s readiness to engage with truly challenging human organizational experiences such as racism, incivility, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and postcolonialism. Such bold and often perilous engagement is essential for our human reconciliation and movement forward together. We find the same year-over-year increasing sophistication and dynamism in our methodologies and methods. From our first forays into interviewing and participant observation to early

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ethnographies to discourse analysis to today’s applications of powerful methods in activism, digital media, and postqualitative inquiry. Our qualitative research has continually evolved new and robust ways for moving us all toward better, more human and humane organizations. Yes, we have reached the point at which our own handbook is warranted and needed. The present volume meets that need directly. Our first Sage Handbook of Qualitative Research in Organizational Communication does what a field handbook needs to do: assimilate and demarcate the significance of our collective qualitative research on the human (and posthuman) condition in complex organizations and cast our direction forward. The reader will find the requisite major sections on philosophical and theoretical approaches that have influenced qualitative research, data collection, and analysis methods, and the future of qualitative inquiry in our field. But a deeper gaze into the specific chapters reveals that ever-increasing sophistication and dynamism we have achieved in and through our methodological work. The wellestablished approaches and methods we have developed, as well as the provocative new ones we are developing, allow us to examine pressing communicative organizational phenomena in local, global, and “glocal” contexts. Our three editors, Boris Brummans, Bryan Taylor, and Anu Sivunen, together represent the broad appeal, influence, and reach of our research. Their work, itself, is a demonstration of the increasing value and impact of qualitative research in organizational communication. These three renowned scholars are perfectly positioned to assimilate our past work and chart the next path forward. They have brought together an assembly of authors representing the best exemplars of our qualitative scholarship. The result is that requisite handbook, that genealogy of our work so far and charge to go forward, to be even better at that necessary grappling with the vital role of human communication in organizations. For the publication of a field handbook is both a celebration and challenge. We, as scholars, are committed to taking that challenge, to getting ever better at what we do. How we take up that challenge is a consequence of this, the inaugural Sage Handbook of Qualitative Research in Organizational Communication. Our scholarly future is cast by the authors and by the readers of this handbook. That is a good thing, as it should be. So read and move our scholarship forward, while always grappling with the good, the bad, the ugly and the mundane of us, our organizational, communicative humanness. That focus, the challenge of engaging with the inescapable character and consequences of our human communication, that essential gift, is what qualitative research does for us.

Acknowledgments It takes a village to create a handbook; that is, this kind of collaborative effort can only emerge as part of an unfolding field of relation. Here, we would like to express our profound gratitude to the following people who helped us co-compose this field. First, we are tremendously grateful to our stellar international cast of 85 contributors, for this volume would never have seen the light of day without their insightful contributions and extraordinary generosity. We are also extremely grateful to 15 colleagues from around the world, who agreed to serve on our Editorial Advisory Board and provide their expertise during our book’s becoming. A very special note of thanks goes to the wonderful people at Sage, who guided us through the publication of this first handbook of its kind with exceptional professionalism and remarkable patience: Senior Publisher Matthew Waters, Reference Manager Colette Wilson, Assistant Editors Charlotte Hanson and Benedict Hegarty, Production Editor Gourav Kumar, Copyeditor Clare Weaver, Proofreader Derek Markham, Marketing Manager Ben Sherwood, and Senior Graphic Designer Ginkhan Siam. Last, but in many ways first, we are most grateful to our dear families, whose love, kindness, and support continuously in-form our unfolding trajectories. Boris H. J. M. Brummans, Montréal, Canada Bryan C. Taylor, Boulder, USA Anu Sivunen, Jyväskylä, Finland

Introduction: Toward a Methodological Lingua Franca for Qualitative Research in Organizational Communication B o r i s H . J . M . B r u m m a n s , B r y a n C . Ta y l o r , and Anu Sivunen The organizational communication discipline has existed as a distinct subfield of communication studies for nearly 70 years. Typically, scholars in this discipline study discursive practices and interactional processes that shape the structures and cultures of human organizing—including, for example, identification, narrative, and socialization (see Jablin, et al., 1987; Jablin & Putnam, 2001; Putnam & Mumby, 2014). Tracing its roots to the postwar growth of business and management studies, the field’s programs of theory, research, and teaching have evolved to engage the dynamic conditions of postindustrial organizing, including corporate social responsibility, digitalization, globalization, the knowledge economy, and growing campaigns for workforce diversity, equity, and inclusion. Over the past century, the field has increasingly expanded from its North American origins to include nations in Asia (e.g., China and Japan), Australasia (e.g., Australia and New Zealand), Latin America (e.g., Brazil and Mexico), Northern Europe

(e.g., Denmark, Finland, and Sweden), and Western Europe (e.g., France, Germany, and the Netherlands).1 In their various roles (e.g., as journal editors and professional association officers), organizational communication scholars promote the international and interdisciplinary study of language, culture, and society as significant features of organizational life. While maintaining a focus on conventional topics of corporate and professional communication (e.g., collaboration, decision-making, and leadership), they also display strong interpretivist and critical commitments to studying meaning and power as central elements of organizational communication. Increasingly, these studies depict communication as a process conducted in (and around) informal, alternative, and nontraditional sites of organizing (e.g., community associations, nonprofit and volunteer groups, political campaigns, or social movements). Methodologically, these commitments have shaped robust traditions of qualitative

INTRODUCTION

research in organizational communication studies (e.g., associated with the use of participant-observation, interviewing, and artifact/textual analysis). Emerging from the interpretive and critical turns developed in the Western social sciences and humanities from the 1970s onward, these traditions have continued to evolve and proliferate. While the field continues to display methodological diversity—most recently, including new materialist, postcolonial, and postqualitative turns—this proliferation has arguably achieved a critical mass. Evidence of this trend is displayed in two findings. First, as noted by Keri Stephens (2017) in her content analysis of Management Communication Quarterly, the field’s flagship journal, “In the past 15 years, two thirds of the published empirical articles in MCQ contained at least some qualitative methodological approaches” (p. 132, emphasis added). Second, at least one metric indicates this predominance remains steady. Our recent Google Scholar search for publications since 2019 tagged with the keywords “organizational communication” AND “quantitative methods” returned 5,810 results. Conducting the same search for that period using the keyword “organizational communication” AND “qualitative methods” returned 8,490 results. Aggregating those two search results to produce a combined total creates a proportional distribution of 59% qualitative vs. 41% quantitative research listings (a finding that roughly correlates with Stephens’s results, though a rebalancing of methodological approaches seems underway). While these are admittedly general indicators, they nonetheless suggest that a majority of organizational communication scholars affiliate in some fashion with the conduct of qualitative research. To date, the development of qualitative research traditions in organizational communication has been dispersed across various book chapters and journal articles (e.g., GistMackey & Kingsford, 2020; Jensen et  al., 2020; Tracy et al., 2014; Taylor et al., 2021; Wilhoit, 2017), and occasional commentary

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in field-related and general methodology textbooks (e.g., Lindlof & Taylor, 2017; Tracy, 2020). These efforts have been valuable. However, as James Barker notes in his foreword to this handbook, no single, comprehensive text exists that consolidates authoritative reviews, related commentary, and agenda-setting statements on this topic. For example, the first edition of the Handbook of Organizational Communication, published by Sage, did not include specific chapters on research methods; the second edition contained one chapter on qualitative methods, plus one chapter on discourse analysis; and the third edition included a stand-alone section on research methods, including chapters on field research, ethnography and qualitative methods, discourse analysis, and mixed methods (see Jablin et al., 1987; Jablin & Putnam, 2001; Putnam & Mumby, 2014). Again, while these efforts are useful, a comprehensive volume would ideally promote the coherence and consistency of qualitative research in organizational communication, as it is taught, conducted, and evaluated. It would encourage development of a methodological lingua franca to guide the field’s growing expansion across international and interdisciplinary boundaries. Its contents would orient both mature and emerging scholars to historical legacies and developing opportunities that shape the field’s use of qualitative methodologies. They, subsequently, would be better equipped to engage with urgent challenges of contemporary organizing and communication. Examples here include communication technology use, work-life issues, digital transformation, corporate social responsibility, and questions of identity. This handbook is designed to achieve these goals. As the first volume of this kind in the field, it presents state-of-the art overviews and critical discussions by high-profile scholars, both senior and junior, from different parts of the world. Its contents focus on key onto-epistemological approaches to qualitative research in organizational communication, on specific methods of data collection

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and analysis, on questions of representation, and on the contributions of qualitative methodology to key research programs in the field. In what follows, we explain the structure of this volume and provide an overview of its chapters.

CHAPTER OVERVIEW This handbook consists of four main parts: (1) approaches to qualitative research in the field of organizational communication; (2) data collection methods and issues; (3) data analysis methods and issues of representation; and (4) the future of qualitative organizational communication research. While these parts may appear to be separate, the topics and issues treated in their chapters are inextricably connected. Hence, throughout the book, we signal intertextual connections between arguments made in those chapters— for example, between discussions of distinctive traditions, and discussions focused on their associated programs of data collection and/or analysis. Because of these connections, some topics reappear in a number of chapters—even as they are discussed from different angles. Chapters in “Part I: Approaches to Qualitative Organizational Communication Research” address philosophical foundations and theoretical traditions that have influenced the field of qualitative organizational communication research. They review key concepts and premises that distinguish each approach; discuss prominent exemplars and research programs; explore current debates and controversies among affiliated scholars; and project the future of each approach within organizational communication studies. Specifically, in Chapter 1, Jody Jahn and Karen Myers discuss mixed methods approaches. Traditionally, this set of approaches has been associated with postpositivist projects seeking to utilize qualitative findings to contextualize and enhance the

validity of their quantitative findings (e.g., through triangulation). This practice has been controversial, generating debates about whether positivist and naturalistic logics of research can (or should) be reconciled—and if so, exactly how. To advance this conversation, Jahn and Myers promote an alternate framework of “mixed research.” This alternative is admittedly challenging, in that it requires researchers to be more informed and open concerning the obligations and constraints associated with their chosen paradigms. Cultivating that reflexivity, however, can also surface new opportunities for researchers to leverage complementary, synergistic relationships between their approaches. That work can, in turn, enhance their findings and stimulate related theory building. In Chapter 2, Angela Gist-Mackey and Cristin Compton discuss the venerable tradition of ethnography within organizational communication studies. In addition to reviewing the history of this tradition, the authors compare a growing number of approaches to conducting ethnography (e.g., autoethnography and digital ethnography) in the field. They review recent trends in the publication of ethnographic research in prominent journal forums, and discuss several challenges and opportunities facing researchers desiring to sustain this tradition. In Chapter 3, Charles Conrad and George Cheney discuss rhetorical approaches. The rhetorical tradition has played an important, if ambiguous, role in the development of qualitative organizational communication research. Its status as the dominant mode of humanistic critique in the field sometimes creates the appearance that it is a parallel, complementary tradition to the interpretive and critical traditions of social science that primarily fuel qualitative research. While this is partly true, these traditions display as much convergence as they do divergence. For example, groundbreaking qualitative scholarship in the field has historically been fueled by the compelling traditions of rhetorical theory. Conrad and Cheney subsequently review the

INTRODUCTION

Aristotelian, Burkean, and discourse-related traditions of organizational-rhetorical scholarship, and discuss their application to the study of relevant sites such as social movement organizations. They conclude with a series of suggestions for how qualitative scholars might further advance this tradition. In Chapter 4, François Cooren, Philippe Lorino, and Daniel Robichaud reclaim the pragmatist philosophical tradition as a paradigm for qualitative organizational communication research. Cooren and colleagues review several concepts developed by pragmatist giants such as Charles Sanders Peirce and William James, including the centrality of experience and abductive reasoning. In turn, they trace the general implications of these concepts for organizational inquiry (e.g., pluralism and dialogism), and more specific principles that can enhance qualitative organizational communication research (e.g., cooperative inquiry). In Chapter 5, Rebecca Meisenbach and Madeline Pringle discuss phenomenological approaches. They discuss key ideas in this tradition developed by historical figures such as Edmund Husserl and Alfred Schütz (e.g., epoché). The authors subsequently review several versions of “interpretive phenomenology” (e.g., hermeneutic, semiotic, embodied, etc.), followed by their discussion of conventional challenges facing organizational communication researchers seeking to conduct phenomenological studies (e.g., accurately invoking the related Weickian concept of sensemaking). Meisenbach and Pringle conclude by noting emerging trends in phenomenological research that create opportunities for combining and critically modifying these traditions to serve the evolving goals of organizational communication research. In Chapter 6, Theresa Castor discusses approaches to qualitative research in the communicative constitution of organizations (CCO) tradition, which is increasingly recognized as a leading paradigm within the field. Castor recounts her own journey to CCO scholarship from a background in language

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and social interaction (LSI) research, attracted partly by these traditions’ shared methodological interest in discourse analysis. After reviewing key epistemological assumptions in CCO research, Castor traces their manifestations in the methodological practices of discourse analysis, conversation analysis, narrative analysis, ethnography, and ventriloquial analysis. She concludes with comments and questions intended to promote reflective, successful cultivation of qualitative methodology in this tradition. In Chapter 7, Patrice Buzzanell, Spencer Margulies, Evgeniya Pyatovskaya, and Patricia Abijah discuss feminist approaches to qualitative organizational communication research. After reviewing key concepts and commitments of feminist onto-epistemology and theory (e.g., standpoint, doing justice, etc.), they review distinctive elements of, and recent trends in, feminist organizational (communication) scholarship. Turning to the specific practice of qualitative research, Buzzanell and colleagues explore the requirements for its feminist practice. They conclude by exploring challenges and opportunities facing researchers seeking to conduct this research (e.g., affiliating with “peripheral” researchers, cultivating intersectionality, etc.). In Chapter 8, Jasmine Austin and Tianna Cobb discuss critical race theory (CRT) and intersectional approaches. They frame their discussion in recent controversy associated with challenges posed to racialized conventions (e.g., whiteness) of organizational communication theory and research. Austin and Cobb note that, as a result, the field is poised to make more frequent and sophisticated use of CRT. They provide a concise review of CRT’s origins, affiliations, and key tenets. Due to the relatively small record of related research in organizational communication, the authors discuss examples from various communication subfields (e.g., intercultural communication). They provide specific recommendations for how organizational communication researchers can take up the

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implications of these models at each stage of conducting their qualitative studies. In their conclusion, they call for “radical innovation” in qualitative research to challenge persistent racial oppression, displayed across various levels and forms of organizational communication. Continuing that theme of challenge, in Chapter 9, Mahuya Pal, Beatriz NietoFernandez, and Silpa Satheesh discuss postcolonial approaches to qualitative organi­ zational communication research. They review key commitments of this tradition, and the opportunities they create for “transforming power imbalances, shifting the focus of research to organization of the political economy, and envisioning alternative social imaginaries.” The authors discuss how the practice of qualitative research can disrupt Eurocentric conventions of epistemology and representation (e.g., apparent neutrality) in the depiction of non-Western others. They review two qualitative methodologies (ethnography and critical discourse analysis) available for conducting this work, and the modifications required to implement this tradition. In illustration, Pal and colleagues provide a detailed case study for each of these methodologies. In Chapter 10, Jamie McDonald and Elizabeth K. Eger discuss queer approaches. Like CRT, the emergence of this tradition is relatively recent in organizational communication research. However, also like CRT, this perspective has great potential to serve the field’s growing interest in challenging oppressive conditions and practices of organizational communication (e.g., cisheteronormativity). After reviewing the intellectual foundations of this approach, the authors discuss the recent “queering of organi­ zational research” (e.g., addressing discourses of corporate diversity, equity, and inclusion programs). They subsequently discuss how researchers can queer the use of qualitative methods—for example, to depict the fluid qualities of participant and researcher identities in the field. McDonald and Eger

provide illustrations from their own research programs that demonstrate the reflexivity and vulnerability characterizing this tradition. They conclude by focusing on implications of this tradition for evolving programs of qualitative research in organizational communication. In Chapter 11, Trudy Milburn and Sunny Lie Owens discuss a major program of qualitative communication research that has evolved largely parallel to the organizational communication discipline: the Ethnography of Communication (EC) approach. As practiced by LSI and intercultural communication scholars, EC research is particularly rigorous and systematic in its analysis of cultural forms and practices of speaking. Over the years, this approach has increasingly sought to conceptualize how cultural knowledge is displayed and shared in communicative practices. While EC studies have occasionally engaged with sites of organi­ zation/organizing, there has been little effort made to integrate this tradition with the agendas of organizational communication studies. Milburn and Owens discuss why this is, and make the case for cultivating that integration. They subsequently explore synergies between the two traditions, manifest at the levels of ontology, epistemology, theory, and methodology. In Chapter 12, Kurt Lindemann and Yea-Wen Chen discuss autoethnographic approaches. Similar to the previous chapter’s discussion, this chapter focuses on a popular interdisciplinary genre that has apparently lost its luster in organizational communication studies proper. After reviewing the defining characteristics of this tradition, Lindemann and Chen discuss why this shift has occurred, and why organizational communication should revive the practice of autoethnographic research. In this process, the authors reflexively demonstrate their argument by providing vignettes that meditate on their professional identities and careers. In Chapter 13, Kevin Barge and Anna Wiederhold Wolfe discuss engaged approaches

INTRODUCTION

to conducting qualitative research. Continuing the theme of parallel developments in the discipline, the authors describe a durable tradition of research that has spanned several subfields. All of its threads converge, however, around “a common methodological orientation that emphasizes the cocreation of knowledge through the joint action of academic and nonacademic partners.” After reviewing key commitments in this approach (e.g., of ethical collaboration), the authors unfold what it means for organizational communication researchers to design and conduct their qualitative studies as a “relational practice.” They also review how researchers can implement that practice in key project areas, including problem formulation, theory building, research design, and problem solving. In this process, the authors offer a range of “methodological positions” (e.g., consultative, participatory, etc.) guiding qualitative researchers in organizing their partnerships with organizational members and stakeholders. Collectively, the chapters in this first section indicate the breadth and depth of intellectual traditions that have historically shaped the conduct of qualitative research in organizational communication studies. Valuably, they clarify the distinctive concepts and commitments associated with each of these traditions, helping readers to better understand and justify their choices in grounding their studies. Finally, these chapters demonstrate how each of these traditions is currently poised between the forces of tradition and innovation—creating, in some cases, a wind shear that affects their stability. Potentially, we could register the related tensions, within and between these approaches, by measuring shifts in their relative popularity among organizational communication scholars. However, it is doubtful that doing so would be truly useful. The more interesting questions, it seems, include how and why we believe that ongoing developments in organi­ zational communication make some traditions more or less accurate and successful

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for our purposes in conducting qualitative research. In holding related discussions, we do well to be informed, explicit, and reflective about our motives and our assumptions. Doing so is likely to make those discussions more robust and beneficial, and make our choices as a field going forward more informed and better supported. Chapters in “Part II: Data Collection in Qualitative Organizational Communication Research” address the range of qualitative data collection methods used in our field (e.g., interviewing and participant observation). They review how particular methods (or sets of related methods) have been represented in the organizational communication literature, and discuss prominent exemplars of how these methods have been used in empirical studies and larger research programs; review current debates and controversies regarding these methods; and reflect on how these methods might be used in future organizational communication research. Each chapter also addresses ethical questions regarding data collection. Specifically, in Chapter 14, Bryan Taylor and Ryan Bisel discuss research design. They highlight a contradiction in which organi­ zational communication scholars, on the one hand, seem to value the role of design in qualitative studies, and on the other hand, disdain design as an expression of deductive logics typically opposed by qualitative researchers. The authors argue that research design is not inherently opposed to the spirit of qualitative inquiry, and is appropriate (if not necessary) to all qualitative studies. They review several definitions of research design, discuss the core elements of this practice, and review four of its key principles displayed in qualitative organizational communication research. Taylor and Bisel conclude by reflecting on these principles, based on insights from interviews conducted with leading organizational communication scholars, who shared their stories on research design. In Chapter 15, Keri Stephens, Craig Scott, and Nancy Carlson discuss challenges faced

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by qualitative researchers in negotiating access to organizational communication settings. Even though it is an exciting and rewarding process, negotiating access can also be surrounded with fears of rejection. However, negotiating access is important for organizational communication scholars in various career stages—partly because funding agencies increasingly require grant applicants to partner with organizations in conducting their research projects. Stephens and colleagues discuss access negotiations, identify common concerns in this practice, offer recommendations on how to overcome them, and provide guidelines for building relationships as well as integrating cultural considerations in negotiating access. Illustrating their points with concrete examples, Stephens and colleagues show the complexity of gaining access to research sites, including those that are situated in dangerous or difficult contexts. In Chapter 16, Brenda Berkelaar discusses interviews and focus groups as widely used, albeit often underappreciated, methods in our field. The author highlights interviewing as “purposeful conversation and craft,” calling upon us to think collectively and conscientiously about the use of these methods. By situating interviewing as a method in history, Berkelaar notes that interviewing-specific histories are often appropriated from other disciplines outside organizational communication research. She discusses the various philosophical approaches to interviewing and reviews empirical organizational communication studies that use interviewing as a data collection method. Through these examples, she shows how the role of the interviewer and interviewees is presented, how interview situations unfold, and how conversational accounts are reported. To conclude, she discusses possibilities for how the use of interviews and focus groups as data collection methods may evolve in organizational communication research in the future. In Chapter 17, Rebecca Gill and Joshua Barbour discuss participatory research

methods, such as observation and shadowing. As a commonly used method in qualitative organizational communication research, the authors provide a well-established typology of participatory research methods with current examples from qualitative organizational communication studies. The four “stances” included in this typology are presented on a continuum, ranging from “complete witnessing” to “complete participating.” Gill and Barbour subsequently discuss the various phases involved in participatory research as they are supported with different research techniques. Finally, the authors provide suggestions on how participatory methods might continue to be used in organizational communication research. Specifically, they encourage participatory researchers to engage in continuing conversation about identity and embodiment, as well as acknowledging and attuning to the challenges related to open access and virtual organizing. In Chapter 18, Jennifer Gibbs and SallaMaaria Laaksonen discuss collecting digital data in qualitative organizational communication research. They explain how the conceptualization of organizing as communicatively constituted has opened up new data collection opportunities, including digital sites such as online communities, social movements, and other forms of digitally enabled collective action. The authors provide an extensive overview of different types and characteristics of digital data, and discuss related research exemplars. These studies illustrate a variety of approaches, ranging from data collected from digital technologies to data collected about digital contexts through qualitative methods. To conclude, Gibbs and Laaksonen discuss challenges and limitations related to working with digital data, and they encourage qualitative organizational communication researchers to think creatively about digital data sources and possibilities for using them in data collection. In Chapter 19, Elizabeth Wilhoit Larson discusses collecting visual data. Although the use of data, such as photos, videos, artwork,

INTRODUCTION

or attention to aesthetics has grown, it is still underutilized as a method in our field. Drawing on published examples, Wilhoit Larson shows how visual data can surface new kinds of communication for qualitative study, and provide a more multi-sensory approach to that research. She discusses epistemology as it relates to visual data and presents five existing visual methods that organizational communication researchers can use. Finally, technical, logistical, and ethical challenges for conducting visual research are presented before the author concludes with future directions for visual research. The chapters in this second section illustrate the various data collection methods available to qualitative organizational communication researchers, as well as discuss the historical and philosophical underpinnings of these methods. They also highlight less debated issues preceding data collection, such as the role of research design and the negotiation of access. Some of the methods have a long history in our field as well as in other disciplines (e.g., interviewing, focus groups, and participatory methods). Others (e.g., digital and visual data collection) are not as well established, but offer great potential for our field. Reading the chapters in Part II shows that we are well positioned to contribute to interdisciplinary discussions about qualitative research design, access to organizational sites, and data collection in various organizational settings. However, important questions remain. For example, How should qualitative researchers respond to regional (e.g., European Union) data privacy regulations that constrain their data collection? How can qualitative researchers ensure continuous publications in journals with page limits and data availability policies that may be constraining, especially when aiming to collect organizational data? Attuning to these questions is important, we believe, because it will challenge, but also provide new insights into, how we engage in research design, the negotiation of access,

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and the collection of data in qualitative organizational communication scholarship. Chapters in “Part III: Data Analysis and Representation in Qualitative Organizational Communication Research” address the range of qualitative data analysis methods used in our field (e.g., narrative and critical discourse analysis), as well as questions related to representation, positionality, and writing. They review how particular analytical and representational methods (or sets of related methods) have been represented in the organi­ zational communication literature, and discuss prominent exemplars of how they have been used in empirical studies and larger research programs; review current debates and controversies regarding these methods; and reflect on how these methods might be used in future organizational communication research. Each chapter also addresses ethical questions regarding data analysis and representation. In Chapter 20, Sarah Tracy, Angela Gist-Mackey, and Marco Dehnert discuss phronetic iterative qualitative data analysis (PIQDA) as a useful “umbrella analysis approach” for qualitative organizational communication research. The authors discuss PIQDA as a methodology, and compare it to other analytical approaches, such as grounded theory, thematic analysis, the Gioia methodology, and Fairhurst and Putnam’s integrative methodology. Subsequently, they turn to critical issues and questions concerning the practice of PIQDA, including research design and focus, coding, quality and ethical concerns, and techniques for focusing the analysis, followed by a review of three dominant ways in which this methodology has been adopted in the organizational communication field. In Chapter 21, Stephanie Dailey, Larry Browning, and Jan-Oddvar Sørnes discuss the well-established use of narrative analysis in qualitative organizational communication research by addressing how scholars conduct these analyses, as well as how we might improve upon them. Hence, this chapter aims to celebrate the “narrative turn” in our

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field by providing a conceptual discussion of narrative and its premises. Building on the idea that we can use stories to understand human action and organizing, the authors then explain the process of investigating and collecting good narrative data in organi­ zational contexts, based on an overview of the components of a good story. To conclude, they elucidate various types of methods that organizational communication scholars can use to analyze good stories. The goal of Chapter 22, written by Chantal Benoit-Barné and Mathieu Chaput, is to explore how rhetorical analysis can be conceived and used to investigate organizational communication phenomena. Here, the authors contend that “a critical review of rhetorical methods in the discipline that considers recent developments, particularly the growing interest in rhetorical field methods” is sorely needed. To accomplish this goal, the authors describe four approaches to rhetorical methods—each with their own analytical objectives and takes on what counts as data. They subsequently review how these data can be collected; how they ought to be analyzed; the role of the researcher in the process of rhetorical analysis; and, finally, the overall implications of rhetorical analysis for our understanding of organizational communication. Chapter 23, by Jonathan Clifton and Jakob Rømer Barfod, reviews the contributions of conversation analysis (CA) to organizational communication research. Through their overview of the history and assumptions surrounding this type of analysis, the authors show that “CA is not a monolithic approach to analyzing social life that has one widely accepted and agreed upon definition.” In turn, their aim is to build bridges and create “synergies between research communities that may not be taking sufficient advantage of common ground.” They pursue this goal by highlighting similarities in the research interests of both CA researchers and organizational communication scholars, as well as by providing a compelling illustration of the

theoretical and practical payoffs of this type of analysis. In Chapter 24, Ellen Nathues, François Cooren, and Mark van Vuuren discuss ventriloquial analysis, which is influenced by the CA approach, and is increasingly popular in organizational communication studies as well as other fields. Specifically, the authors present, operationalize, and play with the “ventriloquial thesis of (organizational) communication” in this chapter by reviewing its Bakhtinian heritage, its mild and strong versions, and its upstream and downstream forms. After this, they explain how ventriloquial studies can be conducted, mapping out the scope and craft of this type of analysis, and showing how “ventriloquations” can be identified. In Chapter 25, Jennifer Mease and Scott Branton explore an emerging tradition in qualitative organizational communication scholarship: the analysis of sociomateriality and affect. The authors begin by showing how scholars ontologically frame materiality and affect in an entitative, mutual influence, or posthuman way. Subsequently, they explore nine focal phenomena for the analysis of sociomateriality. They then discuss the practice of analyzing and attuning to sociomateriality, especially in conjunction with affect, based on three principles: collapsing and expanding the field of analysis; relating with, rather than analyzing, data; and following, moving across the sociomaterial field. Thus, Mease and Branton’s chapter provides insight into how sociomateriality can be integrated into the analytical methods used by organizational communication researchers, and how embracing affect encourages us to rethink qualitative analysis. In Chapter 26, Debbie Dougherty and Blessing Ekene Okafor discuss what distinguishes critical discourse analysis (CDA) from other organizational communication research methodologies, as well as the common features that draw this body of work together. “There is a clear articulation over the years,” they observe, “that CDA engages

INTRODUCTION

with important struggles,” particularly “the struggle over power—how it is enacted, contested, and performed.” However, few texts have focused on “what struggle means and how it is engaged.” To address this oversight, Dougherty and Okafor “consider the dominant struggles that are engaged in CDA by organizational communication scholars,” namely, struggle over power; meaning and action; discourse and materiality; discursive openings/closings; and difference. Hence, the authors explore CDA in organizational communication as a methodology by discussing each of these discursive struggles. In Chapter 27, Luisa Ruge-Jones, William Barley, and Jeffrey Treem discuss the analysis of digital work in qualitative organizational communication research—principally by interrogating “the…dualism between ‘digital as virtual life’ and ‘in-person as real life.’” To start, the authors review past research on digital work, highlighting “how different methodological choices have embodied the three core tenets of qualitative inquiry” (i.e., selfreflexivity, context, and thick description). After this, they explore how this research informs our current conceptualization and analysis of digital work, particularly in view of the ongoing blurring of the online and offline. Drawing on past and present studies, the authors in turn reflect on the praxis of analyzing digital work by employing digital methods. In view of “a burgeoning interest in developing new methods to study tensions,” Gail Fairhurst and Linda Putnam present six methods for the analysis of contradictions, dialectics, and paradoxes in Chapter 28. They start with grounded theory as a benchmark, and subsequently discuss discourse tracing, contrapuntal analysis, an integrative methodology that combines grounded theory and organizational discourse analysis, a ventriloquial tensional approach, and applied tensional analysis. The authors explain how these methods share certain features, yet also diverge in several ways. However, they all confront two key problems: “the definitional

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conundrum of paradox (and related concepts) and sensing paradox in first encounters.” Addressing these issues is important, Fairhurst and Putnam maintain, because it “brings a communicative lens to the study of organizational paradoxes, one that moves away from treating it as ancillary to the work on cognitions and perceptions.” In Chapter 29, Consuelo Vásquez, Viviane Sergi, and Anthony Hussenot discuss the value of taking a process ontology perspective on qualitative analysis in organizational communication research. In their view, this analytical approach “offers a more complex and suitable approach to attend to the intricacies of everyday organizational communicative practices,” yet it also presents a number of challenges. To develop their approach, the authors start by reviewing organizational communication scholarship that has studied organizations as processes of becoming. After this, they present three analytical foci (i.e., temporality, spatiality, and materiality) that enable researchers to investigate organizational communication from a process ontology perspective, and then discuss how these aspects become analyzable by studying communicative events. In closing, Vásquez and colleagues discuss three main analytical challenges of process-oriented studies (restitution, categorization and separation, and writing) and explore ways to address these challenges. Concluding Part III, in Chapter 30, Oana Brindusa Albu, Boukje Cnossen, and Chahrazad Abdallah discuss the importance of reflecting on how researchers’ intersecting social positions shape their entrance into, interactions with, and conversations within sites of inquiry, as well as their representation of these sites, especially in terms of writing. By analyzing ethnographic vignettes, the authors demonstrate how valuable this positionally reflexive work is for qualitative organizational communication research, because it makes researchers “aware of the dynamic intersections of their identities.” In addition, “it helps them develop an ability

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to (re/inter)act ethically based on a deeper understanding of the effects of their academic practices—in terms of power, domination, and privilege—on the people and settings they are studying.” Together, these chapters reveal the wide variety of analytic methods that are available to qualitative organizational communication researchers, as well as the importance of being reflexive about our various “positionings.” Some of these methods, such as PIQDA, narrative analysis, or the analysis of tensions and paradoxes, have become staples in the field. Others, such as the analysis of materiality and affect, digital work, or process constitute the forefront of what is, currently, analytically possible. The latter may therefore be seen as potential inflection points that can change the direction of where the field is going, analytically speaking. When reading these chapters, the range and depth of the analyses qualitative organizational communication researchers use is impressive—and so is our ability to engage in reflexivity. What is perhaps most surprising, however, is why qualitative organizational communication researchers thus far have published so few texts that deal explicitly with analytical questions, and why analysis is not an ongoing topic of discussion, or even debate, like it is in quantitative organizational communication research (e.g., see Miller et  al., 2011). Hence, by revealing the richness and sophistication of the analytical—and reflexive—approaches we have at our disposal, we hope that the chapters in Part III will also constitute an inflection point in terms of putting analytical—and reflexive—questions at the forefront of the fields’ conversations. Chapters in “Part IV: The Future of Qualitative Research in Organizational Communication” address vital trends that will (or should) shape the evolution of qualitative organizational communication research. These trends include: How do current developments in qualitative methodology implicate the study of organizational communication? And also the reverse: How

do current developments in organizational communication implicate the use of qualitative methods? Thus, the chapters in the final section of this handbook set an agenda for ongoing scholarship. Specifically, in Chapter 31, Mikkel Flyverbom, Paul Leonardi, and Nitzan Navick present an innovative approach for conducting qualitative organizational communication research on digital technologies. The authors call this approach “digital forensics,” a “set of tools that researchers need to deploy to understand what role digital technologies play in the organizing process.” Their approach highlights research that focuses on situations in which organizations use digital technologies for communication, “leaving digital traces that can fruitfully address research questions regarding a wide variety of objects of study.” Flyverbom and colleagues in turn present five “communicative objects of study”—viewing communication as “occurring on, with, through, about[,] and around digital technology”—and provide exemplars from qualitative organizational communication studies. To conclude, the authors highlight how the increasingly “datafied” world will raise new pressing questions for our field, and present us with ample analytical and epistemological challenges. In Chapter 32, Shiv Ganesh, Cynthia Stohl, and Samantha James discuss conducting qualitative organizational communication research on globalization. They show how questions of globalization have challenged our field for decades and how globalization has been accompanied with increasing visibility, which requires researchers to develop and adopt a hybrid analytical stance. Drawing on research exemplars, Ganesh and colleagues illustrate how organizational communication scholars studying globalization have engaged with various parochialisms, such as theoretical, methodological, and pragmatic parochialism. The authors then explain how taking a hybrid analytical stance entails “paying attention to how researchers establish the reach, significance, meaning,

INTRODUCTION

and value of their work,” and how this stance requires embracing a particular set of dualities in each research stage, such as depth and scale, compilation and creativity, as well as universality and specificity. In Chapter 33, Kate Lockwood Harris discusses postqualitative organizational communication research. As a form of qualitative inquiry, this research can be seen as a set of methodological approaches aimed at shifting or decentering our understanding of the conduct of qualitative research as well as its underlying ontological, epistemological, and axiological assumptions. Harris focuses on postqualitative research guided by feminist new materialism (FNM), explaining how FNM “refuses to separate ways of being from ways of knowing.” For this reason, methodologies and methods become “obsolete” as thinking frames of research. Thus, Harris emphasizes the importance of a relational ontology in postqualitative research and uses this ontology to draw the relational history of this emerging type of research. In turn, she overviews three key principles of FNM, discusses their methodological implications, and provides examples of existing qualitative organizational communication research grounded in these principles. Finally, Chapter 34 is co-authored by Kirstie McAllum, Stephanie Fox, Laura Ginoux, Heather M. Zoller, Andrea Zorn, and Theodore Zorn, who discuss qualitative organizational communication research post-COVID-19. The authors reflect on “how the pandemic context compelled qualitative organizational communication researchers to question taken-for-granted methodological assumptions and reconsider previously successful methodological choices.” They document and assess the changes and challenges the pandemic induced at all stages of the research process and discuss the emergence of innovative ways to design studies, recruit participants, collect and analyze data, and disseminate research findings. To conclude, McAllum and colleagues discuss research methods and practices that qualitative

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organizational communication researchers may embrace in the post-pandemic “new normal.” Overall, the chapters in Part IV paint a compelling picture of the changing landscape of qualitative research in organizational communication, not only methodologically, but also theoretically and metatheoretically. The future will tell how the changes discussed in this section will shape the evolution of our field. If this handbook makes one thing clear, though, it is that qualitative organizational communication scholars are well equipped— and will continue to equip themselves well— to study the (organizational) world’s pressing issues in innovative, insightful, and useful ways. This handbook concludes with two afterwords. The first one is written from the perspective of a management scholar, Silvia Gherardi. However, in her afterword, Gherardi questions and problematizes being positioned as a “management scholar”— by us, the co-editors of this volume. While “going visiting” (Haraway, 2016, p. 126) the chapters of this handbook, she in turn reflects on how different voices are textually constructed and emerge. This leads her to discuss the value of “developing a posthumanist empirical approach, in which ‘humans’ are relationally configured with whatever is present in specific situations, and are deeply entangled in the world, rather than being privileged or positioned as distant judging observers.” The second afterword is written from the perspective of two well-known organizational communication scholars: Eric Eisenberg and Patricia GeistMartin. Like Gherardi, each of these authors approached reading this book with a positionality that informed their interpretations. Hence, Eisenberg and Geist-Martin first offer stories of how they each began their research on organizational communication. Following their stories, they provide central motifs that they garnered from their reading of the chapters. To conclude, the authors share their own impressions of the changing landscape of

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qualitative research in organizational communication inspired by this handbook.

CONCLUSION OF A BEGINNING This book started as an idea during Boris’s stroller walk with newborn Johan Brummans in Montréal at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. The idea developed through an email Boris sent to Bryan, which led to a correspondence, and then a Zoom conversation, which led to working on a proposal together with Anu, which was then sent to publishers and eventually accepted by Sage, which led to inviting peer contributors from around the globe, and to more work, to writing—and rewriting, to now, this handbook. Put differently: this handbook is itself an artifact of communicative organizing— the very thing it speaks about. In this way, the handbook demonstrates how “Form is emptiness, emptiness is form” (Gyatso, 2002/2015, p. 114), as the Buddhist saying goes. At one time, it was emptiness, full of potential, yet not yet expressed. To see how it has taken form has been an incredible, unpredictable, unimaginable experience— although its formation did also require heaps of collective credence, prediction, and imagination. Perhaps this Buddhist saying should be rephrased as “in-formation is emptiness, emptiness is in-formation.” The initial idea that appeared to Boris during his walk in a park, we could say, in-formed (Manning, 2013) a field of relation (Massumi, 2015), which subsequently in-formed this book. As a book, we hope the idea will now in-form the conversations and texts (see Taylor & Van Every, 2000) that in-form qualitative organizational communication research as a field of relation. Dreaming even bigger, we hope this book will become a resource for establishing a methodological lingua franca or “common language” that in-forms the habitus of qualitative scholarship in organizational communication. Importantly, we do not presume that

such a discourse should be monologic, static, or oppressive. Only that it should usefully cultivate a dialectic that has been acutely present throughout our work on this volume. That dialectic can be phrased as follows: First, our field desires and benefits from the development of models and standards that encourage coherence and consistency in our conduct of qualitative research. And second, our field desires and benefits from the development of qualitative research traditions that accommodate the diverse interests and evolving agendas of its members and stakeholders. We may wonder why it has taken so long for this book to come into being, why the original idea did not appear in our minds and took root earlier—and why, correspondingly, no methodological lingua franca exists at present. “Well we know where we’re goin’,” as David Byrne (1985) sings in “Road to Nowhere,” “but we don’t know where we’ve been.” In line with this wisdom, we believe the answer to our question also lies in understanding “where we’ve been,” in understanding how the habitus of qualitative organizational communication research has taken form since the interpretive turn in the 1980s (see Putnam & Pacanowsky, 1983). According to Pierre Bourdieu, an academic field is characterized by a historically developed system of dispositions that defines a practical sense for how to operate (feel, judge, think, move) in a given social space. A habitus functions as a system of classification that enables agents to make sense of the world from the point of view of a field. This system develops over time, based on a particular “doxa,” a set of central (and often unquestioned) presuppositions that define what a field considers valuable (innovative, productive, insightful, legitimate, ethical, etc.). By incorporating a habitus during their education and socialisation, scholars learn to embody this doxa and develop a sense for seeing, appreciating, and doing their work. In time, a field’s “common sense” becomes an individual sense, creating a relationship of ontological complicity between scholar and social space. Because a habitus is embodied over a period of time, it becomes second nature for agents to act according to the field in which they operate. (Brummans, 2015, p. 73; see also Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992)

INTRODUCTION

Although the field has been in-formation for over 40 years, organizational communication studies has—surprisingly—not yet developed a “system of dispositions” that rewards debating questions of qualitative methodology. This gap contrasts with the field’s more robust habitus for engaging disciplinary and metatheoretical questions (e.g., see Ashcraft & Allen, 2003; Corman & Poole, 2000; Kuhn, 2005; Mumby & Stohl, 1996; Pal et  al., 2022; Redding, 1985; Taylor et  al., 2006). As noted above, this gap is evidenced by the relative absence of methodological chapters in the three editions of the Sage Handbook of Organizational Communication, and the merely sporadic appearance of methodological articles in MCQ. The contrast between this gap and comparable discussions among quantitative organizational communication researchers—to say nothing of those in related fields like management and organization studies—is not flattering for our field. Discussing, debating, and writing about methodological questions is “second nature” it seems among those communities. It is also an integral part of their research praxis, leading to the creation of specialized outlets for related conversations (e.g., see Organizational Research Methods and Qualitative Research in Organizations and Management). Our hope is that this handbook will partly address this issue by in-forming the habitus of qualitative organizational communication scholarship. We hope that, by engaging with this handbook through reading, dialoguing, debating, referencing, and putting its insights into practice, its audiences will affect our field, changing how it engages in, and reflects on, its practices of deskwork, fieldwork, and textwork (see Yanow, 2000). Here, for example, we might begin with the question of how exactly our practices can and should be distinguished from those of related scholarly communities—or fields of relation. By raising such questions, this handbook contributes to the development of a lingua franca allowing our field to more accurately

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and successfully debate questions of qualitative methodology. Such a shared discourse is important for the field’s future, partly because it will make qualitative inquiry more “commonsensical”—both for its newcomers, and for advanced scholars who have already developed a “relationship of ontological complicity” with qualitative research traditions. In other words, this handbook should guide our field in living the following paradoxical wisdom: “And the future is certain Give us time to work it out” (Byrne, 1985)

Note 1  For related commentaries, see Broadfoot and Munshi (2007); Chen, (2000); Fauré and Bouzon (2010); More and Irwin (2000); Schoeneborn and Sandhu (2013), and Vásquez and Marroquín Velásquez (2016).

REFERENCES Ashcraft, K. L., & Allen, B. J. (2003). The racial foundation of organizational communication. Communication Theory, 13(1), 5–38. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2885.2003. tb00280.x Bourdieu, P., & Wacquant, L. J. D. (1992). An invitation to reflexive sociology. The University of Chicago Press. Broadfoot, K. J., & Munshi, D. (2007). Diverse voices and alternative rationalities: Imagining forms of postcolonial organizational communication. Management Communication Quarterly, 21(2), 249–267. https://doi. org/10.1177/0893318907306037 Brummans, B. H. J. M. (2015). “Turning the lens on ourselves”: Bourdieu’s reflexivity in practice. In A. Tatli, M. Özbilgin, & M. Karatas-Özkan (Eds.), Pierre Bourdieu, organisation and management (pp. 70–94). Routledge. Byrne, D. (1985). Road to nowhere [Recorded by Talking Heads]. On Little creatures [CD]. Sire Records.

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Chen, L. (2000). Connecting to the world economy: Issues confronting organizations in Chinese societies. Management Commu­ nication Quarterly, 14(1), 152–160. https:// doi.org/10.1177/0893318900141008 Corman, S. R., & Poole, M. S. (Eds.). (2000). Perspectives on organizational communica­ tion: Finding common ground. The Guilford Press. Fauré, B., & Bouzon, A. (2010). French approaches to the performative properties of language at work: An overview. Management Communication Quarterly, 24(4), 620–626. https://doi.org/10.1177/0893318910381473 Gist-Mackey, A. N., & Kingsford, A. N. (2020). Linguistic inclusion: Challenging implicit classed communication bias in interview methods. Management Communication Quarterly, 34(3), 402–425. https://doi. org/10.1177/0893318920934128 Gyatso, T. (2015). The essence of the Heart Sutra: The Dalai Lama’s heart of wisdom teachings (T. Jinpa, Ed. & Trans.). Wisdom. (Original work published 2002) Haraway, D. J. (2016). Staying with the trouble: Making kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press. Jablin, F. M., & Putnam, L. L. (2001). The new handbook of organizational communication: Advances in theory, research, and methods. Sage. Jablin, F. M., Putnam, L. L., Roberts, K., & Porter, L. (Eds.). (1987). Handbook of organi­ zational communication: An interdisciplinary perspective. Sage. Jensen, P. R., Cruz, J., Eger, E. K., Hanchey, J. N., Gist-Mackey, A. N., Ruiz-Mesa, K., & Villamil, A. (2020). Pushing beyond positionalities and through “failures” in qualitative organizational communication: Experiences and lessons on identities in ethnographic praxis. Management Communication Quar­ terly, 34(1), 121–151. https://doi.org/10.1177/ 0893318919885654 Kuhn, T. (2005). The institutionalization of Alta in organizational communication studies. Management Communication Quarterly, 18(4), 618–627. https://doi.org/10.1177/ 0893318904273851 Lindlof, T. R., & Taylor, B. C. (2017). Qualitative communication research methods (4th ed.). Sage.

Manning, E. (2013). Always more than one: Individuation’s dance. Duke University Press. Massumi, B. (2015). Politics of affect. Polity. Miller, V. D., Poole, M. S., & Seibold, D. (2011). Advancing research in organizational communication through quantitative methodology. Management Communication Quarterly, 25(1), 4–58. https://doi.org/10.1177/08933 18910390193 Mumby, D. K., & Stohl, C. (1996). Disciplining organizational communication studies. Man­ agement Communication Quarterly, 10(1), 50–72. More, E. A., & Irwin, H. T. (2000). Management communication for the new millennium: An Australian perspective. Management Com­ munication Quarterly, 14(1), 142–151. https://doi.org/10.1177/0893318900141007 Pal, M., Kim, H., Harris, K. L., Long, Z., Linabary, J., Wilhoit Larson, E., Jensen, P. R., GistMackey, A. N., McDonald, J., Nieto-Fernandez, B., Jiang, J., Misra, S., & Dempsey, S. E. (2022). Decolonizing organizational communication. Management Communication Quarterly, 36(3), 547–577. https://doi. org/10.1177/08933189221090255 Putnam, L. L., & Pacanowsky, M. E. (Eds.). (1983). Communication and organizations: An interpretive approach. Sage. Putnam, L. L., & Mumby, D. K. (Eds.). (2014). The Sage handbook of organizational com­ munication: Advances in theory, research, and methods. Sage. Redding, W. C. (1985). Stumbling toward an identity: The emergence of organizational communication as a field of study. In R. D. McPhee, & P. K. Tompkins (Eds.), Organi­ zational Communication: Traditional themes and new directions (pp. 15–54). Sage. Schoeneborn, D., & Sandhu, S. (2013). When birds of different feather flock together: The emerging debate on “organization as communication” in the German-speaking countries. Management Communication Quarterly, 27(2), 303–313. https://doi.org/ 10.1177/0893318912470079 Stephens, K. K. (2017). Organizational communication methods published in MCQ 2001–2015: Trends and pedagogical implications. Management Communication Quarterly, 31(1), 130–138. https://doi.org/ 10.1177/0893318916675735

INTRODUCTION

Taylor, B. C., Barley, W. C., Brummans, B. H. J. M., Ellingson, L. L., Ganesh, S., Herrmann, A. F., Rice, R. M., & Tracy, S. J. (2021). Revisiting ethnography in organizational communication studies. Management Communication Quarterly, 35(4), 623–652. https://doi. org/10.1177/08933189211026700 Taylor, B. C., Irvin, L. R., & Wieland, S. M. (2006). Checking the map: Critiquing Joanne Martin’s metatheory of organizational culture and its uses in communication research. Communi­ cation Theory, 16(3), 304–332. https://doi. org/10.1111/j.1468-2885.2006.00272.x Taylor, J. R., & Van Every, E. J. (2000). The emer­ gent organization: Communication as its site and surface. Lawrence Erlbaum. Tracy, S. J. (2020). Qualitative research meth­ ods: Collecting evidence, crafting analysis, communicating impact (2nd ed.). WileyBlackwell.

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Tracy, S. J., Eger, E. K., Huffman, T. P., Redden, S. M., & Scarduzio, J. A. (2014). Narrating the backstage of qualitative research in organizational communication: A synthesis. Management Communication Quarterly, 28(3), 422–431. https://doi.org/10.1177/ 0893318914536964 Vásquez, C., & Velásquez, L. M. (2016). Forum introduction: Organizational communication in Spanish-speaking Latin American countries. Management Communication Quarterly, 30(2), 245–248. https://doi.org/10.1177/ 0893318915620456 Wilhoit, E. D. (2017). Photo and video methods in organizational and managerial communication research. Management Communica­ tion Quarterly, 31(3), 447–466. https://doi. org/10.1177/0893318917704511 Yanow, D. (2000). Conducting interpretive policy analysis. Sage.

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PART I

Approaches to Qualitative Organizational Communication Research

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1 From Mixed Methods to Mixed Research Approaches for Qualitative Organizational Communication Research Jody L. S. Jahn and Karen K. Myers

Presumably, readers of this handbook are already familiar with interpretivist approaches to organizational communication research (i.e., that emphasize questions of meaningful practice and experience). As a result, they might wonder how a chapter on mixed methods research can be helpful. “Mixed methods research” has long been defined as research that combines both qualitative and quantitative methods. However, we propose here a shift from merely combining methods to thinking more broadly (e.g., epistemologically) about how researchers might configure the resources of multiple paradigms to gain a richer understanding of their chosen ­ phenomenon—an approach we subsequently refer to as “mixed research” (Johnson, 2017, p. 159). For interpretivist researchers, a mixed research approach entails more than simply adding a quantitative component to their studies. Rather, we argue that qualitative researchers can anchor their study designs in the familiar paradigmatic commitments of interpretivism (e.g., social construction,

situated meaning, and Verstehen), and also enrich their study by exploring their phenomenon through the lens of a complementary paradigm (e.g., critique, postpositivism). Thus, a mixed research approach engages with the philosophical commitments of multiple paradigms, allowing their complementary ontological, epistemological, and axiological commitments to enhance a researcher’s examinations across the various stages of a project. We subsequently propose and demonstrate how mixed research studies can capitalize on the creative potential and added insights that emerge when considering a phenomenon through complementary paradigmatic lenses. This chapter proceeds as follows: The first half of the chapter provides foundational background about mixed methods research approaches and techniques for mixing methods. We critique the common pragmatic mixed methods research approach (see Morgan, 2007), arguing that such research narrowly focuses on methods at the expense

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of considering larger philosophical commitments (Coates, 2021; Johnson, 2017). The second half of the chapter proposes strategies for configuring those commitments in mixed research designs, or studies that draw from two (or more) paradigms to explore a phenomenon (Johnson, 2017). We introduce this mixed research approach, and then illustrate possibilities for combining interpretivist paradigms with both critical and postpositivist paradigms. To be clear, however, we anchor these proposals using the core commitments of the interpretivist paradigm. We proceed by introducing these commitments, then we break down how additional paradigms can usefully question them. Qualitative researchers, we argue, can and should use these questions at various stages of their mixed research studies to enhance the value of their findings. We close with two broad areas for future development: We encourage scholars to teach mixed research (e.g., in graduate seminars) to cultivate future scholars’ deftness—and their own—in moving intentionally within and across paradigms and philosophical commitments. And we encourage scholars to embrace mixing interpretivist research with paradigmatic stances that fall outside of the commonly used North American and Eurocentric perspectives.

MIXED METHODS BACKGROUND Mixed methods are typically understood as the combination of both qualitative and quantitative methods in a single study. Postpositivist scholars have long used mixed methods, particularly by leveraging qualitative research findings in the service of distinctive postpositivist commitments (e.g., rigorous investigation of empirical phenomena, intended to establish the strongest possible warrants for related ontological claims). For instance, researchers might draw from qualitative interview data to develop a more objective measurement tool (e.g., Myers & Oetzel, 2003).

In such cases, the researcher’s philosophical grounding is primarily in a single paradigm— postpositivism—which privileges objectivist beliefs and quantitative findings over their interpretivist and qualitative counterparts. This section provides a brief overview of the foundations of mixed methods before moving onto a philosophically informed conceptualization of mixed research.

FROM PRIVILEGING POSITIVISM TO ADVANCING PRAGMATISM IN MIXED METHODS RESEARCH Early mixed methods studies tended to be grounded in one paradigm–scientific theory or positivism–which is touted as that which can be “rigorously tested and corroborated by objective empirical research” (Craig & Tracy, 1995, p. 249). Scholars have long questioned the validity of study results obtained from using only one method. Campbell and Fiske (1959) are credited with proposing a variation of mixed methods, which they referred to as a multitrait multimethod procedure that combined more than one quantitative method to provide an indepth probe into convergent and discriminant validity issues that arose when developing a measure. While their multitrait method aimed to understand variables from multiple angles, they did not propose a means of expanding inquiry to integrate different ontological perspectives on phenomena. Eventually, researchers introduced the first true mixed methods studies that not only included both quantitative and qualitative data, but also adopted a pragmatic perspective to analyze and interpret the findings with an openness to epistemology. In particular, the idea of collecting data representing two different vantage points—named “triangulation” by Webb and colleagues (1965)—was initially introduced and accepted by quantitative researchers who sought to develop ever more objective measures. Eventually,

FROM MIXED METHODS TO MIXED RESEARCH APPROACHES

triangulation became associated with collecting and using both quantitative and qualitative data. However, most of the first mixed methods users were quantitative postpositivist researchers who sought to merely enhance their quantitative studies, using qualitative data to lend how and why understandings about their measure (Jick, 1979). Early mixed methods scholars tended to align with postpositivist perspectives, and urged fellow scholars to acknowledge the value of alternative research approaches, to consider the advantages of using a qualitative “strand” (i.e., sub-protocol), and to adopt a mindset open to multiple ways of knowing, referred to as multiplism (Greene, Caracelli, & Graham, 1989). According to Greene and colleagues, researchers using mixed methods must attempt to suspend their ontological commitment to either postpositivism or constructivism, and instead fully embrace both. Ideally, scholars capitalize on the affordances of each ontological strand in their data collections, and mesh the two datasets in the integration stage, creating a pragmatic view of the phenomenon. Despite this advocacy, researchers have been skeptical of mixing methods and their paradigms. Some scholars refer to disagreements regarding the appropriateness of mixing methods as “paradigm wars” (Corman & Poole, 2000). Paradigm wars called attention to how some combinations of paradigms and their philosophical commitments appeared incommensurable, a term coined by Thomas Kuhn (1962/2012) to indicate that a given paradigm encompasses one fully contained worldview. As a result, and according to strict interpretation, findings falling within one paradigm can only make sense if they adhere to its internally consistent logic. Accordingly, a finding that makes sense within the logic of one paradigm is considered uninterpretable within another paradigm. The paradigm wars formed a battle between positivism’s commitment to objectivity, generalizability, and deductive inquiry, versus the naturalistic paradigm’s commitment to intersubjectivity,

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contextual grounding of findings, and the process of inductive inquiry. To overcome challenges with incommensurability, mixed methods scholars proposed using a pragmatic approach (Morgan, 2007), in which scholars prioritized their comprehensive and sophisticated understanding of a phenomenon, and as such, sought insights using whichever methods made practical sense. Pragmatist scholars attempted to skirt around the paradigm wars in two ways: First, rather than defining a paradigm as an all-­ encompassing worldview, or superordinate explanation of reality, they offered a much narrower definition. Here, paradigms represented “shared beliefs within a community of researchers who share a consensus about which questions are most meaningful and which procedures are most appropriate for answering those questions” (Morgan, 2007, p. 53). Second, rather than claiming to unite positivist and naturalistic approaches, pragmatists promoted a “third” paradigm that could exist alongside the others (Johnson & Onwuegbuzie, 2004; Morgan, 2007; Teddlie & Tashakkori, 2003). Thus, mixed methods research attempted to meet positivist and naturalistic approaches in the middle by focusing on producing intersubjective (rather than subjective or objective) findings. Ideally, these findings were transferable across contexts (rather than strictly contextual or generaliz­ able), and were derived using abductive reasoning, a combination of inductive and deductive inquiry (Morgan, 2007). It is important to note, however, that there is substantial skepticism within the mixed methods community about whether this pragmatic approach stands on its own as a “third” paradigm, a point we will return to later in the chapter (Coates, 2021; Sommar Harrits, 2011). Scholars have advanced the use of mixed methods by arguing for the value of combining different approaches. The next section summarizes common mixed methods study designs, and discusses how scholars maximize the value of mixed methods through integrating their findings.

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PURPOSES FOR MIXING METHODS IN A STUDY Arguably, researchers in the Education field have done the most to articulate various uses and values of mixed methods research. In particular, they have identified and explained various study designs and their affordances. Greene and her colleagues (1989) were among the first to identify and classify common mixed methods designs, with the aim of developing “a conceptual framework” for evaluation designs (i.e., projects seeking to evaluate the effectiveness of existing educational programs, and proposed changes). They reviewed 57 published empirical investigations that used mixed methods, identifying five commonly used research designs. The first and most known purpose for mixing methods was triangulation—using more than one method to determine whether differing data converge in a study’s findings. They reported that this technique was rarely used, likely due to a seeming paradox: the quantitative and qualitative methods employed needed to be both very different, and “conceptualized, designed and implemented within the same paradigmatic framework” (Greene et al., 1989, p. 266). Further, each data collection effort must be independently implemented, but their collective data must be equally prioritized—a challenge for researchers with narrow methodological training. The second purpose for employing mixed methods was to examine ­complementarity— that is, when deeper understanding is required to explain overlapping but distinctive elements of a phenomenon (Greene et al., 1989). To probe this overlap, methods must differ, but paradigms associated with the two strands should be at least somewhat similar. Third, a development design purpose entails the initial use of one method, which informs the development of the second phase of a study. First, researchers carry out a qualitative strand with an interpretive lens,

while their subsequent quantitative methods align with a postpositivist view (Greene et al., 1989). While researchers attempted to equally prioritize their mixed methods, their biases generally resulted in one of the two strands figuring more prominently in reports through stronger emphasis on its data and findings (Greene et al., 1989). The fourth purpose of initiation involves mixing methods to draw out new perspectives on a phenomenon, often through paradox (Greene et al., 1989). Greene and colleagues recommended that initiation be used when the phenomenon is relatively complex, and when the researcher is capable of simultaneously holding multiple paradigmatic commitments. Finally, expansion involves considering multiple viewpoints for the purpose of broadening the understanding of a phenomenon (Greene et al., 1989). The need for this purpose arose from a recognition that quantitative researchers often relied on qualitative data when quantitative data was either incomplete, or when quantitative findings revealed problems that required more exploration. The expansion purpose is limited when researchers do not fully integrate their datasets, and when the narrow focus of their quantitative strand overly constricts their design of the qualitative strand (Caracelli & Greene, 1993). Greene and colleagues concluded that employing multiplism—again, gathering diverse data from various sources and through various means—would better accomplish an expanded understanding of a phenomenon.

MIXED METHODS STUDY DESIGNS More recently, Creswell and Plano Clark (2017) have moved to further formalize mixed methods approaches by identifying additional design approaches, and developing a conceptual framework for distinguishing them. Their resulting typologies are useful for designing studies, and as a reference for considering

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which kinds of questions can be answered by a given approach. This section describes a few of these approaches along with their affordances and challenges. First, the concurrent, parallel, or triangulation strategy utilizes two different methods to confirm or cross-validate results (Creswell & Plano Clark, 2017). A triangulation design is hindered when a researcher lacks sufficient proficiency in either the qualitative or quantitative method. However, a larger obstacle to triangulation is when researchers fail to equally integrate and prioritize both perspectives. For example, when a researcher begins a study with ontological commitments privileging one side or the other, their tendency might be to rely on data associated with it, and interpret the findings accordingly. This is especially true when significant discrepancies emerge between the two strands of data. However, for interpretivists and critical scholars, this design offers opportunities. Specifically, qualitative research affords mixed methods researchers the opportunity to develop their findings—even for the nonconvergence of data types—by asking participants to help interpret the study’s initial quantitative and/or qualitative results. Even critical theorists can find the addition of quantitative data and methods (e.g., inferential statistics) useful to identify relationships between constructs, characterize the material force of political and economic structures, and make generalizable claims regarding minoritized individuals. One recent organizational communication study by Foot, Sworn, and AlejanoSteele (2021) offers an outstanding example of a concurrent parallel/triangulation study. Foot and her colleagues investigated multi­ organizational coalitions aimed at countering human trafficking in the Global South. These nonprofit organizations operated with varied resources and constraints and in complex environments reflecting their national context. The authors examined how leaders of multiple organizations collaborated, and how their associated activities and

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characteristics contributed to various outcomes. The team gathered both qualitative interviews and answers to open-ended survey questions. The authors concluded that their use of mixed methods enabled them to probe more holistically the complementary, and indeed complex, data members and leaders provided. The variety of data researchers ­ collected—from surveys (quantitative and qualitative), interviews (qualitative) and networks (­ quantitative)—provided multiple vantage points from which to view participants’ relationships with chosen coalitions, processes, structures, and outcomes. These authors’ free movement between quantitative and qualitative data demonstrated their openness to epistemology. Nonetheless, their data were analyzed in ways that most closely align with interpretivist methods. A second approach that interpretivist/critical researchers might consider is the sequential exploratory design, which prioritizes qualitative, interpretive inquiry as the initial style of methods and analysis, followed by the use of quantitative data collection and analysis. The purpose of this design is to interpret and elaborate a phenomenon by using quantitative methods to measure the extent to which findings distilled from the qualitative study are widespread within the subject population. Postpositivist scholars often use this design to develop measurement instruments. The researcher first uses exploratory questions to draw out understandings and deeper meanings from participants; the researcher then writes survey questions based on the qualitative findings. Qualitative researchers might find this design especially appealing because qualitative data can highlight unexpected and under-researched aspects of a phenomenon, and qualitative findings anchor and shape the design of the second phase of research. Organizational communication scholars Lee and Flores (2019) have recently demonstrated a sequential exploratory design. Their study investigated organizational temporality among U.S. immigrant workers arguing that their culture of origin affects their mobile

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phone work practices. They first interviewed five immigrant workers to understand how they experienced organizational temporality, and to identify difficulties that arose due to their home country’s time orientation differing from the time orientation and practices of their current workplace. These authors used the findings from these five interviews to identify existing measures to incorporate into their quantitative survey assessing organi­ zational temporality, and participant acculturation and mobile phone use. While the Lee and Flores (2019) study employed a type of sequential exploratory method, the emphasis clearly was on using quantitative methods, while the interviews appeared to shed light on the context and serve as a filter for selecting survey items from existing research. Two other designs might be appealing to interpretivist/critical scholars. The first is the sequential explanatory strategy, in which researchers collect and analyze quantitative data followed by qualitative data collection and analysis. The second is the concurrent nested/embedded strategy, which draws on both quantitative and qualitative methods simultaneously, with one method prioritized and the other complementary. To use these designs, interpretivist and critical researchers must be prepared to gather a sufficiently large sample to conduct statistical analysis. However, this can be difficult if researchers require participants with unique qualifications or in a particular context, which can be the case in qualitative studies (e.g., individuals who chose a career downgrade or managers who supervise teams of members who are all more senior than them) (Miles & Huberman, 1994). Creswell and Plano Clark (2017) also describe two additional designs—transformative and multiphase— which are variations on the primary four designs described above. Compared to other designs, the transformative strategy is unique because the researcher leans on theoretical perspectives (e.g., critical theory, advocacy, participatory research, or a conceptual or theoretical framework) to inform and guide data

collection, analysis, and interpretation. Given the researcher’s theoretical commitments, time, and resources, priority may be placed on either quantitative or qualitative research. Finally, the multiphase strategy is implemented over time, employing concurrent and sequential methods. The most common use of this strategy is to examine processes that unfold overtime, often based on a stimulus or intervention. A multiphase strategy is particularly useful when the researcher wants to better understand a relatively complex phenomenon, and when the researcher is capable of maneuvering among paradigmatic commitments to adapt the study over time as unexpected findings emerge (similar to an initiation design, Greene et al., 1989). Most studies do not fully draw on the advantages of mixed methods–especially when their design privileges the quantitative strand, or when the quantitative study occurs first, thus limiting the scope of the subsequent qualitative research (Caracelli & Greene, 1993). Overall, scholars can strengthen their use of mixed methods by incorporating multiple sources of data and analysis techniques throughout, and by better integrating their findings across studies, discussed next (Caracelli & Greene, 1993; Greene et al., 1989).

INTEGRATING FINDINGS AND INTERPRETATION IN MIXED METHODS STUDIES Scholars have argued that the true value of using a mixed methods approach lies in the insights that emerge when integrating findings across two or more datasets. However, scholars admit that integrating their datasets is one of the biggest challenges, and most mixed methods studies fail to do so (Bryman, 2007; Greene et  al., 1989). Scholars fail to integrate data for several common reasons: datasets seem not to be directly comparable, the researcher clearly privileges one dataset

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more than the other, or the researcher is inexperienced with navigating across paradigms and philosophical commitments. Integrating data is defined as analyzing, interpreting, and writing research reports “in such a way that the quantitative and qualitative components are mutually illuminating” (Bryman, 2007, p. 8). Researchers who have not integrated their data will have essentially done two studies that report separate findings without addressing overlaps and complementarities across studies. In contrast, when a researcher has integrated their findings, they report insights drawn from both the separate sets of findings, and insights about the overall phenomenon that become apparent when considering both datasets as a whole. One example of integration is transforming one set of data to mirror the other dataset. For example, researchers might qualitize quantitative data (Sandelowski, 2009). This practice involves creating a narrative to describe variable relationships in a quantitative dataset; doing so enables the researcher to tell the story of what they see in their quantitative study and evaluate how that account aligns with and departs from the narrative emerging in their qualitative data. Conversely, researchers might quantize qualitative data. Here, they assign numerical values to themes found in their interview and observational data; this approach enables researchers to count reoccurring themes and flag possible cause-effect variable relationships that might also be found in the quantitative dataset (Sandelowski, 2009). Pragmatism offers an additional approach to integrating data; namely, to use abductive reasoning to work back and forth across datasets to derive situated understandings about each study’s findings while also forming a gestalt understanding of the phenomenon itself (Feilzer, 2010; Morgan, 2007). Mixed methods proponents have identified both the need to better integrate findings across datasets and several techniques for doing so. Too often, however, these recommendations do little to address the core challenge (and opportunity) floating just below

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the surface of mixed methods work. That is, while researchers are often thoroughly trained and well versed in using particular methods, they often have incomplete, fragmented, or superficial understandings of how their research is anchored in the philosophical commitments of paradigms that more broadly inform their work. As a result, efforts to integrate findings are severely constrained because researchers are either not well-versed in philosophical commitments, or not deliberate in how they draw from them in study design and implementation. To that point, we see philosophical commitments as being an under-used tool in mixed methods research. In the next section, we propose that philosophical commitments can help researchers hone their creative thinking about a phenomenon, and outline obligations and questions to help design a mixed methods study.

TOWARD A “MIXED RESEARCH” APPROACH TO ORGANIZATIONAL COMMUNICATION RESEARCH While it is largely assumed that researchers’ methodological choices extend from their philosophical stances, it is often unclear when reading a study how to determine whether a researcher has made deliberate, philosophically informed methodological choices. For instance, Coates (2021) examined how authors presented their philosophical assumptions, conducting a content analysis of more than 1000 mixed methods studies in the education field. Coates concluded that instances of apparent inattention to philosophical commitments might be due to weaknesses in researchers’ research education, or their metatheoretical understandings. Regardless of researchers’ intent or awareness, mixed methods studies tend to fall into one of three categories that signal how they draw from paradigmatic commitments: Aparadigmatic, single-paradigm, and mixed-paradigm studies (Coates, 2021; Johnson, 2017).

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Aparadigmatic mixed methods studies center their research questions on particular details about the phenomenon to drive methodological decisions. Here, the research problem forms the point of departure; then, the researcher asks: what methods can be used to shed light on this phenomenon? (Johnson, 2017). Thus, because the phenomenon is the starting point, researchers adopting an aparadigmatic stance simply select the methods they think will best help them explore the research problem (Coates, 2021). Single-paradigm mixed methods studies adopt philosophical assumptions from one paradigm to drive the inquiry processes when using multiple methods (Johnson, 2017). This stance sees methods as tools to explore questions within a single paradigm (Coates, 2021). Single-paradigm studies are commonly grounded in postpositivist premises, which lead the researcher to ask: how can mixing methods help to confirm the validity or accuracy of an instrument? Multi-paradigm mixed methods studies adhere to commitments from more than one paradigm to guide the inquiry process (Johnson, 2017). When used intentionally, the researcher can ask how the philosophical commitments from one chosen paradigm can address the blank spots present in another paradigm-in-use. This approach enables the researcher to ask: how can we understand the phenomenon from different ontological vantage points using different types of data (often from multiple sources)? So far, we have built toward two important points to be addressed in the next section: First, scholarly debates about how to define mixed methods research are ongoing and unresolved, and we see an opportunity to not just review the area, but to pivot the conversation. Second, there is a groundswell of voices in the mixed methods arena emphasizing the untapped potential of intentionally designing studies with complementary philosophical commitments in mind—not just complementary methods (Coates, 2021; Johnson, 2017; Schieber et al., 2017); the remainder of this chapter adds to that chorus.

A MIXED RESEARCH APPROACH This section aims to transform the existing conversation about mixed methods research by advancing and adding detail to the notion of mixed research (Johnson, 2017) for organi­ zational communication researchers. In particular, we suggest that researchers ground their research decisions within the philosophical commitments of multiple paradigms. This is because those commitments provide constraints and scaffolds for analytical thinking that can enrich the creativity, deepen the insights, expand the theoretical claims, and enhance the innovation of practical recommendations from a study. To illustrate, Schieber and colleagues (2017) provide an exceptional example of what multi-paradigmatic mixed research can look like. Their multiphase study involved researchers with multiple backgrounds and perspectives investigating ­physician-patient communication. Specifically, a multidisciplinary team with sociologists, linguists, epidemiologists, and economists used the Delphi participatory method, which involved each research team devising their own research questions, then gathering and analyzing observational and interview data—all from the perspective of their home discipline. Crossdisciplinary teams then engaged in several rounds of discussion to integrate the data and findings across team members’ varying disciplinary perspectives. The result was a ­collectively-developed questionnaire that they administered to physicians and patients. While a full review of their study is not possible here, their methods are a thought-provoking model for mixed research involving interdisciplinary teams and integration across multiple paradigms. Of course, mixing paradigms can surface incongruities and incompatibilities between combinations. For example, Lindlof and Taylor (2017) note that critical researchers have historically accused interpretivists of systematically deferring necessary consideration of power by prioritizing the concerns of

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intersubjective understanding. In turn, interpretivists have accused critical researchers of prematurely imposing value judgments and explanations for chosen phenomena, and thus inhibiting potential, novel understandings of their complex operations and significance for social actors. In proposing a mixed research approach, we attend to productive complementarity between paradigms, while tasking researchers with identifying the paradigmatic incompatibilities most relevant to their work. Regardless of possible incongruities across paradigms, we explore how philosophical commitments can be combined in productive ways in mixed research designs, or studies that draw from two (or more) paradigms

to explore a phenomenon (Johnson, 2017). Mixed research is focused on combining philosophical commitments, not just mixing methods—thus the different moniker regarding the approach. We first provide an overview of the mixed research approach, then illustrate possibilities for combining interpretivist qualitative research with critical and postpositivist paradigms. In particular, we anchor our proposals for mixed research within interpretivism’s core philosophical commitments (Table 1.1). We then break down how additional paradigms bring new questions to each of interpretivism’s core commitments, which might enter various stages of a mixed research study.

Table 1.1  Comparison of Philosophical Commitments across Interpretive, Postpositive, and Critical Paradigms (Table adapted from Neuman, 2014) Postpositivism

Interpretive Social Science

Critical Social Science

To discover general laws that aid in generating predictions, controlling events Objective reality exists external to its observers; one true “reality” is an aspirational construct To look for phenomena with general social applicability; to strive for as “accurate” an understanding of social reality as possible

To develop deep, situated understandings of social action from participants’ perspectives (Verstehen) Social reality is fluid and constructed through situated human interactions

Epistemology – valid ways to reach truth, create knowledge

Knowledge is produced from precise, repeatable observations; knowledge helps people articulate and control aspects of life

Epistemological commitments

To seek knowledge is to seek general understandings about the social world gained through systematic observation from an external vantage point

Knowledge is collectively constructed in situated fluid social interactions; knowledge helps people gain empathy about others’ experiences To uncover meaning systems means to gain deep insight (knowledge) about participants’ situated experiences, which show how they construct and navigate the meaning systems

To expose how power structures and relationships empower people to make social change Social reality has many layers; there are both visible and hidden social structures that control, oppress people To articulate and expose power structures in participants’ lives; to reveal power structures to participants so they can free themselves from illusions and oppression Knowledge is informed by theories that expose power structures and relationships; knowledge helps people see and change power structures To seek knowledge means to expose power relationships to participants (to articulate and make power/oppression visible to them), and to do so for participants (so they can free themselves)

Purpose for research

Ontology – nature of social reality

Ontological commitments

To look at collective communicative interactions where understanding is built; to understand participants’ experiences from their perspective

(Continued)

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Table 1.1  Comparison of Philosophical Commitments across Interpretive, Postpositive, and Critical Paradigms (Table adapted from Neuman, 2014) (Continued)

Axiology – role of values in scientific research Axiological commitments

Postpositivism

Interpretive Social Science

Critical Social Science

Researcher values can inform what a scientist chooses to study; can be an object of study, but scientific process should be value-free Researchers recognize that personal interests might drive their selection of a research topic; otherwise, scientists commit to conducting a value-free scientific process

Researcher values inform how a given group acts, differ across groups, are situated and co-constructed in situ

Scientific inquiry always starts from a value position; some value positions are right, others are wrong

Researchers focus on values as Researchers begin their an object of scientific inquiry; scientific inquiry from their values are a foundation for self-reflexively stated value social worlds participants position so readers can see the co-construct together and vantage point from which the with the researcher during researchers view the power research process structures they are exposing

MIXING INTERPRETIVIST AND CRITICAL PARADIGMS An interpretivist study could be expanded to gain understandings about systems of oppression. In particular, a critical lens can accompany interpretivist research to look for deep, situated understandings in a context and how they reflect, draw from, reproduce, or reject systems of oppression. This combination of critical and interpretivist commitments can be useful for illustrating how the situated understandings that participants interactively create (an interpretivist concern) might impose or reinforce their experience of oppression (a critical concern), and how participants’ choices in how their community generates collective meaning can instill either oppressive or emancipatory possibilities for understanding. To identify opportunities to expand creativity and deepen inquiry, we begin by examining philosophical commitments side-by-side, looking for overlaps and differences, then posing questions to guide the research process.

Interpretivist Philosophical Commitments Interpretivism holds that we co-construct fluid social realities through ongoing interaction, conducted within a given context (Lindlof &

Taylor, 2017). Elaborating on this ontological commitment, we might consider how interpretivist research pays close attention to the “micro” interactions that layer on one another, operate in cycles, or generate local patterns of behavior that are never permanent and always up for grabs to some extent. A foundational goal of interpretivist research is Verstehen, or deep understanding about interactions occurring within a particular context (Tracy, 2020). Seeking Verstehen means to look for the ways that communities build systems of meaning, and how they are held together or made coherent by internal logics. The assumption that knowledge is socially constructed and understood through examining situated meanings is a core epistemological commitment of the interpretivist paradigm (Neuman, 2014). An axiological commitment of interpretivism is the assumption that values are relevant and an occasion for researcher self-reflexivity; knowing a researcher’s value stance offers additional context and insight into why the researcher arrived at their particular study findings and conclusions (Neuman, 2014).

Critical Philosophical Commitments In contrast to interpretivism, a critical paradigm holds that social reality is shaped by

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numerous (and conflicting) layers of influence, that there are enduring social structures that control and oppress people, and that social structures can be hidden or visible to a social group (Neuman, 2014). A critical perspective attends to power structures for the purpose of identifying and potentially changing them. That is, a foundational goal of critical research is to reveal power structures to the communities experiencing them, so that they can empower themselves to overcome oppression. Critical research pays close attention to the “macro” or otherwise enduring structures that shape social realities. A core epistemological commitment of critical scholarship is the assumption that knowledge is informed by theories that expose power structures and relationships, and that knowledge helps people see and change power structures. To seek knowledge means to expose power relationships to participants (to articulate and make power/oppression visible to them), and to do so for participants (so they can emancipate themselves). An axiological commitment of a critical perspective is that scientific inquiry always starts from a value position; some value positions are beneficial and just, while others are misguided and destructive. Furthermore, scientists begin their inquiry from their self-reflexively stated value position. Defining their value position aids the researcher’s participants and readers to see the vantage point from which the researcher views the power structures they are exposing.

Complementarity across Philosophical Commitments The philosophical commitments of interpretivist and critical paradigms are potentially complementary, and can inform each other in important ways. First, both paradigms share an ontological preoccupation with shedding light on organization members’ lived experiences. Articulating elements of participants’ experiences is the first step toward helping people navigate their communicative interactions

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with greater intention. From an interpretivist vantage point, this means helping participants make sense of their experiences by situating them within a cultural context or other system of meaning. From a critical vantage point, this means helping participants to understand how and why they may have been oppressed and to make sense of their own power and positioning within a broader power structure. Thus, the shared ontological commitment to articulate aspects of participants’ organizational experiences can help participants better understand their role (interpretivist) or positioning (critical) within a meaning system (interpretivist) or power structure (critical). This recognition leads us to pose the following set of ontological questions, regarding the articulation of participants’ experiences: • How are emerging and situated understandings of communication shaped by systems of oppression? • In what ways do participants’ accounts or narratives evince constraints/limitations rooted in power and oppression systems? • In what ways do we see the seeds of oppression operating in participants’ emerging, situated understandings in a context? • In what ways does participant talk evince the seeds of emancipatory possibilities within enduring systems of oppression?

Second, both paradigms share an epistemological commitment to understanding the coproduction of situated meaning and power relationships (Lindlof & Taylor, 2017; Neuman, 2014). From an interpretivist perspective, this means understanding how ­ participants interact with other people to ­produce meaning. From a critical perspective, this means examining how participants ­interact with power structures as they interact with each other. A mixed research scholar might thus make epistemological commitments to understand how participants coconstruct meaning and experiences within situated ­ contexts (interpretivist) and power structures (critical). This recognition leads us to pose the following set of epistemological

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q­ uestions, regarding the communicative coconstruction of meaning and power: • How do patterns of action (i.e., both emerging and enduring) privilege some participants’ perspectives, while marginalizing those of others? • In what ways do participants invoke power structures (explicitly or implicitly) as they make sense of their experiences?

Third, both paradigms share an axiological commitment regarding researcher transparency and self-reflexivity about their positionality and perspective (Neuman, 2014). From an interpretivist stance, self-reflexivity and transparency guide the reader to understand how the researcher (as an analytical instrument) arrived at their conclusions. From a critical stance, researcher transparency allows the reader to see the power position from which the research findings and recommendations were produced. A mixed research study might thus honor axiological commitments to researcher self-reflexivity and transparency pertaining to how the researcher arrived at their findings (interpretivist), and from what power position they see and experience social reality (critical). A mixed research study might then ask questions that speak to these shared goals, while honoring the different reasons and techniques for doing so according to the two paradigms. This recognition leads us to propose the following set of axiological questions, regarding researcher transparency and self-reflexivity: • What aspects of a researcher’s positionality are essential for participants and readers to know about to make sense of the study’s findings? • In what ways does the researcher’s knowledge of their own power and positioning shape their research interests, approach, organizational access, and findings?

Flecha (2014) offers an example of a study merging interpretive and critical paradigms. The study conducted by researchers in the European Commission aimed to investigate the Roma, one of the most stigmatized ethnic

minorities in Europe. Roma have long avoided research participation because historically research has been exclusionary and conducted by outsiders in ways that ignored the Roma voice. This five-year study used a method called Communicative Methodology that involved Roma voices in designing, implementing, and monitoring the study. They collected quantitative survey data to assess participants’ perceptions of students’ learning and performance in math, languages and other core subjects. Interviews and focus groups explored what strategies appeared to help students succeed in school. While the methodology was mostly interpretive, the critical framework was a guiding force in the study’s design, and in analyzing and interpreting the data.

MIXING INTERPRETIVIST AND POSTPOSITIVIST PARADIGMS In this proposed configuration, an interpretivist study could be expanded to consider how deep, situated understandings in a context draw from, reproduce, or reject broader social systems of meaning. Similarly, the general findings derived from a postpositivist study could be probed from an interpretivist vantage point to identify and articulate the situated social co-production of generalizable phenomena.

Postpositivist Philosophical Commitments Postpositivism holds an ontological assumption that an objective reality exists external to its observers (Neuman, 2014). However, the idea that “one true reality” exists is considered an aspirational construct. A main goal of research is to look for phenomena that have wide or general social applicability, and to strive for as “accurate” an understanding of social reality as possible. One epistemological

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commitment of postpositivism is that knowledge is produced from precise, repeatable observations; knowledge helps people articulate and control aspects of their social lives. To seek knowledge is to seek general understandings about the social world gained through systematic observation from a vantage point external to the phenomenon itself. An axiological commitment is that values can inform what a scientist chooses to study, and values can be an object of study; however, the scientific process should be value-free. Scientists recognize that personal interests might drive their selection of a research topic, but they commit to conducting a value-free scientific process because, presumably, accounting for individual researcher values hinders other researchers’ efforts to replicate a study (as they might adhere to a different value system).

Second, epistemological commitments of interpretivist and postpositivist stances diverge in complementary ways, in that interpretivism assumes an emic view—that knowledge is produced and made meaningful within situated interactions, and that the researcher can best understand those contexts from within (Lindlof & Taylor, 2017; Tracy, 2020). In contrast, postpositivism assumes an etic view—that knowledge is produced from systematic observation of generalizable and universal aspects of social life, and that the researcher observes such phenomena from an external vantage point (Neuman, 2014). A mixed research study might thus honor both sets of epistemological commitments by employing both emic and etic vantage points throughout a study. This recognition leads us to pose the following epistemological questions concerning the alternation between emic and etic vantage points:

Complementarity across Philosophical Commitments

• How do situated emerging meanings draw from or reject broader, more general societal meanings? • When using consistent qualitative methods across research sites, how do meaning-making processes reflect broader societal approaches to making meaning?

Interpretivist and postpositivist paradigms complement each other in important ways that can lend macro insights (postpositivism) to situated interactional or micro findings (interpretivism). First, an ontological assumption of postpositivism is that it assumes that generalized social experiences exist at a macro level, while an interpretivist ontological assumption is that social realities are built through the mundane micro experiences of a community. Thus, a mixed research study might honor both sets of ontological assumptions by looking for the macro in the micro, and vice versa. This recognition leads us to pose the following set of ontological questions regarding the articulation of participants’ experiences with micro- and macro-level phenomena: • In what ways do we see the seeds of general societal/organizational meanings reflected in situated understandings? • In what ways do we see the potential for situated meanings and experiences to impact or contribute to new societal meanings or processes?

Third, axiological commitments of interpretivist and postpositivist perspectives converge on the idea that values inform the topics researchers choose to study (Neuman, 2014). However, these paradigms diverge in the extent to which they hold researchers accountable for the role their values play in all aspects of a research project. A mixed research scholar might incorporate both sets of axiological commitments by engaging in a kind of multi-perspectival selfreflexivity in which they ask themselves to consider how their personally held values inform how they observe and make sense of a phenomenon from both close range (a situated interpretivist stance), and from a removed vantage point (an “objective” postpositivist stance). Likewise, the researcher might derive generalizable findings from a “value-free” postpositivist stance, while reflecting deliberately on the

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decision points throughout a mixed research process in which their values informed study design, analysis, or integration choices. This recognition leads us to pose the following set of axiological questions, regarding researchers’ cultivation of multi-perspectival self-reflexivity: • How do I explain this phenomenon and its importance as a community insider (emic perspective) versus as a community outsider (etic perspective)? • What were the primary decision points in this research process and in what ways did my personally held values inform how the research proceeded? • How do understandings gained from micro interactions before and during the research process influence progressive meanings? • How can quantitative methods reflect unique contexts but still retain the objectivity necessary for generalizability?

An example of mixing interpretivist and postpositivist paradigms would be to use a variation of Alan Turing’s “imitation game” (originally devised as a test for ascribing sentience to computers). This method involves making outsider’s assumptions about an insider’s culture explicit so they can be corrected, clarified, and elaborated upon (Collins et  al., 2017). This method involves three players drawn from two social groups—the Interrogator/Judge and Non-Pretender are from the same social group, while the Pretender is from the other social group but pretends to share the culture of the other two players. The goal is for the Interrogator/Judge to ask questions about the target culture and, based on the answers from the Pretender and Non-Pretender, figure out who is who. The interrogator makes their determination by asking questions relating to unique aspects of the culture’s experiences and practices that would only be apparent to insiders. Thus, the players (rather than the researcher) provide the domain-specific knowledge that characterizes the local culture and its boundaries. One use for the imitation game is to flag and correct researcher’s interpretations about participants’ lived experiences

and culture—in effect, it is an involved way to validate interpretivist and postpositivist findings while correcting distortions caused by the researcher’s outsider perspective relative to the group under study. Another use for the imitation game is between collaborating researchers who are trained in different paradigms; the game allows them to articulate their differing philosophical assumptions, research approaches, and understandings about the phenomenon itself. Doing so makes philosophical assumptions an explicit conversation throughout the research process that can clarify both paradigmatic convergences and divergences, ultimately strengthening mixed research findings. The imitation game can be applied when mixing any combination of paradigms.

MIXING CRITICAL AND POSTPOSITIVIST PARADIGMS In this configuration, scholars might combine critical and postpositivist approaches in a mixed research project by working back and forth between their parallel macro-level assumptions about the nature of reality. For instance, while critical scholars often rely on qualitative methods to uncover the effects of forces of domination, they might draw on postpositivism to arrive at an explanation of cause and effect, which could supplement a critical study’s claims about the generalizability and widespread nature of the power structures they seek to reveal. Conversely, a postpositivist study might adopt critical assumptions about the presence and impact of power structures into their overall assumptions about how various groups experience social realities.

Complementarity across Philosophical Commitments Both critical and postpositivist paradigms embrace the belief that macro phenomena are produced through predictable cause/effect

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relationships (Table 1.1). First, from a postpositivist stance, one ontological assumption is that there is a shared, objective reality that can be explained with some degree of accuracy. From a critical stance, power structures and forces of domination are always at play in ways that dominate social groups and communities. Both perspectives strive to better understand enduring social systems and their effects, while they diverge on their end goals of explanation and prediction of social reality (postpositivism) versus emancipation from social power structures (critical). A mixed research study might honor both sets of commitments by asking questions that generalize the presence of power structures in—and their impacts on—social realities. This recognition leads us to pose the following set of ontological questions regarding the articulation of participants’ experiences with power in social contexts: • In what ways do power-related variables inform cause/effect predictive relationships between/ among variables? • How might attention to power structures, privilege, and marginalization shape the postpositivist findings and suggested interventions extending from such studies?

Second, both critical and postpositivist paradigms share an epistemological assumption that knowing more about one’s social reality can enhance their control over it (Table 1.1). From a critical perspective, knowledge (i.e., informed by theories that expose power structures) helps people see power relationships so that they can free themselves from them. From a postpostivist perspective, knowledge (i.e., produced from precise, repeatable observations) helps people articulate, predict, and control aspects of their lives. A mixed research study that honors both sets of epistemological commitments might seek general understandings about the social world and the role of power structures in those generalized understandings. This recognition leads us to propose the following set of epistemological questions regarding

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the articulation of general social experiences for greater control: • In what ways are power structures a given aspect of an objective social reality, and how do power structures impact people’s social experiences? • How might systematic observations of social phenomena reveal systemic power dynamics? • In what ways does knowledge about generalized social experiences reveal systemic oppressions and/or opportunities for emancipation? • How might societal assumptions influence who the researcher invites to participate in the study? • Will skepticism about inferential statistics cause such findings to be minimized?

Third, critical and postpositivist paradigms diverge on their axiological commitments, with a critical stance emphasizing the importance of claiming a value position from the start of the research process, and a postpositivist stance largely ignoring—indeed avoiding— the role of values in informing the research process (see Table 1.1). A mixed research study could explore this tension between the value stances of these paradigms by, on the one hand, asking how power structures might be a given, “objective” aspect of social reality that perhaps does not require a self-reflexive value orientation to detect and see the impacts of them. On the other hand, engaging in selfreflexivity around one’s power and positionality can expose postpositivists’ assumptions about privilege and marginalization that they, perhaps inadvertently, reproduce in hypothesizing and testing cause/effect explanations and predictions. This recognition leads us to pose the following axiological questions regarding researchers’ assumptions about privilege and marginalization: • What if an “objective” understanding of “the” social world always assumed that power structures were operating? • How does the researcher’s power and positionality reproduce a body of knowledge that highlights privileged experiences while ignoring or erasing marginalized experiences? • How do power structures influence the production and format of the findings?

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• How do power structures influence who has access to the final report?

A recent study on Afghan entrepreneurs’ perceptions of danger in a war zone (Bullough & Renko, 2017) provides an example of how mixing postpostivist and critical assumptions to a research problem can lead to richer understandings about how contextual factors shape researchers’ interpretations of findings from a quantitative measure. In their initial quantitative study, Bullough and Renko found that women Afghan entrepreneurs perceived significantly less danger than male entrepreneurs, and marginally less danger than both male and female non-­entrepreneurs. The authors found these findings puzzling because Afghan society and social structures oppress women—90% experience domestic abuse in physical, sexual, and mental forms in the home, with more than half reporting physical violence, and 80% are in an arranged marriage (Bullough & Renko, 2017). Beyond the home, women are severely restricted in their activities—they cannot leave the home without permission from, or escort by, male family members. Thus, running a business can expose women to unwanted attention and violence from passersby who notice them. Given these dangers, the authors conducted focus group interviews with Afghan women entrepreneurs to gain perspective about why and how their perceptions of danger were sharply lower than that of male entrepreneurs. The interviews revealed that women understand, recognize, and experience danger from war and social unrest (e.g., bombings, torture, rape, killings), but their most pressing concerns are about navigating their relationships at home to maintain harmony and foster support for and male participation in their entrepreneurial pursuits. Moreover, based on the women’s accounts in focus groups, the authors inferred that threats from war and social upheaval largely fall on male heads of households who take on the responsibility to protect their wives and family.

Another example is Garcia and Ramirez’s (2021) investigation of student leadership and leadership potential with Raza men, described as “racial-ethnic groups beyond Chicana/o/x and Mexican American” (p. 242). They drew on an earlier convergent study they conducted (published in 2017) that collected interviews from Latino men along with secondary quantitative survey data collected by the Cooperative Institutional Research (CIR). Using a critical lens in the 2021 article, they recognized that the surveys used by CIR had been designed by White men and collected by White college students. Believing that the findings of their 2017 study were significantly shaped by dominant White knowledge, Garcia and Ramirez extended the original study’s finding by using Chicana feminist theory and by interviewing Raza men. By adding a critical lens and an additional layer of data, they discuss the previous quantitative findings, while also revealing social structures that oppressed their participants. To summarize our discussion in this section, it is revealing to set side-by-side the philosophical commitments of the primary paradigms that organizational communication researchers tend to draw from. These comparisons are not meant to be decisive nor exhaustive, but rather to provide a template for thinking about possibilities for mixed research studies in our field. We see exciting potential for theoretical expansion by combining philosophical commitments of the paradigms discussed herein with other ­paradigms-in-use in the field, such as feminist, “flat,” decolonial, postcolonial, relational and other stances. The next section proposes future directions for mixed research.

FUTURE DIRECTIONS FOR MIXED RESEARCH IN ORGANIZATIONAL COMMUNICATION We propose two broad and important points regarding the future directions for mixed research in organizational communication.

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The first area for development is for our field to cultivate a cohort of intentional mixed research scholars with the deftness to move intentionally within and across paradigms and philosophical commitments. We see an opportunity in the organizational communication field to build from the deep methodological expertise our scholars possess, and to capitalize on the creative and theoretical potential that lies in grounding research in the philosophical commitments of more than one paradigm. While it is easy to recommend that our field embrace mixed research, we recognize the challenges of doing so in the multi-faceted communication field. Institutional and professional pressures in the academy increasingly encourage the narrow siloing of researchers in theoretical, methodological, and ideological micro-tribes. Organizational communication programs also differ dramatically from one place to the next regarding which philosophical stances dominate the research interests of colleagues and home departments. Some departments lean predominantly interpretivist, while others are mostly postpositivist, and still other programs are deeply grounded in critical work. Such dynamics in which one paradigm dominates a department can lead to researchers assuming that “their” paradigm is the only one they need to know, and as a result, scholars might not reflect specifically on the philosophical underpinnings of it. That is, scholars might adopt the paradigm as a kind of unquestioned, baseline belief system, rather than articulating its contours and how its commitments lend analytical tools that can serve their inquiry processes. In such an environment, classic mixed methods research can make practical sense as scholars combine different methods within a single paradigm. Throughout this chapter, we have argued that the move to mixed research expands and deepens the quality of situated understandings, explanatory power, and emancipatory potential of research studies. However, cultivating a field of intentional mixed research scholars will require us to reflect on the

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dominant philosophical stances within our departments and field, and challenge ourselves, our colleagues, and our graduate students to see our phenomena through multiple ontological, epistemological, and axiological frames. Toward that end, we propose that a mixed research approach should be incorporated into graduate research methods courses, regardless of the dominant paradigm informing the course. The second area for development is for our field to expand scholarly creativity and theoretical nuance by moving beyond North American and Eurocentric assumptions about reality, knowledge, and value orientations. Several mixed research authors provide a starting point for how this could look. First, Cram and Mertens (2015) propose a transformative paradigm that incorporates Indigenous knowledge frameworks into a philosophical stance that considers social justice to be the foundational principle of a research endeavor. An Indigenous worldview emphasizes social justice, self-­determination, and decolonization. These priorities are threaded throughout all decisions in the research process—from conducting research relationships with respect, to understanding and explaining, through to designing and implementing interventions for transformation. Furthermore, an Indigenous perspective considers the web of relationships involved in studying, explaining, and finding solutions to problems. Respectful and inclusive research relationships are imperative to bringing about understandings and transformation. Second, Fetters and Molina-Azorin (2019) propose how researchers might embrace a yin yang (i.e., Taoist-influenced) philosophy to consider both the wholeness and complementarity of philosophical commitments more thoroughly in a mixed research study. These authors write that a researcher embracing the ontological perspective of yin yang would accept the idea of a singular reality alongside the “duality of reality as yin and yang ” (p. 16). From an epistemological viewpoint, the yin yang framework accepts that mixing

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complementary philosophical commitments provides a more holistic understanding of a phenomenon. An important axiological commitment of yin yang is to honor both sets of philosophical commitments equally in a mixed research study (as opposed to privileging one over the other as often occurs in mixed methods research designs). Third, and reflecting the values of holism and Indigenous philosophies mentioned above, Martel, Shepherd, and GoodyearSmith (2022) propose that the Indigenous M¯aori worldview can be valuable in conducting bicultural research. In particular, they draw from the M¯aori concept He awa whiria (braided river) to consider the strengths of combining two different worldviews into a “workable whole” (p. 17). Like the notion of yin-yang, this perspective emphasizes the importance of considering different paradigmatic stances as being of equal value.

CONCLUSION If organizational communication scholars can agree on one thing, it likely is the ethos found in Kurt Lewin’s sentiment: “there is nothing so practical as a good theory” (Lewin, 1945). Regardless of a scholar’s philosophical grounding and methodological training, we see unrealized potential to add flesh to the bones of our organizational communication theories through engaging with phenomena from multiple philosophical angles. Doing so helps researchers better understand how participants construct their situated social realities, enables researchers to identify blank spots in their assumptions about participants’ lived experiences, and creates awareness about ways that power and oppression are woven through both the general and situated aspects of organizational life. A mixed research approach, in other words, assembles a range of observations and interpretations to create a more complete view of a phenomenon, which can lend depth

and nuance to a theory, while shedding light on specific practical problems organization members face every day. We believe our field is ready for this and encourage readers to apply, critique, and generally advance the project we have proposed here.

REFERENCES Bryman, A. (2007). Barriers to integrating quantitative and qualitative research. Journal of Mixed Methods Research, 1(1), 8–22. https://doi.org/10.1177/2345678906290531 Bullough, A., & Renko, M. (2017). A different frame of reference: Entrepreneurship and gender differences in the perception of danger. Academy of Management Discoveries, 3, 21–41. https://doi.org/10.5465/amd.2015.0026 Campbell, D. T., & Fiske, D. W. (1959). Convergent and discriminant validation by the multitrait-multimethod matrix. Psychological Bulletin, 56(2), 81. https://doi.org/10.1037/ h0046016 Caracelli, V. J., & Greene, J. C. (1993). Data analysis strategies for mixed-method evalu­ ation designs. Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, 15(2), 195–207. https://doi. org/10.3102/01623737015002195 Coates, A. (2021). The prevalence of philosophical assumptions described in mixed methods research in education. Journal of Mixed Methods Research, 15(2), 171–189. https://doi.org/10.1177/1558689820958210 Collins, H., Evans, R., Weinel, M., LyttletonSmith, J., Bartlett, A., & Hall, M. (2017). The imitation game and the nature of mixed methods. Journal of Mixed Methods Research, 11(4), 510–527. https://doi. org/10.1177/1558689815619824 Corman, S. R., & Poole, M. S. (Eds.). (2000). Perspectives on organizational communica­ tion: Finding common ground. Guilford Press. Craig, R. T., & Tracy, K. (1995). Grounded practical theory: The case of intellectual discussion. Communication Theory, 5(3), 248–272. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2885.1995. tb00108.x Cram, F., & Mertens, D. M. (2015). Transformative and indigenous frameworks for multimethod

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and mixed methods research. The Oxford handbook of multimethod and mixed methods research inquiry. Oxford University Press. Creswell, J. W., & Plano Clark, V. L. (2017). Designing and conducting mixed methods research (3rd ed.). Sage. Feilzer, M. Y. (2010). Doing mixed methods research pragmatically: Implications for the rediscovery of pragmatism as a research paradigm. Journal of Mixed Methods Research, 4(1), 6–16. https://doi.org/10.117 7%2F1558689809349691 Fetters, M. D., & Molina-Azorin, J. F. (2019). A call for expanding philosophical perspectives to create a more “worldly” field of mixed methods: The example of Yinyang ­philosophy. Journal of Mixed Methods Research, 13(1), 15–18. https://doi.org/10.1177%2F155868981 8816886 Flecha, R. (2014). Using mixed methods from a communicative orientation: Researching with grassroots Roma. Journal of Mixed Methods Research, 8(3), 245–254. https:// doi.org/10.1177/1558689814527945 Foot, K., Sworn, H., & Alejano-Steele, A. (2021). An outcome-centered comparative analysis of counter-human trafficking coalitions in the Global South. Management Communication Quarterly, 35(3), 418–444. https://doi.org/10. 1177%2F08933189211017925 Garcia, G. A., & Ramirez, J. J. (2021). Proposing a methodological borderland: Combining Chicana feminist theory with transformative mixed methods research. Journal of Mixed Methods Research, 15(2), 240–260. https:// doi.org/10.1177/1558689820954023 Greene, J. C., Caracelli, V. J., & Graham, W. F. (1989). Toward a conceptual framework for mixed-method evaluation designs. Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, 11(3), 255–274. https://doi.org/10.3102/01623737011003255 Jick, T. D. (1979). Mixing qualitative and quantitative methods: Triangulation in action. Adminis­ trative Science Quarterly, 24(4), 602–611. Johnson, R. B. (2017). Dialectical pluralism: A metaparadigm whose time has come. Jour­ nal of Mixed Methods Research, 11(2), 156– 173. https://doi.org/10.1177%2F1558689 815607692 Johnson, R. B., & Onwuegbuzie, A. J. (2004). Mixed methods research: A research paradigm

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whose time has come. Educational Researcher, 33(7), 14–26. https://doi.org/10.3102%2F001 3189X033007014 Kuhn, T. S. (1962/2012). The structure of scientific revolutions. 50th anniversary. The U ­ niversity of Chicago Press. Lee, S. K., & Flores, M. L. (2019). Immigrant workers’ organizational temporality: Association with cultural time orientation, acculturation, and mobile technology use. Management Communication Quarterly, 33(2), 189–218. https://doi.org/10.1177 %2F0893318918821727 Lewin, K. (1945). The research center for group dynamics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Sociometry, 8, 126–135. Lindlof, T. R., & Taylor, B. C. (2019). Qualitative com­ munication research methods (4th ed.). Sage. Martel, R., Shepherd, M., & Goodyear-Smith, F. (2022). He awa whiria—A “Braided River”: An indigenous M¯aori approach to mixed methods research. Journal of Mixed Meth­ ods Research, 16(1), 17–33. https://doi.org/1 0.1177%2F1558689820984028 Miles, M. B., & Huberman, A. M. (1994). Quali­ tative data analysis: An expanded source­ book. Sage. Morgan, D. L. (2007). Paradigms lost and pragmatism regained: Methodological implications of combining qualitative and quantitative methods. Journal of Mixed Methods Research, 1(1), 48–76. https://doi. org/10.1177%2F2345678906292462 Myers, K. K., & Oetzel, J. G. (2003). Exploring the dimensions of organizational assimilation: Creating and validating a measure. Commu­ nication Quarterly, 51(4), 438–457. https:// doi.org/10.1080/01463370309370166 Neuman, W. L. (2014). Social research meth­ ods: Qualitative and quantitative approaches (7th ed.). Pearson. Sandelowski, M., Voils, C. I., & Knafl, G. (2009). On quantitizing. Journal of Mixed Methods Research, 3(3), 208–222. https:// doi.org/10.1177%2F1558689809334210 Schieber, A. C., Kelly-Irving, M., Génolini, J. P., Membrado, M., Tanguy, L., Fabre, C., … & INTERMEDE Group. (2017). Integrating multidisciplinary results to produce new knowledge about the physician–patient relationship: A methodology applied to the INTERMEDE project. Journal of Mixed Methods Research,

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11(2), 174–201. https://doi.org/10.1177 %2F1558689815588643 Sommer Harrits, G. (2011). More than method?: A discussion of paradigm differences within mixed methods research. Journal of Mixed Methods Research, 5(2), 150–166. https:// doi.org/10.1177%2F1558689811402506 Teddlie, C., & Tashakkori, A. (2003). Major issues and controversies in the use of mixed methods in the social and behavioral

sciences. In A. Tashakkori & C. Teddlie (Eds.), Handbook of mixed methods in social & behavioral research (pp. 1–50). Sage. Tracy, S. J. (2020). Qualitative research meth­ ods: Collecting evidence, crafting analysis, communicating impact. John Wiley & Sons. Webb, C., Streufort, S., DePadova, A., & McGlynn, T. (1965). Mixing qualitative and quantitative methods: Triangulation in action. Tavistock Publications.

2 Ethnographic Approaches to Qualitative Organizational Communication Research Angela N. Gist-Mackey and Cristin A. Compton

Ethnography is a qualitative methodological tradition in the social sciences grounded in the exploration, interpretation, and translation of culture and/or culture sharing groups by researchers, for a situated audience. Within organizational communication studies, there are a variety of specific traditions, philosophical assumptions, practices of data collection and analysis, and sub-disciplinary expectations concerning the meaningful use of ethnography. Though ethnographic approaches have waxed and waned in popularity (see Stephens, 2017; Taylor et  al., 2021), they have also proven to be uniquely valuable and effective for organizational communication scholars. For further background, we recommend Taylor’s (2017) overview of the historical emergence of, fluctuating interest in, and scholarly debates regarding ethnography in organizational communication. Ethnography is distinguished from other methodologies in that it requires the researcher to become immersed within a collective culture. Though ethnography is used across the

social sciences with specific methods used differently across contexts, we argue that an ethnographic study in organizational communication, often reflects the following: • Ethnographers have extended close contact with those in a chosen culture-sharing group. • Ethnographers are embedded, physically or digitally, within the group to conduct fieldwork during day-to-day activities witnessing communication. • Ethnographic researchers look for patterns of social organizing through use of symbols, language, rituals, and/or actions that have been identified as central to the culture from either emic (insider) and/or etic (outsider) perspectives. • While theories or frameworks guide researchers’ practices of attention toward an interpretation of cultural phenomena, researchers also engage with emergent phenomena in ways that work between emic (i.e., insider, emergent) and etic (outsider) perspectives. • Data collection methods are systematic, purposeful and respectful of the culture being studied. Related fieldwork methods likely include:

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observation, participation, and/or witnessing the group to understand the culture’s systems of logic, power, and values; headnotes, which are a cognitive tactic ethnographers employ when they are in the field; thick descriptions or field notes that are written, thorough, and self-reflexive; ethnographic interviews or (situationally appropriate) interviews; and textual analysis of visual, digital, and/or physical artifacts relevant to the culture.

˚ ˚ ˚ ˚

In sum, ethnography is the “art and science of describing and interpreting cultural behavior from a close textual-analytic standpoint” (Jackson et  al., 2007). The root words that make up ethnography—“ethno” meaning culture or people, and “graphy” meaning ­writing—literally translates to writing about culture and people (Goodall, 2000). A number of organizational communication scholars have referred to being an ethnographer as “a way of life” (e.g., Goodall, 2000; Tracy, 2020).

ETHNOGRAPHIC METHODOLOGY AND ETHNOGRAPHIC APPROACHES Ethnography, as a methodology, and ethnographic approaches, while rooted in the same history, are not synonyms. As a methodology, ethnography can be understood as a collection of research methods with a specific overarching goal of understanding a culture or culture-sharing group (Creswell & Poth, 2018). However, scholars apply terms such as “ethnographic,” “ethnographic approaches” or “ethnographic analysis” somewhat loosely, reflecting a wide array of various qualitative methods, and in some cases, overarching goals. Notably, the methodological use of ethnographic approaches and ethnography by organizational communication scholars has changed over time. Reading through some scholars’ methodology sections in organi­ zational communication scholarship claiming

“ethnography” as their approach, we see they have diverged in what that approach means in practice, growing from what we have established as a more “traditional” ethnographic approach. We are intrigued by this prospect, as the expansion of ethnography into a variety of different ethnographic approaches illustrates methodological adaptability and capacity for cultural sensitivity. Nonetheless, we believe innovative approaches should always be undergirded by solid scholarly rationales that are ethically informed. For example, McIsaac and Aschauer (1990) chose an “ethnographic approach” because they were interested in “the relationship between writing and its social context” (specifically proposal-writing). The authors used methods including: (1) working on-site over eight months; (2) formal and informal interviews with invested stakeholders with a post-interview questionnaire to “reduce subjectivity;” (3) textual analysis of relevant documents; (4) discursive interviews with specific stakeholders; and (5) participation in one meeting. Kramer (2009) also used an “ethnographic approach” in his exploration of role negotiation in a temporary organization, specifically employing (1) analysis of relevant textual documents; (2) observations over time, writing field notes and taking headnotes; and (3) semi-structured interviews outside of the site. Similarly, Anderson (2020) employed a “quasi” ethnography (citing Elliot & JankelElliot, 2003; Ezan, 2009) to explore aging within a specific neighborhood context. Methods employed by the author included: (1) observations; (2) semi-structured interviews; (3) retrospective reflection of data collection process and experience; and (4) analysis shaped by theory. Notably, Anderson (2020) identified the term “quasi” because of the brief amount of time spent in the field (15 hours), but justified that the underlying goal of exploring culture-sharing practices fundamental to ethnography was the best fit for their study. Rice (2021), too, specifically identified ethnographic methods, not methodology, for their study about high reliability

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collaborations. Specifically, Rice’s (2021, p. 479) data was gathered using “ethnographic observation and interviews” and analyzed using a grounded-theory inspired (Strauss & Corbin, 1998) coding process. Other recent organizational scholarship refers to its methodological approach as “ethnography” or “ethnographic analysis.” For example, Biss et al. (2022) explored organizational accommodations made for trauma victims in the context of a nonprofit agency. Biss et  al.’s (2022, p. 129) manuscript title reflects an “ethnographic analysis” while the manuscript articulates conducting an ethnography. Methods the authors identified include: (1) participant observation over a year with over 100 hours of field time; (2) interviews with 28 staff; and (3) analysis of relevant organizational documents. The authors used Strauss and Corbin’s (1998) member checking to validate their findings and followed Tracy’s (2020) phronetic iterative approach to analyze their data. Similarly, Eger (2021) explored how organizational identity and culture were communicated within the context of a transgender nonprofit agency. Specifically, Eger (2021) described their methodology as an ethnography, including three years of data collection that included: (1) over 415 hours of participant observation across a 3-year time frame; (2) 36 semi-structured interviews; (3) document and artifact analysis; and (4) an arts-based method called a “creative focus group” in which participants across five focus groups drew or made collages to describe their identification with the organization. Analysis procedures were described as inductive coding. The purpose of introducing and comparing these studies is not to critique the approaches or authors; rather, we are intrigued by the multiplicity of ways that “ethnography” is conducted and communicated throughout organizational and communication scholarship. Though the terms used to describe ethnographic research vary, how organizational communication scholars choose to describe and share their research can shape how

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methods sections in publications ultimately read, which arguably shapes the field and future research. Disciplinary expectations and traditions, reviewers with unique methodological training and experiences, and a multitude of methodological texts all articulate ethnographic work differently, and this condition contributes to the variety of ways in which the use of ethnography is justified in social science research. In particular, we appreciate the way that qualitative organizational communication scholars have been nimble in the use of ethnography and ethnographic-inspired approaches and methods. We feel strongly that this proliferation of ethnographic approaches adds to the intellectual diversity that shapes our field and contributes to its vitality. Again, we call on scholars who innovate and intentionally deviate to carefully articulate their methodological aims and decisions in an effort to educate and inform their readers by providing clear parameters and rationale for their research designs. Perhaps most salient to our positions as we explore the multiple and diverse applications of “ethnography” in organizational communication scholarship is the explicit, or in some cases implicit, what Sarah Tracy (2013) calls “sincerity.” Sincerity, to us, is a way of articulating an ethic of care specifically within qualitative research. Sincerity is one of eight criteria Tracy (2013) identifies as a meaningful way to evaluate qualitative research. Sincerity reflects transparency and reflection from the narrator as they explicate about chosen methods, why those methods were chosen, challenges to data collection and analysis. Sincerity also incorporates reflexivity about how personal values and biases intersected with the site of study, participants, and ultimately their readers and themselves. In this chapter, we concisely explicate the dynamic history of ethnography’s evolution, summarize how organizational communication scholars have employed ethnography as methodology, articulate various types of

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ethnographic inquiry, and highlight emerging trends in organizational communication’s ethnographic scholarship. We close by offering reflexive observations for ethnographers in organizational communication.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF ETHNOGRAPHY Scholars have pointed to ancient Greece and Herotodus’ work History as a foundational initial foray into ethnography (Clair, 2003). In History, ethnography, as form of inquiry, is cast as an act of translating lived experiences, stories, and experiences of cultural Others through the lens of a situated (e.g., situated politically, philosophically, economically, paradigmatically, experientially) self (Denzin, 1997). Notably, History centers travel (or the putting oneself among perceived Others) as central to ethnographic inquiry. The popularity of ethnography grew in the 1800s through the 20th century by European governments seeking to either colonize or problematically “save” cultures that were largely destroyed in the Middle Ages (Taylor, 2017). Broadly speaking: on one hand, colonial governments sought to gain knowledge of local cultures that would facilitate (e.g., through translation and manipulation) imperialist expansion easier—a practice often resulting in violence, harm, and irreparable damage to those cultures. On the other hand, European ethnographers traveled to various colonized places, including the Americas, Africa, and South Asia and described behaviors of Others who were maintaining their cultural practices, through a distinctly Western and ethnocentric lens, (Taylor, 2017). Because of the colonialist and imperialist roots of ethnography, it is imperative for scholars to acknowledge its history of, and potential use for, harm, exploitation, and violence against cultural groups as a part of the history of ethnography in present-day scholarly application. Simply put, ethnographic researchers, and the research they

have produced, have an infamous history of overlaying their own experiences, lenses, and values onto collectives of Others in ways that obscure, misrepresent, judge, or devalue them (see Clair, 2003 for powerful critiques and examples). In more modern applications, this trend has both abated and persisted. For example, conducting ethnography has been identified as a way of perpetuating violence against newly constructed forms of Others, including against those, for instance, who grapple with mental health challenges (Pinto, 2020). The cultural, individual, and potential harms that ethnographic research has caused, and can potentially continue to cause, is important to note and prevent.

Into the Academy: Anthropology, Sociology, and Organizational Communication In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, “ethnography” was increasingly conflated with intercultural research conducted from a Western cultural anthropological perspective. From a data collection perspective, distinctly “ethnographic methods” developed during this time, including practices like journaling and documenting (which were later developed into thick descriptions), sketches and drawings, and (as the technology became accessible) photographs (Wolcott, 2016). In the 1920s, Western anthropologists such as John Dewey, Thorstein Veblen, and Frank Boas (dubbed the founder of cultural anthropology), as well as Boas’ students Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, Zora Neale Hurston, and Ella Cara Deloria made ethnography sexy. Newspapers covered stories of ethnographic inquiries all around the world, bringing what was situated as “exotic” and different to developed Western markets. Cultural anthropologists did a great deal to advance the concept of culture, which in the 19th century was understood as something civilizations and their individuals attain, to mean “a way of life” (Menand, 2019). This shift was, as many

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social changes are, controversial and challenging (see King, 2019 for a history). By the 1960s, ethnography in anthropological studies was so well-used that it, to some, became synonymous with qualitative research (Wolcott, 2016). From the 1960s to the mid-1970s, there was a burgeoning interest in educational and anthropological research that situated ethnography as the way to understand cultural relations between groups. Over time, different “schools” of ethnography have emerged, each with unique aims and theoretical foundations (e.g., feminist, critical theory, cultural studies, Marxist, symbolic interactionism; see Atkinson & Hammersly, 1994). Likewise, emerging social sciences and their subdisciplines embraced ethnography as a meaningful approach to research. Social anthropologists (Denzin & Lincoln, 2005) and urban sociologists (Deegan, 2007) are some of the best-known proponents of ethnographic research in the early 20th century. In communication scholarship, perhaps the best known tradition is Ethnography of Communication (EOC; Hymes, 1974; Geertz, 1973). This research program draws on cultural anthropological approaches, centering real-world spoken communication practices that move beyond grammatically correct linguistics into socially appropriate and effective communication between cultural group members. Both content and context are central to an EOC approach, allowing scholars to focus on meaning beyond the words themselves in conversations such as tone, conversation type, and sequences in turn taking, for instance (see also Chapter 11 in this volume).

Ethnography and Organizational Communication Qualitative research, and specifically ethnographic methods, have been used in organizational studies for decades. Beginning in 1924 and lasting nearly a decade, researchers

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associated with the Hawthorne Studies conducted interviews and observations of employees in the Hawthorne Works factories in metropolitan Chicago (see Mumby & Kuhn, 2019). This research brought to the fore the well-cited methodological reality called the “Hawthorne effect,” in which those who are being observed tend to behave differently than they would ordinarily, and as observation continues over time, the effect of being watched also changes (Newstrom & Davis, 2002). This concept, subsequently taught in numerous college-level organi­ zational communication courses, is central to ethnography and organizational studies. Though ethnography and ethnographic approaches continued to be used in organi­ zational and management studies over the next three decades (see Tracy & Geist-Martin, 2014 and Taylor, 2017 for summaries), it was in the 1970s and the influence of Clifford Geertz’s work on interpretive anthropology that focused organizational communication scholars on conceptualizing their organi­ zations from a cultural perspective. One core idea that separated applications in organi­ zational communication from traditional management or business studies was the argument that organizations themselves can be understood as cultures (Pacanowsky & O’Donnell-Trujillo, 1982; Keyton, 2010), and behaviors and performances within organi­ zations could be conceptualized as meaningful cultural texts (Pacanowsky & O’DonnellTrujillo, 1983; Tracy & Geist-Martin, 2014). This perspective invited ethnography as a vital way to explore power relations, organizational identification and identity work, leadership, as well as a multitude of other sub-disciplinary areas of inquiry. In the 1980s, the notion of organizational life as a cultural experience captured the attention of both scholars and practitioners (Alvesson, 1990). Managerial scholars tended to take a prescriptive approach to studying organizational culture, aiming to identify best practices to manage and change organizational culture (Keyton, 2010). Meanwhile,

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organizational communication scholars leaned toward studying organizational culture via ethnography as an interpretive act (Keyton, 2010), and then later as a critical ethnographic endeavor seeking to improve organizational life to make it more equitable (Thomas, 1993). Newer applications of ethnography in organi­ zational communication have expanded from traditional ethnographic approaches within organizational settings (e.g., Goodall, 1989; D’Enbeau & Buzzanell, 2013) to autoethnographic approaches, digital explorations of virtual spaces, new conceptualizations of the interplay between institutions and individuals, and more (see Chapters 12 and 18 in this

volume). Below, we explicate diverse ways ethnographic research has, or could, be used effectively in organizational communication. See Table 2.1 below for a summary of the various types of ethnography addressed in this chapter.

TYPES OF ETHNOGRAPHY Ethnography has a long lifespan and, as such, has evolved into a variety of different manifestations. The essence of ethnographic research typically involves some type of cultural foci and uses a variety of fieldwork

Table 2.1  Types of Ethnography Autoethnography

Critical Ethnography

Digital Ethnography

Institutional Ethnography

Organizational Ethnography

Premises and Practices

Value to Field

Autobiographical; a “turn inward” to the researcher

Illuminates the researcher behind the research; reflexivity and connection

Potential/Future Applications

Amplify marginalized experiences Challenge prescriptive academic forms of knowing Sensitivity to social justice and Pushes researchers to act upon Challenge new, often power; focus on advocacy value commitments in the uninterrogated systems of and change face of exposing hidden power across platforms power dynamics Interrogate digital forms of organizational control Focus on cultural interactions Allows researchers to engage Make meaning at the with participants through with participants in new, intersection of human mediated within, but novel, and meaningful ways communication “norms” decentralized from, a digital that reflect technology’s and technology, values, space influence on culture ascribed power, and performativity Emphasizes pragmatic Tool for critical/ interpretive Illuminate connections and approaches to traditional scholars interested in power interdependence of ethnographic practices relations as they emerge; organizational structures, Uncovering systemic specifically social change, complex systems of power, connections within political economy, and and oppression across institutions from a situated cultural construction multiple new and emerging power perspective platforms Positions organizational culture Centers discourse and lived Allow researchers from as communicative experience within the within and outside of the Requires researchers to organization and the organization interrogate how invisible organized Offer understanding about ideas and practices affect Potentially exploitive; levels of d/Discourse or organizing researchers should be social narratives that mindful of power positions influence social organizing between researcher and space

ETHNOGRAPHIC APPROACHES

methods, namely observation/witnessing, interviews, and/or artifact/textual/visual analysis to explore cultural experiences. Yet despite these relative constants, scholars have innovated and created various types of ethnographic approaches. Here, we highlight types of ethnography relevant to qualitative organizational communication, including (listed in alphabetical order): autoethno­ graphy, critical ethnography, digital ethno­ graphy, institutional ethnography, and organi­zational ethnography. For each type of ethnography, we offer working definitions, descriptions of the parameters constituting each type, focus of ethnographers employing each type, citations for organizational communication examples, and suggestions for future applications for ethnographic organizational communication scholarship.

Autoethnography Autoethnography is “the study of one’s own culture and oneself as part of that culture—and its many variations” (Patton, 2002, p. 85). Additionally, Tracy (2013, p. 19) defines autoethnography as “the systematic study, analysis, and narrative description of one’s own experiences, interactions, culture, and identity.” Definitions of autoethnography commonly include a focus on the autoethnographer’s personal identity, as well as their relationship to their culture or a cultural phenomenon the autoethnographer has experienced or is experiencing. In essence, autoethnography turns inward and examines one’s own lived experience in situ. Autoethnographies have been described as more autobiographical (Patton, 2002) or narrative (Tracy, 2020) in nature when compared to traditional ethnographic research. Written formats often include short stories, poetry, personal essays, photography, and prose (Patton, 2002). Performances are often common in autoethnographic work as well, which makes sense given that autoethnography unpacks the connections between that

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which is personal and that which is cultural (Ellis & Bochner, 2000). Ultimately, the focus of autoethnographers is to incorporate a deep sense of reflexivity into the autoethnographic analysis. Often, autoethnographers focus on concrete action, dialogue, emotion, embodiment, spirituality, and/or self-conscious (Patton, 2002). Using one’s own experiences to yield insight into one’s own culture or subculture in a way that provides self-awareness and introspection as a primary data source is what distinguishes autoethnographers’ work from traditional ethnographers’ scholarship (Patton, 2002). There are a number of notable organi­ zational communication scholars who have published autoethnographic scholarship. We briefly review a few notable manuscripts here in the interest of space. Recently, Joëlle Cruz, Jamie McDonald, Kirsten Broadfoot, Andy Kai-chun Chuang, and Shiv Ganesh have collectively explored their experiences with foreign academic worker identities, as they manifest in their labor at institutions of higher education in the United States. Their autoethnographic inquiry was informed by intersectionality theory (Crenshaw, 1991) addressing various identities such as age, race, gender, sexuality, and national origin. Ultimately, their scholarship makes important contributions revealing how intersectional identities are “negotiated in everyday life by foreignborn academics, and identifies features of the performance of foreign worker identity related to spatiality, presence, and absence” (Cruz et  al., 2020). In addition, Herrmann (2017) published an edited book titled, Organizational Autoethnographies: Power and Identity in Our Working Lives, that covers a variety of salient and worthwhile insights related to topics such as emotional labor (Denker, 2017); women’s embodiment during military socialization (Hunniecutt, 2017); work–life balance (Lindemann, 2017), and regional identity (Tull, 2017) among many others (see also Chapter 12 in this volume). In the future, organizational communication scholars can potentially use autoethnography

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to better amplify marginalized experiences related to organizing. In essence, we believe that awareness about both visible and hidden forms of marginalization should be enhanced. Autoethnographies in organizational communication can challenge prescriptive academic forms of knowing and push the boundaries of qualitative epistemologies. Rigid boundaries that determine what legitimately counts as knowledge are often rooted in hegemonic ideologies and function to exclude and silence voices (Brayboy, 2021). Autoethnographic approaches value personal lived experiences with cultures as a valuable way to know truths qualitatively.

Critical Ethnography Critical ethnography differs from more conventional ethnography by incorporating a heightened level of sensitivity to issues of social justice, power, and agency. Thomas (1993, p. 2) explains critical ethnography as a reflection that examines “culture, knowledge, and action… [while]…[i]t deepens and sharpens ethical commitments by forcing us to develop and act upon value commitments in the context of political agendas.” Further, Thomas (1993, p. 2–3) elaborates that, “[c]ritical ethnographers describe, analyze, and open to scrutiny otherwise hidden agendas, power centers, and assumptions that inhibit, repress, and constrain.” Ultimately, critical ethnography is the use of ethnography toward critical aims; specifically, revealing hidden power structures and making positive change. Critical ethnographies done by organi­ zational communication scholars often explore how organizational cultures construct and maintain taken-for-granted meanings that can function in harmful or oppressive ways for organizations and their stakeholders (Alvesson, 2013). For instance, cultures may function metaphorically like a “psychic prison” (Morgan, 1997, p. 206) that shapes members’ ways of thinking and behaving, and can lead to managerial action

that exercises mind control (Willmott, 1993). Such a phenomenon is well suited for critical ethnographic inquiry. Critical ethnographers begin their approach to research similarly to conventional ethnographers with an aim to explore and interpret cultural phenomena. Then, critical ethnographers take their analysis into additional phases to reflect upon and unpack implicit norms and assumptions, offering social critique, and advocating for ethical change. In short, critical ethnography is both interpretive (i.e., hermeneutic) and emancipatory. Such approaches to analysis can advance social equity and justice in organizations and acts of organizing because it pushes interpretation to inherently consider manifestations of power. Organizational communication scholars have used critical ethnography in various ways. In one example, Gist-Mackey’s (2018) critical ethnography, the inequities of classism and racism were addressed in the cultures of unemployment support organizations serving blue-collar job trainees and white-collar job seekers. In this critical ethnography, a defamiliarization process was used during the analysis to re-interpret observations, accounts, and occurrences within the organizational culture and reframe them using critical thought (Thomas, 1993). Defamiliarization allowed the findings to illuminate internalized manifestations of racism and classism. In another example, Batch and Windsor (2015) explored the culture of communication using critical ethnography in the nursing profession for contingent nurses. They found that non-standard workers in nursing were marginalized because of a dominant stereotype of nursing as exclusively full-time work that pushes contingent nurses to the periphery. Ultimately, they found, “entrenched systemic structures and processes shaped the physical and cultural dimensions of a contemporary work environment and contributed to an ineffective communication culture” (Batch & Windsor, 2015, p. 870).

ETHNOGRAPHIC APPROACHES

Organizational communication scholars have a long history of exploring organi­ zational and organizing as sites of power using critical approaches (e.g., Ashcraft & Mumby, 2003; Deetz, 1992; Jensen, 2018; Pal et  al., 2022). Ultimately, organizational communication scholars are well positioned to employ critical ethnography, given the prevalence of critical qualitative scholarship in the discipline (see also Chapters 7, 8, 9, and 10 in this volume). Future research employing critical ethnography can challenge new, often uninterrogated systems of power across new and emerging sites of organizing. Critical ethnographies are a salient cultural tool at unpacking implicit assumptions and their power-laden consequences, as well as advocating for social justice. Further, critical ethnography can also interrogate digital forms of organizational control, which could also be explored using digital ethnography, which is addressed next.

Digital Ethnography Digital ethnography explores the manifestation, cultural nuances, and presence of digital media in daily life by using ethnographic approaches to research (Pink et  al., 2016). Digital ethnographers account for the way digital media is increasingly integrated with daily social interaction. Pink and colleagues (2016, p. 20) explain that digital ethnography, “takes the novel step of acknowledging the role of digital ethnography in challenging the concepts that have traditionally defined the units of analysis that ethnography has been used to study…[by going] beyond simply translating traditional concepts and methods into digital research environments.” There are characteristics that set the scope of what constitutes digital ethnography. First, digital ethnography always attends to developments in the digital age (Robinson & Halle, 2002; Turkle, 2011), which can be broadly interpreted as technology advances. Second, digital ethnographies often engage

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with participants in mediated contexts rather than in direct physical interaction. For instance, research could be digitally tracking participants with their consent, collecting ­participant-constructed data via media (i.e., video, photography, blogs, vlogs), or exploring how new media offer pathways to engage research participants in situ (Pink et al., 2016). Pink et al. (2016, p. 26) identify five key principles digital ethnographers follow: (1) multiplicity, (2) non-digital-centricness, (3) openness, (4) reflexibility, and (5) unorthodox. The notion of multiplicity allows digital ethnographers and participants to engage with digital media in a variety of ways. Because digital technologies and media are emerging in new forms they are always interdependent with daily lived experiences and thus digital ethnographers need to continually evolve in their methods to study such technology. Second, the notion of non-­digital-centric-ness captures the way that scholars often de-center media as the foci of research in order to better understand the way digital media become inseparable from lived experiences. Third, openness is a core concept in digital culture where access is privileged by various structures, such as open access and creative commons. Ultimately, access, sharing, and collaboration become a raison d’etre (reason for being) regarding digital relationships. Fourth, reflexivity in digital ethnographic contexts is similar to that of other ethnographies, which is the notion that digital ethnographers should be mindful of how they are encountering the digital world as they produce knowledge about it, continually reflecting on their own positionality. Finally, the notion of being unorthodox points to the reality that digital ethnography requires researchers to attend to “alternative forms of communicating” (Pink et al., 2016, p. 32). For instance, digital ethnographers have an opportunity to engage visual/audible forms of communication in ways that are unique and innovative. This can provide novel ways of communicating with participants and producing knowledge, which

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organizational communication scholars are well positioned to explore. So far, digital ethnography has been underused in organizational communication scholarship. Notable exceptions, however, include Bulut’s (2015) exploration of how immaterial labor crossed social class lines in the video game industry, as well as Oreg and Babis’ (2021, p. 1) digital ethnography, which “collect[ed] data from Facebook pages and groups, blogs, and websites of nonprofit organizations and individual volunteers and donors.” Oreg and Babis (2021) conducted ethnography in two ways. First, “…at the micro-level, explore[ing] human milk donations to nonprofit milk banks. The second, at the meso-level, explores a community of migrant workers” (Oreg & Babis, 2021, p. 1). These examples demonstrate how digital ethnography can be used to study organizing and organizations (see also Chapters 18 and 27 in this volume). Digital ethnography is an opportunity for organizational communication scholars who study topics such as sociomateriality, human–machine communication, and the digital divide, to further engage their interests. Future digital ethnographers could make meaning at the intersection of emerging human communication norms and technology to interpret digital value systems, ascribed power, and performativity among new media users.

Institutional Ethnography Institutional ethnography is situated through the lens of institutions (e.g., workforce, education, family) and was developed to explore how social relations and practices structure people’s lives and become institutionalized via practice (Smith, 2005, 2006). Organizational communication scholars are well suited to use this approach because intuitional ethnographies also shatter the “organization-as-container” metaphor, situating institutions as larger, dispersed bodies of

socialized power and knowledge (e.g., the health care institution). This form of ethnography was originally developed by sociologist Dorothy E. Smith in the 1970s (2005, 2006). Institutional ethnography intentionally moves away from ethnography as a fixed and canonized qualitative methodology and instead places it firmly in the pragmatic realm, privileging effective research practices. Paradigmatically, institutional ethnography straddles an interpretivist/critical line, centering the researcher and their experience while simultaneously seeking to reveal (often hidden) social power relations through ethnographic methods (Smith, 2006). As we have argued, ethnographic approaches that invite interpretation and flexibility in data collection and analysis, as well as a more general push of rigid methodological expectations, are both necessary and to be approached with mindfulness and sensitivity. From a study design perspective, institutional ethnographers begin with the perspective of a group of people, but do not intend to draw generalizations from analysis of those groups. Instead, the uniqueness of institutional ethnographies “is produced by the researcher’s developing knowledge of institutional processes, which allows a kind of listening and probing oriented toward institutional connections” (DeVault & McCoy, 2006, p. 24). In sum, institutional ethnographers seek to understand institutional arrangements that affect people and ultimately how institutions control and govern people’s lives (Bisaillon & Rankin, 2013; Smith & Turner, 2014) with a specific focus on the pragmatic. Given the pragmatic focus of institutional ethnography, readers interested in such approaches can also consult Chapter 4 in this volume. Surprisingly, while institutional topics and theories are common in organizational communication (e.g., Boivin et  al., 2017; Lammers, 2003; O’Connor et al., 2017), there are very few examples of institutional ethnographies in organizational communication proper. We highlight two exceptions here.

ETHNOGRAPHIC APPROACHES

Sorsa et al. (2014) used video-ethnography to explore the institutional roles of actors during performance appraisals. Their findings revealed how strategy is employed in interaction between managers and employees who evoke the pragmatic and functional meanings of strategic discourse. The study highlights the embodied and material nature of strategy, as well as how managers use nonverbal gestures and appraising attitudes to make the strategy more concrete during performance appraisals. Sorsa et al. (2014) also identified how institutional documents or texts are strategically ascribed agency when they are ventriloquized during performance appraisals. In another example, Witteborn et  al. (2013) compared three different institutional settings (i.e., nonprofit, healthcare, and technological institutions) using ethnography. This study focuses on the applied or pragmatic nature of research. Witteborn and colleagues used this comparative institutional analysis to show that research processes and outcomes can have different logics for scholars across institutional contexts. The difficulty we had finding recently published institutional ethnographies in organizational communication proper points to opportunities for future use. Sorce (2019) makes a compelling case for institutional ethnography’s future applicability in the communication discipline. Specifically, Sorce (2019) argues that institutional ethnography aligns well with interpretive or critical approaches to research interested in cultural, social, and new media contexts. Organizational communication scholars interested in topics including social change, cultural construction, interdependence of organizational structures, power relations as they emerge across digital and physical spaces, political economy, and more, are areas of study that would be well suited for institutional ethnography. Organizational communication scholars interested in understanding ruling relations (Smith, 1974), broadly conceptualized, could potentially find an ideal fit with institutional ethnography. There is also room for future

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growth in institutional ethnography: incorporation of digital methodologies (such as those explicated in the digital ethnography section above) as well as a breadth of hybrid institutional settings, which would reveal institutional power relations in new, complex ways.

Organizational Ethnography Simply put, organizational ethnography is a methodological approach to study organizing and organizations. Organizational ethnography requires the examination of taken for granted, yet salient ideas and practices that influence organizational lives and organi­ zational cultures within organizational contexts or sites of organizing (Schwartzman, 1993). Taylor (2017) explains that early imperial and colonial efforts, which were the violent genesis of ethnography, were in essence organizational enterprises. Hence, ethnography has always been organizational in nature. Organizational ethnography gives organizational communication scholars a way to interrogate organizations and organizing as cultural phenomena. Organizational communication, as a discipline, embraced the notion of organizations as cultures that were communicatively constituted in the 1980s (Pacanowsky & O’Donnell-Trujillo, 1982, 1983). In doing so, organizational ethnographers typically engage cultural knowledge, behavior, and artifacts that participants share and use to interpret their experiences in a culture sharing group (Keyton, 2010; Spradley, 1980). Organizational ethnographers can illuminate aspects of organizational lives that other methodologies can potentially miss, such as: (1) hidden or concealed dimensions of everyday organizational lives, like emotions, politics, or values in decision making; and (2) a focus on the relationship between individual and context, in which agency, perceived power, and an existing historical context shape day-to-day interactions (Yanow et al., 2012).

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There are many examples of organizational ethnography within organizational communication involving the study of culture-sharing groups, associated with traditional brick and mortar physical organizations, and also more innovative, grass-roots—and even virtual— spaces of organizing. One example of studies in the former category include Branton and Compton’s (2022) study of gay bars. In this study, organizational communication scholars explored how the meaning “gay bar” was negotiated using co-sexuality as a theoretical framework. Their findings indicated that through neoliberal branding, the meaning of gay bars was constructed as an inclusive space for all sexualities by both patrons and employees within these establishments. In another example, de Souza (2019) used organizational ethnography to explore how stigma could be induced by neoliberal ideology in food pantries. Through a thorough analysis of ethnographic data, de Souza (2019) demonstrates how neoliberal ideologies stigmatize food pantry users in ways that are tied to values such as individualism and hard work. These ethnographies were geographically situated in specific brick and mortar organizations where organizational communication researchers conducted their fieldwork. However, other organizational communication scholarship also challenges the common “container” approach spatially and temporally to studying the culture of organizations via ethnography. For instance, in Cruz’s (2015) work exploring post-conflict Liberian markets, they considered national culture in relation to the cultural nuances and norms of African Women’s Susu groups. In this study, Cruz (2015) explored the intersections of gender, class, and nation in relation to “dirty work” theories, and challenged the cultural stigma of food labor. This study—and others subsequently—led Cruz and Sodeke (2021) to challenge Eurocentric epistemologies of organizational ethnography and organizational communication – a project which has advanced the discipline’s ongoing

quest for decolonization. In another example, Cox et  al. (2019) studied Full-Figured Fashion Week (Cox et  al., 2019), an annual event whose organization seeks to challenge the way certain bodies are privileged over others in the U.S. fashion industry. Cox et al. (2019) found that the organizers of this event nonetheless struggled between promoting body positive and fat accepting discourses, which ultimately led to problematic decisions that sustained the status quo privileging of thin body types. We have highlighted only a few examples here. Please note that organizational ethnography is popular in organizational communication and has been used to study diverse sites of organizing, such as homeless shelters (Jensen, 2018; Jensen & Meisenbach, 2015), U.S. Border Patrol (Rivera, 2015), Community Theater (Kramer, 2004), Legal Brothels (Blithe & Wolfe, 2017), aging communities (Anderson, 2020), unemployment organi­ zations (Gist-Mackey & Dougherty,  2021), airport security lines (Malvini Redden, 2013), immigration support centers (Kvam, 2017), and healthcare organizations (Scholl, 2007) among others. Scholars interested in learning more about organizational ethnography may also consult Chapters 13 and 15 to learn more about engaged qualitative organizational communication research and negotiating access to organizations respectively. Future use of organizational ethnography presents chances for researchers to better understand levels of d/Discourse that influence social organizing.

Blurring the Boundaries Above, we have reviewed various types of ethnography including: autoethnography, critical ethnography, digital ethnography, institutional ethnography, and organizational ethnography. For parsimony, we reviewed these in discrete categories, but we want to reiterate that the boundaries between these types are porous and ambiguous. For instance,

ETHNOGRAPHIC APPROACHES

Gist-Mackey’s (2018) study, while formally identified as a critical ethnography, would also easily constitute an organizational ethnography. In addition, it is important to note that there are many other types of ethnography that could have been listed here as the longlived history of ethnography has manifested in many variations. This list of types is not intended to be exhaustive or comprehensive, but rather a heuristic to reveal the diverse ways ethnographic approaches have emerged over time.

TRENDS IN ETHNOGRAPHIC RESEARCH The use of ethnography among organi­ zational (communication) scholars has been consistent over time; albeit in a multiplicity of forms and approaches. In order to highlight some contemporary trends, we review recent ethnographic research published in two leading outlets: Journal of Organizational Ethnography (JOE) and Management Communication Quarterly (MCQ). Though certainly other journals contain ethnographic work by organizational communication scholars (e.g., Organization, Organization Studies, Culture and Organization, etc.), we chose these journals as a proxy because of their connection to organizational communication as a discipline and their direct methodological connection to the study of organizations and organizing.

Journal of Organizational Ethnography The Journal of Organizational Ethnography (JOE) was launched in 2012 with the support of Emerald Publishing to serve as a home for organization and management scholars and their ethnographic research. Some have called JOE a “collective manifesto” for its

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contributors to shape the future of organi­ zational ethnography (Brannan et al., 2012); the journal’s founders situated it as a place for scholars to engage with the complexities not only of pragmatic considerations or intellectual differences, but also with the growth of ethnographic methodology across disciplines and approaches to organization and management scholarship. Ethnographic approaches are acknowledged as contextdriven and diverse, and the journal encourages its contributors to openly engage with their justification and engagement with multiple data collection methods (e.g., Watson, 2011), ethical considerations, paradigmatic positioning, and aesthetics and history of the methodology (see Brannan et al., 2012). The journal generally publishes new issues three times a year. Authors from across the globe publish in JOE, and like many multidisciplinary journals, manuscripts are situated within and across multiple social science disciplines ranging from anthropology and sociology to management studies and criminology. Broadly, manuscripts published in JOE include both data-driven applications of organizational ethnographies and conceptually or methodologically driven manuscripts that explore or expand organizational ethnography (also conceptualized as ethnography within organizations) from various ethical, pragmatic, and paradigmatic perspectives. Many of the methodologically focused articles published in JOE reflect struggles with best practices (e.g., Moretti, 2020; Richards, 2019; Strudwick, 2019), proposing new approaches to qualitative methodologies (e.g., critical grounded theory; Belfrage & Hauf, 2015 and polyphonic sound montages within ethnography; Arnfred, 2015), and ethical considerations when managing both self and context as an ethnographer (e.g., BaumTalmor, 2020; Kunda, 2013; Warden, 2013). Several of JOE’s special issues are formally centered on specific themes or context areas. Different issues have included manuscripts covering: new forms of ethnographic inquiry (2014); administrative-centered ethnographies

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(2015); public service reform (2017); differences between at-home and ethnography abroad (2018); possibilities, politics, and pitfalls of organizational ethnography (2018); poverty and marginality in nonprofits and charities (2019); care values (2019); passing social and structural tests in organizational ethnography (2019); taking sides in organizational ethnography (2021); organizing the city (2022); and police encounters (2022). However, not all issues have specific themes and reflect a mix of contexts, approaches (including autoethnographic approaches), and methodological considerations. Unlike many communication journals, such as MCQ theoretical lenses, contributions, and implications are not central to articles in JOE instead, methodological and practical implications are featured. Often, scholars use sensitizing concepts or broad theoretical claims from multiple disciplines to situate their work and are explicit about their theoretical approaches and contributions to varying degrees. Most authors using theory in JOE position organi­ zational ethnography as theory grounded in data (e.g., Fine & Hallet, 2014; Smets et al., 2014; Watson, 2013). Theoretical contributions are explicitly made in areas similar to those found in organizational communication including, but not limited to, identity and identity work (e.g., Winkler, 2013); space (Raulet-Croset & Borziex, 2014); decisionmaking processes and professional capacity (Steenhuisen, 2014); professionalism and power (e.g., O’Boyle, 2014); and performativity (Merkus et al., 2014). We find it interesting that communication is an uncommon disciplinary approach in studies published in JOE given the breadth of multidisciplinary work and varied approaches to ethnography available across its issues. Organizational communication scholars, provided they are conscientious about the methodological traditions of organizational ethnography and can justify their methodological choices, could find JOE a meaningful place to share their work with organizational

and management scholars with a focus on ethnography.

Management Communication Quarterly Management Communication Quarterly (MCQ) has been dubbed the closest home or flagship journal for organizational communication by a number of scholars (e.g., Sias, 2016; Stephens, 2017). While we realize this is an imperfect proxy for the discipline of organizational communication, since organizational communication scholarship is published across disciplinary forums, we do believe it will allow us to illuminate the ethnographic genre of organizational communication scholarship. In order to conduct this meta-analysis, we first downloaded all publications in MCQ from 2010–2020, which yielded 363 files. We used computer assisted analysis via NVivo qualitative analysis software, and coded all manuscripts that incorporated some type of qualitative approach. A total of 142 manuscripts that incorporated qualitative data were coded for: (1) year published, (2) qualitative methodology, (3) type of data, (4) type of analysis, (5) type of verification, (6) theories used, and (7) subject matter. We then honed in on manuscripts that named ethnography or ethnographic approaches as the methodology. From 2010–2020 there were 13 studies published in MCQ that explicitly named ethnography as the methodological approach. If we expand that search to publications that include any type of fieldwork or observational methods, then there are 46 publications that emerge in our analysis. Ultimately, ethnography and ethnographic approaches are commonly used in organi­ zational communication scholarship. Of the 13 manuscripts that explicitly named ethnography as their methodology, these manuscripts used a variety of different data types including: fieldwork/observation (n=11), interviews (n=10), social media content (n=1),

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video recordings (n=1), archival/textual data (n=1). Please note the numbers here are not mutually exclusive as some studies incorporated multiple types of data. These studies ethnographically explored a variety of different types of organizational contexts, including workplaces; corporations; consultancies; transportation; nonprofits; religious/ spiritual organizations; and housing/residential organizations. Collectively, these studies used the following theoretical frameworks: semiotics; sensemaking; positioning theory; emotional labor; organizational identity and identification theories; African feminism; and communicative constitutive of organization/ organizing. Ultimately, these insights reveal that ethnography is a nimble approach to research that can span a variety of different contexts, which organizational communication scholars have employed using a variety of different types of data, and been informed by a variety of different theories. One helpful resource for ethnographers in MCQ can be found in a manuscript collectively authored by Peter Jensen, Joëlle Cruz, Elizabeth Eger, Jenna Hanchey, Angela Gist-Mackey, Kristina Ruiz-Mesa, and Astrid Villamil’s (Jensen et  al., 2019) forum titled “Pushing Beyond Positionalities and Through ‘Failures’ in Qualitative Organizational Communication: Experiences and Lessons on Identities in Ethnographic Praxis.” In this manuscript, each author takes an introspective look at their own identities and how they manifest in ethnographic research in situ highlighting important lessons learned via reflexivity. Collectively, they share experiences from their work across organizational contexts including homeless shelters, African street markets, employment agencies, nongovernmental organizations, exiled Cuban communities, large corporations, and education programs. Another insightful publication regarding ethnography in MCQ was collaboratively developed by scholars Bryan Taylor, William Barley, Boris Brummans, Laura Ellingson, Shiv Ganesh, Andrew Herrmann, Rebecca

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Rice, and Sarah Tracy (2021). In this piece, the authors collectively posit that ethnography has been a significant symbol for scholarly community within organizational communication because ethnography has shaped the field’s sense of self. In this important work, barriers to ethnographic research are identified and the authors describe the importance of maintaining ethnography’s vitality in organizational communication. First, ethnography is important for continuing to explore issues of social justice, diversity, equity, and inclusion for organizational communication (Taylor et al., 2021). Further, ethnography is one way to maintain the mission of community engagement that has become an inherent part of much organi­ zational communication research and teaching. Each author in this forum shares insightful accounts regarding their own ethnographic scholarship and its trajectory. In order to maintain the commitment to ethnographic scholarship, Taylor et  al. (2021) call institutions to provide greater support for early career ethnographers and for collaborative, interdisciplinary ethnographic research.

ETHNOGRAPHY, MOVING FORWARD Perhaps most salient to our positionalities as we explore the multiple and diverse applications of “ethnography” in organizational communication scholarship is the explicit, or in some cases implicit, feeling of what Sarah Tracy (2013) calls “sincerity.” Sincerity is one of eight criteria Tracy identifies as a meaningful way to evaluate qualitative research. Sincerity reflects transparency and reflection from the narrator, meaning there is explication about chosen methods, why those methods were chosen, challenges to data collection and analysis. Sincerity also requires ethnographers to engage reflexivity about how personal values and biases intersect with the site of study, participants, readers, and themselves. For us, sincerity reflects care in

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terms of how one approaches the study so the reader can understand the whole process. The second author of this present chapter was recently discussing the study design for a dissertation with a novice scholar, and this very conversation around “what constitutes a sincere approach to ethnography” emerged. The scholar had chosen ethnography as their methodology but acknowledged their design would not fulfill the “traditional” approach to an ethnographic study design because fieldwork, and particularly immersion into a collective, would be prohibitive for them for a variety of well-thought out reasons. When asked, “why ethnography, then?” they shared that they liked its connection to exploring shared cultures and its credibility as a methodology. They also indicated they perceived and liked the flexibility of ethnographic methods, while acknowledging that they would have to work to justify why they were calling their design “ethnographic.” While the second author understood the logic— and somewhat agreed with it—it remained unclear if this study design reflected a “sincere” approach to ethnography. Is naming an approach “ethnographic” because there is a perceived shared culture to be explored or because of the recognizability of the methodology a reasonable justification for calling one’s approach “ethnographic?” Ultimately, the novice scholar was encouraged to be transparent about what methods they were using and why, and to make the argument that those methods were framed from an ethnographic lens—that is, seeking to understand a shared culture. Did the novice scholar receive the right advice?

CLOSING REFLECTIONS We maintain that ethnography and ethnographic approaches are inherently tied to qualitative organizational communication research writ large. Of course, there are myriad methods and methodologies one could

use to explore communication within contexts of organizing and organizations. However, ethnography is an established, welldefined starting point backed by years of history. Ethnographic approaches are well documented and can point even novice students and scholars to the realities and practices of conducting qualitative research. Students who want to conduct their own qualitative research about human organizing are often mentored to start learning about ethnography or ethnographic approaches because of its established nature and depth of history, within our field specifically and across the social sciences generally. Ethnography is a gateway for translating research from the abstract to the concrete across multiple research topics and areas of inquiry. Teaching ethnography and ethnographic approaches is invigorating because doing so breathes intellectual life into communication and organizing. It is wonderful to see contemporary scholars engaging in such thought-provoking ethnographic work. Taylor et al. (2021) provided a wonderful overview of why ethnography and organi­ zational communication might be losing their connection, and even be somewhat at odds in more recent literature. One of their arguments in particular stands out as something our discipline should consider in relation to ethnographic approaches. First, the time required to design, conduct, and analyze culture(s) using ethnography exists in tension with ever growing demands for our time within institutions coupled with a publishing system that is slow, under resourced, and relies on the generous voluntary donation of time by experts who also face increased demands on their time. While we might individually be working toward changing the culture of time demands within our unique institutions, collectively we must consider how we choose to consider the application of ethnography in our work. What can we learn from the very cultures in which we participate? How can we better unplug, slow down, observe the patterns that are emerging against our own

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health and well-being? What can an inward ethnographic eye toward organizational communication reveal about our future trajectory? How can this insight change us for the better? We challenge you to use ethnographic approaches to explore yourself, your communities, your labor, and your life. We appreciate how the art and science of ethnographic approaches lead to evocative writing and compelling opportunities for reading (Tracy, 2020). We have loved immersing our minds in scholarship that uses ethnography’s tools for description, understanding, interpretation, and emotional connection to cultures, spaces, and times in ways that are revolutionary and reflexive. We have particularly enjoyed more recent critical ethnographic work that brings the political back into social science spaces, calling for change in the most ethnographic (i.e., culturally informed) ways possible. Thick descriptions of lived experiences, which are far from our own, or even cultural milieu within which we are situated often foster connections to humanity, imbuing dignity, and influencing future generations for the better. Ethnographic approaches are not only writing as a method of inquiry and a way of life, but also as a catalyst for social change and justice. Ethnography requires us to lean into reflexivity, power, and voice.

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31(1), 130–138. https://doi.org/10.1177/ 0893318916675735 Strauss, A., & Corbin, J. (1998). Basics of quali­ tative research techniques. Sage. Steenhuisen, B. (2014). Cutting dark matter: Professional capacity and organizational change, Journal of Organizational Ethnogra­ phy, 3(2), p. 152–168. https://doi.org/10.1108/ JOE-03-2012-0016 Strudwick, R. (2019). Tensions in ethnographic observation: overt or covert? Journal of Organizational Ethnography, 8(2), 185–195. https://doi.org/10.1108/JOE-11-2016-0022 Taylor, B. C. (2017). Ethnography. In C. R. Scott & L. Lewis (Eds.), International encyclopedia of organizational communication. Wiley. Taylor, B. C., Barley, W. C., Brummans, B. H. J. M., Ellingson, L. L., Ganesh, S., Herrmann, A. F., Rice, R., & Tracy, S. J. (2021). Revisiting ethnography in organizational communication studies. Management Communication Quar­ terly, 35(4), 623–652. https://doi.org/10.1177/ 08933189211026700 Thomas, J. (1993). Doing critical ethnography. Sage. Tracy, S. J. (2013/2020). Qualitative research methods: Collecting evidence, crafting analy­ sis, communicating impact. John Wiley & Sons. Tracy, S. J., & Geist-Martin, P. (2014). Organi­ zing ethnography and qualitative approaches. In L. L. Putnam & D. K. Mumby (Eds.), The Sage handbook of organizational communi­ cation: Advances in theory, research, and methods (3rd ed., pp. 245–269). Sage. Tull, A. (2017). Dolly, Ellie May, and me: My Southern Appalachian working identity. In A. Herrmann (Ed.), Organizational autoethnog­ raphies: Power and identity in our working lives (pp. 71–86). Routledge. Turkle, S. (2011). Alone together: Why we expect more from technology and less from each other. Basic Books. Warden, T. (2013). Feet of clay: Confronting emotional challenges in ethnographic experience. Journal of Organizational Ethnography, 2(2), 150–172. https://doi.org/10.1108/ JOE-09-2012-0037 Watson, T. J. (2011). Ethnography, reality and truth: the vital need for studies of “how things work” in organisations and management. Journal of Management Studies, 48(1),

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3 Rhetorical Approaches to Qualitative Organizational Communication Research Charles Conrad and George Cheney*

Whatever else they are, organizations are inherently rhetorical; whatever else it is, rhetoric is inherently organizational. (Crable, 1990, p. 115)

The history of rhetoric has been neither linear nor singular. It has often been devalued and conceived of as mere technique (“cookery”). At other times, it has been treated as one of the three fundamental forms of knowledge available to humans. At still other times, it has been submerged into broader concepts of symbolic action, message design, or textual/ discursive production. Organizational communication has had a much shorter history, but also has had a shifting identity, moving from an application of organizational psychology that focused on tactics and tools during the mid-20th century, to broader social, cultural, and economic analyses following the “critical/interpretive turn” of the early 1980s and the “discursive turn” around the turn of this century.1 During these later

eras, organizational communication scholars came to view rhetoric as too intentional, too essentialist, and too culturally bound adequately to capture organizational texts, performances, or meanings. However, this view was excessively narrow because it ignored similar transformations taking place in rhetorical theory and criticism. Beginning in the 1930s and with increasing intensity during the 1960s, rhetorical scholars also systemically critiqued behaviorist perspectives on human communicative action, instead advocating the application of broader dramatistic perspectives. During the early years of the 21st century, their focus broadened further to include rhetorical analyses of texts created through qualitative research (Middleton et al., 2015; Stewart et al., 2017). As a result, the current moment provides opportunities to integrate the two research streams, to merge qualitative organi­ zational communication and rhetorical/

*  Acknowledgments: We are grateful to the editors for their in-depth feedback, and to Ryan Wenzel for assistance in surveying recent research.

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critical research (see also Chapter 22 in this volume). In the pages that follow, we focus on key moments in the development of rhetorical perspectives, highlight interpretations that were minimized or overlooked, and discuss the key implications for qualitative research in organizational communication. Along the way, we suggest applications of rhetoric to qualitative organizational communication research, by either citing representative extant studies, or describing how additional studies could be conceived and conducted.

CONCEPTIONS OF RHETORIC AND ORGANIZATIONAL COMMUNICATION: ORIGINS, CHOICES, AND TRANSFORMATIONS Both organizational communication and rhetoric have ancient origins. The oldest known examples of written communication in the Middle East, China, and Meso-America involve records of commercial transactions and contracts. Ptah-Hotep, vizier to the Pharaohs of the late 24th and early 25th centuries BCE, advised his superiors that leadership involved patience, careful listening, delegating tasks, and sharing authority, all forms of wisdom that could be obtained by anyone, regardless of their economic standing or gender. Chinese Emperors Yao and Shu (c. 2300 BCE) sought ways to open lines of communication with their employees and subjects, and to produce clear messages, documenting key ones in writing. By the first century CE, Greek and Roman scholars had suggested many of the key concepts of 20thcentury organizational and organizational communication theory. Pre-classical rhetoric was not as systematized as classical Greek conceptions, but it evidenced clear norms, standards, and patterns of use. The ancient Maori in Aotearoa New Zealand expected speeches to exhibit

qualities of creativity, situational-appropriateness, and dramatic power; aboriginals of the Solomon Islands recognized that different kinds of speech require different stylistic choices; Balinese oratories had four main parts and orators were trained to display bravery, refinement, “sweet-speaking,” and the ability to captivate an audience. Consciousness of what we would now call “rhetorical methods” is evident in the historical Buddha’s advice to his followers about preaching, and an even greater interest in rhetoric appears in writings by and about Confucius during the sixth century BCE and in Han Fei Tzu’s Difficulties in the Way of Persuasion, composed in the third century BCE (Kennedy, 1980). Homer’s Odyssey can be read as a lengthy effort to enhance Ulysses’ image. An even older example of “image management” came after the battle of Kadesh (1274 BCE) when Ramses II quickly dispatched early PR agents to Egypt to report that his troops had crushed the Hittites, in a battle that historians now recognize was essentially a tie. They dutifully prepared a massive celebration for the Egyptian army’s return, ensured a huge, adoring audience, and subsequently arranged to have somewhat exaggerated details of the victory chiseled in stone and recorded on obelisks which still stand (Kerrigan, 2017). In addition, the origins of what became the “Western” tradition in rhetoric are revealed in the texts of the Old Testament. The appeals that eventually were labeled “modes of proof” that would come to dominate the late classical and neo-classical eras; and the four interrelated dimensions of a rhetorical act (speaker, speech, audience, situation)—all were illustrated in these ancient sources (Corbett, 1965; Kennedy, 1980). However, the impetus for pre-classical rhetoric was fundamentally practical, and the goal was influencing beliefs and behaviors in concrete, immediate situations. Analyses of rhetoric were consequently developed within these parameters.

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The Pre-Socratics, the Socratics, and the Sophists Contemporary rhetorical theory and criticism has long been inextricably linked to ­philosophical—that is, ontological, epistemological, and axiological—assumptions (Campbell, 1970). Western philosophy and science began during the sixth century BCE among a group of thinkers located primarily in the Greek colonies on the western coast of Turkey and in southern Italy, especially in the cities of Miletus and Elas (also called Velia). Eventually christened the “pre-Socratics,” and supported by the largesse of an economic elite whose wealth and income was based on a burgeoning slave economy, their efforts to systematically understand the natural and social world created the intellectual climate within which classical views of rhetoric and its relationship to knowledge and society developed (Kirk et  al., 1984). Revisiting this history, with a fresh perspective, helps to reveal how a number of issues in what we call the organizational communication tradition were in certain ways presaged in classical rhetoric. The fundamental ontological paradox established in the debates among the preSocratics was interconnected with multiple epistemologies. The central question involved the generation of knowledge: was it to be obtained by elites searching for stable, universal essences (literally physis—­ psychological drives, economic systems/ structures, and so on that exist independent of human cognition and action)—or was it to be widely available through empirical analysis of symbolically/rhetorically created realities that guide and constrain beliefs, perceptions, and choices (nomos)? Members of both groups offered different answers to this question; still overall, those seeking physis were more skeptical of sensory knowledge than were early humanists. The former position underlies Platonic views of rhetoric; the latter was the basis of Sophistic rhetoric. During the fifth century BCE, entrepreneurial teachers on the island of Sicily

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exploited the overthrow of a tyrant by developing a cottage industry that trained ordinary citizens to use rhetoric to win lawsuits in the courts. In the process, they made some of the first steps toward democratic governance and the affirmation of personal freedoms. For these teachers, rhetoric could not exist under tyranny and was fundamental to democracy. In contrast, Socrates believed that little individual or societal good had been accomplished by public debates and doubted that justice was served by the rhetoric of the courts of law (Kennedy, 1980). When the Sicilians’ ideas reached the Greek city states, they were expanded and strengthened by the Sophists, especially Protagoras and Gorgias. About twenty years older than Socrates, Protagoras was famous throughout Greece for his integrity: a careful political and moral thinker, he supported no party, interest group, or reform; nor did he seek power for himself. Even the Platonic Socrates, who accused other Sophists of being corrupt, immoral, and/or unworthy, celebrated Protagoras’s integrity. Protagoras developed and taught an extreme subjectivism, one that assumed there is no “truth” or “reality” independent of perceptions, recognized no difference between appearance and being—and with respect to ethics—refused to posit an all-embracing “good” for humans. Instead, individuals or groups could use discourse to diagnose societal problems in situ and determine/prescribe the best course of action. In the process, they cultivated shared, taken-for-granted assumptions and constructed related structures and institutions. By extension, no citizen, regardless of birth, class, or history of associating with elites, was superior to, or more capable of achieving excellence (arete) than any other. At the root of Protagoras’s view was his “invincible respect for the democratic virtues of justice, respect for other men’s [sic] opinions and the process of peaceful persuasion as the basis of communal life, and the necessity of communal life to the very survival of humanity” (Guthrie, 1971, p. 268). In contemporary terms, for Protagoras the

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capacity for leadership was not an in-born trait: a prerogative of membership in a class that was born to rule because of divine gifts, breeding, and maturation under the tutelage of elites. Rather, it was a communicative skill that could be cultivated and refined (see also Fairhurst, 2007). Gorgias, even more than the other Sophists, fervently believed in the power of persuasion when adapted appropriately to audiences and situations (the concept of kairos). Persuasion was, in short, the “queen of sciences, and had all the rest in its power” (Guthrie, 1971, p.  271). From this standpoint, there is no absolute truth: If there were, we could not grasp it; and even if we could grasp it, we could never communicate it to others through our imperfect, arbitrary, humanly constructed language. Humans live in a world where truth is contingent and temporary, not universal and timeless; knowledge could only exist relative to a perceiving subject, and decisions are necessarily based on probabilities, not certainties. What an individual could be persuaded to believe (doxa) was the highest possible criterion for evaluating claims or courses of action. Parallels between the topics debated by the Sophists and Platonists, and the development of key aspects of organizational communication, particularly in the areas of leadership and participation, are striking. For example, trait theories of leadership, power-authority relationships, and the goal of developing efficient forms of coordination and control clearly are all implicit in Socratic rhetoric. From its beginnings, rhetoric was bound up with the ideals and practices of democracy. Although democracy was in fact a contested as well as a celebrated concept for the ancient Athenians (as it remains today across the world), they saw argument and deliberation as important for legislative bodies and by extension for society as it was understood. Moreover, they understood that debate over democracy’s goals, values and feasibility itself to be important and not a process that could ever reach an “end” (see Zhou, 2023). Thus, rhetorical perspectives were and

continue to be important for understanding how democracy is formulated, executed, and modified through policies of institutions and organizations, especially as viewed through the lens of worker rights (Cheney et al., 2023; Nadesan & Cheney, 2017). Yet across history, authoritarianism and totalitarianism have been repeatedly accepted, at least temporarily, whenever safety and stability have been viewed as more important than personal freedoms or individual/collective voice. Even when Western societies do choose democracy over autocracy, the resulting socioeconomic/political systems have been circumscribed by race, ethnicity, gender, wealth, and other markers for exclusion (Davis et al., 2022). Just as Plato and his successors articulated an efficiency-based justification for autocracy, the Sophists developed an early philosophical justification for contingency theories, organizational democracy, and decentralization. And in both cases the philosophical perspectives were developed within comprehensive analyses of the ways in which history, culture, and societal institutions guided and constrained human symbolic action, which produced, reproduced, and transformed rhetorical situations, broadly defined. Such a rich and nuanced understanding of persuasion leads us to reformulate conventional unidirectional and univocal understandings of rhetoric and to reconsider persuasion in the context of organizations and organizing. It provides potential directions for yet largely unfulfilled opportunities for qualitative, rhetorical analyses of organizational cultures and organization-polity relationships (for illustrative examples, see Dooris et al., 2020; Ihlen & Rokness, 2020).

Aristotle’s Integrated Model “The most famous discussion of rhetoric in [classical] Greek is surely that by Aristotle,” George Kennedy (1980) observes, “but it was just as surely not rhetoric described by

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Aristotle that was taught in schools for the next two thousand years” (p. 3; also see Corbett, 1965). Although Aristotle shared Plato’s rejection of the extreme subjectivism and relativism of Protagoras and other Sophists, one of his goals was to mediate the “vehement partisanship” (Guthrie, 1971, p.  3) that had developed between Plato and the Sophists. For example, Books I and II of Aristotle’s (1991) Rhetoric are designed to define rhetoric as a “true art,” a teachable and systematic discipline, not a “knack.” Aristotle also affirmed the Sophistic view that probability is often the highest level of certainty possible in human affairs (Corbett, 1965). In this view, debate and especially the presentation of multiple sides of issues are crucial for personal and societal decision-making (Kennedy, 1980; compare Burke, 1945, 1950 on perspectivism without relativism). Undeniably, Aristotle’s Rhetoric did emphasize one-way, strategic communication, with discrete messages, designed for known (and largely homogeneous) audiences, with clearly stated purposes, in situations of uncertainty. He also rejected the use of an “effects” criterion to evaluate rhetoric by locating excellence and virtue in the integrity of a rhetor’s efforts, rather than in their outcomes (Corbett, 1965). Still, ambiguities in the Rhetoric, combined with the loss of sections that linked rhetoric, poetics, ethics, and politics, enabled later rhetoricians and others to de-emphasize this complex interplay that made up what we now call “discourses.” As a result, during the hegemony of the so-called “Ciceronian Tradition” (100 BCE–100 CE), the complex values underlying Aristotle’s Rhetoric were reduced to affirming a type of efficiency as a central and short-term goal, and visible effects as the core evaluative criterion (Kennedy, 1980).2 Moreover, over the course of the Middle Ages, rhetoric became increasingly technical, undergoing what Kennedy has labeled letteraturizza—a process of elevating the speech over audience and speaker, and reducing speech to considerations of composition and style.

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The Aristotelian corpus links the arts of politics and rhetoric to one another through the exercise of moral virtue (ethics) and excellence (arete) in persuasion (rhetoric). Aristotle’s Rhetoric defines its subject matter in three distinct but interrelated ways. Here we will de-emphasize his first definition, the counterpart or antistrophe of dialectic, because it focuses on the structure and form of argument, rather than on the content of the premises that are used, and offers a minimally constitutive conception of communication. Aristotle’s second definition, the “faculty” of “discovering in the subject matter those things that are suasive to another [person]” in a particular case, situation, context, or broader social milieu (see Grimaldi, 1972, p. 3) is much better known throughout the communication field (Aristotle, 1991; compare Burke’s [1973] rhetorical situation). This definition highlights the capacity of the rhetor and the potentialities of a situation; it directs our attention towards discovering and enacting the optimal strategies for persuading an audience, while upholding the highest ethical principles that have been constructed and legitimized within a rhetorical community (Grimaldi, 1972). Rhetors do not “invent” arguments and appeals; nor do they speak on their own; they do so within a specified community of decision makers. Consequently, using the “best” of the available means does not involve persuasion at any cost, but rather persuasion that leads participants in rhetorical acts as close as possible to manifesting virtue (“practical wisdom” or phronesis) in a specific socio-cultural situation (Flyvberg, 2006). Rhetoric creates and sustains eudaimonia or, as it is commonly translated today, “flourishing together” (Oates, 1963; compare Appiah, 2005, 2008). Thus, persuasion is guided and constrained by atechnoi: socially legitimized rules and resources that are not created by the rhetor but are resources available to all speakers of privilege within a particular polis. However, rhetoric also is a creative act, one that relies on etechnoi—artistic proofs

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that are internal to speech, including ethos, pathos, and logos. Aristotle’s analysis of the processes of invention, arrangement, and memory highlights a cycle of understanding, expression, reproduction, and in some cases transformation. Rhetoric does rely on topoi— known topics, accepted frames of reference, or familiar reservoirs of meaning and argument (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980; Perelman & Olbrects-Tyteca, 1970). But, as Crick (2014) explained, topoi are “specific ways of placing material into relationships that ideally bring about new questions and new insights” (p. 15). Their use involves cross-referencing one another, events of the day and those of the past, in various linguistic permutations, drawing symbolic lines across time and space (Burke, 1945). Thus, rhetoric is not limited to immediate, strategically designed, and situationally contained effects. This is because it simultaneously constructs/produces/transforms cultural assumptions and legitimizes social structures through the creation and management of ambiguity—the opening and closing of ranges of meaning. It is through this process that rhetoric reaches beyond discrete situations for the uses and effects of persuasion, and qualifies as an entire dimension of human experience. It encompasses actions as well as symbols (e.g., factory shutdowns, layoffs, or the offshoring of jobs) and transsituational as well as the text-bound suasory aspects of human relations (e.g., discourses about competition, success, growth, or freedom as ideographs; see McGee, 1980). Aristotle’s final definition of rhetoric, the “ethical branch of politics,” has undoubtedly received the least amount of attention in the organizational communication discipline. This omission is ironic for three reasons. First, it is the most comprehensive of the three definitions. Second, it is based on a rudimentary form of qualitative research—for example, the systematic observations of the nexus among rhetoric, politics, and ethics that Aristotle made during his travels among multiple societies in the Mediterranean, and summarized/ analyzed in his Politics (Barker, 1976). Third,

this definition radiates out towards concerns not only in specific organizational and career contexts but also in terms of the pursuit of the good life in general: it offers a “unifying vision of moral virtue, suasive [or suasory] speech, and the deliberative activities of the polis” (Johnstone, 1980, p. 1). The interrelationships among rhetoric, ethics, and politics in Aristotle have important bearings on current issues in organization, economy, and society, including debates over the roles of government and business, boundaries among the sectors, and the nature of the public sphere. During the classical age, the standard interpretation of virtue located ethics inside the individual. For Aristotle, however, ethics was inextricably linked to the pursuit of the good life through the cultivation of virtuous citizens and effective deliberative processes (part of telos). Virtue—in this dynamic sense—is infused and sustained by communicative, political, and social activities. The polis (or active political and social community) is created to help humans satisfy their intrinsic social needs; however, it also has a moral function, to move (in Ciceronian terms) citizens and polities as close as possible to the highest good—which necessitates both enacting and achieving virtue in rhetorical situations (Johnstone, 1980). For Aristotle, one of the highest forms of reasoning, phronesis, referred to the collaborative achievement of an intersubjective understanding that aims toward social betterment. As Flyvberg (2006) explains, phronesis is a wisdom involving discernment about situations that includes encouragement of ethical excellence in others (see also Chapter 20 in this volume). A revival of Aristotle’s virtue ethics—and its application to organizational communication—has important implications for contemporary questions of professionalism, authenticity, and integrity in leadership (Appiah, 2005, 2008; compare Cheney et al., 2010). Virtue means more than simply following laws, rules, or mores. It also includes matters such as the ethical culture of collective

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agents, patterns of managerial style, and shared values about “good” business practices and their sources—be those individual/group behaviors, or mediated representations (as in popular culture and career-advice websites). In a polis, members of the community are motivated by altruism and self-interest, necessarily involving shared concerns: What is good for the community is also considered good for its members, because individual identities and interests are tied to “corporate” ones. Social action involves creating and maintaining a balance between conflict and cooperation in concrete decision/action situations. In real poleis, people are psychologically and materially dependent on one another, connected through emotional bonds, traditions, and networks of communication and influence. Loyalty to people, places, and organizations both guide and constrain efforts to maximize individual, family, and public interests. Information is ambiguous, incomplete, differentially interpreted, and strategically manipulated. Individuals’ interests and preferences are influenced by images and the rhetoric through which options and choices are communicated to them. Change results from ideas, persuasion, networks of alliance and competition, the pursuit of power, and concern for one’s own and others’ welfare (Stone, 2012). In sum, Aristotle’s third definition of rhe­to­ric has far-reaching implications for organi­zational rhetoric and contemporary organizational life, based on the three core conceptions he advanced. First, ethics/values are inherent in rhetorical-political action, not merely added or positioned in opposition to them and rhetorical-political action is implied in the cultivation of ethics/values. Such a perspective undermines strictly “business cases”: Ethical practices cannot be cast as means to image management that are separate from and thus undermined by strategic ends or diminished to a secondary consideration in organizational strategy––one that competes with objectives of efficiency, profitability, or growth. A dialogic view also precludes insulating or isolating certain spheres of activity (e.g., the market or war)

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from rhetorical-ethical evaluation. For instance, the current “crisis of democracy” conflates the structure and processes of democracy with the outcomes it provides (Davis et al., 2022). It is grounded in the historical/rhetorical processes through which the organizational/economical “realms” are separated from cultural/political realms, and through which “workers” (especially those who are organized) are defined as special interest groups in competition with society writ large. Democracy is, among other things, an ideograph, a political point of reference under constant pressure and change (Cheney et al., 2023; Nadesan & Cheney, 2017). The ancient Greeks never doubted that democracy was possible, but they questioned whether it was a good idea. Today, many people think democracy is a good idea but wonder if it is truly possible in a hyper-globalized, increasingly unequal, and politically polarized world (Davis et  al., 2022). Organizational rhetoric, aided by ethics and politics, should help to lead discussions of governance— from neighborhoods and communities, to corporate boardrooms, to legislative bodies, and outward to social media and the streets (Middleton et al., 2015). Second, organizational ethics based on attempts to impose a priori rules systems on organizational actors are ultimately doomed to fail: “[C]odes of conduct framed by corporate legislation and enhanced corporate governance increase the probability of organi­ zational hypocrisy … as words and deeds fail to align” (Clegg & Rhodes, 2006, p. 5). This type of disjuncture is frequently discussed in colloquial terms as a violation of trust. For Aristotle, it was directly related to the establishment and maintenance of ethos by a rhetor. In practical terms, this means that organizational codes of ethics should be approached with an eye toward processes of formulation, interpretation, and application (May, 2011), with a full recognition of their capacity to be inverted or employed in cynical ways (Jackall, 1988; compare Durkheim, 1957).

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Although formal organizational authorities tend to dominate persuasion that occurs within and around organization, the active roles of members as interpreters, reformulators, and sometimes subverters of official meanings should be kept in mind. This is an arena where conceptions of organizational culture, studies of power, and rhetorical approaches heavily overlap (see Zhou, 2023; Zoller, 2003, 2012).

Kenneth Burke’s Dramatism Aristotle’s perspective is clearly less processual than necessary to encompass the contemporary scope of rhetoric. Dramatism, as developed by Kenneth Burke (1945), offers a more dynamic, more dialectical depiction of the drama of human relations, while retaining Aristotle’s ideas as a touchstone (see also Chapter 22 in this volume). However, the sheer scope—and its sometimes-bewildering complexity—of Burke’s corpus invites reductionist readings. Burke’s earliest theoretical works, Counterstatement (1931) and Permanence and Change (1935), focused on symbolic action and the inability of then-dominant models of literary and symbolic criticism to capture the complexities of human experience and their relationship to our cultural constructions. Subsequent works such as Attitudes toward History (1937) and Philosophy of Literary Form (1941, best known for its essay on the “Rhetoric of Hitler’s ‘Battle’”) were written during the trauma of the Great Depression. Grammar of Motives (1945), which responded to the horrors of World War II and their extension into the Cold War (Rhetoric of Motives, 1950), offered an incongruous perspective—one that examined how materiality influences symbolic action and human experience. Burke’s final major works, Rhetoric of Religion (1961) and Language as Symbolic Action (1966) provided a summation of his ideas as illustrated in key symbolic acts of Western civilization—for example, the Old

Testament and St. Augustine’s Confessions— and returned the reader to his analyses of literature and society written three decades previously. In short, over the course of the 20th century Burke examined many aspects of life, literature, and method (the subtitle of LSA). It is no wonder that readers would seek a focus, a “representative anecdote” of his work, one that has sufficient scope to be a faithful reflection of a text but does not offer a reductionist reading of it. Burke’s concept of identification (1950) and the Dramatistic pentad (1945) are logical selections for that anecdote, but only if treated in sufficient scope. Identification, Burke’s vehicle for expanding the world of persuasion in a post-Aristotelian, post-Marxist, and post-Freudian way, is too often treated in terms of unitary connections and static pictures. This depiction gives insufficient attention to ambiguity as a resource in crafting, announcing, and transforming identities—especially work/careerrelated and organizational identities. Burke chose the term “identification” to amplify rhetoric for several reasons, including avenues of theoretical and practical resonance. His formulation embraced Marx’s sense of material alienation, incorporated William James’ view of mysticism, absorbed parts of Freud’s concept of the unconscious, and responded to the array of situations described in Harold Lasswell’s prescient linkage of the micro/interpersonal realm to macro/global issues. Collectively, these connections vividly showed how emotional identifications with leaders and in-groups can influence events. In this perspective, emotionality and rationality are intertwined, rather than bifurcated. Approaching identification through the comprehensive lens offered in the Grammar and the Rhetoric of Motives offers a constitutive view of rhetoric. It leads immediately back to Burke’s overall perspective and the social context within which they were written—ad bellum purificandum (“towards the purification of war,” Burke’s dedication of

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Grammar). War—whether hot or cold—is itself a perverse, destructive form of cooperation. Burkean “identification” is simultaneously a warning about how in-group identifications and identification by antithesis can get out of control and a call for a transcendent even if imperfect or fragile kind of unity. Still, most research on identification conducted by organizational scholars via Burke, while instructive and applied to a wide range of situations, has not fully attended to the multidimensionality of the concept as he proposed it (see Cheney et al., 2014). A great deal of this research downplays the practical implications of processes of identification, including the potential for social change. As well, it largely ignores any connection between identity/identification and power, thereby devaluing politics. Finally, it loses the elasticity of the concept of identification, which could help us understand attachments at emotional, cognitive, and material levels as well as in the realm of the symbolic. The second common distortion of Burke offers a caricature of his complex, nuanced ontological and epistemological perspective, and presents a convenient method of charting elements of a piece or body of discourse. This reduction ignores Burke’s view that the “five key terms” of dramatism are defined by their relationships (ratios) to one another more than by their individual attributes; and (2) it misses the central point of Grammar of Motives, the paradox of substance, a profound commentary on epistemology. For Burke, the concept of paradox is central to analyses of the drama of human relations. The sub-stance of an act is revealed in its details, but only with reference to what is outside, underneath, or above them. Thus, critical analysis is a dialectical process of moving from textual details to context and back—loosely speaking, this process is akin to the hermeneutic circle. In this sense, it is qualitative research, but a form that integrates analyses of texts, various contexts, and their mutual influences. Symbols and symbolic action create and reproduce the material world and have the

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potential to transform it, but at the same time limit it, making it “recalcitrant” to change (Prelli et al., 2011), as in the case of conceptions and structures that impede action on the climate crisis, for example. A comprehensive dramatistic view of organizational communication would raise issues about the material aspects of technology, workplaces, and the role that organi­ zations play in cultures, local and global. It would focus attention on Burke’s treatment of “occupational psychoses” (1935), “administrative rhetoric” and the “bureaucratization of the imaginative” (1937) as the bases of organizational dominance of the lifeworld and its attendant managerialism (Deetz, 1992; Deetz & Simpson, 2004). It also would focus attention on issues of equality, inequality, and socioeconomic class identity (Burke, 1993). Certainly, class remains a complex and shifting object of study that cannot be illuminated by economics and sociology alone. In the United States and in many other countries, recent practical experience demonstrates the complexity of class identifications—especially as they are considered against the backdrops of concrete economic differences, on the one hand, and ideational aspects of difference related to education, race, gender, and job/occupation/profession on the other hand. The relative unpredictability of alignments of groups of U.S. citizens based on class and style with certain presidential candidates in the past four decades attests to the difficulty in maintaining either a conventional socioeconomic strata analysis, or one that is largely disconnected from material referents and foundations (Gandara & Daenekindt, 2022). Class is a site where the interactions between the symbolic and the non-symbolic are far more complex than has typically been recognized and accounted for. This is an important place where organizational rhetoric can be combined with qualitative studies of political and economic rhetoric to offer a nuanced account of what class means, how it relates to sharp societal divisions, and how it operates in day-to-day life—not only in the United

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States, but also in other parts of the world (Aune, 2001). Ironically, during the past four decades organizational communication as well as rhetorical scholarship has de-emphasized material conditions in deference to issues of identity (Cheney & Cloud, 2006; Cloud, 1994; Dougherty, 2011). However, Burke realized that identity and multiple identifications were inextricably bound up with economic, social, and organizational forms of power (Cheney et  al., 1998). Power is a central concern of discourse studies and in particular critical discourse analysis (see also Chapter 26 in this volume), as discussed in the next section.

Discourse, Rhetoric, and Organization The discursive turn in organizational communication resulted in part from the development and acceptance of language- and meaningcentered perspectives during the 1980s and 1990s, and in part from new network ties that linked North American scholars to AngloEuropean traditions in poststructuralism, postmodernism, and sociolinguistics. These approaches are particularly relevant to this chapter, since they are closely linked to qualitative discourse analysis. Generally, they share a commitment to understanding the constitutive functions and effects of language production, distribution, and interpretation, whether spoken or embodied in physical texts (see Mumby & Clair, 1997; Putnam & Cooren, 2004; see also Chapters 6 and 22 in this volume). However, unlike certain interpretive perspectives that ask what symbolic acts represent, discourse studies ask what discourse does in specific social, political, and economic situations (see also Chapter 4 in this volume). They stress how discourse constitutes organizations and organizational life, how they interact with material realities to privilege some realities, actors, and interests over others, and how symbolic and material realities mutually

constitute themselves through recurring organizational practices (Potter & Wetherell, 1987). So many versions of discourse perspectives have developed that this paradigm can only be described as “plurivocal” (Grant et  al., 2004; Mumby, 2013). Alvesson and Kärreman (2000) have suggested that these variations can be best understood if arrayed along a continuum from “radical” (or “hard constructionist”) perspectives at one pole, to “autonomous” views at the other. These versions are differentiated by at least three factors. The first is the connection they assume between discourse and meaning—the extent to which discourse determines meaning, or whether the two are loosely coupled. The second factor involves the range of discourse and discourse analysis displayed—whether discourse is best understood as a local, c ontext-dependent phenomenon or as ­ broader processes that structure the social world. A final difference involves the role that material realities and structures (e.g., political-economy) play in explaining the significance and consequence of particular discursive events. Radical discourse perspectives posit that discourse constitutes and drives ­subjectivity–– our sense of selves, feelings, thoughts, orientations (Weedon, 1987), meanings and meaning systems; and social structures and institutions (Alvesson & Kärreman, 2000). Here, critics claim three weaknesses are inherent in such perspectives. First, they are reductionistic, treating discourse as a determinant of everything else—“discourse… comes close to standing for everything, and thus nothing” (Alvesson & Kärreman, 2000, p. 1128). Second, radical standpoints obscure the strategic/intentional use of symbols to further one person’s, group’s, or organization’s interests over others. Finally, that they excessively de-emphasize the processes through which power, power relationships, and power inequalities are created, reproduced, and, in some cases transformed. In this critique, radical discourse perspectives render power itself illegible (Sennett, 1980), in that it no longer

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stands out in any way from the great “text” of social relations—it may become “so diffuse and decentered that there is no agency, and there are no oppressors” (Walkowitz, cited in Palmer, 1990, p. 165; see also Fairclough, 1992, 2005). Rhetoric, the conscious, purposive, strategic use of symbols to influence others also is marginalized or defined out of existence (Cheney et  al., 2004; Sillince, 2006). Individual ethical responsibility becomes a moot issue (Cloud, 1994; Palmer, 1990). In short, radical discourse perspectives may strip symbolic action of meaningful connections to the key concepts examined in critical theory––system and struggle; political, legal, and economic force; natural and material reality. In the process, the possibility of analyzing the complex relationships between discourse and situation may be diluted—if not eliminated (Archer, 2000; O’Doherty & Willmott, 2001; Reed, 1998, 2000; Sayer, 2000). At the other pole of Alvesson and Kärreman’s (2000) continuum are autonomous perspectives in which analysis focuses on the dynamic interaction between a rhetorical text and its context (Heracleous & Marschak, 2004). This concept describes aspects of situations, audience, rhetor, as well as textual features (e.g., structure and temporality, cultural assumptions such as enthymemes), and symbolic forms such as metaphor, that bear upon the development and interpretation of a rhetorical performance. Autonomous versions of discourse theory allow systematic analysis of how rhetoric/ communication is used to create the guidelines and constraints that guide symbolic action by organizational actors. Also, they encourage the analysis of processes of reification (see van Dijk, 2011; Watson, 1995) and invite connections to multiple interpretive perspectives. In this view, managing (or persuasive action by non-managers) is inherently discursive. It involves “telling the right kind of stories to the right audiences at the right moment” (Alvesson & Kärreman, 2000, p. 1132). This prescription displays the

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influence of rhetorical traditions, including the classical concept of kairos, contemporary conceptions of argument (Perelman & Olbrechts-Tyteca, 1969); rhetorical criticism (Bitzer, 1968, 1980); some versions of institutional theory (e.g., Lawrence & Suddaby, 2006; Meyer & Rowan, 1977; Townley, 2002) and the “situated symbolic action” model of Heracleous and Marschak (2004). Between radical and autonomous views of organizational discourse are mid-range models that allow for a more restricted separation of discourse and meaning in which the former frames the latter in specific situations and about specific issues (see Watson, 1995), but does not subsume or overwhelm the latter. These perspectives provide conceptual space for “extra-discursive” social phenomena that can be investigated empirically, independent of the analysis of discourse per se. Sustaining a degree of separation between text and context allows mid-range models of discourse to be used to interrogate a wide range of complex symbolic processes (Hardy, 2004; Watson, 1995). Researchers can view texts as varying in their degree of agency and form—their durability, materiality, and accessibility—and the extent to which their “consumption” transcends time and space (Taylor & Van Every, 2000). The central challenge facing discourse perspectives is to retain autonomous or midrange perspectives. Pressures to shift to more radical views is not unique to discourse views, of course. It was central to Marx and Engels’ analysis of “sham socialism” in The German Ideology (Merkins Wood, 1986). Conrad and Haynes (2001) examined the tendency for communication theories in general to shift toward subjectivist/objectivist extremes as they develop, even if adherents attempt to maintain links to situation and context (also see Reed, 1997). Palmer (1990) noted the same tendencies in discourse perspectives on social/cultural history. Fortunately, rhetorical and organizational communication scholars could work together to prevent a slide into “discoursism” by locating agency outside of

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texts. Fairhurst and Putnam’s (2014) analysis of uncertainty and ambiguity is broad enough to capture the material, political, and social elements of rhetorical situations which are created and reproduced through intentional actions of human agents pursuing their economic (and other) interests. Some midrange discourse theorists use the term sociomateriality to capture the array of ways material dimensions of the world make their way into discourse (Ashcraft, Kuhn, & Cooren, 2009). This perspective also has potential to produce research that integrates qualitative discourse research and rhetorical criticism. In sum, qualitative studies of the ways in which organizational rhetors appropriate the dominant taken-for-granted assumptions of cultures (“bearing down” in Hardy’s 2004 model) are numerous. Studies of the production of texts with the explicit intention of their being “scaled up” to become taken-forgranted assumptions of organizations, institutions, or broader societies do exist but are less common (Forester, 1992; Hess, 2008; Watson, 1995).

Rhetoric, Movements, and Social Movement Organizations (SMOs) Perhaps the most obvious possible connection between rhetorical theory and criticism and organizational communication lies in research on social movements: [O]rganizations are the targets of, actors in, and sites for social movement activities. Social movements are often represented by formal organi­ zations, while organizations resemble episodic “movements” rather than bounded actors…As forms of coordinated social action, movements and organizations are ships riding the same waves. (Davis et al., 2008, p. 389).

However, even though movement research in sociology, rhetoric, and organizational theory/ behavior have experienced similar trajectories, their interconnections have been limited and fleeting. Initially, social movement

researchers took a social-psychological perspective on collective action to account for seemingly irrational behavior: for instance, the rise of Nazism and German citizens’ willingness to accept it. This “collective behavior” or “structural stain” approach, grounded in the scholarship of Adorno and others, focused on the frustrations and anxieties of individuals and the processes through which they were translated into collective action. Eventually, sociological research shifted from individual-level analyses of why movements occur to how they functioned to recruit and motivate members and obtain and utilize other resources. Although many U.S. sociologists still subscribe to the resource mobilization view, by the 1980s, critics argued that it paid too little attention to processes of interpretation and meaning creation—as many organizational communication scholars said of their own field during the same era (see Benford & Snow, 2000). In response, many sociologists began to focus on processes of framing, based on the qualitative studies of Erving Goffman (1974). The symbolic interactionist traditions became central. Simultaneously, other scholars (primarily in Europe) were developing a third strain of research, labeled “new social movement [NSM] theory/research.” They argued that the social movements of the 21st century are more interested in challenging cultural norms and hegemonic processes that guide identity formation/transformation than affecting structural (political or economic) change. NSM research relies on interpretive analysis of “participant narratives (personal narratives)—those that describe individual movement-related experiences [which] when ‘bundled together,’ help create group ‘ideoculture’—and …movement narratives (controlling, overarching, or master narratives)—those shared tales that are ‘collectively constructed by participants about the movement and the domains of the world the movement seeks to change’” (Malesh, 2009, p. 133, citing Benford, 2002, p. 53,

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Coogan’s [2009] analysis of framing processes among students in a prison re-entry program). Because movement/master narratives are constructed from bits and pieces of individual narratives, they form “dense reconstructions” that are used interpersonally and rhetorically. Their formation, and their use, can only be understood through deep qualitative methods.3 Scholars in rhetorical theory and criticism also recognized the similarities between social movements and formal organizations. For example, Simons (1970) noted that the leaders of both faced certain “rhetorical requirements” to attract and mold followers into efficiently organized units, to “secure adoption of their product by the larger structure (i.e., the external system, the established order),” and to “react to resistance by the larger structure” (pp. 3–4). The greatest challenge movement leaders faced was to balance the demands of multiple stakeholder groups by crafting rhetorical strategies that fulfilled “the requirements of the movement by resolving or reducing rhetorical problems” (Simons, 1970, p. 2). This challenge is both external and internal: movements often are composed of people whose perceived interests are in tension with one another, if not directly contradictory. Treating them as homogeneous entities oversimplifies them and the challenges faced by their leaders and de-emphasizes the transformations that take place because of those internal processes. The similarities become equivalences when movements are organized into social movement organizations (compare Lofland, 1996; Stewart et al., 2012). Research on movement rhetorical began with Leland Griffin’s (1952) call for rhetorical critics to move beyond analyses of speeches and individual rhetors to examine the symbolic acts of social collectives (Cox & Faust, 2009; Crick, 2021; Foust & Alvarado, 2018; for an organizational rhetoric/communication perspective, see Cheney & Lair, 2005). Doing so also would introduce the concept of process to rhetorical studies, the

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ways in which movements move through distinct developmental phases. Early movement studies, like early organizational communication, focused on the persuasive strategies used by leaders. However, movement critics soon adopted a broader, dramatistic perspective (Griffin, 1969) that focused on the ways in which symbolic conflict (Cathcart, 1972) serves a constitutive function, both for social collectives and for their members/participants (Gregg, 1971). Movements are sets of meanings that are constantly being negotiated and renegotiated and should be studied as patterns of public discourse that emerge over time through rhetorical action. However, during the late 1980s and 1990s, and stimulated by Michael McGee’s (1980) introduction of the concept of the ideograph, movement studies began to make their own discursive turn. McGee critiqued all the assumptions underlying traditional movement studies—that historical forces exist as such, that they produce concrete and identifiable phenomena, that movements could be a source of social or rhetoric is a cause or effect of social forces, and that accurate representations of movement could be created through any combination of empirical analysis and rhetorical criticism (Crick, 2021). McGee’s radical position was met by a variety of responses (see Lucas, 1980), including the construction of the concept of counterpublics as an alternative to “movements” (Cox & Foust, 2009; Foust, 2017; Hauser, 1999)4. Other movement scholars have called for a “new materialism” based on the work of Bruno Latour (2005), one that rejects the dichotomies of traditional materialism— between phenomena and meaning, body and mind, thing and word, reality and representation, nature and society (RSA, 2016). These developments led to—and were supported by—rhetorical critics’ use of traditional qualitative methods, including Pollock’s (2006) use of oral histories, and Rand’s participant observation of Camp Courage LGBTQ training sessions (2021). Visual analysis has also grown in popularity, including Veneti and

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Poulakidakos’ (2021) mixed methods study of event videos posted by a movement, and Foust and Weathers’ (2021) study of memes posted by movement members participating in meetings of local governments. Particularly interesting are analyses of tours—whether mediated (Atkinson, 2021) or conducted in-person (see Pezzullo, 2007; Gordon, Pezzullo, & Gabrieloff-Parish, 2021). In short, during the past decade there has been a major “re-thinking” and expansion of traditional rhetorical critical methods to include qualitative research methods—particularly those suitable for “field” research (Middleton et al., 2015; Pezzullo & Onis, 2018; see also Chapter 22 in this volume). Theoretical and methodological developments much like those in sociology and rhetorical theory/criticism have been taking place in organizational behavior/theory. Like sociological research, links between organization studies and social movements go back to the 1960s and 1970s (Davis et al., 2005). However, by the turn of this century, the realities of organization-society relationships, and the growing influence of social movements both inside and outside of formal organi­ zations, generated a convergence (Davis et al., 2008). These efforts also followed a similar trajectory, beginning with their adoption of resource mobilization models (McCarthy & Zald, 1977), followed by their development of studies of framing (Gamson & Meyer, 1996; Zald, 1996). Subsequently, this research program expanded to include several other topics and activities. These included NSM theory and research similar to those developed in movement rhetoric studies, studies of the rhetorical and material strategies of shareholder activists, covert collective action conducted inside organizations (Morrill et  al., 2003), and finally, the growth of feminist SMOs and women’s political organizations. Research methods ranged from fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis (Ragin, 2000), to narrative analysis (Polletta, 2006) to multi-sited and “mobile” ethnologies (Czarniawska, 2004).

As Malesh and Stevens conclude (2009, p. 6), qualitative research of these types displays significant potential: [B]roadening the scope of rhetoric to explicitly include social movements indicates that rhetoric is not only interactional and situated, but also transformative and material. Recognizing that rhetoric is ubiquitous, encompassing all manners of interactive praxis, emphasizes the materiality of rhetoric in a way that is tied to the many modern realities that melt divisions between our theory and our practice, our lives and our classrooms, our citizenry and our identity.

CONCLUSIONS: NEW PATHWAYS We have made two primary arguments in this essay. The first is that, while key concepts from rhetorical theory and criticism have been invaluable for analyzing human collectivities, including formal organi­ zations, their impact has been limited by their own histories. Each domain—rhetorical and organizational—has at times been narrowed beyond their potential breadth. In some cases, the development and creative use of qualitative research methods have mitigated against those processes, generating research that calls for a broadening of theoretical perspectives. We have concluded each section with a partial list of paths not yet taken—but that still might be. In this conclusion, we would like to broaden our own perspective, by suggesting several topics for future engagement and development by qualitative researchers interested in studying symbolic action in, by, and around formal organizations.

The Rhetoric of IdeologyProducing Organizations When we consider the products of organi­ zational communication/rhetoric, we may overlook the fact that one product is ideology.

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Organizations such as think tanks and the media generate and support specific ideologies, often valorizing neoliberal policies or libertarian ones. There also are, of course, organizations whose goal is to produce and legitimize progressive ideologies (McGann & Weaver, 2000). Their work also has had significant influence and has generated substantial pushback from opponents of so-called “identity liberalism” (Lilla, 2016). Organizational rhetoric/communication scholars should probe these issues in depth, to understand the “identificational” dynamics at work in sociopolitical allegiances and transformations, as well as the impact that they have on global politics and economics (see Aune, 2001; Conrad, 2011; Springer et  al., 2016; for an example, see Winders & Scott, 2009).

Globalization, Localization, Postcolonialism, and Beyond Globalization is an important contemporary example of an ideograph that not only crystallizes many meanings and emotional associations, but is also undergoing constant change since its introduction around 1975 (Said, 1978). This term is variously understood vis-àvis several concepts, including multiculturalism, postcolonialism, the “Global Village” (McLuhan & Powers, 1992), corporate domination, the “Washington Consensus,” and international governance. Additionally, globalization is alternately viewed as both a cause of, and an impediment to, the development of humane and effective immigration policies, informal exchanges of people and ideas, and collective movement action. As a result, the term engenders far more powerful—and polarized—reactions than its predecessor, internationalism. This is important discursive territory for qualitative scholars in organi­zational rhetoric and organizational communication, just as it is for those in politics, economics, and sociology (Gibbs & Ganesh, 2019; Upton, 2017; see also Chapter 32 in this volume).

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Rhetoric, Technology and the Environment Popular rhetoric about technology often presents it as “floating above” the world, no longer dependent on labor or the environment. This discourse is illustrated by phrases such as “postindustrial,” “the electronic or digital age,” and the “post-carbon world” (e.g., Cheney et al., 2011; Cheney et al., 2023). This is a grand illusion—one of the most influential rhetorical tactics in history, as noted in powerful, illustrative ways by the group Adbusters. com in their efforts to upend conventional advertising and marketing, including ostensibly “green” initiatives (see Kolinjivadi, 2023). Indeed, rhetoric can aid us in finally getting over Cartesian dualism and the consequent “abstraction” or alienation of humans from nature that has helped to mislead “Western civilization” for approximately 400 years. Qualitative studies of organizational communication/rhetoric can help to uncover narrowly circumscribed assumptions in most organi­ zational theory about what the environment consists of, and can help us find points of leverage for persuasion, dialogue, and genuinely “green” efforts (see Endres, Sprain, & Peterson, 2009; Walker & Daniels, 2019).

Notes 1  Organization and management studies, especially in Europe, underwent a similar linguistic/ cultural turn (Reed, 2005). 2  The Ciceronian tradition had little impact on interpretations of Aristotle in the Arabic/Muslim world. As a result the Arabic/Muslim view that developed after Aristotle’s key works became available in Arabic (between the eighth and tenth centuries CE) integrated Rhetoric and Poetics, in the process elevating the importance of emotion, and linked the communicative arts much more closely to the remainder of the Organon (Hamod, 1963; Vagelpohl, 2015). 3  Other sociologists have proposed hybrid models that integrate resource mobilization, framing, and new social movements (Malesh & Stevens, 2009). 4  For a critique of Hauser’s model, see Ono and Sloop (1995).

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4 Pragmatist Approaches to Qualitative Organizational Communication Research François Cooren, Philippe Lorino, and Daniel Robichaud

Pragmatism tends to have a mixed status in organizational communication research. While its intellectual impact is explicitly recognized by key scholars such as James R. Taylor and Elizabeth Van Every (2000, 2014) or Karl Weick (1995), its influence remains, in many respects, relatively cryptic in contemporary research. Like the character Mr. Jourdain in Molière’s 17th-century play Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, who didn’t know he had been speaking prose his whole life, organizational communication researchers are often speaking the language of pragmatism without knowing it. In other words, even if they are not always aware of the historical influence of this philosophical movement on organization studies, they unknowingly tend to be guided by some of its basic tenets. Or do they? In what follows, we will show that if some pragmatist precepts have been integrated in organizational communication research (e.g., pragmatist theories of meaning and action), others clearly deserve to be rediscovered, as they might help to address

key questions that keep puzzling us. These puzzles include issues of epistemology (e.g., pragmatism’s anti-foundationalism), theory (e.g., pragmatist conceptions of pluralism and dialogism) or, especially relevant for this chapter, methodology (e.g., the aesthetic dimension of qualitative inquiry). This chapter is therefore meant to reintroduce readers to an intellectual movement that might look familiar, but merits, we believe, to be better understood. Our first section below presents a few central positions and concerns peculiar to the pragmatist tradition—in particular, the centrality of experience, its theory of meaning, its anti-foundationalist position, and its identification of three key forms of reasoning. In our second section, we then introduce the pragmatist approach to organizational inquiry, which leads us to present several key concepts. These include pragmatism’s theory of action, its “law of the situation,” its pluralist and dialogical conception of inquiry, its notion of ecological emergence, its depiction

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of the researcher’s role in organizational studies, and finally, its conception of inquiry as an estheticizing process. In our third section, we discuss the methodological implications of pragmatism for social scientific research—particularly regarding the traditional opposition between quantitative and qualitative methodologies as well as the role of abduction in inquiries. We conclude by proposing general guidelines for qualitative organizational communication research, inspired by our conception of pragmatism.

CENTRAL POSITIONS AND CONCERNS OF THE PRAGMATIST TRADITION As with any philosophical tradition, pragmatism is represented by many schools of thought that are not necessarily compatible (Konvitz & Kennedy, 1960). While it is commonly accepted that this movement was born in the 1870s in the context of discussions taking place in Harvard’s short-lived Metaphysical Club, it is noteworthy that two of its founding fathers—Charles Sanders Peirce and William James—later disagreed about some of its most basic tenets, especially regarding their respective conceptions of truth (Misak, 2013). These disagreements, not only with James, but also with other scholars who claimed to follow the pragmatist tradition, led Peirce (1905) to famously rename his philosophy “pragmaticism,” commenting that this alternate term was “ugly enough to be safe from kidnappers” (p. 166). In this section, we propose to avoid discussing key differences that divide the pragmatists—whether in classical [e.g., ­ Charles Sanders Peirce (1998) vs. William James (1907)] or more contemporary eras [e.g., Richard Rorty (1979) vs. Hilary Putnam (1990)]. Instead, we will emphasize what they apparently share, conceding that our take on pragmatism tends to be closer to Peirce’s and Dewey’s (1958) versions than to James’ (1890). The purpose of this section,

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then, is to recall basic principles shared by most pragmatists on the meaning of experience and research. More precisely, we propose to address the four following elements of pragmatism: (1) the centrality of experience, (2) its theory of meaning, (3) its anti-foundationalist position, and (4) its specification of different types of reasoning that characterize the logic of research.

The Centrality of Experience One important aspect of pragmatism is that it rejects two philosophical doctrines—empiricism and rationalism—whose relationship has historically configured debates concerning the origin of knowledge. Empiricism, in its strongest form, assumes that sensory experience is the absolute origin of what we can know and that the human mind is—to use John Locke’s (1690/1959) famous expression—a sort of “white paper” that can only be filled in a posteriori—that is, after the world has been experienced. In contrast, rationalism—as represented, for instance, by Descartes (1641/1960), who was one of Peirce’s nemeses—claims that truth can only be reached through logical reasoning abstracted from sensory experiences. As a result, certain propositions—for instance, algebraic or geometric demonstrations—don’t even need to be empirically validated to be considered true. As it is so often the case, this doctrinal opposition proved sterile for the pragmatists, who claimed that we never start from a tabula rasa. This position leads them to side with rationalists, up to a point. It also leads them to partially side with empiricists, in that they consider experience a key resource in how we get to know something and practically deal with situations (Misak, 2013). But what is particularly original in the pragmatist position is that “experience” is considered what William James (1912/1976) called a “doublebarrelled term” (p. 24). James meant that this term refers both to the content of our immediate experiences, but also to the very act

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of experiencing itself. Commenting on this expression, Dewey (1925/1958) writes, Like its congeners, life and history, [experience] includes what men [sic] do and suffer, what they strive for, love, believe and endure, and also how men act and are acted upon, the ways in which they do and suffer, desire and enjoy, see, believe, imagine—in short, processes of experiencing… It is “double-barrelled” in that it recognizes in its primary integrity no division between act and material, subject and object, but contains them both, in an unanalyzed totality. (p. 8)

In other words, pragmatists insist that experience should not be treated as indexing of some sort of “absolute” reality, but as all there is. Experience therefore is not to be connected to some other sort of reality, but to other experiences. William James (1912) identified this position as a form of radical empiricism, which takes into account not only how we are experiencing the world (and not only the content of our experiences), but also how we have experienced it in the past, which takes the form of habits and beliefs.

The Pragmatist Theory of Meaning Another position that is usually consensual among pragmatists concerns the very birth of this movement, which emerged from the famous definition known as the Pragmatic Maxim. This foundational maxim, originally defined by Peirce during discussions that took place in the context of the Metaphysical Club (Olshewsky, 1983), is usually phrased as follows (although many versions were rewritten by Peirce himself throughout his life): Consider what effects, which might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object. (Peirce, 1878, p. 293)

As we see, for pragmatists, the totality of the meaning of a concept is to be found in its conceivable experiential consequences. As

Peirce (1878) pointed out, “there is no distinction of meaning so fine as to consist in anything but a possible difference in practice” (p. 293), a position that James (1907) also adopted. The pragmatic maxim was from outset meant as an epistemological standpoint, or method. As Peirce put it in an unpublished paper titled “The Kernel of Pragmatism”: pragmatism is, in itself, no doctrine of metaphysics, no attempt to determine any truth of things. It is merely a method of ascertaining the meanings of hard words and of abstract concepts. (Peirce, CP 5.464)

Peirce’s writings first applied his method to an “occult idea” most in need of clarification, that of reality. In his “pragmatic clarification of the idea of reality,” to paraphrase Peirce scholar Robert Lane (2018), Peirce developed what he called a realist position, a position he set not against any form of idealism, but fiercely against nominalism. That latter tradition held that laws and generalities do not really exist, and consist merely of words that we use to describe facts and qualities. Again, Peirce was not taking a metaphysical stance here. He was merely following the pragmatic maxim: if the maxim is appropriate or true, then general concepts of continuity and laws, in the form of habits and dispositions, are meaningful since they have distinct and clear experiential consequences. Even the application of a concept to an object expresses a law or habit. This fact, according to Peirce, makes continuity—an implication of the application of a concept—something real as per the pragmatist maxim (Forester, 2011). As we discuss below, Peirce’s epistemological realism here entails significant methodological consequences for the analysis of organizations. One important aspect of Peirce’s realism, derived from the pragmatist maxim, is that realism pertains not so much to objects “out there,” but to their qualities. For Peirce, the qualities were understood as dispositions— the famous example here being the hardness

PRAGMATIST APPROACHES

of a diamond. However, in order to be discovered, described and known, these qualities must always be inferred from the effects they produce consistently. In other words, it is only in its interaction with other elements of a given situation that the properties of a specific subject or object can reveal themselves, and become meaningful. The notion of the “hardness” of the diamond, for example, would be meaningless, or empty, without imagining attempts at scratching—for example, with a knife. To consider an organizational example, if we wonder what “being a leader” means, the first reaction of a pragmatist would be to identify what a person who is said to manifest “leadership” typically does. In other words, the claim that such a person has “leadership” would have to be translated into identifying distinct habits and dispositions for “leadership” that are meaningful for the participants in related interaction. By conducting this specific inquiry (a term we return to, below), we can hope to identify, from a pragmatist viewpoint, what being a leader—and, more generally, leadership—concretely and practically means. For example, one might discover that an alleged leader tends to respect others’ viewpoints (i.e., that she is therefore respectful), that she knows how to delegate work (i.e., that she can be trustful), that she can assume her responsibilities (i.e., that she is accountable), and that she is someone people tend to listen to (i.e., that she is influential). All of these qualities—being respectful, trustful, accountable, and influential—are what leadership psychologists typically identify as the key traits of leadership (Fairhurst, 2007). However, a pragmatist typically goes beyond this psychological reduction to show what these qualities interactionally and practically mean, for there is no meaning outside of the realm of experience. In other words, pragmatists do not put aside the qualities that help us define what being someone or being something consists of, but their focus on (inter-)action invites them to always study these properties through the effects they

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(potentially) produce. Importantly, this also means that the world that surrounds us and that we are part of acts on us as much as we act on it (Mead, 1932/1980).

Pragmatism’s Anti-foundationalist Position A central commitment of pragmatism is its rejection of any form of foundationalism—if by foundationalism we mean that, for instance, knowledge has an essential base from which it can be built, an absolute a priori underlying any form of experience. One of the most renowned examples here is, of course, Descartes’s (1644/2009) dictum of “cogito ergo sum,” which the French philosopher presented as an unquestionable premise from which knowledge can be constructed. In other words, we can, according to Descartes, doubt anything, except that we think, which is the proof of our existence and capacity to know something. However, Peirce (1877) famously rejected Cartesianism by claiming that any experience is always guided by what he called “habits of mind”—that is, beliefs that “guide our desires and shape our actions” (p. 5). If there is such a thing as doubt, Peirce believed, it occurs because something in our experience appears to call into question what we believe to be true. While belief is called “a calm and satisfactory state which we do not wish to avoid” (p. 5), Peirce depicted doubt as “an uneasy and dissatisfied state from which we struggle to free ourselves and pass into the state of belief (p. 5). Peirce subsequently called this struggle inquiry, a key conception that inspired many important developments in Pragmatism, especially on Dewey’s (1938/1993) part. Pragmatism is therefore considered antifoundationalist to the extent that multiple sources can be identified, not only of knowledge [pragmatists would rather speak in terms of knowing (Dewey & Bentley, 1949)], but also, more generally, of actions, and that

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those sources must always put to the test of experience. The sources of our knowing an object that we investigate can be found in the ways we interact with it (a.k.a., “secondness”), which allow us to infer its qualities (a.k.a., “firstness”), through the habits that guide those interactions (a.k.a., “thirdness”).

The Three Forms of Reasoning Among other things, Peirce was a philosopher and a geodesist. But he was first and foremost a logician, and this dimension of his identity proved crucial for the development of pragmatism. While classical epistemology usually discriminates between two forms of reasoning, called deduction and induction (cf. Popper, 1934/1959), Peirce famously identified a third form of reasoning, abduction, which plays a key role in inquiry. Consistent with his position regarding doubts and beliefs (discussed above), Peirce identified abduction, or what he also called hypothesis, as the creative dimension of our inquiries, as it is the only form of reasoning that can introduce a new idea (Peirce, 1931–1958, 5.171). Typically, deduction is characterized by the drawing of a necessary conclusion (or result) from specific premises (a rule and a case). The following example of reasoning can, for instance, be called deductive to the extent that the conclusion is necessarily true if both premises are true: (1) animals are mortal (rule); (2) humans are animals (case); therefore, (3) humans are mortal (result). There is no new idea introduced in this example as the conclusion is implicitly present in the premises of the reasoning. Alternately, induction consists of starting from both a case and a result to infer a specific rule. Consider this example: (1) these animals are brown (case); (2) these animals are bears (result); therefore, (3) bears are probably brown (rule). As we see here, what characterizes an induction is that even if its premises are both true, the conclusion could still be false (for instance,

we know that black and white bears exist). It is not by chance that inductions are typically the forms of reasoning implied in the drawing of stereotypes, with all their negative consequences, even as stereotypes can also be extremely useful in our lives, since they help us to generalize from specific observations (Lorino, 2018). Peirce famously identified a third form of reasoning, which consists of starting from a rule and a result to infer a specific case. Here is an example: (1) this animal lays eggs (result); (2) all birds lay eggs (rule); therefore, (3) this animal is probably a bird (case). Induction and abduction are both forms of reasoning in which premises can be true while conclusions can still be false (for instance, platypuses lay eggs, but are not, as we know, birds). However, they differ to the extent that abduction does not lead, like induction, to a generalization. On the contrary, abduction involves a specific observation (result), which is rendered comprehensible (case) by mobilizing a rule. Importantly, while abduction is implied in any form of comprehension of a phenomenon (which does not necessarily imply creativity) this reasoning is at the core of all creative processes. Our appreciation of abduction’s significance grows when we consider that all metaphors are based on abductive reasoning. For example: (1) a man waits for the moment to strike (result); (2) snakes wait for the moment to strike (rule); therefore, (3) this man is a snake (case). This condition means that any act of recognition can also imply a form of novelty. Typically, metaphors consist of associating phenomena that are usually dissociated. This is especially true when we are confronted with a surprising fact that calls into question what we think we already know. For instance, the first time that researchers were confronted with a platypus, they thought it was a hoax, as they were confronted with a semiaquatic animal that had fur, a beak, mammary glands, and was laying eggs (Eco, 2000). They finally identified it as a mammal because of its possession of

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mammary glands, but its existence forced them to question their beliefs (e.g., that mammals don’t lay eggs or have beaks). Both induction and deduction are forms of inferences conceived as having exclusively logical grounds—hence their status as logicians’ desiderata. However, the conception of a tentative theory or hypothesis explaining a number of observations has generally been treated as a process falling outside the domain of logic, as it was thought to be a mere act of guessing, or an act of insight on the part of the researcher, either of which is far more psychological than logical in nature. Peirce took issue with such a view, however, and articulated the notion that abduction allows us to logically and epistemically explain how we conceive a new idea to account for an observation. Failure to recognize these opportunities, Peirce believed, came from our holding too “narrow and formalistic a conception of inference.” To be sure, Peirce recognized the fuzzy or intuitive nature of abduction and at times described it as a guessing instinct: “‘It is really an appeal to instinct’ (1.630). ‘The abductive suggestion comes to us like a flash. It is an act of insight’ (5.181) and ‘abduction is nothing but guessing’ (7.219)” (Peirce, 1931–1958, cited by Fann, 1970). However, as a logical operation formally conducted upon data, he insisted that “guessing” should be understood as an inference, which he came to describe as follows: The surprising fact, C, is observed; But if A were true, C would be a matter of course; Hence, there is reason to suspect that A is true.

Abduction thus starts from a surprise and moves towards a hypothesis. To be sure, its validity (i.e., as a “wager” placed on the “payoff” of confirmed knowledge) may initially be considered low, but its productivity, its “uberty” as Peirce put it, is high. That is, it generates new ideas, beyond a current generalization concerning the shared qualities displayed by a set of data (e.g., in the case of induction).

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The logic of abduction is therefore closely tied to the nature of pragmatism. This is because the problem of abduction is mostly that of providing good reasons for choosing one candidate hypothesis over another. And that is where the pragmatist maxim comes into play. In reading a section of Peirce’s “Collected Papers” (5.195 to 5.205) on this point, one can hardly miss the centrality he placed on abduction in pragmatism’s epistemology. Specifically, Peirce described pragmatism as “the logic of abduction” in relation to the pragmatist maxim: If you carefully consider the question of pragmatism you will see that it is nothing else than the question of the logic of abduction. That is, pragmatism proposes a certain maxim which, if sound, must render needless any further rule as to the admissibility of hypotheses to rank as hypotheses, that is to say, as explanations of phenomena held as hopeful suggestions; and, furthermore, this is all that the maxim of pragmatism really pretends to do […] Thus, the maxim of pragmatism, if true, fully covers the entire logic of abduction. (5.196, emphasis in original)

As pointed out by several authors (e.g., Eco & Sebeok, 1983; Fann, 1970; Lorino, 2018), this form of reasoning is usually what triggers inquiry, as it often (but not always) arises from our encounter with a surprising fact that leads us to explore the implications of a hypothetical explanation. Here, it is important to remember that pragmatists, following Peirce, associate abduction as a form of inquiry with its other two stages of induction and deduction. As we will see, the pragmatist concept of abduction can be extremely useful, both for understanding organizational life, and for conducting qualitative research.

THE PRAGMATIST APPROACH TO ORGANIZATIONAL INQUIRY Pragmatism conceptualizes human action as an exploratory and creative process (Joas, 1996).

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In this way, for pragmatists, any reflective action, especially in organizational contexts, appears as a legitimate form of research, and the boundary between research and “reflective practice” (Schön, 1983) may seem blurred. We will see further, however, that in the pragmatist perspective, the distinctiveness of research activity, though not denied, needs to be redefined on another basis than the traditional theory/practice divide.

A Theory of Action The pragmatist perspective on human action rejects the conventional dichotomy between repetition and invention, routine and creativity, exploitation and exploration (March, 1991). As we have argued above, new experience never starts from a “white paper,” since it involves our translation of existing beliefs (i.e., predispositions to understand a certain type of situation in a certain way) into habits (i.e., acting in a certain way in a certain type of situation), which serve as resources for making meaning of new situations, and adapting to their evolving course of action. For pragmatists, inquiry combines this use of experience as an instrument to engineer future action with the exploration of new organizational practices. Organizational inquiry is thus considered a social and communicational practice of collective sensemaking, performed in the face of the irreducible uncertainty and indeterminacy characterizing situated activity. This inquiry is not triggered by a contingent or optional decision to improve collective practices. Instead, it responds to some practical imperative, when an ambiguous or contradictory situation disrupts our beliefs and habits, and requires some renewal of collective practices to fulfill our existential purposes—which for organizations, include examples such as healing patients, training students, ensuring nuclear safety, reducing greenhouse gas emission, producing healthy food, transporting passengers safely, etc. In

this perspective, organizational inquiries, and particularly research inquiries, are potentially ameliorative and transformative. In this view, goals are not fixed, and their definition/redefinition is an intrinsic part of the organizational inquiry. Thus, this type of inquiry does not separate, but appraises and handles jointly means, ends and their relationship. As Dewey (1939/1988) pointed out, “The object finally valued as an end to be reached is determined in its concrete makeup by appraisal of existing conditions as means” (p. 213). The inquiry thus involves a continual process of valuation that does not only evaluate the workin-progress and its results, but permanently re-evaluates the relevance and practicality of values and methods of judgment themselves. Therefore, values, as goals, are not fixed but are re-engineered by the valuation process, which is an intrinsic part of the inquiry. This view of valuation may raise questions about the academic practices of evaluation, based on fixed and often rigid procedures and criteria, independent from studied situations, however pressing issues at stake may be.

The “Law of the Situation” For pragmatists, inquiry is triggered by a doubtful—“indeterminate” in Dewey’s terms—situation, which entails that situations play a key role in the continuous reengineering of collective action. Therefore, the concept of situation must be defined with some care. As Dewey (1938/1993) noted, “what is designated by the word ‘situation’ is not a single object or event or set of objects and events. For we never experience nor form judgments about objects and events in isolation, but only in connection with the contextual whole. This latter is what is called a situation” (p. 72). Situations are thus considered continuously evolving sets of “objects and events,” including technical and material artifacts, concepts, discourses, acts, etc. As a result, participants in organizational inquiries must take the complexity, dynamics

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and uncertainty of situations seriously, and accept that they cannot know with full confidence which habits will be sustained, and which changed. Inquiry is experimental and must abide by what Follett (1925/2003) called the “law of the situation” (p. 58). By this phrase, Follett meant that we must start with a thorough exploration and open discussion of our immediate conditions, and what they apparently dictate to or require from us. We must start by defining and problematizing those conditions—for example, by translating their force into some kind of problem formulation. We must then produce risky hypotheses that “could only be adopted on probation, and must be tested” (Peirce, 1998, p. 95). This process requires that those hypotheses “indicate operations which can be performed to test (their) applicability” and “when executed, provide needed evidential material” (Dewey, 1938/1993, p. 115).

Pluralism and Dialogism For pragmatists, organizational inquiry is a fundamentally cooperative activity. Participants cooperate not only to conduct the inquiry, but also to reflectively assess the methodologies they use in their inquiry. Through this reflective commitment, participants move from constituting a simple working group to being a community of inquiry (Ansell, 2011, p. 158; Dewey, 1927/1988, p. 351, 353). Due to the diversity of its participants, organizational inquiry typically involves the use of multiple perspectives: it applies to its situations diverse beliefs and habits corresponding to different professions and functions, managers, employees, neighborhood communities, service users, researchers of different disciplines, political and administrative authorities, etc. This form of organizational inquiry, importantly, also involves perspectives embodied in other-than-human participants, such as artifacts, rules, procedures, concepts and theories, or conventional wisdom. Dewey and Bentley (1949/2008) defined “trans-actional

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inquiry” as a form of inquiry in which the very identification of participants, whether human or other-than-human, is not fixed, but is contingent to the course of the inquiry, and may change at any moment. Meanings subsequently emerge, not only from the interplay between participants, but also from the transformation of participants’ identities that is initiated by the conduct of inquiry. Inquiry is thus considered radically immanent: no participant has a transcendent position that would give access to some sort of ultimate truth. Inquiry is thus considered not only pluralist, but also dialogical. This means that when participants relate to each other and mutually question their diverse beliefs, they can generate new perspectives in the “in-between” space of their dialogue. Peirce repeatedly used the words “dialogue” and “dialogical” when stressing this relational quality of thought and action, which is based on the addressivity inherent in mediating signs, both linguistic or non-linguistic (i.e., whichever may convey a meaning). As Peirce repeatedly pointed out, “a sign addresses somebody” (Peirce, 1931–1958: 2.228); “all thinking is necessarily a sort of dialogue” (Peirce, 1977: 195); and finally, “every logical evolution of thought should be dialogic” (Peirce, 1931– 1958: 4.551). Pluralism and dialogism are thus considered keys to the creative power of pragmatic inquiry. As a form of inquiry, organizational communication research should thus adopt dialogical methods. These methods should cultivate free expression of distinct voices animating a situation, be they human or otherthan-human, without ex ante ordering of their relevance and legitimacy. They should also suspend hierarchies and power relationships, focus on activity and practices and not on persons, allocate resources to undertake experimentation, and continually redefine research questions. A key methodological issue here involves the need to reveal habits and beliefs at stake in the situation, which are often invisible and even unconscious. Pluralism, by exposing each participant’s beliefs and

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habits to different views of the world, brings a major contribution to this important task.

Ecological Emergence Peirce made clear that by ‘dialogue’ he did not mean the interaction between atomized psychological subjects, but between meaning-making entities—which he called ­ “quasi-minds,” and may include animals, objects, and other physical phenomena (e.g., involved in the process of crystallization). The notion of quasi-mind could be defined here as any habit-conveying human or other-thanhuman agent; it is close to Dewey’s notion of “organism” and Actor Network Theory’s notion of actant. As Peirce pointed out, [F]or the purpose of this inquiry, a Sign may be defined as a Medium for the communication of a Form. It is not logically necessary that anything possessing consciousness, that is, feeling of the peculiar common quality of all our feeling, should be concerned. But it is necessary that there should be two, if not three, quasi-minds, meaning things capable of varied determination as to forms of the kind communicated. (Peirce, 1998, p. 544, emphasis added)

In trans-actional forms of organizational inquiry, participants not only address each other, but are also continuously trying to understand each other’s acts and utterances through the changing situation. Therefore, they not only make meaning of the organi­ zational situation through dialogue, but also develop their dialogue through the situation. In pragmatism, then, the community and the field of inquiry therefore have no ontological boundaries. Perimeters are strictly instrumental artifacts, which can be modified by participants at any moment, in response to the requirements of their organizational inquiry. Their “quasi-minds” are connected by a multitude of links to “quasi-minds” who are assumed to be external to the explored domain. By interacting with each other, the members of the community of inquiry must thus decide which links can and cannot be

analytically severed and detached—a requirement which renders their judgments both contingent and temporary. Organizational inquirers are therefore ecologically integrated in their so-called “environment,” and are consubstantial with it: “[Our] observation sees man-in-action, not as something radically set over against an environing world, nor yet as something merely acting ‘in’ a world, but as action of and in the world in which the man belongs as an integral constituent” (Dewey & Bentley, 1949/2008, p. 50).

Scholars’ Role in Inquiry Organizational communication scholars and “field actors” play different roles in pragmatic inquiry, but their respective roles do not correspond to the familiar “practice/ theory” divide (e.g., evoked in the distinction between “practitioners” and “researchers”). The pragmatist approach thus rejects the “inquirer/inquired” duality and the spectator theory of knowledge (Dewey, 1929/1984). On the one hand, scholars are considered practitioners in their own right, engaged in observing, writing, speaking, and data collecting practices. They are, in other words, part of the explored situation. On the other hand, field actors produce much “theory” (e.g., logically developed, constantly tested, and eminently useful knowledge)—even if it is not recognized as such in academic protocols. How can we then characterize the specific role of scholars in research inquiry? Field actors have immediate, in-depth knowledge of their singular situation. Through completing other field studies, readings, and exchanges with fellow researchers, organizational communication scholars are more likely to widen a situation’s field of usable experience. Moreover, they are expected to master specific methods to convene a “felicitous” inquiry—one that enables the concerned organizational group to pursue purposeful and collective action. Lastly,

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scholars are also expected to develop instrumental mediators (e.g., tools, models, methods, rules) that are potentially applicable to inquiry in other, similar situations—although without any guarantee that such replication will prove relevant.

Inquiry is an Estheticizing Process To summarize, the pragmatist view of the inquiry applied to organizational communication research appears as a collective estheticizing process: a social process aiming at stimulating the emergence of dynamic, appraisable, transformable, and meaning-making forms from shapeless (or, “indeterminate”) situations, and unorganized arrays of “things” (e.g., circumstances, events, actors, acts, tools, concepts, etc.). In Dewey’s terms (1934/2005), inquiry tries to transform the shapeless and continuous flow of organizational experience into “an” experience, a socially, spatially and temporally delineated and organized set of events, acts, feelings and ideas. As he also pointed out, There are absorbing inquiries and speculations that a scientific man (sic) and philosopher will recall as ‘experiences’ in (this) emphatic sense. In final import they are intellectual. But in their actual occurrence they were emotional as well; they were purposive and volitional. (…) An experience of thinking has its own esthetic quality; (it) has a satisfying emotional quality because it possesses internal integration and fulfillment reached through ordered and organized movement. This artistic structure may be immediately felt. In so far, it is esthetic. What is even more important is that not only is this quality a significant motive in undertaking intellectual inquiry and in keeping it honest, but that no intellectual activity is an integral event (is an experience), unless it is rounded out with this quality. (…) In short, esthetic cannot be sharply marked off from intellectual experi­ ence since the latter must bear an esthetic stamp to be itself complete. (pp. 39–40, emphasis added)

Thus, research inquiry should be undertaken as an esthetic project, carrying intellectual, practical, moral, and emotional content. It should be, in short, a full living experience.

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METHODOLOGICAL IMPLICATIONS OF PRAGMATISM FOR SOCIAL SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH Now that we have presented some of the most central positions and concerns of pragmatism, as well as its core notions of abduction and inquiry, we proceed to explore the implications of this school of thought for social scientific research—especially in the context of organizational communication studies. Although we will see that pragmatism does not privilege qualitative over quantitative forms of inquiry, we focus on how pragmatism can inform the way qualitative methodologies are designed and mobilized in organizational communication research.

Qualitative vs. Quantitative Methodologies As we have noted, Charles Sanders Peirce was a philosopher, mathematician and logician, but he also worked in the field of geo­ desy, a science that aims at measuring three fundamental properties of Earth, namely its geometric shape, its orientation in space and its gravity (Geodesy, 2023). This means that the opposition between qualitative and quantitative methodologies would not have made much sense to him, as he was used to mobilizing both types in his own work. As implied in the pragmatic notion of inquiry, choosing a specific method (e.g., qualitative vs. quantitative) to investigate a phenomenon is contingent on the situations and problems we are facing. Depending on these situations or problems, and on the different phases of research inquiry (abductive, deductive, inductive), we might rely on quantitative or qualitative approaches or combine them (see Chapter 1 in this volume). For instance, quantitative methods might typically be used when dealing with the inductive phase of research, a phase during which researchers try to test and perhaps generalize concerning what has been previously

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hypothesized and/or deduced. However, qualitative methods, such as ethnography, could also be considered extremely useful during the abductive phases of a research, especially when researchers attempt to develop a plausible narrative for explaining a situation, or when they are looking for phenomena that they might consider worth studying more systematically. Importantly here, there is no such thing as an exclusively “pragmatist methodology” derived from a pragmatist viewpoint. Pragmatism does not offer a normative framework for using research methods, but it does promote the adoption (and adaptation) of methods deemed useful for understanding a given situation. We could even describe this as methodological opportunism, in that pragmatist inquiry is a type of meta-method, one which (reflexively) specifies a method for the appropriate use of research methods. In the initial phase of inquiry (typically the creative or abductive phase), our construction of hypotheses will orient our choice of methodological tools as fitting with our hypotheses. It is noteworthy here that partitioning inquiry into three phases—i.e., abductive, deductive, and inductive—should not be understood as an invitation for quantitative researchers to instrumentalize qualitative forms of inquiry. In other words, pragmatists do not claim that qualitative methods should only be used as preambles to “the real stuff”—i.e., in the positivist paradigm, quantitative studies. For instance, the abductive phase, which is where researchers formulate their guesses, intuitions, and hypotheses, can result from an abnormal statistical result, which can then lead researchers to develop more specific inquiry, which could be qualitative. In other words, the abductive phase does not necessarily correspond with the mobilization of qualitative methods. Similarly, the inductive phase, which is usually the phase where researchers attempt to test and, if possible, generalize their results, does not necessarily correspond with the mobilization of quantitative methods. For instance, a

certain form of generalization can be made from the multiplication of case studies even if these case studies only involve qualitative methodologies.

The Importance of Abduction While inductive and deductive approaches are often opposed, we believe that the idea of abduction allows researchers to develop a qualitative methodology that is closer to how they traditionally experience fieldwork. In this respect, Sarah Tracy (2020) pointed out that [i]n logic, reasoning is often categorized as either inductive (a bottom-up, “little-to-big” approach) or deductive (a top-down, “big-to-little” approach). In qualitative methods, we often speak of emic understandings of the scene, which means that behavior is described from the actor’s point of view and is context-specific. This is contrasted with etic understandings, in which researchers describe behavior in terms of external criteria or theories that are already derived and not specific to a given culture. (p. 26, italics in the original)

In contrast with these two established methodologies (inductive vs. deductive), Tracy proposed a third perspective, which she called the “phronetic iterative approach,” an approach that, as she pointed out, is directly inspired by Peirce’s (1903/1997) notion of abduction (see Chapter 20 in this volume). As Tracy reminded us, researchers should never initiate fieldwork without engaging their preconceptions concerning which phenomena they should be interested in, or the theories that should inspire them. In other words, Tracy (2020) acknowledged that we are not, as mentioned before, white papers to be filled by what we will possibly discover in our fieldwork. Peirce would speak of beliefs, habits, or attitudes that lead us to observe certain things and not others, or that help us to anticipate certain phenomena. The risk, of course, is that we then use fieldwork just to confirm something we already know, a risk that is nicely summarized in Maslow’s (1966) famous quote: “If all you

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have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail” (p. 15). Methodologically speaking, it is therefore imperative, from a pragmatist perspective, to predispose ourselves to welcoming surprises that could lead us to question what we think we already know. However, this is far from being an easy task, given our psychological tendencies to develop and react to cognitive dissonance (Festinger, 1957). That is why pluralism and dialogical approaches may prove inescapable: by exposing our vision to the different visions of our fellow participants in inquiry, our perspective to their perspectives, and by opening ourselves to critical dialogue, we can therefore evolve and avoid confirmation bias. As pointed out by Tracy (2020), Even though most qualitative researchers start broad, they also frequently begin with several theories or specific phenomena that may become salient. Indeed, it is perfectly acceptable and quite helpful for qualitative researchers to talk to colleagues and use past research that would help them appreciate the scene. (p. 29)

To avoid dogmatism or prejudice, when using preconceptions tested in the past and “digging one’s furrow” within a certain theoretical frame, researchers should adopt some methodological precautions, such as confronting different interpretations of a given situation or requiring from scholars the demonstrated capacity to involve different intellectual frameworks. Abductively speaking, a theory or preconception can be useful by allowing us to make sense of what we observe or hear. This is because it allows us to recognize in what is done or said something we already know— for example, in situations that require moderate rather than radical abduction, or what Umberto Eco calls “overcoded abductions” (Eco, 1983, p. 210). In other, more disruptive situations, and thus more innovative forms of abduction (“under-coded” or “creative” abductions, in Eco’s terms), the recognition of already known schemes may at first seem impossible. Abduction then requires us to, as

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the suffix “ab” indicates, take a step aside— for example, by adopting a metaphorical approach, or exploring more distant fields of action and knowledge, in order to elaborate plausible explanations. Here, we use as an illustration an analytical method presented elsewhere in this handbook (see Chapter 24). Specifically, the “ventriloquial” approach to ­ communication—which has strong pragmatist roots (Cooren, 2014a, 2014b)—invites researchers to recognize in what people say and do the activity that consists of making various figures say and do something—whether these figures are regulations, facts, organizations or other people. This “hammer”—the ventriloquial approach—definitely invites us to find its logically implicated “nails” (i.e., ventriloquial acts). However, this identification can have generative power, to the extent that it acknowledges everything that can make a difference in a given situation. Examples here include the euthanasia declaration of a dying father (Brummans, 2007), a protocol invoked by a hospital director during a meeting (Cooren, 2010), or a moisture meter that reveals the level of dangerous toxicity in an apartment (Bencherki, 2016). In other words, this overcoded form of abduction can enable researchers to observe what others had not necessarily observed before. More importantly, this abductive reasoning, which leads us to recognize acts of ventriloquism in what people are saying, also offers a different way of theorizing the process of organizing, such that human beings are no longer considered the centers and prime movers of their organizational universe. What is crucial, however, and in keeping with Peirce, is to remain attentive in pragmatic inquiry to what Bateson (1972) called differences that make a difference. By this phrase, we mean ventriloquizing that might sufficiently differ from others, such that researchers might be forced to speak about a different sort of phenomenon. In other words, what we have to fear in organizational inquiry is creating a sort of Procrustean bed where the type of act

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we have identified—in our case, the typical ventriloquial act—is used as a standard that leads us to cut off other relevant aspects of phenomena that would not fit with that preferred model. Interestingly, abductive reasoning is involved in both the acts of typification— which consists of identifying a phenomenon as a specific type because of its display of certain properties—and calling into ­question— which consists of noticing that something, regardless of its displayed properties, does not exactly look like the type we initially had in mind (hence, its creation of surprise). Methodologically speaking, what researchers then have to do is remain as vigilant as possible about the typifications they have developed over the years in order to remain open to alternative possibilities—that is, alternative types that could help them make sense of what they are observing. The most productive way to do so is to compare one’s analyses with ones proposed by other participants. We utilize this approach, for example, in data sessions where several researchers get together to analyze the same data.1 Creativity consists, first and foremost, in finding resemblances, similarities and resonances in phenomena we initially consider to be different, dissimilar, or unalike (Martine & Cooren, 2023). Methodologically speaking, one of the keys to successful inquiry is to remain sensitive to these dynamics of resemblance and dissimilarity, which form the essence of an abductive reasoning, especially in its collective dimension. Going back to the etic/emic opposition, already questioned by Tracy (2020), pragmatism thus invites researchers not to systematically choose between a top down (etic) vs. bottom up (emic) approach, as abduction, in its very mechanism, requires both. In other words, we have to remain open to the actors’ points of view and the specific aspects of the context we are observing, but we cannot understand their behavior and their situation without resorting to preconceptions or theories that transcend this specific context (see also Caronia, 2019).

CONCLUSION: CONSEQUENCES FOR RESEARCH METHODOLOGY In this chapter, we have attempted to demonstrate that pragmatism is a rich intellectual movement—one that deserves to be rediscovered by organizational communication scholars, given the range of its implications in terms of epistemology, theorization, and methodology. In conclusion, we wish to re-emphasize the pragmatists’ radical rejection of the theory/ practice dichotomy. As a result, scholars inspired by pragmatist ideas may adopt action research approaches. More precisely, they may prefer approaches such as “cooperative inquiry” (Reason & Bradbury, 2001) or dialogical inquiry (Lorino et  al., 2011) that avoid any rigid division of roles between “researchers” and “practitioners” and suggest that research should be done with rather than on people. Beyond this general orientation, the pragmatist researcher’s choice of specific methods remains open. As mentioned above, the pragmatist concepts of inquiry and abduction define a metamethod rather than, properly speaking, a method. They sketch general guidelines that we propose to summarize as follows: methodological opportunism, valuation rather than evaluation, experimentalism, complying with the law of the situation, building a pluralist community of inquiry, emphasizing abduction and meliorism. Methodological opportunism: In the pragmatist approach to inquiry, the choice of methods is contingent on the studied situation and on problem definition and does not refer to a normative methodological framework. Law of the situation: What drives the choice of methods and theories is the specific situation faced by inquirers, whether scholars or managers, and its problematization. The methodological adaptation to the problematized situation should thus be periodically reassessed. Valuation: Due to the complexity and uncertainty of situations, research is always exploratory and hypothetical. Even the values involved in building axiological judgments

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about the research are immanent rather than transcendentally imposed to the inquiry process. Valuation as an activity that defines values thus differs from an evaluation based on fixed values (Putnam, 2002). Pluralist community of inquiry: Legitimate and relevant valuation presupposes that the valuation process is constructed in a robust way to avoid relativism. It should therefore involve critical pluralism, i.e., the free and organized expression of distinct viewpoints by constituting a community of researchers and practitioners around the organizational inquiry, and by establishing open and free expression between distinct categories of actors, without specific precedence or priority. Although scholars have their own form of expertise, their research should be always open to practitioners’ knowledge and know-hows. A successful research design must therefore be flexible enough to allow the widening of the community of inquiry to newly identified significant stakeholders. Mediating: All research inquiry, including valuation, is dialogical. The related dialogue conducted between different cultural, professional, generational, or gender perspectives frequently produces problematic communication. As a result, it is valuable for researchers to, early on, develop and later use effective interaction (including conflictual interaction), mediation tools, such as shared languages, analysis and measurement tools, and rules of dialogue. This condition of dialogue and contingent, evolving understanding leads us to reconceive of the status of the artifacts we produce during research inquiry. While in mainstream research, these artifacts are often presented as the main or sole results of our studies, one of our objectives should be to transform how we think and operate in organizational activities. In other words, artifacts are not “true and final representations,” but mediators whose primary function is to facilitate inquiry. Experimenting: Analyses and explanations, even when agreed upon by the community members, remain hypothetical. Thus, experimentation plays a key role in their valuation. Researchers should not hesitate to

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practice various forms of experimentation— e.g., small scale real experimentation, simulation, and thought experiments (Kuhn, 1977). This is because many aspects of research practices are not always valued in scientific outlets. Nonetheless, these aspects can make important differences in the practical world of organizations, and in the theoretical relevance of developed concepts and ideas. Abduction: Abduction plays a key role in research inquiry. First, by transforming an uncertain and fuzzy situation into a problem. Second, by selecting a hypothetical response to this problem. Since the definition of the problem itself is hypothetical, unlike rationalist problem-solving procedures, the cycles of exploratory inquiry should always requestion the definition of the problem. Meliorism: Finally, pragmatism invites us to highlight the transformative dimension of research, not only for ethical reasons (social responsibility of the scholar), but also for epistemic reasons, because the capacity to adapt social practices to (great or small) social challenges is a key standard of research relevance. Transforming practices should therefore be considered the ultimate form of experimentation and a sine qua non condition of research relevance. In connection with action research (Lewin, 1946; Reason, 2006; Raelin, 1997), its community-based, pluralist and dialogical methods can thus be mobilized to achieve ethical, social, or political goals (for instance, by pushing for more democratic opening to concerned stakeholders).

Note 1  The same idea, expressed differently, can be found in Weick (1979), another scholar who was highly influenced by pragmatism.

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Lane, R. (2018). Peirce on realism and idealism. Cambridge University Press. Lewin, K. (1946). Action research and minority problems. Journal of Social Issues, 2(4), 34–46. Locke, J. (1690/1959). An essay concerning human understanding (Vol. 1 and 2). Dover Publications. Lorino, P. (2018). Pragmatism and organization studies. Oxford University Press. Lorino, P., Tricard, B., & Clot, Y. (2011). Research methods for non-representational approaches to organizational complexity: The dialogical mediated inquiry. Organi­zation Studies, 32(6), 769–801. https://doi.org/10.1177/ 0170840611410807 March, J. G. (1991). Exploration and exploitation in organizational learning. Organization Science, 2(1), 71–87. https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2.1.71 Martine, T., & Cooren, F. (2023). The voice of the work to be made: Abductive communication and creativity. Discourse & Communication, 17(1), 23–39. https://doi.org/10.1177/ 17504813221123847 Maslow, A (1966). The psychology of science: A reconnaissance. Harper & Row. Mead, G. H. (1932/1980). The physical thing. In A. E. Murphy (Ed.), The philosophy of the present (pp. 119–139). The University of Chicago Press. Misak, C. (2013). The American pragmatists. Oxford University Press. Olshewsky, T. M. (1983). Peirce’s Pragmatic Maxim. Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, 19(2), 199–210. Peirce, C. S. (1877). The fixation of belief. Popu­ lar Science Monthly, 12(November), 1–15. Peirce, C. S. (1878). How to make our ideas clear. Popular Science Monthly, 13(January), 286–302. Peirce, C. S. (1903/1997). Harvard lectures on pragmatism. In P. A. Turisi (Ed.), Pragmatism as a principle and method of right thinking: the 1903 Harvard “Lectures on Pragma­ tism.” State University of New York Press. Peirce, C. S. (1905). What pragmatism is. The Monist, 15(2), 161–181.

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Peirce, C. S. (1931–1958). The collected papers (C. Hartshorne & P. Weiss, Eds., Vol. 1–6; A. Burks Vol. 7–8). Harvard ­ U niversity Press. Peirce, C. S. (1977). Semiotics and significs: The correspondence between Charles S. Peirce and Victoria Lady Welby (K. L. Ketner & J. E. Cook, Eds.). Texas Tech Press. Peirce, C. S. (1998). The essential Peirce: Selected philosophical writings (Vol. 2). Indiana University Press. Popper, K. (1934/1959). The logic of scientific discovery. Routledge. Putnam, H. (1990). Realism with a human face. Harvard University Press. Putnam, H. (2002). The collapse of the factvalue dichotomy and other essays. Harvard University Press Raelin, J. A. (1997). Action learning and action science: Are they different? Organizational Dynamics, 26(1), 21–34. https://doi.org/ 10.1016/S0090-2616(97)90025-5 Reason, P. (2006). Choice and quality in action research practice. Journal of Management Inquiry, 15(2), 187–203. https://doi.org/ 10.1177/1056492606288074 Reason, P., & Bradbury, H. (Eds.). (2001). Hand­ book of action research: participative inquiry and practice. Sage. Rorty, R. (1979). Philosophy and the mirror of nature. Princeton University Press. Schön, D. (1983). The reflective practitioner: How professionals think in action. Maurice Temple Smith. Taylor, J. R., & Van Every, E. J. (2000). The emer­ gent organization: Communication as its site and surface. Lawrence Erlbaum. Taylor, J. R., & Van Every, E. J. (2014). When organization fails: Why authority matters. Routledge. Tracy, S. J. (2020). Qualitative research ­methods: Collecting evidence, crafting analysis, com­ municating impact. Wiley Blackwell. Weick, K. E. (1995). Sensemaking in organi­ zations. Sage.

5 Phenomenological Approaches to Qualitative Organizational Communication Research Rebecca J. Meisenbach and Madeline S. Pringle

In this chapter, we invite the reader to join us in consideration of phenomenology as a path for qualitative research that can and should be used more often in organizational communication studies. At its heart, phenomenology is the study of the conscious experience of things—of phenomena as they appear, or “give” themselves to knowing subjects in lived experience. As a methodology, therefore, it is poised to answer questions such as “What is [this lived experience] like?” or “How do [persons] communicate and make meaning of this phenomenon?” As such, phenomenology can help communication scholars foreground how organizational members perceive and experience organi­ zational cultures, practices, and identities in ways that may challenge an organization’s expectations and assumptions. Before we proceed, however, we confirm our position on a recurring question surrounding the phenomenological tradition that is particularly relevant for this volume— specifically, the nature of its relationship to

“qualitative” research methods. Some scholars use phenomenology to frame quantitative or mixed methods studies. For example, Martiny et al. (2021) used phenomenology to frame a mixed-methods study of the experiences of a string quartet both as they played (quantitatively) and as they described the experience (qualitatively). Although we recognize that the complexity of phenomenology supports a variety of methodological affordances for researchers, only some of these approaches are consistent with the interpretivist and critical onto-epistemologies that inform the bulk of qualitative research conducted in organizational communication. As a result, we emphasize those qualitative approaches in this chapter, with an eye toward their relevance to organizational communication research. Thus, when we discuss phenomenological methods, we reference qualitative methods unless explicitly stated otherwise. Phenomenological methods have developed out of—and continue to be linked

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to—some heady philosophical debates about the nature of reality and knowledge—that is, to ontological and epistemological questions. Further, phenomenology is sometimes closely linked with the theoretical tradition of semiotics, which is not everyone’s “cup of tea.” However, before saying, “thank you, next,” readers might consider that communication scholars (e.g., Orbe, 1998) have long noted that phenomenological methods are particularly well-suited to address important issues such as racial and ethnic differences, and to “interrogat[e] the trajectories of power through which systems of domination and oppression among groups of persons are sustained” (Martinez, 2006, p. 293). Such concerns are currently of central interest to organizational communication research, and phenomenology-based analysis usefully “enables a sensitive analysis of the multiple forms of power and domination as they exist in corporate sites” (Deetz, 1994, p. 42). The goal of phenomenology is usually to understand a phenomenon’s experiential essence, but there are different approaches to doing so, and even differing stances on what an essence is. Therefore, this chapter provides an overview of the different qualitative phenomenological research traditions, speaks to themes in past and current organi­zational communication research that has used phenomenology, addresses issues/struggles incorporating phenomenology in this work, and considers the future of phenomenology in qualitative organizational communication research, all in an inviting way that might make readers say, “Thank you, yes!”

APPROACHES TO QUALITATIVE PHENOMENOLOGY This first section introduces key concepts of phenomenological work and provides distinctions among types of qualitative phenomenological research—philosophically, theoretically, and methodologically. Among the many

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existing phenomenological approaches, we highlight transcendental, hermeneutic, semiotic, and embodied phenomenology, but also introduce elements of interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA: Smith et  al., 2009), post-intentional phenomenology (Vagle, 2014) and finally, feminist/queer phenomenology (Ahmed, 2006). Different phenomenological traditions advocate related, but distinct methods of collecting and analyzing data, depending on what assumptive stances the researcher accepts (see Table 5.1). Up front, we note that the lines among phenomenological methods are blurry—and frankly, confusing at times. That is, we anticipate that some of the lines we draw below to assist readers in understanding these variations may be protested by others. As an example of these overlaps, Richard Lanigan, who was one of the first scholars to write about phenomenology in the communication discipline (1982), can be read as promoting a phenomenological method that combines Merleau-Ponty’s reinterpretation and extension of Husserl and Heidegger’s approaches, with a healthy incorporation of Peirce’s semiotics. However, rather than offering a deep dive into phenomenology’s philosophical origins, we discuss distinct emphases of each approach, highlighting the affordances and constraints that might come from incorporating different phenomenological methodologies into their qualitative organizational communication research.

Transcendental Phenomenology Transcendental phenomenology is most closely associated with the philosopher Edmund Husserl, who conceptualized it as a descriptive method meant to “articulate the structure of pure experience” (Sturgess, 2018, p. 4). In this way, the approach is about both how participants describe a specific phenomenon of interest, and the interconnected and intentional relationship between participants (the subject) and the phenomenon (the object).

How do persons describe/ How is [this lived communicate their experience] navigated/ experience of a managed, taking phenomenon? What into consideration are the textural and contextual factors? structural elements of this experience?

Typical research questions

What is [this lived experience] like?

Role of communication Transactional; communication All communication as signs Social constructionist; is the medium through that contribute to how communication which a phenomenon is individuals experience constructs and gives describable a phenomenon meaning to human experience and interpretation of a phenomena

Focus on epistemology of realism/objectivity via bracketing

Assumptive stances

Hermeneutic

Interpretive Post-intentional Phenomenology

Post-

(Continued)

What is this version of this lived experience like at this point in time for this person, considering this context that is subject to change, impartial, and contextually situated? Vagle (2014) suggests “What is it like to…” “What does it mean to…” “What is it to find oneself…” (p. 126) Related to the body; what does Communication as part of the the body communicate in the always changing experience of a phenomenon being studied? phenomenon in varied contexts “the body is no longer conceived as an object in the world, but as our means of communication with it” (Merleau-Ponty, 1962, p. 106)

What is [this lived experience] like taking into consideration the body’s integral part in the experience?

Challenging mind-body split and Reality and experience of a dualistic onto-epistemological phenomenon are always stances; focus on knowing becoming and likely to change; what is grounded within researcher stance engaged via embodied experience of a bridling specific situation

To understand how phenomena “[T]o see what the phenomenon are interpreted by those might become,” and how it is experiencing them via an created in context (Vagle, 2014, embodied contextualization p. 119)

Embodied

Phenomenological Method Approaches

To understand how To interpret how phenomena are phenomena are consciously experienced understood by those as they are constituted experiencing them; and regulated via signs; “meaning-giving emphasizes importance method of inquiry” of time, place, and (Van Manen, 2016, context p. 28) Focus on subjectivity and Focus on ontological intersubjectivity questions of being; reality as intersubjective

To describe the essence of a phenomenon; a descriptive method to “articulate the structure of pure experience” (Sturgess, 2018, p. 4)

Semiotic

Goal

Transcendental

Descriptive

Table 5.1  Phenomenological Method Approaches

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1. Bracketing; 2. Data collection; 3. Horizonalization; 4. Textural descriptions; 5. Structural descriptions; 6. Composite description of phenomenon

Research exemplars in Burns & Bossaller (2012); organizations/about McAllum (2014); Stratton organizing (2010) Opportunities for Understand interaction qualitative of communication organizational and organizational communication structures; describe how scholars participants experience and understand an organizational phenomenon

Data analysis steps/ components

Transcendental

Descriptive Hermeneutic

Interpretive Embodied

Phenomenological Method Approaches

Emphasis on body-subjects; 1. Turning attention to a i.e., how the body phenomenon as lived (both participants’ and experience; researcher’s) influences how 2. Investigating humans engage in the world experience as we live it and experience phenomena; vs. as we conceptualize have not identified unique it [data collection]; data analysis steps 3. Reflecting on essential themes that characterize the phenomenon; 4. Writing and rewriting to describe the phenomenon; 5. Maintaining a strong pedagogical relation to the phenomenon; and finally; 6. Balancing the research context by considering parts and whole Razzante (2018); Zirulnik & Dougherty & Drumheller Fisher & Robbins (2015); Orbe (2019) (2006); Meisenbach Hancock et al. (2015); (2010) Mikkelsen (2021) Critical work taking into Understand how Understand questions of consideration important individuals new materialism and contextual, cultural, communicatively embodiment systematic factors create and interpret organizational phenomena

Pre-step of bracketing: 1. Description (collection of lived experiences as data); 2. Reduction (paring down data to essential themes of the phenomenon); 3. Interpretation (reflection and iterative connections between parts and whole of the data)

Semiotic

Table 5.1  Phenomenological Method Approaches (Continued) Post-

Understand how knowledge is partial and situated in context and how power dynamics play into the multiplicity of experiences

Gardner (2013); Pate (2012)

1. Identify a phenomenon in its multiple, partial, and varied contexts; 2. Devise a clear, yet flexible process for gathering data; 3. Make a post-reflection plan; 4. Read and write through data in a systematic, responsive manner; 5. Craft a text that captures tentative manifestations of the phenomenon in its multiple, partial and varied contexts

Post-intentional Phenomenology

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Husserl sought to understand the basis of human beliefs and knowledge by considering how objects “present” themselves to humans (i.e., are consciously perceived by humans). Thus, the goal of transcendental phenomenological qualitative methods is to unveil and describe participants’ conscious relationship between the self and the phenomenon at hand and to identify the essence of this specific experience. In one example of transcendental organizational management research, Stratton (2010) studied the workplace phenomenon of personal web usage (PWU), identifying essential emotions that employees experienced surrounding their PWU. In another example, McAllum (2014) investigated the meanings volunteers give to their work, being most strongly guided by Husserl and transcendental phenomenology theorizing and methodological considerations, as discussed below. Central to Husserl’s philosophical approach is the notion of intentionality. However, here “intentional” does not mean purposeful decision making or planning; rather, it describes an assumption that human action and communication is always about or intended toward something. Thus, studying intentionality in phenomenology isn’t necessarily about studying careful conscious decision-making (e.g., did she mean to do that?) or when a person purposefully decides what something means, but it is about how people experience and relate to a phenomenon (Vagle, 2014). It is a human science focused on how knowledge comes to be among humans. In sum, those engaging in transcendental phenomenology seek to set aside preconceived notions, biases, and assumptions about the world in order to identify the pure human experience or essence as described by one’s participants. Thus, the approach could be called transcendental, precisely “because the observer could transcend the phenomena and meanings being investigated to take a global view of the essences discovered” (Sloan & Bowe, 2014, p. 6). Though Husserl

also wrote about the importance of subjectivity as intersubjectivity, the apparent conflict between the objectivist notion of transcending one’s own positionality and the social constructionist intersubjective assumptions of most qualitative research help explain the limited use of this methodology in organi­ zational communication scholarship. In considering the implications of these stances for a practical methodology, Husserl (1927/1981) emphasized phenomenology as a “descriptive method” and an “a priori science” (p. 23). He believed that a first-order experiential account of lived phenomena was necessary before one could perceive objective conscious experience, scientific knowledge, or a “more authentic science” (Smith et  al., 2009, p. 15). To apply Husserl’s philosophies of transcendental phenomenology in empirical qualitative research, scholars such as Moustakas (1994), Giorgi (2009), Sanders (2003), and Creswell (2014) have developed systematic data analysis methods. The first step researchers typically engage in when using transcendental phenomenology is bracketing or epoché. One must put aside preconceptions, everyday experiences, and taken-for-granted ways of thinking— their pre-considered “natural attitude”—in order to achieve the “phenomenological attitude.” Thus, transcendental philosophy is sometimes described as holding an objectivist onto-epistemological assumption. However, Husserl also argued for subjectivity as intersubjectivity. Regardless of this assumptive blurriness, bracketing is used in his phenomenology to fully surface and set aside the researchers’ own preconceived notions of the experience under study. Doing so is seen as necessary to identify the essence of the phenomenon studied via the participants’ descriptions, rather than the researchers’. In this way, the researcher transcends their own perspective to identify core essences of an experience. Beyond this initial bracketing, transcendental phenomenological scholars engage

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in a process of reduction. If one considers epoché a mindset that is adopted before starting the research process, reductions help to uphold epoché throughout the research process. Reduction encourages researchers to look at the phenomenon “in a field of its own as a means of ‘seeing it again for the first time’” (Conklin, 2007, p. 278). Specifically, an eidetic reduction is the attempt to get at “the content of conscious experience” (Smith et al., 2009, p. 14) through a process of free imaginative variation that sets aside previous knowledge and assumptions about a phenomenon and instead considers all possibilities of the studied phenomenon from all lenses or perspectives. In sum, to get past one’s own everyday experiences and preconceptions or “natural attitude,” one should engage in bracketing and reduction to achieve the state of epoché and identify essential features of a phenomenon. After careful consideration of one’s natural attitude and the attempt to put it aside, the researcher collects data from those who have experienced the phenomenon under study (Creswell, 2014). Scholars like Creswell (2014) and Giorgi (2009) have highlighted the importance of using interviews as a method to truly get at the essence of the experience in mind. In the next section, we confirm the prominence of this method type across all qualitative phenomenological realms, in addition to other methods such as participant observation, focus groups, and other documents. Once their data is collected, researchers commence analyzing these descriptions (Conklin, 2007; Creswell, 2014; Vagle, 2014). Moustakas (1994) called this process horizonalization, which consists of highlighting all significant statements from one’s data that “provide an understanding of how the participants experienced the phenomenon” (Creswell, 2014, p. 61). The researcher seeks to describe all the data’s experiential “horizons,” while resisting interpreting ambiguities in the data (see Giorgi, 2009). This process of horizonalization helps

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the researcher identify significant statements that represent clusters of meaning in the data. After highlighting significant statements throughout the data, the researcher begins to write summary descriptions. With themes in mind, transcendental phenomenologists write up individual textural and structural descriptions of each interview. Textural descriptions draw attention to the commonalities of what the participants experienced. Structural descriptions allow the researchers to detail the context or setting that influenced how the participant experienced the phenomenon (Creswell, 2014; Moustakas, 1994). Conklin (2007) emphasized that this part of the writing process illuminates the unchanging or essential features of the experience—those that, if they were not there, would change the experience entirely. Once all the individual descriptions are generated, the researcher creates a composite textural description and a composite structural description of the phenomenon. These composite descriptions should identify the essential qualities of what and how the phenomenon in question is experienced by participants, and they are then combined into a description that is the basis of the results (Conklin, 2007; Creswell, 2014).

Interpretive Phenomenology We group these next versions of phenomenology together, as their philosophical roots have more similarities with each other and with qualitative organizational communication research, than if compared to transcendental phenomenology. Transcendental phenomenology focuses much more on getting at the root of experience through description while interpretive phenomenology (Sloan & Bowe, 2014), as encompassed by hermeneutic, semiotic, and embodied phenomenology discussed below, analyzes how persons make sense of their experience of a phenomenon.

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Hermeneutics Martin Heidegger, a student of Husserl, combined hermeneutics with phenomenology, generating an approach known as hermeneutic phenomenology (hereafter, HP). Heidegger turned attention from the epistemological focus of Husserl’s approach to how humans come to know things to instead view phenomenology as the science of being (Dasein) in the world. That is, he argued that humans experience the self and world together, and that attempts to split mind and body, or bracket out presuppositions, cannot account for how we are always-already situated in an environment, and that our descriptions are interpretations. Heidegger urged investigating phenomena through a contextualized perspective, understanding that the essential qualities of an experience were not the same for everyone; Thus, one could not get at a pure description of a conscious experience as hoped by Husserl. This conclusion also draws attention to Heidegger’s assumptions about (inter)subjectivity as key to phenomenology. Like Husserl, Heidegger believed that scholars’ subjectivity is important. However, they differed in how to handle subjectivity. Phenomenologists frequently quote Heidegger’s argument that using phenomenology means “to let that which shows itself be seen from itself in the very way in which it shows itself from itself” (1962, p. 58). That is, phenomenology should focus on how things come to be through conscious experience in a lived world. Subsequently, most HP research assumes one cannot separate the researcher from the participants or from interpretation of the participants’ phenomenological experience. This multi-layered interpretation is known as the “double hermeneutic” (e.g., Smith & Osborn, 2003). That is, HP offers researchers’ interpretations of participants’ interpretations of a phenomenon, “because the researcher is trying to make sense of the participant trying to make sense of what is happening to them” (Smith et al., 2009, p. 3).

The double hermeneutic thus represents the multiple levels of interpretation involved in phenomenological study. It also connects to the idea of intersubjectivity, as it emphasizes how researchers and participants are engaged in interactive sensemaking. HP assumes that researchers cannot be separated from who or what they research, nor the research process, such that iterative back and forth of interpretation will occur. As a result, HP focuses on an interpretation of the phenomenon being studied, rather than seeking a pure conscious experience of all in relation to the phenomenon at hand. As we mentioned above, hermeneutic, semiotic, and embodied phenomenology share similar onto-epistemological assumptions about reality and intersubjectivity, but they also have methodological distinctions that we discuss below.

Hermeneutic phenomenological methods When thinking about hermeneutic methods, scholars highlight interpretation in contrast to a greater focus on description in a transcendental approach. This approach to phenomenology is envisioned as a “meaning-giving method of inquiry” (Van Manen, 2016, p. 28) that asks, “What is this human experience like?” (p. 350). Through such inquiry, Heidegger argued scholars could seek “the universal structures of Being” (Heidegger, 1962, p. 277). Van Manen’s approach aligns well with the interpretive turn in organizational communication and thus, is more commonly seen in our field (e.g., Dougherty, 2001). For example, Dougherty and Drumheller (2006) used HP to investigate how employees experienced and made sense of emotions and emotionality in a workplace that privileged traditional rationality. Findings from their interview-based study showed how employees accepted and perpetuated rationality in the workplace by selecting rational extracted cues and deselecting emotional extracted cues. Similar to Deetz’s (1994)

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work, Dougherty and Drumheller drew attention to how organizations perpetuate control by privileging and expecting rational workers, while limiting emotions in organizational workplaces. Meisenbach (2010) conducted phenomenological research on the experiences of female breadwinners (FBWs) in the United States. HP was ideal for her study, since existing research on the phenomenon of female breadwinning privileged the male’s experience in a heterosexual relationship, while she wanted to analyze the lived experiences of FBWs themselves. Her study generated six essential qualities of the experiences of 15 U.S. FBWs, which indicated how these women constructed their gendered paid-work identities within their oppositesex marriages: 1) having (but not necessarily wanting) control, 2) valuing independence, 3) feeling pressure, stress, and worry, 4) valuing partners’ contributions, 5) feeling guilt and resentment, and 6) valuing career progress. Exploring the experiences of FBWs drew particular attention to issues of control, a common thread among organizational communication scholars using phenomenology, showcasing its critical potential. Though closely aligned with interpretive and critical organizational communication research goals, Van Manen’s practical methodological guidance is not as explicit as that offered by many of the transcendental versions of phenomenology. That is, some might say he does not offer much guidance on how to actually do phenomenological research. Indeed, he said, “in a serious sense there is not really a ‘method’ understood as a set of investigative procedures that one can master relatively quickly” (1990, p. 29). However, he offered six research activities that constitute such research along with detailed guidance on the thematic analysis that is central to one of those six activities: 1 Turning attention to a phenomenon as lived experience; 2 Investigating experience as we live it, vs as we conceptualize it [data collection];

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3 Reflecting on essential themes that characterize the phenomenon; 4 Writing and rewriting to describe the phenomenon; 5 Maintaining a strong pedagogical relation to the phenomenon; and finally, 6 Balancing the research context by considering parts and whole.

Van Manen’s (1990) book spends a chapter on each of these six research activities, and it is a valuable resource for those interested in conducting HP. In addition, Jonathan Smith (e.g., Smith et  al., 2009) has incorporated a Heideggerian approach into his Interpretative Phenomenological Approach, which has become very popular among psychologists.

Semiotic phenomenology Richard Lanigan (e.g., 1982) articulated a distinctly semiotic phenomenology within the communication field. Semiotics is the study of signs and their functions. Van Manen (1990) highlighted that, from a semiotic point of view, any social behavior or speech act may operate as a sign. When humans encounter signs, they analyze and evaluate what they mean or represent as a path to understanding the world. Lanigan (1982) and scholars such as Martinez (2006) have suggested that all communication is semiotic in nature, as it is entirely constituted via the expression and interpretation of signs. Lanigan (1982) also stressed that “all communication is phenomenology by force of being constituted and regulated by consciousness of experience (the signifier) and its entailment as the experience of consciousness (the signified)” (p. 63). In this way, semiotic phenomenology within the communication discipline interprets how phenomena are consciously experienced as they are constituted and regulated via signs. Smith and Martinez (1995) articulated this connection best, suggesting that semiotic phenomenology “enhances the ability to imaginatively and critically configure the felt reality of lived experience based upon signs perceived and expressed in conjunction with operative

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personal, interpersonal, social and cultural code” (p. 69). Semiotic phenomenology also considers time, place, and context in ways that can meaningfully address differences. For example, Martinez (2006) suggested that intentionality, as focus on one’s conscious experience of something, forces researchers to look at contextualizing features such as racial, ethnic, and cultural elements. Earlier work by Martinez (2003) also highlighted these notions, suggesting that semiotic phenomenology’s focus on interconnected signs and systems provides a space to “engage the immediacy and concreteness of persons’ lived experience without essentializing it” (p. 120). In the context of experiences of queer scholars of color and their work, Martinez demonstrated that through a semiotic phenomenological lens, the essentialization and subsequent exclusion of work from scholars such as Juanita Ramos, Gloria Anzaldua, and Carla Trujillo in academic spaces is visible and challenged. Thus, semiotic, and interpretive phenomenology more generally, can take on the challenge of addressing and contextualizing differences in the manner of critical, poststructuralist, and postmodern theory.

Semiotic phenomenological methods Despite Lanigan’s (1982) argument that semiotic phenomenology provides both “a theory and a method for the valid, scientific study of human communication” (p. 70), it is relatively underused in empirical communication research. Most pieces implementing this variation of phenomenology are philosophical and theoretical in nature. In their review of semiotics in the Communication discipline within U.S. journals, Catt and Eicher-Catt (2012) found only 28 published communication articles focusing on semiotics and/or semiotic phenomenology. Empirical articles often focused on intercultural communication, but we argue this approach is also relevant for organizational research (e.g., Razzante, 2018).

Lanigan (1982) offered a three-step methodological process based on Merleau-Ponty’s writing. The approach also involves a “prereflective process of identifying preconceived ideas, assumptions, and beliefs (bracketing)” stemming from transcendental phenomenology (Orbe, 2009, p. 750). The first official step involves collecting a set of lived experiences. Methods for collecting participants’ lived experiences of the phenomenon being investigated most commonly include qualitative interviews, but might also involve focus groups, participant observation, and critical incidents. The second step of this process is reduction. Lanigan described the reduction process as the paring down of all themes collected to only those found to be essential to the experience. Orbe (2009) suggested that Lanigan’s reduction step involves condensing the collection of lived experiences into essential themes, thus aligning closely with Husserl’s concepts of reduction, eidetic reduction, and free imagination within transcendental phenomenology. The third and final step of Lanigan’s analysis is interpretation, which involves additional interrogation and understanding of discovered themes. This step moves back and forth between data and themes “to generate meanings and significance that may not have been apparent in earlier stages” (Orbe, 2009, p. 751). This iterative element references the hermeneutic circle, which involves the researcher looking recursively at both the whole and the parts of a studied phenomenon. As well, hermeneutic phenomenology focuses much more on interpretation of lived experiences in contrast to transcendental phenomenology’s focus on description. Thus, Lanigan’s semiotic phenomenology incorporates elements of both its transcendental and hermeneutic predecessors. To summarize, Lanigan’s (1982) interpretation of Merleau-Ponty’s three steps of description, reduction, and interpretation for semiotic phenomenology aligns with much contemporary qualitative communication research, even though that research may

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not explicitly claim a connection to semiotic phenomenology. As an exception, Orbe often explicitly incorporates this three-step process in his research (e.g., Bauer & Orbe, 2001; Camara & Orbe, 2011; Orbe, 1994; Zirulnik & Orbe, 2019; see also examples by Montague, 2012; Pompper, 2014). In addition, as noted above, Martinez’s work (2003, 2006) has highlighted the perspective’s capacity to critically engage ethnic, sexual, and cultural contexts that create different experiences of phenomena. For example, Smith and Martinez (1995) employed semiotic phenomenology in their study of harassment experiences, directly discussing the stages of description, reduction, and interpretation. More broadly, Martinez (2006) has also combined existential/semiotic phenomenology with Chicana feminism to address intersections among race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, and power in identity.

Embodied phenomenology Work such as Martinez’ also connects to embodied phenomenological work, which is often associated with Merleau-Ponty. He, like Heidegger, argued for a more contextualized understanding of phenomena and experience. However, instead of centering being in the context of the world, Merleau-Ponty suggested the need for a more embodied contextualization of studied phenomena, as “it is through the body that we engage in the world” (Sturgess, 2018, p. 7). Merleau-Ponty (1962) subsequently highlighted what he called body-subjects, suggesting that “the body is no longer conceived as an object in the world, but as our means of communication with it” (p. 106). Thus, embodied phenomenology highlights the importance of one’s own body in phenomenological research, in addition to participants and the phenomenon and experience at hand. Smith et  al. (2009) emphasized this idea when addressing Merleau-Ponty’s influence on phenomenology, suggesting that “ultimately we can never share entirely the others’ experience, because their experience belongs to

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their own embodied position in the world” (p. 19). Embodied phenomenology embraces the inescapable intersubjectivity of interpretive phenomenology, emphasizing the need to consider the body in order to understand the experiences under study.

Embodied phenomenological methods Embodied phenomenology, as a variation of phenomenology that aligns with hermeneutic phenomenology’s interest in interpretation but suggests a greater emphasis on the role of the body, promotes that emphasis in its methods. As noted above, Merleau-Ponty suggested that embodiment meant studying how bodies, or body-subjects, influence how humans engage in the world, a commitment which prioritizes researchers taking into consideration not just the embodied perspectives of their participants, but of their own embodied perspectives as well. Hall et al. (2007) made this point clear in their empirical work on Yellowstone riverfront property owners, arguing that “phenomenological inquiry is the recognition of the body as the primary source for inquiry” (p. 30). Furthermore, the interaction of that body with the physical world around it is essential to understand “what it means to live with the ‘last best river.’” (p. 2). Yet, embodied phenomenology does not have a distinct data collection and data analysis process separate from techniques used in hermeneutic phenomenology or Lanigan’s three-step process of description, reduction, and interpretation. What we have found is that empirical, embodied phenomenological research examines how research participants engage in embodied ways of knowing and experiencing the phenomenon being investigated. By using data collection methods such as interviewing and participant observation, researchers focus on how participants’ bodies are instrumental in understanding a phenomenon. In their interview-based case study of the Vietnam War-era Australian Army Training Team Vietnam (AATTV) for example, Fisher

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and Robbins (2015) applied an embodied phenomenological perspective that challenged conventional assumptions regarding the mind-body duality—especially as it pertained to leadership-as-practice. Their findings suggested that advisers used their body to lead by example, physically leading soldiers in their commands and being an exemplar for the rest of their team. Embodiment was also essential in relational management—particularly its elements of rapport, mutual trust, “mateship,” and taking care of subordinates— as advisers and their soldiers slept together, ate together, cleaned their units together, and fought together. These findings highlighted the adviser’s body as a main component in leadership, illuminating the importance of embodiment in leadership practices that is often neglected. A common thread we found across the broader body of interpretive phenomenological work, but particularly within embodied phenomenology research, is a focus on stigmatized, minoritized, or intimate-labored work and peoples (e.g., Hancock et al., 2015; Mikkelsen, 2021). For example, in their combination of case studies on male sex shop workers, massage therapists, and Santa Claus performers, Hancock et  al. (2015) focused on the body being the site of knowing itself. The researchers used these case studies to retrospectively assess how minoritized male workers tacitly and corporeally learned the negotiation of (in)appropriate touch. When one’s work is so closely connected to the body, Hancock et  al. (2015) highlighted the need to not just learn through engaging bodies as objects, but to recognize that one’s body is itself instrumental in learning, knowing, and experiencing a particular phenomenon. Alternately, Mikkelsen (2021) used interviews, observational data, and ethnographic shadowing in studying Danish prison officers’ everyday doings, drawing special attention to “patterns of bodily action,” such as voice and facial expression (p. 1779). Mikkelsen explained that ethnographic interviewing allows researchers to

witness the everyday activities her participants may engage in and how these actions impact the officers. She noted that this form of observing the officers allowed her to get as close as possible “to study the physical aspects and embodied nature of their work” (Mikkelsen, 2021, p. 1777). To conclude, the focus of embodied phenomenology is still on interpretation, but places greater emphasis on how interpretation and the nature of being is necessarily discovered by researchers and participants in the body as a knowledge site.

CHALLENGES TO USING PHENOMENOLOGY IN QUALITATIVE ORGANIZATIONAL COMMUNICATION RESEARCH So far in this chapter, we have addressed phenomenology’s philosophical origins and similarities and differences among various qualitative approaches. In this section, we address some of the challenges and controversies surrounding phenomenology that may have discouraged organizational communication scholars from using phenomenology, while also shedding light on opportunities phenomenology has for qualitative communication research. One core concern is potential contradictions between typical qualitative social constructionist assumptions and the Husserlian objectivist assumptions tied to phenomenology. Among the implications of these potential contradictions, two stand out. First, this tension matters in terms of a researcher’s beliefs about the definition and role of truth in methodology. Second, it affects the conceptualization and use of bracketing or epoché in the research process. Some phenomenological research, particularly that stemming from Husserlian stances (e.g., Moustakas, 1994), assumes there are ultimate Truths that can be revealed through description (aligning with postpositivist assumptions). Yet, the majority of

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qualitative communication scholars assume an intersubjective, social constructionist stance on truth. However, supporting those who choose to reconcile phenomenology with an intersubjective notion of truth, even Husserl argued for intersubjectivity in some of his writing. As Williams (2021) noted, “A guilty secret amongst Husserlians is that he was often inconsistent and unclear, and even we do not know what he meant much more often that we like to admit”, and he argued against treating Husserl “as if [he] is some sort of methodological unicorn” (p. 381). Another challenge in using phenomenology without postpositivist commitments (e.g., in hermeneutic and poststructuralist approaches) is the potential paradox between seeking the essence of a phenomenon and holding social constructionist assumptions about knowledge and truth that seem to reject the possibility of a static essence. In other words, if “essence” is taken to describe the material, necessary, and unchanging core of a phenomenon, it contradicts interpretive assumptions about the social nature of truth and knowledge. Some scholars resolve this tension by highlighting how the concern of phenomenology is with essence as it “resides in the experience – inherent to the participants and vicariously experienced by the readers – not in the phenomenon” (Olt & Teman, 2019, p. 150). In this way, to the extent that experience is socially shaped, phenomenal essence is also dependent on participants’ co-construction of experience. Van Manen (1990) addressed the concern directly, saying “by essence we do not mean…some ultimate core or residue of meaning. Rather, the term “essence” may be understood as a linguistic construction, a description of a phenomenon” (p. 39). Similarly, Vagle (2014) has encouraged scholars to distinguish between the fluid and socially constructed notion of a discursive essence(s) and the more static notion of materially-essentializing, with the former concept supporting interpretive, critical, and postmodern uses of phenomenology. Closely related here are concerns about how those assuming social constructionist notions

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of epistemology should resolve potential contradictions inherent in the idea of bracketing out one’s own bias. As noted throughout this chapter, some scholars who use phenomenology say “one must ‘bracket off’ or suspend one’s attitudes, values, biases, etc.” (Priya, 2017, p. 297). Even Van Manen, who might otherwise seem to align with an interpretivist view of phenomenology, has described bracketing as one of the essential elements of phenomenology (see Van Manen, 1990), whereas others (e.g., Orbe, 2009; Vagle, 2014) argue that such bracketing is difficult if not antithetical to the onto-epistemological stances of hermeneutic and other versions of phenomenology. Orbe (2009) incorporated but modified traditional definitions of bracketing when he wrote that the three-step process of description, reduction, and interpretation, made popular in Communication by Lanigan, begins with a “prereflection process of identifying preconceived ideas assumptions, and beliefs (bracketing)” (p. 750). Of particular value to critical and post-organizational scholars, Vagle (2014) helpfully suggested shifting from language of bracketing to that of “bridling” to represent one’s inability to fully “set aside” one’s prior experiences and assumptions. Bridling involves reflexivity, enabling scholars to acknowledge their own and others’ pre-understandings of investigated phenomena. Thus, scholars may avoid said pre-understandings having “an uncontrolled effect on the understanding” (Dahlberg, 2006, p. 128), and bridling helps scholars to “cull our agency so that our agency alone does not determine the phenomenon” (Vagle, 2014, p. 69). Furthermore, rather than bracketing out pre-understandings, bridling involves taking a “reflective, open stance” (p. 67) that allows room for understanding the phenomenon in multiple ways. Another challenge to employing phenomenological methods is that, like many methodologies, phenomenology has its gatekeepers (e.g., Crotty, 1996 in nursing). The most public example of this gatekeeping can be seen in how, beginning in 2017, two

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prominent phenomenological researchers published a series of commentaries debating what constitutes authentic phenomenological research. Zahavi, a philosopher, soon joined the debate, resulting, according to Williams (2021), in at least nine publications over a three-year period addressing one another. Such debates can certainly help clarify methods and their uses, but they may also deter scholars from attempting to use phenomenology as a methodology for fear of being publicly rebuked. One of the above commentaries is even intimidatingly titled “Getting It Quite Wrong: Van Manen and Smith on Phenomenology” (Zahavi, 2019). However, these commentaries do offer guidance on potential methodological challenges of interest to organizational communication scholars. In his 2017 article, Van Manen laid out what he called misconceptions about what counts as phenomenological research. He argued that phenomenology a) is not the same as thematic analysis, b) is not about sensemaking, and c) that the outcome of phenomenological research should not be a list of themes, but rather should be a “fullfledged reflective text” (p. 777). He viewed phenomenology as an almost poetic methodology that “enthralls us with insights into the enigma of life as we experience it” (p. 779). Of particular interest to organizational scholars is his suggestion that phenomenology is not about how participants make sense of their personal and social worlds. He argued that such work is psychological rather than phenomenological. In contrast, Smith (2018) responded that how participants make sense is what IPA is trying to get at and argued that “yes, it is phenomenological” (p. 1955). This exchange also calls to mind an earlier debate between Giorgi (2010) and Smith (2010) in which Giorgi challenged Smith’s IPA for not being psychological or scientific enough. Zahavi then joined this debate, arguing for an even narrower view of phenomenology than that promoted by Van Manen. Though we agree with Van Manen that thematic analysis and

phenomenological research are not synonymous, we side with Smith and others who argue for space for multiple adaptations of phenomenology. For example, Williams’ (2021) essay about the debates concludes: “that qualitative research methods still qualify as phenomenological if they develop their own set of theoretical terms, traditions, and methods instead of importing them from philosophical phenomenology” (p. 366). Furthermore, we appreciate his stance that rather than debating (in)authentic methods, the key is to clearly distinguish, explain, and justify the distinct approaches that have developed (see also, Halling, 2021). Doing so seems to align well with the overall phenomenological project and creates space for communication scholars to continue to adapt and use phenomenological methods.

TRENDS IN QUALITATIVE PHENOMENOLOGICAL COMMUNICATION RESEARCH In this section, we discuss trends in qualitative phenomenological research, with an eye toward how organizational communication scholars have and have not taken up these trends. These trends focus on the type of phenomenology used, data sources, sample size, and connections with sensemaking. First, most of the phenomenological research within organizational communication, and across organization studies and communication studies more broadly, takes an interpretive or critical stance. Therefore, use of transcendental phenomenology (with its postpositivist-leaning assumptions) is used in some qualitative research but is rare in qualitative organizational communication projects. However, some scholars doing organization studies in fields such as management (e.g., Stratton, 2010) and information technology (e.g., Burns & Bossaller, 2012), and interdisciplinary research teams (e.g., Smith et  al., 2021) have employed a

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descriptive approach that attempts to minimize the incongruity of transcendentalism and social constructionist assumptions. Qualitative organizational communication research that has implemented Husserlian concepts and guidance in methodology (see McAllum, 2014), has done so through a hybrid phenomenological perspective. Among these projects, one major theme was the desire to limit researcher bias, getting at Husserl’s (1977) concept of epoché and Moustakas’ (1994) concept of bracketing through techniques described by Conklin (2007) and Creswell (2014). For example, Burns and Bossaller (2012) attempted to lay aside personal preconceptions by asking neutral questions and rephrasing questions. Smith et al. (2021) addressed potential researcher bias by working with a research team and using member checks. Finally, Stratton (2010) focused on self-awareness and consciously separating out personal thoughts before interviews and during data analysis. In sum, research most directly inspired by Husserl’s (1977) transcendental phenomenological approach seeks to separate researcher bias from participants’ experience in order to get at the true essence of the phenomenon being studied. Conversely, many of those adopting a more interpretive phenomenological stance acknowledge and assume an inability to separate the researcher from the researched and the meaning making process. Subsequently, most of the research spanning hermeneutic, IPA, embodied, and semiotic phenomenology acknowledges and even embraces the role of the researcher in their studies (e.g., Arslan et  al., 2022; Gill, 2015; Harrigan et  al., 2015; Long et  al., 2012; Pompper, 2014). This stance aligns clearly with current trends in highlighting and embracing researcher “bias” and positionality in organi­ zational communication research (e.g., Jensen et al., 2020). Methodologically, most qualitative phenomenological research incorporates interviewing as its main data source. Interviewing

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those with direct experience of a phenomenon helps others see it “from the inside” (Miles & Huberman, 1994, p. 5), as the researcher can explore “the meanings or personal perceptions of a participant’s experience” (Smith, 2011, p. 10). Because phenomenology seeks qualities of an experience in a particular context, it makes sense to get descriptions and meanings directly from the source (i.e., the participants experiencing them), via interviews (Gill, 2014). However, phenomenological research has also combined interviewing with additional qualitative data collection methods such as participant observation (Gill, 2015; Hancock et  al., 2015; Mikkelsen, 2021; Zirulnik & Orbe, 2019), focus groups (Bauer & Orbe, 2001; Orbe, 1994), surveys (Camara & Orbe, 2011; Rabelo & Mahalingham, 2019), and the analysis of archival documents (Harrigan et al., 2015; Stratton, 2010; Zirulnik & Orbe, 2019). These data sources are already very common in qualitative organizational communication research. Second, the organizational communication field’s shift away from the former dominance of quantitative, postpositivist research to qualitative and postqualitative approaches, engages questions about trends in sample size. In contrast to methods that seek large samples, phenomenological work uses “homogenous and purposive sampling,” recruiting participants “who can offer a meaningful perspective of the phenomena of interest and who share a certain lived experience” (Gill, 2014, p. 128). Aligning with the goal of analyzing a phenomenon’s meaning among those who share a particular experience, qualitative phenomenological research assumes that rich in-depth data is more valuable than large, broad quantities of data. Thus, qualitative phenomenological research tends to analyze data from relatively few individuals. As an example, management scholar Michael Zirulnik and communication scholar Mark Orbe (2019) focused a co-authored phenomenological study on two Black female pilots’ navigation of

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communication style and racial/gender barriers when working with white male pilots. The authors relied on observations, interviews, and professional documents to investigate the lived experiences of these women as a path of understanding this specific phenomenon. Gill (2014) synthesized typical sampling sizes across qualitative phenomenological methodologies, finding a range from one participant up to one study having over 100 participants (Tanner et  al., 1993), but with most phenomenological projects using data from one to six participants. In particular, we note that the larger sample sizes tend to come from phenomenological research that employs the postpositivist leaning transcendental approach (e.g., Stratton, 2010, conducted 67 interviews). Creswell (2014) suggested that transcendental phenomenologists have argued for a general range between five and 25 participants. In contrast, Starks and Brown Trinidad (2007) in their comparison of Van Manen’s phenomenology to other qualitative methodologies, suggested that phenomenological sampling sizes may range from one to 10. Smith et al.,’s (2009) IPA suggests that scholars could conduct a study with a single participant. Sample sizes of less than 20 interviews are unusual in organizational communication but are becoming increasingly respected as non-positivist, de-colonial assumptions about methodological validity, thoroughness, and care extend throughout the field. The consistent requirement across phenomenological studies published in communication subdisciplines is that whatever sample size the researcher recruits must be shown to generate meaningful understanding of the phenomenon under investigation. A third trend across communicative phenomenological research (despite Van Manen’s 2017 objections) is connections, some explicit and some implicit, with the theory of sensemaking. In its most basic articulation, sensemaking is about how individuals understand and interpret unexpected events (Weick, 1995). Humans engage in

this process to reduce uncertainty, to clarify what is apparently happening and what they are experiencing—areas of focus suggesting obvious connections to phenomenology’s goals of studying lived experience. As Priya (2017) noted, “phenomenology focuses on how individuals recognize and make sense of the experiences that characterize their everyday reality” (p. 295). Here we want to highlight the tendency among organi­ zational phenomenological research to address sensemaking. Often, discussion of sensemaking in phenomenological organizational studies can be identified by the research questions scholars ask. For example, Rabelo and Mahalingham (2019) examined how employees performing ‘dirty’ work “encounter invisibility and make sense of these experiences” (p. 106); Mikkelsen (2021) asked “how is contamination in emotional dirty work experienced and responded to by workers” (p. 1776); Gill (2015) focused on how “management consultants make sense of their own identity as consultants” (p. 310); and finally, Burns and Bossaller (2012) addressed how “librarians experience the varied landscape of communication tools today” (p. 598). These pieces range in their choice of phenomenological perspective: for example, Rabelo and Mahalingham (2019) and Gill (2015) incorporated IPA, while Mikkelsen (2021) used embodied phenomenology, and Burns and Bossaller (2012) used transcendental phenomenology. Crucially, although these studies all highlight participants making sense of experiences (a goal of both sensemaking theorizing and phenomenological research methods), none of these studies cite or build on Weick’s sensemaking concepts directly. As such, we argue that while there is a logical relationship between the study of sensemaking and “making sense” in phenomenological research, that relationship should not be considered as either synonymous or necessary. Instead, researchers should contextualize this relationship according to the premises of the

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particular phenomenological approach they are adopting. For example, Dougherty and Drumheller (2006) explicitly incorporated sensemaking theory into their hermeneutic phenomenological study of how employees “make sense of emotional events” in a rationalized workplace (p. 219).

PHENOMENOLOGY’S FUTURE IN QUALITATIVE ORGANIZATIONAL COMMUNICATION RESEARCH Overall, we see many benefits to employing a phenomenological approach in qualitative organizational communication research. First, it is well suited to promote learning in previously understudied areas where exploratory research is required. Centering the lived experiences of individuals and groups that have been sidelined and overlooked aligns with current calls to call out the whiteness of our field and decolonize organi­zational communication research (Pal et al., 2022). Semiotic, embodied, and postintentional approaches, with their focus on context and power dynamics, are particularly well suited to addressing issues of representation, minoritization, stigmati­ zation, and difference in organi­ zational experiences. Therefore, we have included Vagle’s (2014) post-intentional phenomeno­ logy in our table (see Table 5.1), even though we have not yet seen published organizational scholarship using his approach. Phenomenological research on marginalized identities has been published outside our field for decades (e.g., Ahmed’s 2007, Fielding’s 2014, and Gardiner’s 2018 work on feminism and phenomenology; see also Ahmed’s 2006 work on queering phenomenology and bodily disorientation) but is only recently gaining widespread attention and acceptance in organizational and, more specifically, in organizational communication research.

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Second, the potential for useful hybrid phenomenological methodologies in organizational communication research is becoming clear. Thus, we encourage exploration of hybrid qualitative methodologies such as phenomenological ethnography (e.g., Katz & Csordas, 2003; vom Lehn, 2019) and phenomenological polyethnography (Olt & Teman, 2019). Although phenomenology and ethnography have been considered separate from one another philosophically and methodologically, these authors and others explore the empirical possibilities when combining elements of both perspectives. Vom Lehn (2019), for example, has demonstrated the utility of incorporating phenomenological ethnography in organization and management studies. He argued that phenomenological ethnography “puts particular emphasis on the practical and in-situ experience of the everyday” often missed in traditional ethnographic work in the field that focuses more on how organizations function (p. 189). Discussed in greater detail in an above section, Mikkelsen (2021) incorporated both embodied phenomenology and ethnographic elements in her work on experiences of Danish prison officers. Meanwhile, phenomenological polyethnography is a qualitative methodology—stemming from duo­ ethnography (Norris, 2012)—that still attempts to describe the essence of an investigated phenomenon by those experiencing it, but it embraces when researchers are also insiders to the phenomenon being studied. Rather than bracket out one’s own experiences or bridle researcher pre-understandings, phenomenological polyethnography embraces researcher voice and understanding as contributing data and knowledge about the phenomenon (Olt & Teman, 2019). Third, some of the work that is already popular in organizational theory has phenomenological roots that are often overlooked and might be usefully reconsidered for their potential import for organizational communication research. For example, Bévort and Suddaby (2016)

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have called for renewed attention to the phenomenological roots of institutional theory. Phenomenological research that incorporates critical, embodied, and postinterpretive stances (e.g., Vagle, 2014) also seems well suited to address spatiomaterial and spatiotemporal issues in organizational communication. As phenomenologist Joel Krueger (2021) noted, Critical phenomenologists draw our attention to powerful connections between bodily disorientation and the politics of social space – that is, the profound, and potentially devastating, consequences of ensuring that certain kinds of bodies (e.g., non-white bodies, queer bodies) are not allowed to comfortably find their way (e.g., Fanon, 1986; Ahmed, 2006, 2007; Yancy, 2016). Certain spaces are often configured to deliberately constrain these bodies and disturb them at a prereflective level. (p. 120)

Overall, though we have discussed core phenomenological approaches, concepts, and concerns, many other questions about the advancement of qualitative phenomenology— within organizational communication research and beyond—remain to be asked and answered. For example, how does phenomenology’s focus on homogenous samples relate to and account for calls for meaningful intersectional research? How might phenomenology be both a tool for decolonizing organizational communication research and in need of decolonization itself? How do phenomenological methods intersect with the recent advances in sociomateriality and new materialisms in organi­ zational communication research? Such questions suggest the robust potential for continued qualitative phenomenological research by organizational communication scholars. We particularly encourage organizational communication scholars to consider using and developing queer, feminist, and post-intentional approaches to phenomenology (Ahmed, 2006; Vagle, 2014) for our field. We look forward to seeing how such research will be conducted and its implications for the phenomenological research agenda in organizational communication.

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McAllum, K. (2014). Meanings of organ­izational volunteering: Diverse volunteer pathways. Management Communication Quarterly, 28(1), 84–110. https://doi.org/10.1177/ 0893318913517237 Meisenbach, R. J. (2010). The female breadwinner: Phenomenological experience and gendered identity in work/family spaces. Sex Roles, 62(1/2), 2–19. https://doi.org/10.1007/ s11199-009-9714-5 Merleau-Ponty, M. (1962). Phenomenology of perception. Routledge. Mikkelsen, E. N. (2021). Looking over your shoulder: Embodied responses to contamination in the emotional dirty work of prison officers. Human Relations, 75(9), 1770–1797. https:// doi.org/10.1177/00187267211019378 Miles, M., & Huberman, A. M. (1994). Qualita­ tive data analysis (2nd ed.). Sage. Montague, R. (2012). Genuine dialogue: Relational accounts of moments of meeting. Western Journal of Communication, 76(4), 397–416. https://doi.org/10.1080/1057031 4.2012.656214 Moustakas, C. (1994). Phenomenological research methods. Sage. Norris, J. (2012). Duoethnography. In L. M. Given (Ed.), The Sage encyclopedia of quali­ tative research methods (pp. 234–236). Sage. Olt, P. A., & Teman, E. (2019). Un[bracketed]: Phenomenological polyethnography. Quali­ tative Research Journal, 19(2), 146–155. https://doi.org/10.1108/QRJ-12-2018-0001 Orbe, M. P. (1994). “Remember, it’s always whites’ ball”: Descriptions of African American male communication. Communication Quarterly, 42(3), 287–300. https://doi.org/ 10.1080/01463379409369935 Orbe, M. P. (1998). From the standpoint(s) of traditionally muted groups: Explicating a cocultural communication theoretical model. Communication Theory, 8(1), 1–26. https:// doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2885.1998. tb00209.x Orbe, M. P. (2009). Phenomenology. In S. K. Littlejohn & K. A. Foss (Eds.), Encyclopedia of communication theory (pp. 750–751). Sage. Pal, M., Kim, H., Harris, K. L., Long, Z., Linabary, J., Wilhoit Larson, E., Jensen, P. R., Gist-Mackey, A. N., McDonald, J., Nieto-Fernandez, B., Jiang, J.,

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Misra, S., & Dempsey, S. E. (2022). Decolonizing organizational communication. Management Communication Quarterly, 36(3), 547–577. https://doi.org/10.1177/08933189221090255 Pate, J. (2012). A space for connection: A phenomenological inquiry on music learning as leisure. [Doctoral dissertation, University of Georgia]. UGA Campus Repository. https:// getd.libs.uga.edu/pdfs/pate_joseph_a_ 201205_phd.pdf Pompper, D. (2014). The Sarbanes-Oxley act: Impact, processes, and roles for strategic communication. International Journal of Strategic Communication, 8(3), 130–145. https://doi.org/10.1080/1553118X.2014. 905476 Priya, A. (2017). Phenomenological social research: Some observations from the field. Qualitative Research Journal, 17(4), 294–305. https://doi. org/10.1108/QRJ-08-2016-0047 Rabelo, V. C., & Mahalingam, R. (2019). “They really don’t want to see us”: How cleaners experience invisible “dirty” work. Journal of Vocational Behavior, 113, 103–114. https:// doi.org/10.1016/j.jvb.2018.10.010 Razzante, R. (2018). Identifying dominant group communication strategies: A phenomenological study. Communication Studies, 69(4), 389–403. https://doi.org/10.1080/105 10974.2018.1472116 Sanders, C. (2003). Application of Colaizzi’s method: Interpretation of an auditable decision trail by a novice researcher. Contempo­ rary Nurse, 14(3), 292–302. https://doi.org/ 10.5172/conu.14.3.292. Sloan, A., & Bowe, B. (2014). Phenomenology and hermeneutic phenomenology: The philosophy, the methodologies, and using hermeneutic phenomenology to investigate lecturers’ experiences of curriculum design. Quality & Quantity: International Journal of Methodology, 48(3), 1291–1303. https:// doi.org/10.1007/s11135-013-9835-3 Smith, A. R., & Martinez, J. M. (1995). Signifying harassment: Communication, ambiguity and power. Human Studies, 18(1), 63–87. www.jstor.org/stable/20011072 Smith, J. A. (2010). Interpretative phenomenological analysis: A reply to Amedeo Giorgi. Existential Analysis, 21(2), 186–192. https:// link.gale.com/apps/doc/A288874193/

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6 Approaches to Qualitative Research on the Communicative Constitution of Organizations Theresa Castor*

Over the past two decades, the Communi­ cative Constitution of Organizations (CCO) approach has gained traction as a significant perspective in organizational communication (see Brummans, Cooren, Robichaud, & Taylor, 2014). While CCO has many influences, the first introduction of the perspective can be traced to the publication of McPhee and Zaug’s (2000) article titled, “The Communicative Constitution of Organizations” (Boivin, Brummans, & Barker, 2017; Putnam & Nicotera, 2009). The central CCO question (“what is an organi­zation?”) is ontological and aims to understand how organizations are produced. While simply put, the answer to this question is “in and through communication,” the CCO approach entails several complex issues including, the nature of organization, communication, and agency, as well as the relation of materiality and communication to organizing. The theoretical development of CCO has been robust, and its dominant form

of research consists of qualitative approaches (Boivin et al., 2017). When I initially began my writing of this chapter, I thought that it would have a straightforward, delineated outline: I would identify and describe some key qualitative approaches that have been used for CCO research. These approaches and example studies that I would describe for each would also neatly illustrate how to apply each method for conducting CCO research. I soon realized that my tidy borders between qualitative approaches to CCO were quite porous. I decided to throw out my map altogether as I realized the in­adequacy of my two-dimensional geographical metaphor and soon I was herding cats. Still, I could not abandon my geography metaphor altogether, and I took up the movement metaphor of “journey” to describe my effort to trace the varied connections between CCO and qualitative research. The journey though, is my own, reflecting the words of T. S. Eliot

* Acknowledgments: I would like to thank Steffen Blaschke, Dennis Schoeneborn, Anna Stöber, and other members of the Copenhagen Business School, as well as Bryan Taylor, for their feedback on this chapter.

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in his poem, Little Gidding: “We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.” As context for this point, I offer a brief autobiography. My initial scholarly identity was that of a scholar in language and social interaction, emphasizing the ethnography of communication and discourse analysis. I later entered the field of organizational communication, given that the sites that I studied consisted of decision-making conducted during organizational meetings. My participation in the 2002 National Communication Association (NCA) pre-conference on CCO1 marked the explicit beginning of my CCO journey. What appealed to me about CCO was its attention to the interconnections it developed between communication, process (e.g., “organizing”), and organizational ontology, as well as the methodological emphases I saw on discourse, conversation, and texts. In CCO, I found a scholarly home where my LSI and organizational communication identities were no longer bifurcated. In my subsequent career, I have drawn eclectically from various qualitative (i.e., discourse-oriented) research methodologies and have not always labeled my work as CCO. This personal tendency is also reflected in CCO research wherein researchers draw upon qualitative methods and methodologies broadly, such that a given study may layer and mix various approaches to gathering and analyzing qualitative data. While this mixing has resulted in many interesting studies that have contributed to a vibrant CCO research program, a possible drawback to this heterogeneity is the challenge that this poses for students in making a methodological entry into CCO. However, what is also crucial to note is that the application of various qualitative methods in CCO is not always conducted as a simple and direct importation, but rather, as a translation.2 This latter image emphasizes how, while aspects of those methods are applied in the service of CCO, not all

characteristics (particularly epistemological) are carried over. Rather than call such divergences out to critique CCO research, my purpose is to explicitly reflect on how they establish CCO’s unique contributions to organizational communication research. Overall, there has been an emphasis in CCO research on the use of discourse as data. And, in developing its claims, CCO research has varied on a continuum from using data inductively to develop novel concepts, to using it deductively—that is, for empirical support of developing theoretical claims. The purpose of this chapter is to review how specific qualitative research approaches have been applied in CCO research. The chapter proceeds with an overview of CCO’s theoretical assumptions, followed by an overview of some of its key qualitative approaches, and will conclude with a reflection on future issues and directions. The specific qualitative approaches I focus on are discourse analysis, conversation analysis and ethnomethodology, narrative analysis, ethnography, and the ventriloquial approach.

PREMISES OF CCO SCHOLARSHIP CCO theorizing has been diversely influenced by several pre-existing theoretical perspectives, including Latour’s actor-network theory, Gidden’s structuration approach, Luhmann’s social systems perspective, Weick’s sensemaking perspective, semiotics, ethnomethodology, narrative theory, and more (see Schoeneborn & Blaschke, 2014). In considering this diversity, Cooren, Kuhn, Cornelissen, and Clark (2011) identified six premises of CCO: 1 “CCO scholarship studies communication events” (p. 1151).

The central unit of study for CCO is communication, or people interacting, whether through talk, discourse, artifacts, texts, narratives, or so forth. Communication is central to organizing.

THE COMMUNICATIVE CONSTITUTION OF ORGANIZATIONS

2 “CCO scholarship should be as inclusive as possible about what we mean by organizational communication” (p. 1151).

While CCO research has tended to focus on discourse, talk, and texts, it also considers how non-discursive forms of communication such as clothing, gestures, architecture, etc. function to constitute organizations. 3 “CCO scholarship acknowledges the co-­constructed or co-oriented nature of (organizational) communication” (p. 1152).

Communication and meaning are not the sole products of individual human agents. Rather, communication occurs among a multiplicity of interactants, and therefore, an understanding of communication must consider the “plenum of agencies” (Cooren, 2006) who are participating in a communication event. 4 “CCO scholarship holds that who or what is acting always is an open question” (p. 1152).

While controversial, CCO scholarship has challenged notions of agency by including “nonhuman” forms of agency such as texts, technologies, and architecture. Such a notion opens up the issue of “who” participates to include “what” participates in communicative constitution processes. However, to be more precise, we should consider that “who or what is acting” is not always ongoing in that in (research and organizational) practices, there is always some sort of closure imposed, such that someone or something is eventually identified and acknowledged as an agent, whether it be an organizational leader, strategy, vision, etc. It is more apt, then, to say that the answer to the question of “who or what is acting” is an evolving and everexpanding one in CCO scholarship. 5 “CCO scholarship never leaves the realm of communication events” (p. 1153).

While sounding similar to the first premise, this one implicates an ontological stance in pointing to how various phenomena and concepts such as power and authority are not separate from communication, but rather, constituted in communication (also see Taylor, 2011).

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6 “CCO scholarship favors neither organizing nor organization” (p. 1153).

CCO scholarship examines “how people get organized,” as well as how organizations are produced. In addition, more recent scholarship has examined “organizationality” or what is “organizational” about “social phenomena, such as networks, markets, social movements, communities, and so on” (Schoeneborn, Kuhn, & Kärreman, 2019, p. 487). As such, CCO is about the communicative constitution of organizations, organizing, and organizationality. To unpack this further, focusing on “organizations” (nouns) calls for researchers to interrogate ontological issues (e.g., what is an organization?). In turn, focusing on “organizing” (verb) points to processes (e.g., how are organizations communicatively constituted?). Finally, focusing on “organizationality” (adjective) points to characteristics that broaden CCO scholarship beyond traditional notions of organizations (e.g., what is organizational about a grouping or activity?). While there are common premises in the CCO approach, CCO has been subdivided into several schools of thought, including the “Four-Flows” perspective; the “Montreal School”; and, the “Social Systems” perspective (Schoeneborn & Blaschke, 2014). The Four-Flows perspective was developed by Robert McPhee and Pamela Zaug (2000) of Arizona State University and was influenced by British sociologist Anthony Giddens’ Structuration Theory. The Montreal School tradition is based on the work of James Taylor and François Cooren, of the Université de Montréal, and has been influenced by the work of scholars such as Bruno Latour, Harold Garfinkel, Algirdas Greimas, and others. The Social Systems perspective was influenced by the work of German sociologist Niklas Luhmann and was connected to CCO thinking (and English-speaking organizational communication audiences) through the work of Dennis Schoeneborn and Steffen Blaschke of the Copenhagen Business School. More recently, a fourth school

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has been identified, the “Boulder School,” associated with University of ColoradoBoulder scholars such as Tim Kuhn, Karen Ashcraft, and Matthew Koschmann. While these schools may have certain characteristics such as scholars, research methodologies, and research themes associated with them, in practice there is a great deal of flow and exchange between them that includes co-authored works (see Schoeneborn et  al., 2014).

EPISTEMOLOGY AND CCO RESEARCH Krippendorf (1984) explains that “epistemology is the branch of philosophy that is concerned with knowledge, not with what exists.” As such, epistemology is the “basis for claims regarding a theory’s truth or validity” (Craig, 2013, p. 40). Approaches to epistemology have been grouped as empirical-scientific or critical-interpretive, as well as a Habermasian-influenced emancipatory approach and a practical theory approach (Craig, 2013, 2015). Ontological assumptions and epistemological approaches are related to each other in that empiricalscientific approaches assume an objectively knowable world and tend to use quantitative research methods, whereas critical-interpretive approaches generally assume a subjectively constructed world and tend to use qualitative research methods. While the CCO literature is replete with discussions of ontology, with some discussions of methods and methodologies (e.g., Boivin, Brummans, & Barker, 2017; Jian, Schmisseur, & Fairhurst, 2008), epistemology has not received as much attention. Notwithstanding this observation, the epistemological orientation of CCO has been characterized as generally critical-interpretive and/or pragmatist (see Scherer & Rasche, 2016; Schoeneborn et al., 2014; see also Chapter 4 in this volume). In analyzing a dialogue among leading CCO scholars representing diverse CCO

perspectives (i.e., between Francois Cooren representing the Montreal School approach; David Seidl Luhmann’s Social Systems approach; and Robert McPhee the FourFlows Model), Schoeneborn et  al. (2014) point out how these diverse CCO perspectives vary in their subjectivist orientation, and on “the question of whether the objective material reality is actually observable” (p. 303). On one end of the continuum, Luhmann’s approach aligns with radical constructivism in that “it is the observer who ‘constructs’ his own reality by observing it and thus any statement of the observer about his observation is only his interpretation of the observation itself” (Herting & Stein, 2007, p. 2). Schoeneborn et al. explain that Structuration Theory, and by extension, the Four-Flows Model, “leans rather toward the social constructivism of Luhmann’s social systems theory” (p. 304). Schoeneborn et  al. place the Montreal School at the other end of the continuum, in that its approach “presupposes the existence and observability of an objective material reality, although its perception is always mediated by communication” (p. 303). In recent work, however, Cooren (2018) appears to dispute the aforementioned characterization, as it presumes a material reality that is separate from the social in a “bifurcated world” (p. 278). In advocating for a relational ontology, Cooren views the social and material as properties—“materiality and sociality as essential features of everything that exists …” (p. 279, emphasis added). In alignment with its overall subjectivist orientation and focus on analyzing specific communication events, CCO research has tended to rely on qualitative research (see Boivin, Brummans, & Barker, 2017). There are some exceptions that, notably, utilize network analysis in conjunction with analyzing discourse (e.g., Blaschke, Schoeneborn, & Seidl, 2012; Kwon & Shao, 2020). However, perhaps also consistent with the different subjective orientations within CCO, there are different ways that qualitative research methods have been used for developing claims in

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CCO research that will be discussed in the following section.

KEY QUALITATIVE APPROACHES IN CCO RESEARCH In their analysis of CCO research published between 2000–2015, Boivin, Brummans, and Barker (2017) found that 86.8% of these publications relied on a “naturalistic or (quasi-) ethnographic approach” (p. 340) for data collection, and 54.4% utilized some “combination of conversation, discourse, and/or interaction analysis” (p. 340) for data analysis. Vásquez and Schoeneborn (2018) observed that “this focus can be explained by the natural fit between [qualitative] approaches and the ontological positioning of CCO scholarship, which proposes starting (and staying) at the level of communication events (see premise no. 1 above)” (p. 13). While in some ways, positivist logics research methods (e.g., of empirical observation and quantitative measurement) could also be utilized for studying communication events, CCO scholars emphasize how organizations/organizing/organi­ zationality are constituted in communication in an enterprise that is best served by analyzing actors’ specific uses of language, actions, and/or material configurations. In other words, in line with its derivation from interpretive and discursive approaches, CCO scholarship assumes that communicative constitution is a meaning-focused endeavor. However, Boivin et  al. also noted a “lack of methodological explicitness and clarity” (p. 340) in CCO scholarship. CCO research has tended to be field based in studying in situ interactions whether it is through field observations, public discourse, or a combination of the two. In addition, CCO has relied on the use of textual records and digital recordings (e.g., audio recordings, video recordings, and photos). Public records also have been utilized, particularly those from public meetings and public

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hearings. As well, some CCO researchers have utilized video shadowing, in which they follow a specific organizational member in order to see and experience organizational interactions. Through this data, a researcher is able to drill down to the level of specific communication events, and analyze aspects of interaction such as conversational exchanges, word and language usage, and physical, material, and spatial features of communication events. Boivin et al. (2017) identified that a slight majority of CCO studies used some form or combination of discourse, conversation, and/ or interaction analysis. In the following overview of qualitative data analytic approaches used in CCO research, I focus on discourse analysis, conversation analysis and ethnomethodology, narrative analysis, ethnography, and the ventriloquial approach. For each area, I discuss two exemplary CCO studies to illustrate how each method has been applied. Using two examples allows for comparing and contrasting each example’s relative distinctiveness, and illustrates the variety in how a given approach may be applied. I also outline some challenges and issues regarding the application of a given method in CCO research. My criteria for selecting example studies included that they either explicitly referenced CCO or a specific CCO “school,” or included well-known CCO scholars as authors. While I was familiar with many of these studies prior to the writing of this chapter, I also did a Google Scholar search using the keywords “CCO” or “communicative constitution of organizations” and the given qualitative methodology. The studies selected as examples were highly ranked in those search results, among other discussions that tended to be more theoretical in nature.

Discourse Analysis Given CCO’s development from the linguistic turn, discourse analysis, as the study of language-in-use, has been a prominent aspect

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of CCO’s development and research. For example, Fairhurst and Putnam (2004) explicated organizations as “discursive constructions”; from within the Montreal School tradition, Taylor and Robichaud (2004) argued that language and discourse are key aspects of organizing vis-a-vis conversations and text, as well as through metaconversations (Robichaud, Giroux, & Taylor, 2004). Also, to clarify terminology, Schoeneborn, Kuhn, and Kärreman (2019) make a distinction between Organizational Discourse Analysis (ODA) and CCO in that applying an ODA lens does not automatically comport with being a CCO perspective—ODA does not typically address issues such as context, texts, agency, or materiality to the extent that these have been significant topics in CCO theorizing. While CCO can trace its roots to the linguistic turn, it has also embraced the material and practical turns, and this may account for the broad interests of CCO scholars in diverse forms of communication, of which discourse is one. As a research methodology, discourse analysis is broad and may be considered an “umbrella term” that encompasses a variety of approaches (Antaki, 2008; Castor, 2022). Among practitioners of discourse analysis, there are diverse and nuanced positions regarding what is discourse, ranging from specific uses of language in spoken interactions to more generalized notions that describe recurring uses of language or ways of communicating across specific instances. This range has also been characterized as the difference between “little ‘d’ discourse” and “big ‘D’ Discourse” where the former is aligned with approaches such as conversation analysis and ethnomethodology, and the latter is associated with approaches such as Foucauldian analysis (Alvesson & Kärreman, 2000). While discourse analysis is broadly used in multiple disciplines, within organizational studies, there are distinct areas of study known as organizational discourse analysis (ODA)

and organizational discourse studies (ODS) (Jian, Schmisseur, & Fairhurst, 2008; Phillips & Oswick, 2012). Because discourse analysis is such a broad area, it is also challenging to identify specific CCO DA studies before they default to a more specific area such as narrative analysis, conversation analysis, or a Foucauldian approach. The two studies selected here for further discussion include Cooren, Matte, Taylor, and Vásquez’s (2007) study of the humanitarian organization known as Médecins sans Frontières (MSF, or Doctors without Borders) and Stohl and Stohl’s (2011) study of the communicative constitution of a clandestine organization. These projects were selected because both are explicitly framed as generally examining discourse and CCO. Using Alvesson and Kärreman’s (2000) study as a starting point, Cooren et al. (2007) describe the “discursive mechanisms” through which (big ‘D’) Discourse is maintained in (little ‘d’) discourse. They do so by examining the “mission talk” of members of MSF across multiple meetings that took place around their conduct of an operation in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The researchers utilized ethnographic research with one spending 12 days on-site using a video camera to record organizational members’ interactions using the research method of shadowing to follow “people with a video camera while they were working” (p. 159; see also McDonald, 2005, and Chapter 19 this volume). The recordings were then transcribed using Jefferson’s (1984) system for capturing nonverbal aspects of talk—a notation system that is also frequently used in conversation analysis. The study takes a longitudinal approach not only in how the data is collected (i.e., over a 12-day span, and within the broader context of a three-year project), but also in how the analysis is re-presented to readers through data excerpts from three discrete moments in time (i.e., from a briefing meeting to a meeting with health centers, and concluding with a debriefing meeting).

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The video recordings and their transcripts were analyzed by a research group to “inductively [identify] discursive patterns that emerged from this sequence” (p. 161). Guided by analytic commitments derived from conversation analysis, ethnomethodology, and actor-network theory, the researchers focused on “1) what kind of action the interactants were engaged in throughout this episode, and especially 2) how it was performed” (p. 161). The authors looked for themes and arguments, rather than at or for specific discursive forms (e.g., questions, declarations). In particular, they examined statements that interlocutors made about MSF’s mission, including what it is, how it is or should be applied, and arguments about the “reality” of its application when MSF’s practices were criticized. In showing how the mission was maintained in talk across various settings (i.e., across time and space), the authors showed how a Discourse becomes an “immutable mobile” (see Latour, 1987) through “interactive work” (p. 153). In our second example, Stohl and Stohl’s (2011) project addressed the question of “how does a communication-as-constitutive of organization’s perspective shape understandings of the organization’s embeddedness in social contexts?” (p. 1197). Their purpose was to extend the Montreal School perspective by using the example of clandestine organi­ zations (i.e., the al Qaeda terrorist network) to highlight limitations in extant CCO theorizing and, conversely, to propose constructive extensions. In analyzing communication by and about al Qaeda’s primary organization, the authors brought to light an assumption of organizational “transparency” in CCO theorizing by which “issues of legitimacy and voice are under-theorized” (p. 1207). The discourse that they focused on consisted of metaconversations about videos issued from or claimed to be issued from al Qaeda, as well as reports and analyses published in the popular press. Reflecting back on the Montreal approach, Stohl and Stohl observed a tendency among

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its affiliates to use publicly available data and to study settings with a high degree of public transparency such as governmental groups (e.g., Robichaud, Giroux, & Taylor, 2004) or governance groups (e.g., Castor & Cooren, 2006). Stohl and Stohl’s article was not structured as a ‘traditional’ study wherein the method, data gathering process and analysis, and/or methodology are described. Rather, their work focused on the development of arguments for their theoretical extension. With these examples in mind, I offer some general observations about the use of discourse analysis in CCO research. First, discourse analysis in CCO is broad and may encompass more specific approaches. For instance, Cooren et  al. (2007) utilized ethnography for data gathering and elements of conversation analysis for data analysis. As such, that project could have been placed in the conversation analysis or ethnography sections of this chapter; however, it was placed in this section because of how the authors explicitly framed their project as addressing discourse. Second, discourse analysis uses data that consists of language use in social interactions and, as such, there are a variety of discursive units of analysis that may be used. For example, Stohl and Stohl (2011) focused on metaconversations. Alternately, Cooren et al. (2007) focused on talk related to the organizational mission and from there, worked inductively to describe discursive patterns. As an “umbrella” term, “discourse analysis” has enabled researchers to draw from various discourse analytic research methods in the service of developing CCO theorizing. However, to carry through the idea of “translation” mentioned in the introduction, in translating a given research method into CCO, some features are retained and emphasized whereas other features may not carry over. Some of these features may include variations in data gathering and data analysis, as well as epistemological assumptions. These will be discussed in more detail below.

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Conversation Analysis and Ethnomethodology Given CCO’s commitment to “staying at” the level of communication events, the use of conversation analysis and ethnomethodology (CA/EM) is sensible. Ethnomethodology is based on the work of American sociologist Harold Garfinkel (1967) and has as its primary program the study of the (social) methods through which people (i.e., ethnos) create social order through their interactions. The “method” implied in “ethnomethodology” calls our attention to the interactional work in how people go about in their everyday lives in ways that are sensible and accountable. Conversation analysis was developed by Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson (1974) and attends to the description and analysis of talk-in-interaction (see Chapter 23 in this volume). CA involves the recording of naturally occurring conversations that are transcribed using notations that capture not only what was said (i.e., words), but how it was said (i.e., nonverbal vocal features such as rate, volume, pitch, overlapping speech, interruptions, etc.). Conversation analysts have examined features of interaction such as turn-taking, turn sequences (e.g., questionresponse pairings), response preferences (e.g., typically, agreement is preferred), and more (see Mazeland, 2006, and Chapter 23 in this volume). Antaki (2008) distinguishes DA from CA by noting that CA [insists] on seeing social actions performed through the very close organisation, as well as the content, of talk.… [CA] wants to stay as close as possible to the speakers’ own understandings of the actions without imposing interpretation from above or speculation about motives from below. (p. 438)

In other words, CA has a close commitment to not only what was said and how it was said, but also to base interpretations very closely on what is made visible or “live” (p. 438) in the talk of participants. Conversation analysis and ethnomethodology have been used as a key basis for the development of the Montreal School approach

to CCO in that CA/EM provide excellent tools and insights into how to analyze the details of specific communication events and how those communication activities contribute to the communicative constitution of organizations/organizing/organizationality (also see Boden, 1994). One way that CCO usage has diverged from CA/EM, however, is that in CCO research, CA has been used as a methodological tool to contribute to knowledge regarding organizing, in contrast to the original CA methodological framework of understanding the mechanism and structure of conversation (e.g., how conversational turn-taking or repairs take place; see Stivers & Sidnell, 2013). CA has a specific epistemological commitment to “begin with what the participants in the scene make visible to each other” (Antaki, 2008, p. 440). In this respect, CCO’s epistemological analysis of talk has emphasized the ethnomethodological endeavor of studying “the methods (methodo-) people (ethno-) mobilize in their daily life to generate social order” (Cooren, 2015b, p. 31) over the specific conversation analytic epistemology. The two example studies I highlight below include Cooren’s (2004) analysis of “collective minding” during a board meeting, and Vásquez and Cooren’s (2013) study of “spacing practices.” In his study, Cooren’s (2004) primary research purpose was to analyze how “collective minding” among managers is achieved in the “terra firma” of interactions. Cooren addressed Weick and Roberts’ (1993) concept of collective mind, and Hutchins’ (1995) related concept of distributed cognition to argue for and illustrate how these are achieved through talk-in-interactions by studying a meeting of managers of a drug rehabilitation center. For his research method, Cooren attended six meetings of this group and was allowed to record the sixth meeting which he then had transcribed using the Jeffersonian method commonly used in CA work (Jefferson, 1984). He identified key excerpts that were relevant to his project for studying collective minding and engaged

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in the additional, in-depth analysis of these through discussions in research team meetings. The data display and analysis in Cooren (2004) includes transcript excerpts to discuss and highlight conversational features such as sequence-initiating actions, co-orientation, and repair sequences to relate conversational sequences to collective minding. This project diverged from a traditional conversation analysis project by making claims regarding an organizational communication concept (collective mind) rather than stopping at the level of conversational structures. Vásquez and Cooren (2013) also utilize conversation analysis in their project which relates CCO to postmodern geography theories to examine sociomateriality. For their project, they examined a Chilean space and technology diffusion program, with the first author utilizing ethnographic “shadowing” of key group planning activities, resulting in 172 hours of audiovisual recordings. Additional data included individual and focus group interviews, and organizational texts or documents. Similar to Cooren’s study (2004), from the great quantity of data, a smaller number (i.e., 15 “communicational events”) were selected for Jeffersonian transcription and indepth analysis. The analysis was influenced by conversation analysis, ethnomethodology, and actor-network theory (e.g., Latour, 2005). As with the preceding study, there are a number of ways in which this project’s application of ethnography and conversation analysis diverges from traditional applications. For example, whereas Cooren (2004) focused on conversational features to build up his analysis, Vásquez and Cooren’s analytic process focused on a different type and level of conversation: presentifying practices, ordering practices, and accounting practices. The difference between these two applications of CA is that the former (Cooren, 2004) highlights talk structures (e.g., repairs, sequences, etc.), and the latter highlights functions which can be achieved through a variety of structures (e.g., presentifying through use of different pronouns). Also, in applying ethnography,

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the focus was on being present in “the field” to gather data consisting of naturally occurring interactions to identify patterns related to understanding CCO processes. Conversation analysis has typically been utilized in CCO research to analyze the details of talk to understand communication events. However, in this process, CA is used more as a method to guide data collection while employing some of the steps for conversation analysis. However, CCO applications of CA generally do not employ all of the assumptions of CA, in that at some point or level in the conduct of data analysis, CA-based CCO studies diverge from claims about the mechanisms of conversation to developing claims more relevant to understanding how organizations are communicatively constituted. In addition, one commitment of CA research is to stay at the level of conversation—what is considered to exist exclusively in the “hereand-now”—and to bring in other matters such as context or power when conversational partners explicitly make those matters present in their conversation. Alternatively, CCO scholars will bring in additional data such as organizational documents, interviews, and prior observations, as part of understanding and developing their claims.

Narrative Analysis Narrative analysis is utilized in many disciplines, including organizational communication, without necessarily being aligned to a CCO approach (e.g., Boje, 2011; Czarniawska, 1997; Rhodes & Brown, 2005; Vaara, Sonenshein, & Boje, 2016; see also Chapter 21 in this volume). Simply put, narratives consist of stories that embody actions, agency, and paths where goals are accomplished by actors or actants in interesting circumstances by overcoming challenges and/or defying expectations. Narratives function to construct reality (Bruner, 1991). As a methodological approach in organizational studies, narrative analysis provides insight

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into issues such as identity, agency, accountability, and sensemaking. With respect to CCO concerns, narratives function to “constitute what defines an organization (i.e., rules, canons and norms)” (Cooren, 2015b, p. 59). When narratives are identified and analyzed, this is in part with an eye toward narrative sequencing and structure and in part, with an eye toward what is being done or accomplished through narratives. However, Schoeneborn, Kuhn, and Kärreman (2019) note an ambivalence in how CCO scholars relate to narrative: “Many CCO scholars do not see why stories and narratives should be special and accord a similar status to a broader spectrum of communicative devices” (p. 479). In CCO analyses that utilize narrative ana­ lysis, these are sometimes self-described as employing a “narrative-semiotic” approach and have drawn from the work of French scholar Algirdas Greimas (e.g., Cooren, 1999; Marsen, 2014; Robichaud, 1999). In narrative analysis, data gathering has consisted of collecting discursive data such as talk at meetings, meeting transcripts, or interviews. This data is then analyzed with an eye toward the semantic content of what speakers say; in other words, researchers pay attention to how speakers construct narratives in their identification of agents, agency, and action, or, more simply stated, who did what. The “who did what” though is not taken as an objective account of actions; rather, what is significant for narrative analysis is the framing of who did what in characterizing actors/actants, actions, agency, relationships, and accountability. The two example projects that will be described are Cooren’s (2001) study of an environmental controversy, and Dobusch and Schoeneborn’s (2015) study of organizationally and the hacker-activist group, Anonymous. Cooren (2001) examined public discourses associated with the Great Whale River project, an environmental controversy involving a dam project in the Canadian province of Quebec. that would impact an area that was

a traditional part of Cree hunting and fishing territory. Several parties had a stake and concern (for or against) the project. There were several research purposes of this study with the main purpose being to [present] a new method of analysis by showing how Greimas’ semio-narrative model can be translated into the field of organizational communication to analyze the organizing or structuring properties mobilized in the formation of coalitions. (p. 179)

Central to the theoretical and methodological purpose of Cooren’s study is to present a way “to operationalize the link between sensemaking, organizing, and narrating” (p. 181). Cooren draws two key ideas from Greimas’ narrative approach: embeddedness (episodes are embedded within each other as part of a story), and hierarchy (which results from embedding). Greimas also proposed a narrative scheme that consists of a manipulation phase (i.e., a breach), a mission (i.e., goal to be achieved with the assistance of helpers) executed with competence (i.e., the overcoming of obstacles and opponents), performance (i.e., fulfillment of the goal), and sanction (i.e., rewards or blame of the protagonist). In applying Greimas’s scheme to the Whale River controversy, Cooren does not explicitly state or describe his data, but it is likely from historical texts, media accounts, governmental or other official documents, and interviews. For this latter data, Cooren acknowledged the Cree community of Whapmagoostui and specific individuals in that community. Cooren’s work described a research methodology or analytic procedure to conduct a narrative analysis (i.e., moving from insights from the data to supporting theoretical claims), focusing on the method of data analysis. The main purpose of Dobusch and Schoeneborn’s study (2015) was to examine how collectives “achieve organi­zational identity and actorhood” (p. 1005)—or

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“organizationality”—and the communicative actions that support defining organizational membership and organizational identity. The hacker-activist group, Anonymous, provided an ideal case for examining such processes given the fluid nature of its membership. Dobusch and Schoeneborn position their study as guided by a “‘communicational ontology’ of organization” (p. 1016). Epistemologically speaking, the authors focus on communication interactions. Aligned with those positions, the authors utilized a specific type of speech-act analysis known as identity-claim analysis. Here, I wish to highlight two items related to their study. First, the authors are meticulous and explicit in positioning their project epistemologically and methodologically, as well as in describing their data collection and data analysis processes. Second, narratives are peripherally involved with their project. Narrative interviews were conducted with Anonymous members for the background but were not the main data being analyzed, and narrative analysis was not a guiding analytic framework. I utilize this study’s secondary connection to narratives as well as Cooren’s (2001) central connection to narratives to put forward some observations and claims regarding the role and usage of narrative in CCO work. The two studies described in this section illustrate diverse ways of relating narrative to CCO. Cooren’s study (2001) is explicitly a narrative analysis, where the project was intended to advance a narrative methodological approach. Alternately, Dobusch and Schoeneborn (2015) utilized narrative in a secondary manner, with narrative interviews being one of the many forms of data that they collected. These two projects illustrate a contrast between methodological approaches to collecting and analyzing narrative data to advance the CCO project with, on the one hand, narrative being a dominant guiding framework for data gathering and analysis, and, on the other hand, narrative being a secondary focus that can guide data gathering but not necessarily data analysis.

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Ethnography In conducting ethnography, researchers enter “the field” by engaging in research in which they are physically present, to varying degrees, in the scene of interaction. This research method has been described with additional labels such as field research, field observations, and participant observation. The term ethnography derives from anthropology and is based on combining the Greek words ethnos (people) and graphos (writing), or a written work about a group of people. Organizational ethnography has a rich history across various disciplines, including organizational communication (see Taylor, 2017; Taylor et  al., 2021, as well as Chapters 2 and 11 in this volume). Within this latter area, ethnography has helped to shed light on organizational practices and sensemaking (see Weick, 1995) by enabling researchers to observe and describe what communication and actions are taking place as well as to get at “back-stage” information regarding the meanings of practices and participant motivations (see, for example, Will Barley’s narrative in Taylor et al., 2021). The relationship between ethnography and CCO work has been described as “complex— and potentially awkward” (Taylor et al., 2021, p. 626). As Taylor et al. explain, there are few purely ethnographic CCO studies, and the emphasis of CCO on the study of transcripts and recordings (specifically, from within the prolific Montreal School approach) can be at odds with ethnography’s emphasis on subjectivity and reflexivity. However, CCO and ethnography are broad and diverse enough traditions such that these tensions are not necessarily insurmountable, but rather, useful provocations for shaping future discussion and refinement of CCO theory and practice (see Brummans & Vézy, 2022). Indeed, the traditions of CCO and ethnography display several synergies. First, the emphasis placed by ethnography on the researcher’s presence and immersion in a setting supports recent CCO trends in the study of objects, places

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and spaces, materiality, and nonhuman agents and agency. Second, the attention to rich descriptions and context from ethnographic research lends itself well to addressing the central CCO issue of how organizations are communicatively constituted. As well, the ethnographic tradition is itself diverse and guided by different epistemological assumptions. Generally, some of the requirements for “doing” ethnography include access to a site and participants at the site; long-term immersion sufficient to develop an understanding of a site’s meanings for its participants; and technical means for recording one’s observations and impressions (e.g., a notebook and writing implement, digital audio-recorder, video camera, etc.). Ethnographers also may collect additional data such as interviews and organizational documents. There are, of course, additional techniques for using each of these methods (see Lindlof & Taylor, 2017). Data analysis, and by extension, writing practices, in ethnography are another matter that reflects varying epistemological assumptions associated with traditions such as postpositivism, autoethnography, and feminist ethnography. Our two examples illustrating ethnographic applications in CCO are Cooren, Brummans, and Charrieras’ (2008) study of Médecins Sans Frontières, and Wilhoit’s (2018) study of a food bank. Cooren, Brummans, and Charrieras (2008) addressed the fundamental question of how organizations are communicatively constituted, explicitly framing their project in a discursive perspective of organizations (see Fairhurst & Putnam, 2004). They explicate the concept of the coproduction of “‘organizational presentification’, a term that refers to the ways in which an organization is made present through contributions of human and nonhuman agents engaged in ongoing processes of interaction” (p. 1343). They described their research method as “passing organizational ethnography” (p. 1347, see Couldry, 2003) in that their field research was conducted over a relatively limited amount of

time compared to a traditional ethnographic study. The first author used the research technique of “shadowing” by following an organizational site leader around utilizing a video camera, resulting in 42 hours of recorded video. The use of video recording assisted the researchers in making note of and observing “various human and nonhuman agents (offices, cars, patients, medical equipment …)” (p. 1348). Their data analysis involved noting examples that helped to address their research questions concerning how human and nonhuman agents coproduced organizational presence. The data represented in this article consisted of detailed descriptions of scenes and interactions, as well as excerpts from the researchers’ transcriptions of spoken meeting interactions. Published a decade later than the preceding study, Wilhoit’s (2018) project honed in on the specific topic of space to “propose a constitutive model of organizational space” (p. 331). In doing so, Wilhoit’s project contributed to the strong interest in CCO theorizing to account for the roles of materiality, sociomateriality, space, and place in constituting organizations. Wilhoit’s model was inspired in part based on her ethnographic work at a food bank in the U.S. Midwest in which, over a seven-month period, she conducted approximately 300 hours of field observations, took field notes, volunteered, and conducted interviews. In analyzing her data, she utilized Strauss’ (1987) grounded theory approach to identify three “constitutive processes” that described the relationship between space and place. In comparison to the other example studies described in this chapter, Wilhoit’s project is not discoursecentric in its analysis. Rather, Wilhoit relies on her observations of the spaces and places of the food bank, as well as the organizational practices surrounding their use. Ethnographic research lends itself very well to advancing CCO research. As Taylor et  al. (2021) explain, “CCO ethnographers, for example, are increasingly adopting ‘postqualitative’ (see St. Pierre, 2021) methods

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that enable them to trace both the human/linguistic and non-human/extra-linguistic processes of organizational becoming” (p. 627; see Chapter 33 in this volume). Within this area, “shadowing” has also been gaining increasing traction (see Chapters 17 and 19 in this volume). As Schoeneborn and Vásquez (2017) explain, Primarily driven by the work of the Montreal School, …shadowing, [is] a data collection technique in which a researcher follows a person “like a shadow” for a certain period of time while taking extensive notes, or audio or video recordings. (p. 13)

Nonetheless, ethnography remains a very broad area that is practiced in many ways. For example, Taylor et  al. (2021) highlight how evolving perspectives on technology, globalization, embodiment, and autoethnography have each shaped the conduct of ethnography in organizational communication studies. In some cases, it seems more appropriate to describe CCO studies of interactions as naturalistic rather than as ethnographic in that while the former may analyze in situ interaction, the latter centers the emic perspectives of social actors and the differences that make a difference for their meaningful experience.

Ventriloquism The ventriloquial approach is unique in that it is currently the only research method created alongside CCO theorizing. In other words, it is both a CCO theory and a method. Developed by influential CCO scholar, François Cooren (see 2010, 2012; see also Chapter 24 in this volume), this approach describes how, when people speak, it is often on behalf of others, whether those others are human, textual, or otherwise (i.e., nonhuman). In this ventriloquizing, pre-existing but technically remote phenomena, such as the authority of others, are brought into the “here-and-now” of a given interaction (Cooren, 2010). This effect

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of ventriloquizing has been referred to as presentification (Benoit-Barnat & Cooren, 2009). As a research method, the ventriloquial approach attends to naturally occurring interactions, with a focus on discourse. Because of its flexibility in what it considers an “agent” and of forms of agency, a ventriloquial analysis may also include the analysis of texts (e.g., Cooren, 2004) and objects (e.g., Cooren, 2015). The two studies selected as examples for illustrating the ventriloquial approach as a research method are Vasilyeva, Robles, Saludadez, Schwägerl, and Castor (2020) and Nathues, van Vuuren, and Cooren (2021). These projects each have as an explicit purpose the delineation of the ventriloquial approach as a research method, and because of this, the details of this approach as a research method are described below with each study. Vasilyeva et  al. (2020) analyzed a specific conflict interaction that took place in Kentucky in 2015, when a then county clerk refused to grant a marriage license to two gay men, in violation of their constitutional rights (see Diaz, 2022). This case quickly received nationwide attention, likely due in part to the fact that a filmed interaction between these actors went viral on the Internet. Vasilyeva and her colleagues studied this interaction to describe and explain the interplay of authority and power in interaction (see Bencherki, Matte, & Cooren, 2020). They presented a three-step process for applying a ventriloquial approach, including: 1) record interactions as they happen, or collect recorded interactions; 2) “identify markers through which a variety of figures appear to recurrently and iteratively express themselves in the interactions” (p. 48); and 3) “interpret or make inferences about what the figures are made to say (or do)” (p. 48). Alternately, the focus of Nathues et  al.’s (2021) project was to delineate a methodological framework for conducting a ventriloquial analysis. In addition to their description of analytic steps, they present an illustration

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by analyzing how organizational vision may be “talked into being” (p. 1457). In contrast to the three steps described by Vasilyeva et al., Nathues et  al. present four steps that consist of: 1) “identifying explicit and implicit invocations (figures) and animations (vents)” (p. 1462); 2) grouping and assigning the items from the preceding steps into clusters and collections; 3) relating those clusters to prior “chains of authorship, possibly including a visual model” (p. 1462); and 4) showing or data display through findings and vignettes. While there are variations across the two ventriloquial studies described here, each has a discourse focus and each illustrates how doing a ventriloquial analysis entails applying a specific theoretical focus. Vasilyeva et al. explicitly include data gathering (step 1) and criteria for analysis (step 2). Nathues et  al. provide more specific steps related to analysis (steps 1 through 3) and data display (step 4).

CONCLUSION In this chapter, I have reviewed a variety of qualitative approaches utilized in CCO research, emphasizing those that predominate. These include discourse analysis, conversation analysis, narrative analysis, ethnography, and ventriloquism. Based on this limited, close examination of these methods and their exemplary studies, I conclude by offering several observations. These are not intended as definitive generalizations or rigid prescriptions, but as impressions that may stimulate further reflection and discussion concerning how qualitative research methods have been applied—and may yet be applied—for CCO research. First, the use of qualitative data analysis in CCO is eclectic, in that elements from what otherwise would be considered discrete methods have been combined and blended. For instance, ethnography and shadowing have been used in conjunction with conversation

analysis to study talk in naturally occurring interactions. One advantage of this mixing is that there is a (relative) openness and flexibility in CCO regarding what legitimately counts as data, and how data can be legitimately gathered and analyzed. Clearly, the bulk of CCO studies indicates that the preferred type of data remains qualitative. However, in borrowing from different qualitative approaches to serve CCO interests, CCO researchers may gloss over important epistemological issues. For example, when conversation analysis has been applied, it has been for the purpose of developing claims related to CCO processes and concepts, rather than for developing claims related to conversational structures. One implication of this practice is that CCO scholars generally, and newer CCO scholars specifically, should be aware that how particular qualitative research methods are applied in CCO research may diverge from how they have been developed and practiced in their canonical works. Therefore, it seems important for CCO researchers to reflect on how they negotiate these legacy affordances in adapting qualitative methods. Traditionally, in discussing their methodology, CCO researchers have emphasized congruence between those affordances and their commitments to the study of process, practice, interaction—and to a lesser extent, discourse. Opportunities persist, however, for CCO scholars to explore and resolve potential tensions between their ontological, epistemological, and methodological choices. Second, CCO scholarship displays flexibility in how claims are made in relation to data. For instance, in some cases, data may be used for illustrative purposes to demonstrate a theoretical claim (e.g., Cooren, 2015a). In other instances, claims may be made and developed more inductively being driven by the data (e.g., Castor, 2020). As a result, it is important to note variations in how CCO qualitative researchers foreground details of their data gathering and/or data analysis. Recalling Schoeneborn et al.’s (2014) observation that

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the leading CCO perspectives adopt different stances along a subjectivist/objectivist continuum, I thus pose the following questions and calls. First, there have been robust discussion and dialogue in the CCO literature regarding ontology and methodology, but the bond that connects the two, epistemology, has not received as much reflection and critical examination. Some questions to be explored in CCO epistemology include: is there a CCO epistemology, or multiple CCO epistemologies? And, either way, what are the characteristics and assumptions of CCO epistemology(ies)? Being more transparent on CCO epistemology—specifically, criteria used for including and prioritizing related positions—would be helpful for students of CCO, as well as for advancing CCO research. Second, CCO takes as a starting premise that communication is a constitutive activity. A constitutive perspective, however, can be applied not just to the communication events being analyzed, but to the involvement of researcher(s) to research sites. In other words, to what extent can CCO researchers be more explicitly reflexive regarding their role in the research process—that is, in constituting the phenomena they claim to document and analyze? This process can take a variety of shapes, ranging from reflecting on the various roles and positions available within a research site to being more explicit concerning what is borrowed and what is “left behind” when one draws from other research traditions (i.e., in selectively conceptualizing and engaging potential objects of study). This recommendation harkens back to the translation metaphor that I introduced earlier in the chapter, which brings me to a third and final consideration. In translation, certain meanings and nuances are conveyed. Actor-network theory and the sociology of translation also explain translation as a process in which actants may be mobilized to advance a cause or action (Callon, 1986). In this mobilization, identities are also redefined. In CCO research, we are also seeing

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such mobilization of qualitative research. In this journey, it is important to consider what is being carried forward, what is lost in translation, and how we can be more transparent in mapping our routes to enable continued dialogue on how to research the communicative constitution of organization/organizing/ organizationality.

Notes 1  The pre-conference was sponsored by the Organi­ zational Communication division and called “Communication in Action: The Communicative Constitution of Organizations and Its Implications for Theory, Research, and Practice.” 2  In using the term “translation,” I also wish to note that this is a significant term in ActorNetwork Theory (ANT, see Callon, 1986; Latour, 1987, 2005; Shiga, 2007). I am applying the term “translation” in a looser way than how it has been applied in ANT.

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7 Feminist Approaches to Qualitative Organizational Communication Research Patrice M. Buzzanell, Spencer Margulies, Evgeniya Pyatovskaya, and Patricia K. Abijah

Feminisms are widely regarded as both a key expression of—and influence upon—qualitative methodologies. This is particularly true in the qualitative study of organization(s), and organizational communication. As a distinctive tradition of scholarship, feminisms are situated in sociopolitical, economic, and cultural contexts; they generate localized knowledge that may become transferable when compared and contrasted with other knowledge generated by women and members of vulnerable populations. Our chapter builds systematically from this premise and incorporates our own localized knowledge. As communication scholar-feminist-activists from the United States, Paraguay, Russia, and Ghana, we are interested in the directions that feminism and feminist approaches to scholarship are taking in the discipline of communication, specifically in organizational communication. We also explore what these directions mean for the discipline, and how this research can be advanced to expand our understandings of feminism, organizing, and communication through qualitative inquiry.

To accomplish these goals, we organize our chapter by moving from discussions of: (1) distinctive concepts, claims, and issues in feminist onto-epistemology and theory; to (2) feminist organizational scholarship; (3) feminist organizational communication scholarship; and (4) qualitative feminist organizational communication scholarship.

FEMINIST ONTO-EPISTEMOLOGY AND THEORY Feminist thought, like any specialized thought, reflects the interests and standpoint of its creators. To trace the origin of a specialized body of thought reveals its affinity to the power of the group that created it (Mannheim, 1936). For example, because White men control structures of knowledge validation, their interests pervade traditional scholarship. As a result, the experiences of women are historically excluded from traditional academic discourse.

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Feminist thought as theory, practice, and body of knowledge reflects the thematic content of women’s experiences. Because there is no single definition of a “woman,” it is vital to discuss distinctive concepts, claims, and issues associated with feminist epistemology and theory. To discuss feminist ways of knowing and being, we first go over concepts, claims, and issues associated with feminist epistemology and theory. Second, we provide an overview of feminist commitments. Lastly, we trace the doing of gender justice.

Feminist Epistemology Epistemology is the study of knowledge— what we know, how we know it, and how knowledge is justified and/or validated. Feminist works in epistemology examine the ways gender influences our conceptions of “knowledge, knowers, and practices of inquiry and justification” (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2020, para. 1). Feminist epistemology seeks to identify how historical ways of knowing (i.e., male-centric) can be reformed to serve the interests of women and other gender-identifying groups. To do so, feminist epistemology centers situated (Haraway, 1988) and subjugated knowledge (Hartman, 2000). Situated knowledge looks to privilege ways of knowing from oppressed groups (e.g., Black women, Latinx women, transwomen). In other words, situated knowledge is an epistemological claim that some individuals are better situated than others to produce knowledge. On the other hand, subjugated knowledge seeks to prioritize the standpoint of marginalized individuals. While situated knowledge looks to an oppressed group’s way of knowing, subjugated knowledge argues for starting off from the lives of marginalized individuals to then “generate illuminating critical questions that do not arise in thought that begins from dominant group lives” (Bacchi, 2018, para. 5). Both are interested in prioritizing the gendered body as means of knowing.

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According to Harding (1986) and Haraway (1988), feminist epistemologists have looked at situated knowledge through three traditions: standpoint theory, postmodernism, and empiricism.

Standpoint theory Innately a critical theory, standpoint epistemology claims to “represent the world from an epistemically advantaged situated perspective” (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2020, para. 15). At its core, standpoint theory examines an individual’s social location arguing that subordinated social groups have advantages for understanding politically laden topics relative to dominant groups. Feminist standpoint theory looks to women as an epistemic advantage during gender-related phenomena. For example, if one were to examine the injustices women in Afghanistan are facing, feminist standpoint theory would privilege the knowledge of Afghan women being restricted from classrooms rather than the Taliban enforcing said restriction. However, the challenge of standpoint theory is that it is implausible to center one group as individuals intersect in complex ways (Crenshaw, 2017; Linabary et  al., 2021). In other words, an individual understanding of oppression and subordination happens differently depending on the person’s intersections of their race, sexual orientation, gender, and other identities. This critique has been taken up by feminist postmodernists who question whether a single standpoint of women is possible.

Postmodernism Rather than viewing the situatedness of an individual, postmodernists look to how reality is discursively constructed. To be constructed is seen as an effect of social practices and systems (Butler & Trouble, 1990). The construction of social roles determines how individuals behave and act in different sociocultural environments. Johannessen-Schmidt and Eagly (2002) further stipulate that stereotypes of groups

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originate in inferences made about a group’s qualities based on their behavior in traditional roles. These inferences are then generalized to all members of said social groups. For example, in Latin America when one uses the term ‘marianismo’ one perceives a woman as submissive, weak, and family-oriented rather than a ‘marimacho’ or tomboy. These identifiers stem from cultural and religious ideologies. As such, individuals are seen as a web of multiple identities that are constantly intersecting. Feminists argue that tensions emerge from these identities that in turn open spaces to disrupt and transform the systems constructing individuals (Anzaldúa, 2013). Feminist postmodernists seek to dismantle the gender binary as natural as well as fight the notion that women are inherently subordinate to men. In doing so, they expose the exclusionary tendencies within feminist thought (Collins, 1990). Now, feminist postmodernism ideals are viewed as controversial. Specifically, critics find that postmodernism threatens “the possibility of analytical focus and of political effective coalition building among diverse women” (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2020, para. 38).

seeks to expose sexist and androcentric biases in science stating that there is no room for bias in epistemology. However, advocates of feminist science argue that certain biases, such as social biases, should be adopted. The second paradox is social construction. This paradox emerges due to the impact of socio-political forces on the field of science. For example, the sexist and androcentric biases within science stem from sexist values in Western society. Some feminist scientists might want to adopt “an individual epistemology to eliminate these social biases” but others call for acceptance and reflexivity about systemic influences. Due to these two paradoxes, feminist empiricists attempt to balance social factors and biases with evidence and empirical theories. Like the other two traditions, there are criticisms of feminist empiricism. Feminist empiricists are critiqued for looking solely to science for answers regarding women and gender-related issues rather than looking at systemic change. Furthermore, feminist empiricists seem content with advocating for the elimination of bias without altering traditional scientific techniques such as the scientific method.

Empiricism

Feminist Commitments

The tradition of empiricism views experiences as the sole way of knowing. Experience here entails how an individual engages with their surroundings based on socialization and other factors. In the case of feminist empiricism, scholars focus attention on women’s experiences with knowledge claims “gain[ing] credibility from their grounding in material and empirical resources for understanding” (Hundleby, 2011, p. 30). In other words, feminist empiricists tend to ask how feminist values can inform and improve scientific methods particularly in relation to sex bias (Hutchinson, 2022). However, feminist empiricism is not devoid of paradoxes. According to Borgerson (2020), there are two paradoxes faced by feminist empiricists. First, is the paradox of bias. Feminist science criticism

As there is no singular feminism, theoretical commitments vary. Generally, feminist scholars seek to “describe, explain, and analyze the condition of women’s lives” (Kolmar & Bartkowski, 2010, p. 2). In communication, feminist theorists delineate, analyze, and explain gender, communication, and social change (Rakow & Wackwitz, 2004). Underlying this work are four main commitments: increase gender equality; eliminate gender stratification; end sexual violence; and promote sexual freedom. Feminists embody these commitments by destabilizing and seeking to end interlocking systems of oppression based on different identity categories. Their commitments drive the questions in which they engage.

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Feminisms engage with questions that facilitate “seeing through what is already crazy about the world, notably the cruelty and injustice with which it tends to go about organizing itself” (Rose, 2014, p. x). We concur with Bell et  al. (2019) when they state, “Not to ask feminist questions…is, in our opinion, accepting the gendered inequities, inequalities and violence that affect women in particular, and ultimately all of us” (p. 4). Questioning is at the heart of feminist commitments that stimulate visions of what can be. People develop these visions by being reflexive, vulnerable, empathetic, and aware of and resistant to unjust power structures (Buzzanell, 2011). Feminists articulate and legitimize personal and alternative ways of knowing (i.e., alternative to received expert knowledge) as means of gaining and using voice (Belenky et al., 1986). Feminists’ questioning and utilizing different ways of knowing have coalesced in collective action. For instance, challenging how and why laws and normative practices barred women from participating in governmental and other public forms of deliberation prompted women’s rights movements. Over a century ago, the 19th amendment in the United States gave White women the right to vote but it took until the 1965 Voting Rights Act to make voting a right for Black women. This pattern of legislating rights for privileged women while ignoring or institutionalizing roadblocks to the rights of non-dominant and indigenous women until many years later has been and remains a global phenomenon (Countries where women can’t vote, 2022; Kaplan & Robinson, 2022; Klarsfeld & Cachat-Rosset, 2021; Örtenblad et al., 2017). Voting is just one right for which feminists have fought. Feminists engage in struggles for rights over women’s bodies and to access food, water, safety (housing and nonviolence), health care, education, and participation in organizations and other institutions. These struggles reflect ongoing challenges for feminist knowing, voice, and organizing (Kaplan & Robinson, 2022). We proceed by

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discussing how feminists organize to do this work of gender justice.

Doing Gender Justice Local–global organizing has benefited from technological affordances that affect the ways in which feminist movements “organize, strategize, create knowledge, and build solidarity networks” locally and transnationally (Mexican feminist academic Srilatha Batilwala in Barrera, 2017, para. 1). The advantages of doing gender justice via “social media and other online spaces [are that these technologies] have become essential vehicles in sharing experiences and mobilizing feminism in the name of a multiplicity of women’s experiences that cut across race and social class distinctions and sexual orientations” (Bell et al., 2019, p. 5). Mobilizing feminist activism within and across borders has demanded greater attention to context-specific materialities (e.g., resources at hand; embodiment; sociopolitical-economic-cultural oppressions and opportunities) but also to gender justice organizing as liquidities—adaptive, shifting, permeable or integrative rather than bounded, power-laden, and connected to marginality (Cruz & Sodeke, 2021). Some examples of local–global feminist activism and organizing include the Everyday Sexism Project, #MeToo, 1 Million Women, women’s marches, El Violador eres tu, Nia Una Menos, and #NoMarriage. The theme for the 2022 International Women’s Day was #BreaktheBias through which people hope to “promote a world free of stereotyping and discrimination” (Whiting, 2022, para. 2). Although these movements operate on the world stage, the struggles and transformations that happen are evident in individual lives and diverse organizational settings and industries. To promote this #BreaktheBias world, we, as the authors, pause to celebrate some “wins” (see Lakritz, 2021; Whiting, 2022) that shape and are shaped by understandings of feminist

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agency and the different forms of organizing that underlie the research directions concluding our chapter. However, just as there are many causes for celebration, the past two years have been dominated by the COVID-19 pandemic and racial injustice activism that disproportionately affected women around the world. Amnesty International found that “domestic violence has increased, job insecurity for women has worsened, access to sexual and reproductive health services has been eroded, girls’ enrollment in schools has reduced dramatically in many places” (International Women’s Day, 2022, para. 8). Events and policies affecting gender rights and violence include—but are not limited to—sexual violence perpetrated by Russian soldiers on Ukrainian women, children, and men as a systemic or organized phenomenon in the Russia–Ukraine War, restrictions imposed on female rights across Afghanistan after the Taliban’s capture of Kabul in 2021, gender violence in Ethiopia, U.S. abortion restrictions, and the “Don’t Say Gay” bill in the state of Florida. Feminist struggles for gender justice are never-ending and the “wins” that maintain hope in local– global organizing are tempered by women’s lived experiences of injustices in other areas. These contestations and achievements become visible in media and academic publications yet are decades and centuries in the making. Incorporating socio-culturalpolitical-economic histories acknowledges where, when, and how the doing of gender justice becomes salient locally and globally and in feminist organizational scholarship.

FEMINIST ORGANIZATIONAL SCHOLARSHIP Because of local–global histories and interdisciplinary roots, feminist organizational scholarship is rich in approaches, diverse theoretical bases, and insights into the organizing and institutional processes and structures that (re)

produce and resist gender inequality. Feminist scholars attend to and document the complex and intertwined bases for the subjugation of women. In affirming that there is no one politically correct feminist method, feminist organizational scholars conduct research from rhetorical, auto/ethnographic, qualitative, postmodern, quantitative, and other analyses (for overviews, see Harding, 1987; Reinharz & Davidman, 1992). These organizational analyses have sought to dismantle beliefs in gender-neutrality (e.g., Acker, 1990; Ashcraft & Mumby, 2004; Buzzanell, 1994, 2000; Eagly & Karau, 2002; Ferguson, 1984; Kanter, 2008; MacKinnon, 1989). Throughout this scholarship, researchers record how women are systematically disadvantaged in every area of organizational life—policies, membership, roles, expectations, and treatment—and how to produce multilevel social change (Ashcraft & Mumby, 2004; Buzzanell, 1994; Calás & Smircich, 1999). At the heart of feminist organizational scholarship is that women are not isomorphic with the ideal White male middle-class heterosexual worker without relational encumbrances who can work 24/7 (Acker, 1990). This ideal worker believes that he succeeds because he is competitive in meritocratic systems and adheres to professional and managerial linear career trajectories. Feminist organizational scholarship demonstrates how ideal worker norms align with everyday unjust practices such as hiring preferences, with inequitable compensation and career systems, with policies offering but failing to provide work–life flexibility, and with values antithetical to feminist mutuality (respect and relationality) and ethical commitments (e.g., Ferguson, 1984; Gilligan, 1993; Mumby & Putnam, 1992). Feminist organizational scholarship originally focused on middle-class White women and double binds that being a worker or leader and being female produced (Jamieson, 1995). This research expanded into issues of race and class, originally taking gender and racial difference approaches and more recently taking

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intersectionalities (Acker, 2006; Ashcraft & Mumby, 2004; Eagly, 2013; Holvino, 2010) and global feminist perspectives such as those manifest in transnational feminist networks (Moghadam, 2005). With the growth and increase in different types of feminisms, a particular challenge faced by scholars involved the conceptualizations of feminisms. Whereas past scholars offered broad and unified approaches rooted in self-determination and choice (Foss et  al., 1999), in partial (group-level) knowledge or standpoints (Harding, 2004), or in “the theoretical study of women’s oppression and the strategical and political ways that all of us, building on that theoretical and historical knowledge can work to end that oppression” (Valdivia, 1995, p. 8), others fought against oppression by “including…people of color, people with disabilities, people of different ages and socioeconomic classes” and individuals in the LGBTQ+ community (Foss et al., 1999, p. 2). These expansions have increased the types of feminisms organized around social identity groups and diverse genders. They have privileged organizational theorizing from both situated and subjugated knowledges (e.g., Calás & Smircich, 1999) and, for example, the raced and classed nature of academic organizing and career using poetic, criticalinterpretive, and (collective) autoethnographic forms and critique (e.g., Abreau et al., 2021; Ashcraft & Allen, 2003; Cruz et al., 2020; Dar, 2019; Ferguson & Dougherty, 2022). This expansive advocacy work continues today and is manifest in feminist organization scholarship that sometimes utilizes particular feminist theories but that often integrates and/or adds to main feminist or gender lenses. For example, Ashcraft (2014) distinguishes among, and critiques, five feminisms found in most organizational and organizational communication studies: liberal (sameness and standardization); cultural (difference with value and variation); standpoint (difference as social materialities); radical poststructuralist (bad bureaucracy, good alternatives, and acceptance of ambiguity);

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and postmodern (difference as multileveled drag) feminisms. She contends that, in organi­ zation studies, these and other feminisms are identified and subject to contestation around their utilities in today’s world. She notes that the vibrancy in feminist organization scholarship did not seem as evident in feminist organizational communication scholarship in 2014, as discussed in the next section.

FEMINIST ORGANIZATIONAL COMMUNICATION SCHOLARSHIP In 2014, Ashcraft attributed the seemingly waning interest in feminist organizational communication scholarship to several causes: the mainstreaming of feminist agendas into organizational communication; the lack of distinctive feminist lenses for research studies; and the decline in robust interdisciplinary debates that situated feminisms in communication and organizational scholarship during earlier decades.

Mainstreaming of Feminist Agendas Historically, organizational communication theories have been criticized for being created with a male subject in mind, viewing any organization as a monolith, and making women “invisible by their absence in theory and research” (Buzzanell, 1994, p. 340). In applying feminist theories (e.g., radical, poststructuralist, standpoint, and transnational feminisms), organizational communication scholars are able to make significant interventions in the subject area by identifying and theorizing “feminist and alternative forms of organizing” (Rice, 2021, p. 9; see also Ashcraft, 2001; Buzzanell et  al., 1997) as well as partial knowledge from socio-culturalhistorical-political-economic and embodied experiences (e.g., Allen, 1998; Biwa, 2021; Buzzanell, 2021; Cruz, 2015; Jarvis, 2021;

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Long & Buzzanell, 2022). As organizational communication is also not gender-neutral, “advantages and disadvantages, exploitation and control, action and emotion, meaning and identity are patterned through and in terms of a distinction between male and female, masculine and feminine” (Acker, 1990, p. 146). Scholars queer organizational com­ munication to explicate how to see the world differently and more inclusively, to address challenges faced by the LGBTQ+ community, and to offer methodologies that extend feminist agendas (see Chapter 10 in this volume). Thus, the mainstreaming of feminist agendas in organizational communication— namely, recognition that gender inequality is central to all organizational behavior (Irefin et  al., 2012)—might be considered a “win” for feminist scholars. Feminist commitments and issues have become increasingly published although the work of doing gender justice continues. In this gender justice work, feminists (as well as other types of critical-cultural scholars) continue to destabilize, decolonize, and rethink organizational communication (Ashcraft & Mumby, 2004; Ballard et  al., 2020; Buzzanell, 2000; Pal et  al., 2022). They broaden analyses to antifeminist and paradoxical online organizing (Jarvis & Eddington, 2021) and grapple with ways to pull organizational communication research, methodologies, teaching, practices, and reflexivity toward critical inclusion (Walker & Muñoz Rojas, 2022; Wilhoit Larson et  al., 2022) and away from #CommunicationSoWhite (Chakravartty et  al., 2018). #CommunicationSoWhite critiques the remnants of a colonialist structure of knowledge and knowing that marginalizes nondominant groups. They engage in deep material and linguistic critique (GistMackey, 2018; Gist-Mackey & Guy, 2019; Kingsford et  al., 2022 and surface tensions in closeting and violence (D’Enbeau, 2017; Harris, 2020; McDonald et  al., 2020). They devote increased attention to work generated

by BIPOC scholars (black, indigenous, and people of color) from diverse cultures and world regions (e.g., Biwa, 2021); they report findings that should revolutionize organi­ zational communication (e.g., Linabary et al., 2021; Pal et al., 2022). Yet, as can be seen from this overview of how feminisms have been mainstreamed, the relative invisibility of feminist organi­ zational communication research comes from this “kind of patch work quilt, taking bits and pieces from here and there in an attempt to offer an account of women as social and political beings” (Irefin et  al., 2012, p. 10). Themes cut across social justice causes to include patriarchy, sexual objectification, racism, stereotyping, classism, discrimination, oppression, white supremacy, and colonization. However, in organizational communication studies, there is an emphasis on the site in which injustice is constituted and practical applications for training and policy change (e.g., antifeminist online organizing; sexual harassment on university campuses, gay bars, classrooms; women political leaders in China; D’Enbeau, 2017; Tian, 2022; Walker & Muñoz Rojas, 2022).

Lack of Distinctive Feminist Lenses In her review of feminist organizational communication, Ashcraft (2014) contended that organizational communication scholars tend not to frame their studies according to particular feminist lenses. We agree that this claim seems valid not only for particular feminist lenses but also for feminist organizational communication in general. We conducted keyword searches in Management Communication Quarterly (MCQ) beginning with volume 1, issue 1, in 1987. “Feminist” and “feminism” did not appear as key words until 1992. From 1992 to present (end of 2022) there were 124 feminist essays of any type (i.e., 94 research and review articles, three introductions, one book review, and 26 “other” which included commentaries and

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non-refereed Forum or Dialogue entries), whereas there were 314 essays for “gender” (1987–2022) and 174 for intersectionality (1996–2022). To us, these numbers indicate that authors did not utilize the term feminist or specific feminisms to categorize and/or explicitly form the theoretical and analytic bases of their studies about organizational communication. Instead, authors simply incorporated feminist commitments and analyses when examining gender, difference, and gender or social justice. As such, the publication pattern of the feminist organizational communication articles in MCQ exhibits ebbs and flows: 26 (1992– December 2001); 50 (2002–December 2011); 36 (2012–December 2021); and 12 (2022). Of interest is that MCQ, volume 35(1), published in February 2021, had a special issue entitled “Feminist Organizational Communication: Legacies, Present, and Futures” that increased the number of essays at that time and into 2022 (22 essays from February 2021–December 2022). These articles in addition to feminist analyses and critiques published in outlets other than MCQ (e.g., Human Relations, Journal of Applied Communication Research) indicate that feminist ways of knowing, being, and advocacy or commitment are embedded within organizational communication articles.

Decline in Interdisciplinary Debates Ashcraft (2014) noted a decline in robust interdisciplinary debates around feminisms in organizational communication. However, there has been development of feminist theorizing and engagement with controversies about specific feminist perspectives in different outlets such as in Communication Theory (e.g., feminist dilemmatic theorizing and new materialism, Harris, 2016; closeting, McDonald et  al., 2020), Women’s Studies in Communication (feminist ventriloquial analysis, Long, 2016), Women & Language (African feminisms, Cruz, 2015), and edited collections

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(feminist paradox theory, Putnam & Ashcraft, 2017). Notably, these innovations have occurred since Ashcraft’s call for reinvigoration of feminist organizational communication scholarship in 2014. In sum, feminist organizational communication theories cannot be homogenized as there are different types of feminism including African, White, liberal, radical, psychoanalytical, socialist, Marxist, postmodern, neoliberal, and postcolonial. Although a thorough examination of all feminist theoretical approaches is beyond the scope of this chapter, it is relevant to acknowledge that each has different claims about how organi­ zations are structured and organizing is constituted. Despite differences, they all emphasize agency, self-reflexivity, and praxis for pragmatic and advocacy approaches for micro, meso, and macrolevel transformation. Thus, feminist organizational communication has pushed boundaries in organization, organizing, membership, and ways of gathering and analyzing qualitative data to better engage with scholars’ onto-epistemological and praxiological commitments and co-advocate for more equitable and just futures (Cruz & Linabary, 2021; Linabary et al., 2021).

QUALITATIVE FEMINIST ORGANIZATIONAL COMMUNICATION SCHOLARSHIP In calling for a reinvigorated feminist organizational communication studies, Ashcraft (2014) recommended that scholars destabilize binaries, account for materialities, and grapple with spatio-temporal and multilevel organizing phenomena. However, there have not been subsequent efforts to survey feminist qualitative organizational communication scholarship, either in the 2001 and 2014 editions of the Handbook (e.g., Ashcraft & Harris, 2014; Taylor & Trujillo, 2001; Tracy et  al., 2014), or related forums devoted to ethnography (Taylor et al., 2021).

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To conduct this survey, we have needed to sum up feminist epistemological and ontological foundations, and how feminisms— as sets of commitments and philosophic ­orientations—inform, guide, and trouble organizational scholarship. We then illuminated feminisms’ contributions to the organizational communication discipline and highlighted the various approaches to qualitative research in organizational communication rooted in feminisms. In this section, we focus our discussion specifically on organizational communication to question (a) what makes feminist qualitative methodologies feminist, (b) what are current debates and tensions in this scholarship, and (c) how directions in feminist qualitative methodological approaches can be re-imagined.

What Makes Qualitative Methodologies Feminist? Feminist perspectives acknowledge positionality, problematize the apparent difference between subjective and objective epistemologies, and ethically engage with the body and bodies. As such, feminist research requires tackling issues of inclusion, antiracism, social justice, democratic decision-making, belongingness, and empowerment of disenfranchised people. In feminist-inspired scholarship frameworks, the terms and strategies for taken-for-granted conceptualizations are subject to continuous interrogation to account for the complexities of organizing and feminist values. The goal is to acknowledge the existence and ensure inclusion of groups and individuals previously shunned by both quantitative and non-feminist methods of inquiry, to ask different questions, to search for new routes, and to stay consciously reflexive. The goal is to turn that gaze upon ourselves (Linabary et  al., 2021; see also Buzzanell, 1994, 2021). Methodologically, we find five processes that make feminist research in organi­ zational communication different from

other types of research. First is its commitment to acknowledge that power imbalances shift between the researcher(s) and the participant(s). Feminist work is collaborative and participatory wherein research is conducted with participants not on bodies. Here, participants are valued for expertise in socio-political-economic-cultural and historical standpoints. We continuously ask ourselves about how to represent different kinds of knowledge, embodiments, and unequal power dynamics ethically, inclusively, and unapologetically (e.g., Biwa, 2021; Walker & Muñoz Rojas, 2021). Second, feminist scholarship’s political motivation challenges systems of oppression and systemic injustices reflected in organizations and organizing. In Crenshaw’s (1989) words, it is intersectional, meaning that individuals’ overlapping identities (e.g., “woman,” “Black,” “straight”) do not exist independently from one another and instead are constantly interacting with power in situ. Conducting feminist research involves actively seeking to dismantle imbalances of power related not just to gender but also race, class, (dis)ability, sexual orientation, age, nationality, and other identities. In other words, it examines systemic and embodied patterns through intersectional lenses, rather than focusing on individuals (e.g., parenthood in U.S. graduate education, Long et al., 2022; Chinese values, organizing, and female political leaders, Tian, 2022). The third distinction lies in dismantling and challenging whiteness and Western biases permeating the communication discipline. Feminist qualitative organizational communication research propels transformation and “toning up” of the organizational communication domain by amplifying marginal voices (Harris, 2020). It is about respecting and acknowledging the diversity of experiences, identities, and knowledge, particularly those who are not engaged in traditional employment but instead deal with “precarious forms of employment, work, and labor” (Linabary et  al., 2021, p. 161; see Jones &

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Tracy, 2022). Feminist qualitative research in organizational communication puts those who often are invisible at the center of theorizing, turning them from witnesses of their own disposability into the agential members of organizations. By making experiences of marginalized individuals and groups a point of departure in organizational communication research, witnessing and struggling become indispensable for undermining whiteness and are both ways to “disorganize white supremacy” (Harris, 2020, p. 150) and thus disrupt and weaken its grip on research agenda in the field. As such, gender is no longer the primary focus of feminist qualitative research (Linabary et al., 2021). The fourth distinction involves perpetual reflexivity in terms of researchers’ positionalities, and in relation to data and analyses. Constantly interrogating oneself and data interpretation not only resists misrepresentation of participants and their lived experiences but also elevates their voices. Being constantly reflexive means questioning how to formulate research questions, choose and create research tools, and work through who stands to benefit from such research (Parker & McDonald, 2019). Such reflexivity may be a source of discomfort. It might mean reformulating research questions and/or changing methods if participants’ contributions require researchers to do so; it might mean recognizing layers of messy and difficult power relations between ourselves as researchers, participants, and reviewers. Fifth, feminist qualitative organizational communication uses and creates different styles of representation to honor participants and reach diverse audiences. Although qualitative research is data-driven empirical inquiry, it often engages in crystallization (whether labeled as such or not) that incorporates different kinds of data and analyses (e.g., personal stories, individual-collaborative autoethnographies, writing stories, pictures/ visuals, recordings, analyses of objects and other materialities) to analyze tensional, emotion-laden and embodied sensemaking. Crystallization engages flexibility, generativity,

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and reflexivity to build “a rich and openly partial account of a phenomenon that problematizes its own construction, highlights researchers’ vulnerabilities and positionality, makes claims about socially constructed meanings, and reveals the indeterminacy of knowledge claims even as it makes them” (Ellingson, 2009, p. 4; see also Ellingson, 2017). Examples range from embodied and autoethnographic experiences with infertility in U.S. healthcare systems (Jarvis, 2021), to commentary on ethical engagement with vulnerable populations such as transcommunities for standpoint analyses (Jones, 2020) and collaborative (auto) ethnographic and poetic inquiry surfacing the embodied and emotional disenfra­ nchisement of “foreign-born” faculty (a “form of fragile insight”, Cruz et al., 2000, p. 282). We provide glimpses of (auto)ethnographic and poetic inquiry useful for, and utilized by, feminist qualitative organizational communication scholars. The general tradition of autoethnography is discussed in Chapter 12 in this volume. Concerning the specific tradition of feminist autoethnography, however, we emphasize that its aesthetic, reflexive, and crystallized or imperfect and multifaceted focus centers on lived, shifting, embodied memories (Durham, 2017, p. 39) within cultural and systemic power structures (Boylorn & Orbe, 2021). It uses personal experience to plumb: how the researchers’ bodies are positioned and come to matter in a given space; how the researcher is affected by both privilege and oppressive forces; and how the researcher is affected by socio-cultural power structures (Denzin et al., 2008; for feminist autoethnography, see Ghabra, 2015). In organizational communication, Cruz et  al. (2020) take a situated intersectional-performative lens in a multi-genre collaborative autoethnography to expose foreignness in academic organizing and worker identity negotiations. Their intersectional-performative lens also involves poetic inquiry, which appeals to the heart and senses, “as if forces we can lay claim to in no other way become present to us in sensuous

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form” (DeShazer, 1986, p. 138). Poetry challenges dichotomous thinking by focusing on “emotional truth that opens up discursive spaces that lurk between words, between voice and silence, between the thought and unthought from de/colonizing perspectives” (Bhattacharya, 2013, p. 610). In sum, methodologically, feminist qualitative organizational communication research grapples with several concerns: researcherparticipant power dynamics, systemic injustices through intersectionalities, whiteness and Western biases, researchers’ positionalities, and representation and presentation.

CURRENT DEBATES AND TENSIONS There are still significant gaps in feminist research within organizational communication. Allen et al. (1996) state: “So many of us still are kept in stages and cages of frustration, oppression, repression, depression, legislation, litigation, isolation, humiliation, mutilation, while waiting and hoping for far more than ‘just a moment, please’ of recognition” (p. xi). Historically, organizational communication as a field seldom attended to racial issues (Ashcraft & Allen, 2003). Although the field started to confront organi­ zing as gendered, we continue to ignore the ways in which organizations are imbued with racism, heterosexism, classism, ableism, and Western orientations (see Chapters 8, 9, and 10 in this volume). As a result, there are enduring tensions in feminist organizational communication, as manifest in qualitative inquiry: (a) inclusion-exclusion, (b) feminism-intersectionalities, and (c) ideologyeconomic sustainability. These tensions are not unique to qualitative studies; however, they reveal themselves more readily in the practice of qualitative research which demands increased reflexivity (admitting one’s positionality, biases, assumptions) that, in turn, influences research design: from setting overall research objectives to data

analysis methods and all methods of data generation and interpretation. The dichotomies, thus, are woven into the qualitative methodologies and become unavoidable.

Inclusion-Exclusion Feminist organizational and communication scholarship is rife with paradoxes (Putnam & Ashcraft, 2017). The inclusion-exclusion paradox is manifest in two ways, scholarly works and within organizing units. Using qualitative research methods, feminist organi­zational communication scholars problematize marginalized groups and reflexivity about positionalities. In qualitative feminist organizational scholarship, the inclusion-exclusion paradox concerns itself with how we come by knowledge of women and marginalized populations. Feminist organizational scholars negotiate which groups of people are marginalized, how to represent those groups in their work, how those groups are accorded a voice to speak on their lived experiences, and who can write about or represent those experiences, among others. A tension arises as to whether it is those in marginalized positions, or researchers with outsider views, who should write about their phenomenon, and interrogate the perspectives from which scholarly works are written. Scholars bear in mind the temporal, cultural, geopolitical, social, and other contexts and consequently address issues that relate to the times. For example, Ferguson and Dougherty (2022) through in-depth interviews examined how whitish conceptualizations of professionalism mitigate inclusion. The interviews revealed that some elements of professionalism required black bodies to conceal certain bodily features that are central to their cultural identity like their hair, manipulate their voices to sound White, or code-switch when in organizational settings.

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Within organizing units, the paradox of inclusion and exclusion involves the tensions between organizationally defined differences and historical differences, and whether inclusion approaches should be organizationalor individual-based (Mease, 2016). Mease found that some organizational diversity managers defined diversity and inclusion in terms of utilizing all talents regardless of difference, while others saw inclusion and exclusion along the lines of individuals who have historically suffered inequalities. Mease argued that tensions in individual and organizational approaches require comprehensive organizational approaches to inclusion. The utility of the inclusion-exclusion paradox is seen as feminist organizational communication scholars using qualitative methods to explicitly state and implicitly acknowledge their positionalities when writing for, about, and to marginalized populations (e.g., Biwa, 2021). This act enables scholars to bring in their experiences and standpoints regarding their subject matter. Thus, the inclusion-exclusion paradox could be reframed as tensions that do not constrict qualitative feminist organizational work. Rather, it enhances scholarship by allowing researchers to be reflexive in their representation of marginalized populations and in their provision of space for individuals with lived experiences to lead scholarly conversation. Thus, feminist organizational scholarships utilize diverse qualitative methods to capture the diverse experiences of the authors and their interest populations, such as Dougherty et  al.’s (2018) photovoice study examining food insecurity and unemployment where participants’ positionings vis-à-vis food revealed the discursive material tensions and vulnerabilities that could not be portrayed as visibly and compellingly otherwise.

Feminism-Intersectionalities Struggle is inherent to feminism, feminist theorizing, and feminist advocacy. Although

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women’s rights offer a common focal point within feminisms, the demands differ among identity groups and cannot be expressed with a singular voice. Tensions result about whether and how to speak of a singular overarching feminism focusing solely on gender and/or women and the plurality of feminisms (Collins, 2019; Curtin & Devere, 1993). Some argue that feminism is both singular and multiple, whereas others argue feminism is both an ideology and set of practices (e.g., Jarvis & Eddington, 2021). In this chapter, we find that feminism is not a monolithic concept but rather a polylithic socio-political and philosophical position precipitated on the relationship between identities and power (Simões, 2021). However, feminist qualitative organizational communication research utilizing particular feminisms–like African feminisms to guide qualitative content analysis for themes (Biwa, 2021), holistic ethnographic understandings (Cruz, 2015), and postcolonial feminisms (Cruz & Sodeke, 2020) to deconstruct case study vignettes– offer concentrated examination of women’s experiences that are quite different from those depicted by Western feminists. Likewise, Dutta (2017) utilized contrapunctual analysis aligned with Relational Dialectics Theory 2.0 (RDT 2.0) to show how culture, career, family, and occupations intertwine to forestall girls’ and women’s engineering occupations, thus offering new directions for feminist advocacy. Even so, the call for feminist intersectional analyses began as a way to discuss issues of Black women’s employment in relation to power in the U.S. and how identity categories interact and interlock in relation to power within the lived experiences of marginalization and privilege (Crenshaw, 1989). It is not enough to view gender equality as solely affecting the homogeneous groups of male and females. In other words, those who engage with intersectionality typically frame the dimension of one’s identity as intersecting, rather than paralleling, to avoid a “singleaxis framework” (Molina-Guzmán & Cacho,

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2014) of discrimination (see Chapter 8 in this volume). Even when engaging in qualitative intersectional analyses, Ziyu Long (in Linabary et al., 2021) argues that organi­ zational communication scholars still need to push past the race-gender-class trinity to truly account for people’s relationships with others and with other sites of power.

Ideology-Sustainability A continual struggle represented in feminist qualitative organizational communication research is the tension between ideology, or configurations of belief and value systems, and sustainability imperatives – for example, around the issue of maintaining financial solvency. Earlier feminist work characterized ideology-sustainability tensions as double binds or paradoxes, insofar as attention to one pole diverted attention from or constrained organizations’ abilities to meet the other. There are several threads in this feminist ideology-sustainability tension: structure, multilevel policy enactment through agency and constraint, and caregiving. Structure refers to the feminist desire to organize in ways that represent and promote values. For instance, critiques of bureaucratic and hierarchical organizing claimed that these competitive, linear systems that promoted careerism and advantage for dominant group members could not accommodate values of cooperation, multiple paths, community or care and inclusion of non-dominant groups, thus arguing that feminist value-rational organizing processes would be preferable (Ashcraft, 2001; Buzzanell, 1994; Buzzanell et  al., 1997). More recently, researchers have scrutinized institutional structures through feminist tensional- and dilemmic analyses designed to rectify injustice, including gendered violence, structured in institutions (e.g., D’Enbeau, 2017; Harris, 2016). These studies have displayed how attention to the contradictory d/Discourses and materialities compel actions that, on

the surface, seem beneficial but invite other problematic behaviors. For instance, Branton and Compton (2021) found that gay bars advertised invitations for diverse sexuality displays and seemed to stray, in some patrons’ views, from the original intent to offer safe spaces for LBGTQAI members, since heterosexual patrons coopted space. The bars could fill coffers but incurred problematic sexual behaviors toward patrons and staff. Second, ideology and economic tension is apparent in multilevel policy enactment through agency and constraint in work-life discussions, particularly, the macro-meso-microlevel policy formation, supervision, and individual access and use of policy. Despite ideological preferences for family-first values, workers felt they could not use family-friendly policies without serious employment and career repercussions (Kirby & Krone, 2002). In this case, workers’ enactment of agency and resistance through structurational analyses displayed how workers weighed the benefits and costs of using particular policies and the pressures they felt to forego policy use, patterns still prevalent today (Lee & Kramer, 2022). Finally, issues of caregiving are entangled in ideology and sustainability tensions, complicated further by postfeminist, neoliberal valorization of personal choice. Caregiving has been argued through collaborative personal narratives during the COVID-19 pandemic with academic caregivers asserting their needs to have reforms for social injustices, health, and other disparities, on collective, rather than individual levels (Ahn et al., 2021). Caregivers argue that current employment prioritization makes ideologies of care and community unsustainable. Likewise, through examination of emotional responses via constant comparative analysis, Villamil and D’Enbeau (2021) identified vulnerability-sustainable tensions manifest during the pandemic through essential work—often care for others through food, service, medical, and other caregiving occupations—as instrumental-disposable with workplace dignity as recognized-transgressed.

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FUTURE DIRECTIONS Today, organizational communication scholars continue to utilize feminist research approaches as well as expand on what it means for a study to be called feminist. Despite feminisms being established philosophical bases for scholarship as well as socio-political movements, they are often not labeled as such and therefore seem to be neglected in qualitative organizational communication studies. However, we contend that the values, tensions, forms of representation, and honoring of women and vulnerable group’s experiences remain feminist and, indeed, see a marked increase given disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, attempts to rescind rights, protests against racial injustice and gender violence, and increased awareness and policy advocacy to remedy health, education, and access (e.g., water, land, food) disparities. As the scholarly landscape has been changing due to the efforts of scholars and activists who embrace feminist commitments, a shift is evident in that more and more scholars are choosing feminist-influenced methods of research. Along with other critical-cultural traditions, feminist approaches are forming a vanguard for the general practices of qualitative organizational communication research. As noted in our chapter, the boundaries of what can be called feminist qualitative organi­ zational communication research are fluid and dynamic, just as organizing and organi­zation can be categorized similarly (see Cruz & Sodeke, 2021). Studies, not explicitly labeled as feminist, center voices that were previously marginalized or omitted, challenge “established” truths, and de-construct and scrutinize ideologies, practices, and structures that routinely exclude women, feminine others, LGBTQ+, and other physically, linguistically, ideologically, and otherwise marginalized groups. These studies often engage with and are embedded in communities in situ and in praxis to improve and honor the lives of those whom we study, just as we also

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benefit through new knowledge generation. Finally, feminist qualitative organizational communication research spans continents and very different feminisms. However, the question of the direction of the knowledge flows—from where and to which locations— is open to continuous critical analysis and questioning. Current and future directions are emerging from work being done at present. As reviewed, researchers are probing contradictions, dilemmas, and tensions. Organizational communication scholarship continues to examine online communities, diverse organizational forms (e.g., bureaucratic, nongovernmental, nonprofit, mutual aid, fluid), and deeply country-/culture-specific manifestations. Currently, it can be challenging to “find” exemplars of qualitative feminist research methods in organizational communication studies in non-Western contexts. There are several domains where problems occur: a) a lot of research is done in languages other than English which makes it inaccessible for the average Western member of academe; b) lack of financial and cultural resources makes it difficult to publish research in Western journals (e.g., translation expenses, difficulty navigating peer-review process); c) for research that is published, it is not necessarily labeled feminist, qualitative or even organizational communication, with some cultures rejecting the very word “feminist” for its connection to the West; and d) areas considered outdated research foci in Western academe may be overlooked or not published regardless of its innovative potential elsewhere. From these domains, we show how attention to these future directions can enable feminist qualitative organizational studies to grow creatively and with impact on the lives of the participants. For instance, Dai (2014) focused on nongovernmental women-led elder homes in China. Given the strict governmental control, oversight, and prevalence of traditional bureaucratic organizations in China, studying a nongovernmental organization (NGO)

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signaled a feminist lens primarily because this organizational form and associated organizing process have been only minimally studied, yet provide essential services in China and are being pursued by younger generations. Ethnography in this case may be also interpreted as feminist: it disrupts traditional ways of doing research in a highly regulated Chinese society; it aims to give voice to a population that is routinely silenced. The study refocused research efforts that previously were fixed on the organization-state-market economy relationship and now offered means of destabilizing typical power axes (organization-client and organization-staff relationship). Here, the feminist qualitative method opens a variety of opportunities to create space for a marginalized organizational form and/or population. Dai’s study enriches our understanding of how feminist qualitative research can be done and to what end within non-Western contexts. Another example of future directions is the feminist revival and revision of concepts that earlier were criticized. de Wet and Schoots (2016) critiqued then reformulated a learning organization (LO) by emphasizing its application to NGOs instead of for-profit organizations. By de-emphasizing the LO’s exploitative goals of worker education to increase profits through extraction as previously formulated and highlighting its orientation to “inter-relationships between people … [and] individual openness and capacity to learn” (p. 66), de Wet and Schoots utilized both humanistic and feminist values to reinstate LO as a viable concept with potential that can be harnessed for organizational and individual improvement. In closing, feminist qualitative methods in organizational communication research, when used in non-Western contexts and destabilizing difference (e.g., religion, gender, sexualities, nationalities, class, ethnicity/ race, able-bodiedness), enable researchers to concentrate on new actors who might have been ignored in previous research, and

consider new foci, organizational forms, and interactions constituting organizations. Should the discipline choose not to continue on this path, it risks becoming parochial, instead of internationally salient, and myopic to the most outstanding challenges of our time in organizational communication.

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8 Critical Race Theory and Intersectional Approaches to Qualitative Organizational Communication Research J a s m i n e T. A u s t i n a n d T i a n n a L . C o b b

In recent years, the communication discipline has experienced an unraveling of sorts. A large number of brave academics have spoken about their experiences of being marginalized, unheard, unaccounted for, and underrepresented. These counternarratives have replaced “rose colored glasses” with a critical lens allowing communication scholars to face the reality of systemic racism occurring within our National Communication Association (NCA), and other professional settings. These developments include the publication of #CommunicationSoWhite (Chakravartty et al., 2018; Ng et  al., 2020), the special issue of #RhetoricSoWhite (Wanzer-Serrano, 2019), the platform for #BlackInTheIvory (Diep, 2020), the teach-ins for #ScholarStrike (Butler & Gannon, 2020), the controversy regarding the racialized demographics of NCA’s Distinguished Scholars, and the walk-out of the 2019 NCA Organizational Communication Division’s Top Paper Panel, leading to the #ToneUpOrgComm movement (Cruz et  al., 2020). These events all stem from critical

analyses of racialized experiences in academia (specific studies are discussed below) that led to changes in division leadership, and expectations of the NCA leadership, including its development of the Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, and Action (IDEA) Committee for the Organizational Communication Division. This committee aims to ensure that diverse perspectives (e.g., regarding race, gender, age, methodology, specialization area, type of institution/ affiliation) are adequately represented in the division’s leadership and routines. Should these efforts fail, then organizational communication scholars and their stakeholders may well conclude that, in the words of lyrical genius Biggie Smalls, radical transformation “was all a dream.” According to critical theorists, critical studies of organizations should investigate exactly these kinds of topics, including false claims, social injustice, exploitation, distorted communication, misrecognition of interests, and even the problematic erasure of personal identities achieved by revealing

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these accounts and making the “invisible visible.” In other words, critical research gives space to marginalized voices and experiences while simultaneously exposing oppressive systems of power, in order to create change (Alvesson & Deetz, 1996). Therefore, the future of critical scholarship in organi­zational communication is dependent on efforts made by scholars to explore the connections between racism and power within organi­zations and organizing. In this chapter, we develop the connection between that future and the scholarly tradition of Critical Race Theory (hereafter, CRT). Qualitative CRT studies have been conducted and published for decades in other disciplines like sociology, English, and law studies. The communication discipline has a more compact archive of CRT studies, and an even smaller body of qualitative CRT organizational communication scholarship. As one can imagine, then, this chapter is influenced by a paradox: while we seek to elevate the status of CRT in qualitative organizational communication studies, we do not yet have an extensive set of exemplars available to illustrate our claims. As a result, this chapter aims instead to review for its readers (also referred to as researchers) key factors to consider when conducting said CRT research pursuing positive change both in our discipline, and in our larger society. Of necessity, some of the examples we discuss tilt towards other subfields, such as intercultural communication, media studies, and even quantitative-methodological frames. Also, most of the available organizational communication scholarship that critically analyzes race does so without the explicit use of CRT. However, we make a diligent effort to emphasize and extrapolate, wherever possible, any uniquely organi­ zational, critical, and qualitative dimensions of these examples and strive to create specific and explicit connections to the goal of this chapter by addressing the distinctive elements of qualitative CRT research.

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In this chapter, we define CRT and its related key concept of intersectionality, and discuss how they fit into the study of organizational communication. We do this by first elaborating on the origins, paradigmatic affiliations, and tenets of CRT and intersectionality. Next, we develop connections between these tenets, and review how they fit into organizational communication scholarship. Then, we discuss considerations and recommendations for how to conduct such research. In sequence, specifically, we will discuss three points to consider during the conceptualization stage of CRT research; ways to reclaim and adapt four qualitative data collection methods and analysis strategies to be more CRT focused; and finally, two recommendations for consideration when completing CRT research. In this process, we seek to provide explanations, examples, and recommendations that will prepare organi­ zational communication scholars for successfully conducting qualitative CRT research. At the end of this chapter, we hope that prospective CRT scholars will have the tools needed to add their own studies to the conversation of CRT and intersectional approaches in qualitative organizational communication research.

UNDERSTANDING CRT: ORIGINS, AFFILIATIONS, AND TENETS Critical Race Theory (CRT) is technically considered an academic field of inquiry, rather than a singular theory (Hylton, 2010). It is a critical framework used to examine and explain the pervasiveness of racism and racialized experiences across and within institutions, with the explicit goal of promoting positive change. CRT emerged in the United States in legal studies in response to social frameworks that failed to recognize and account for more prevalent and subtle discriminatory practices (i.e., de facto) that

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evolved following the implementation of Civil Rights-era liberal anti-racist policies (i.e., de jure). Early CRT scholars, such as Derrick Bell, Alan Freeman, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Richard Delgado, and Patricia Williams, became increasingly critical of what they described as “colorblind ideologies, and the inability of scholars to explicate the often-ambiguous complexities of racism as systemic, unspectacular, covert, and often ambiguous” (Lawrence & Hylton, 2022, p. 255). Over the last 30 years or so, scholars from other disciplines, including communication, have applied CRT as an analytical framework to explore matters of racialization and subordination. CRT has therefore continued to evolve as a transdisciplinary framework, from which several “offshoots” have emerged, including Critical Race Feminism (CRF), Critical Whiteness Studies (CWS), and more recently, Critical Race and Digital Studies (CRDS). To understand CRT, we must be aware of its critical paradigmatic affiliations—its distinctive ways of understanding reality (ontology), what counts as knowledge (epistemology), what values are assigned to social scientific inquiry (axiology), and finally, its strategies for gathering information about the world (method). These affiliations are drenched in the idea that organizational life displays a constant tension between the strategies of control and resistance. Thus, knowledge developed in and through communication can both control and liberate organizational members (Deetz, 2005). CRT scholars believe that reality (ontology) is constructed through power relations and shaped over history, while knowledge (epistemology) is mediated, hidden, distorted, and produced through those power relations (Lindlof & Taylor, 2017). The values driving the goal of research (axiology) are particularly important to CRT—for example, to disrupt those power relations in order to improve and transform the experiences of Black, Indigenous, people of color (BIPOC). Once these components of the paradigm are

understood, we can see how data collection methods are logically adapted to serve their goals. In addition to these paradigmatic features, CRT has clear tenets that distinguish its scholarship. Rollock and Gillborn (2011; summarized in Lawrence & Hylton, 2022) have identified five themes in CRT research. Adapted here, these include: 1 an acceptance [that] racism is pervasive as opposed to occasional. When only looking for explicit acts of racism, scholars can miss the nuances of implicit and microaggressive forms of racism. 2  an understanding that white supremacy operates to privilege white people, while concurrently subordinating Black and minoritized people. Only viewing the outcome of white supremacy as it pertains to BIPOC individuals draws one’s gaze away from how white people can benefit from their supremacist behaviors. 3  an assumption that Black and minoritized people and/or voices should be privileged in scholarship. This theme pertains to representation and how BIPOC individuals are underrepresented in the authorship that tells their own stories and experiences. 4  an understanding that gains in racial equality are often made when there is a [convergence of interest] with those occupying dominant discourses of whiteness. Liberation cannot occur until the dominant group changes itself and recognizes that all our struggles are intimately connected. It becomes clear that if most socially conscious people want to change injustice, everyone must work on one accord. 5 a recognition that systems of subordination are intersectional. CRT should not be bound by binary and singular oppressions but should unmask intersectional marginalization (discussed further below). CRT should focus on race, class, ability, gender, sexual orientation, and more identities that form compounding forms of oppression.

Thus far, as we have illustrated, there is a difference between generic “study” and discussion of race, and critically examining it. CRT is an interdisciplinary framework that expands to include other critical perspectives, and can be used to promote significant organizational change. So far, however, much research, especially in organizational communication scholarship, tends to examine race critically without explicitly naming

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CRT. Critically examining race in scholarship is important in that it can address one or more of the tenets of CRT. However, CRT serves as a framework to guide critical race work in addressing all tenets and situating research in a larger body of scholarship (Rollock & Gillborn, 2011). This chapter subsequently provides a justification and practical recommendations for combining critical race research with a CRT lens. To further promote structural change, CRT must also be oriented toward intersectionality.

CRT AND INTERSECTIONALITY Scholarship that decontextualizes racial identity is unable to investigate the full intricacies of co-occurring racial experiences and their relations to power without using an intersectional lens. Instead, CRT scholars argue that race does not exist outside of situated inter-relationships developed among the phenomena of sex, gender identity, class, ability, neurodiversity, immigration status, etc. In this view, the more marginalized social locations one occupies (i.e., simultaneously), the more opportunities for one to experience compounding forms and levels of oppression. In this way, racism sustains itself, rearticulates, and operates through its relationships with other forms of oppression. This focus on key convergences of oppression is what Crenshaw (1991) famously coins intersectionality. As Crenshaw (1991), known for her robust scholarship on the intersectional experiences of Black women, explains [T]he experiences of women of color are frequently the product of intersecting patterns of racism and sexism, and how these experiences tend not to be represented within the discourse of either feminism or antiracism. Because of their intersectional identity as both women and people of color within discourses that are shaped to respond to one or the other, the interests and experiences of women

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of color are frequently marginalized within both. (pp. 1243–1244).

Thus, intersectional analyses allow us to see the relationship between racism and sexism, and ultimately other prejudicial and discriminatory practices, as interdependent. Utilizing CRT and intersectionality changes how traditional views of racism as a fixed occurrence. It allows scholars to center previously ignored identities, and reveal and explore new patterns of disempowerment. Additionally, a combined CRT and intersectional approach can recover previously subsumed identities that were placed (e.g., in data analysis) into subsidiary umbrella categories. This includes realizing that feminism does not account for the experiences of all women. Instead, for example, Black feminism and Chicana feminism are necessary differentiations that account for how race intersects with additionally marginalized identities and marginalizing experiences. This approach of combining CRT with intersectionality thus resists the “oppression, labels, and comparisons to white heteronormativity” that permeate conventional scholarship. Instead, CRT scholarship “differentiates itself by highlighting intellectual oppression and non-normative views as its foundation” (Austin & Cobb, 2021, p. 1).

CRT, INTERSECTIONALITY AND ORGANIZATIONAL COMMUNICATION SCHOLARSHIP Over the last 30 years, CRT and intersectionality have been applied successfully as analytical frameworks to explore matters of race, racialization, exploitation, and subordination in organizations. Parker (2014) argues that a critical and intersectional approach is important when studying organizations because theories and research tend to “discursively erase the racialized and colonizing histories that connect

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them to white middle-class norms, values, and experiences, casting others as deficient, devalued, or nonexistent” (p. 630). These are important lenses utilized for viewing organizational experiences arising from the relations among language, power, social knowledge, and from organizational treatment (e.g., suppression) of important conflicts. A combined CRT and intersectional approach provide scholars with a holistic framework for critically analyzing the performance of identities (e.g., both individual and combined), decision making occurring at macro- and micro-levels, and how racism interlocks with other forms of oppression such as gender, class, nationality, ability, and sexuality (Deetz, 2005). Critical race theory has become a prominent vehicle for dismantling power structures that disregard and discount organizational members’ diversity of human perspectives and experiences. However, as mentioned, organizational communication scholarship has not yet fully utilized a CRT framework. Instead, we find a record of critically oriented organizational communication scholarship, rooted in CRT, that has advanced the field by revealing the oppressive underbelly of dominant discourses used in organi­ zations and organizing. Similar to this current chapter, previous work also provides concrete guides to situate future research with an intentional focus on critically analyzing race. For example, Orbe and Allen (2008) provide six recommendations (originally developed for the field of applied communication studies) to ensure equitability in future critical race scholarship. Developed further by Orbe and colleagues (2022) and adapted by us, these include: 1 Centralize race in organizational communication research. Allow race to be a site of communicative struggle, instead of simplifying race to a demographic factor that solely describes participants and their behaviors. For example, researchers can centralize race by evaluating past racialized experiences to contextualize the current challenges and opportunities faced by organizational members. When studying one’s motivation to continue working at an organization,

for example, their racialized experience can play a large role in their motivation, especially if the organization has a history of unaddressed racist events. In this example, Jayakumar and their colleagues (2009) realized during their 64 faculty of color interviews, that it is not enough to identify the race of the faculty members, but also depict how their race can impact their experience and motivation to stay or leave the organization. 2 Resist the myth that race issues are salient only in certain organizational settings. Race-related organizational communication scholarship has routinely focused on certain settings and topics such as education, the workplace, and leadership. This recommendation calls for race-related scholarship to extend to other organizational contexts like healthcare, nonprofit organi­ zations, government, media, churches, sports, etc. For example, when studying patient-provider communication in healthcare contexts, without a critical focus on race, one may miss the nuances in experiences when comparing Black and white patients. Thankfully, Adebayo and their colleagues (2022) have studied this interaction, and provided insights for healthcare providers and institutional practices that can foster a racially safer healthcare environment for Black women. 3 Engage in research that explores intersectionality of race, gender, class, and … This recommendation echoes throughout this chapter as we argue for scholars to use CRT with an emphasis on intersectionality. As we have argued, doing so allows one to engage with compounded forms and practices of discrimination, and develop holistic scholarship that approaches racialized issues from additional, historically marginalized lenses. For example, when studying leadership in organizational settings, Allen (1996), Griffin (2016), and Parker (2001) examine how leadership looks different for Black women leaders compared to white women leaders. As they explain, though women leaders in general may face sexism, Black women and women of color who lead simultaneously experience sexism and racism. 4 Consider the impact of theoretical and methodological choices on research. Here, we have an opportunity to shift from using canonical theories and methods rooted in white-centric scholarship, and engage with methodological resources that

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support our use of a critical lens. One example here involves utilizing Black Feminist Thought or Chicana Feminism when conducting research about BIWOC (i.e., Black, Indigenous, and women of color), instead of relying on Feminist Theory that was not created by or for BIWOC. In other words, this recommendation proposes aligning qualitative research methodology with a CRT and intersectional approach. 5 Explore racialized dynamics of power at microand macro-levels. In addition to an intersectional approach, Orbe and Allen (2008) urge CRT researchers to focus on interpersonal interactions (i.e., micro-level) and related organizational and societal constraints operating at macro-levels. Instead of studying race as an isolated event, they argue, scholars should consider if there are systems in place that are (re)producing an environment that tolerates these micro-level instances. Similarly, Chakravartty and their colleagues’ (2018) publication of #CommunicationSoWhite discussed both microand macro-levels of racialized dynamics occurring in communication scholarship. For example, at the micro-level, they found that non-white scholars continue to be underrepresented in publication and citation rates. In addition, they argue that this systemic issue has developed because editorial positions, journal reviewers, and NCA leadership do not adequately represent BIPOC individuals—a matter which perpetuates the cycle of demographic homophily. 6 Promote an engaged scholarship model for research on race. Of importance to CRT research is a focus on practicality and change. At the end of a scholarly work, Orbe and Allen implore scholars to be able to answer the question, “So what?” and “Why does this matter?” and most importantly, “What can we do about it?”

To ensure they are equipped to challenge the persistence of racialized hierarchies and the evolving cultural circumstances in which they operate, qualitative researchers in organi­ zational communication should consult and extend key scholarly works discussed in this section (e.g., Orbe & Allen, 2008; Orbe et al., 2022). Our overarching goal for the rest of this chapter is to explain the methodological implications of this scholarship, and toolkits

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available for adopting CRT and intersectional lenses in qualitative organizational communication research. Specifically, we argue that CRT and intersectionality lenses reveal social inequalities that may otherwise remain invisible with the continued use of traditional qualitative approaches to studying organizations and organizing.

APPLYING CRT AND INTERSECTIONALITY IN QUALITATIVE ORGANIZATIONAL COMMUNICATION SCHOLARSHIP Approaching organizational communication research from a CRT perspective is an intricate process that makes visible the marginality and systems of power pertaining to racialized minority groups. As we argue below, key strengths of qualitative research include the analysis of narrative and storytelling. Similarly, a key element of CRT research involves the gathering of counternarratives—that is, accounts of seeing the world via racialized and intersectional lenses that differ from white heteronormative and hegemonic accounts (Delgado, 1989). Counternarratives are integral in challenging the way one sees the world by way of adopting an alternative perspective. In this sense, “CRT actively embraces critiques of methodological neutrality and colorblindness, and promotes radically constructivist approaches to empirical research and methodological design” (Lawrence & Hylton, 2022, p. 256). For CRT and intersectionality, “social justice and social transformation are not by-products of the research process”—they are inextricably linked (Lawrence & Hylton, 2022, p. 256). Here, we shift from theoretical views of CRT and intersectionality to more practical application-based strategies for implementing them to advance the agenda of organizational communication scholarship. We discuss considerations and recommendations for how to conduct such research. Specifically, we will discuss four points to consider during

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the conceptualization stage of CRT research, ways to reclaim and adapt four data collection methods and analysis strategies, and two recommendations for consideration when completing CRT research. These recommendations are vital to ensuring transparency of our impact and role as researchers and ensuring the validity of our work.

Considerations When Conceptualizing a CRT Study During the initial planning of a CRT study, scholars should take a few important steps to deploy that lens. Therefore, this first section will review the following three specific recommendations for initially conceptualizing a CRT study. These include using previous research as a starting point, leading without exploitation, and leading with a focus on complexity/anti-essentialism.

Using previous research as a starting point Conventional communication research has universalized white experiences, ultimately muting the voices of BIPOC researchers and the experiences of BIPOC communities. For decades, scholars of color have sought to capture these excluded experiences and identities in studying organizational communication. These works, too, are foundational; and it is imperative first to consult this—and similar— existing bodies of research prior to initiating a CRT study. It is ethically important to give credit to those who laid the foundation for us to continue such work to ensure BIPOC scholars are no longer muted. Therefore, a thorough literature search should be conducted as a research idea is developed. Here, we provide exemplary studies as a starting point for delving into these types of CRT and intersectional works. Though this list is not exhaustive, the following list includes examples of communication scholars and scholarship that critically examine race in multiple organizational contexts. These works may serve as important,

leading to the upheaval of the Communication discipline or developed shortly after. Job Selection Process. Matthew Harrison and colleagues (2008) studied skin color bias and its implication towards organizational preference. Socialization. Brenda Allen (1995) focused on her intersectional experiences of socialization as a Black woman faculty member. Jasmine Austin and Ryan Bisel (2022) focused on centering race in organizational conduct of pre-entry conversations. Leadership. Patricia Parker (2001) has conducted extensive scholarship on organizational leadership, centering the experiences of African American women executives. Mentoring. Kecia Thomas and colleagues (2007) have studied the mentoring of racial minority organi­ zational members. Health contexts. Mohan Dutta (2007) has critically examined structural issues of culture and agency displayed in communication of health organi­ zations. Additionally, Tianna Cobb (2022) has studied how organizational communication may destigmatize mental health issues experienced by Black individuals. Higher education. Jackson and Heckman (2002) have studied white students’ perceptions of race issues at their institution. Sistah circles as organizing. Shardé Davis (2015) and Marnel Niles Goins (2011) have depicted Black women’s collectives as an important form of organizing. Racialized critiques of Eurocentric organizing. Joëlle Cruz and Chigozirim Utah Sodeke’s (2021) work has emphasized postcolonial approaches and indigenous modes of organizing. Also, Katherine Hendrix (2002) has analyzed the attempted muting of Black scholars’ race-related research. Sports organizations. Rachel Griffin’s (2012) critical research has depicted the commodification of Black masculinity in the National Basketball Association, and, in addition to a plethora of publications, centered the influence of race in communication faculty’s experience of local and disciplinary conditions. Nonprofits. Angela Gist-Mackey (2018) has studied the intersections of social class and race related to unemployment support offered by nonprofit organizations.

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These are but a few of the scholars who are critically analyzing the racialized experiences of BIPOC individuals, in or applied to organizational contexts.

Lead without exploitation Communities of color have historically been exploited by social scientific research. CRT scholars have noted how white EuropeanAmerican qualitative researchers have exploited Black participants that has led communities of color to mistrust researchers (see Foster, 1994; Stanfield, 1999; Washington, 2006). It is imperative, as CRT researchers, to eliminate these practices and ensure that community members are at the center of our work from beginning to end. To do so, it is the job of the researcher to remove exploitative agendas from their scholarship. The following three practices will advance this shift in our field’s qualitative work. Compensating Participants. Oftentimes, participants give their time freely to participate in research. Still, they should be compensated in respect of their time. Participant compensation is a controversial topic in research, as it can be viewed as a form of manipulation. However, compensation can be beneficial for participants, and take various forms. The most obvious form of compensation is monetary. Participants can be paid directly in the form of cash or gift cards. Compensation can also occur in the form of a free exchange of services like community organizing, community training, program consulting, program implementation, or sponsorship of an organization or event. The point is that scholars are “paid” for conducting research through the acquisition of publications, promotions, and oftentimes, grants and fellowships. Participants are often neglected as candidates for equal compensation. We urge researchers to consider developing innovative strategies for compensating participants for their time and expertise. We also recommend conversing with participants about what type of compensation could be most beneficial for their organization.

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Conduct Collaborative Instead of Hierarchical Research. Due to their expertise, it may seem rather natural for researchers to take a hierarchical lead in research. Critical research challenges this notion, as the power dynamics of privileging academic expertise over the experiences of participants of color often lead to the latter group’s exploitation. Such a perspective removes the power from the community being researched, leading researchers to reap benefits at the expense of the community. For example, when engaging in cultural research, Dutta (2007) argues that marginalized participants should be situated in the research process as cultural experts. Thus, the main goal should be to highlight marginalized voices through scholarly platforms. This culture-centered perspective calls for adopting a collaborative approach to research, in which the researcher works from within the culture, and both the researcher and the community members hold power, respectively. This could involve researchers and organizational members co-developing the research idea, and allowing the research “story” to find the researcher, as they learn from and with participants. Furthermore, researchers should ensure that they are learning about and sharing a full range of experiences present in their chosen site, and not merely those consistent with their biases. Humanize the Participants and Their Experiences. Community members should not only be consulted but also afforded the power to guide the study through sharing their experiences. For example, critical race scholars have highlighted the conventional positionality of whiteness in storytelling research. This positionality begs the question of who controls the narrative of persons of color. Historically, whiteness has been privileged in narrative development and in the study of organizational storytelling, foregoing the actual experiences and voices of communities of color (Delgado & Stefancic, 1997; Harris, 1993). Doing proper CRT research means the research process and its results should reflect the diversity of people’s

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realities. Thus, the experiences and voices being shared must come from the community members themselves, as the participants hold expertise in their culture and histories. A related example of scholarship that humanizes its participants is that of Cruz’s (2015) work utilizing African feminist theory to understand how Liberian market women define dirty work, and deploy empowerment strategies displaying the intersections of gender, class, and nation. Cruz calls our attention to how Eurocentric organizational communication research has conventionally stigmatized “dirty work.” This simplification of the concept has excluded the impacts of gender, social class, and race on its definition and performance. Alternatively, Cruz (2015) shows how these three intersectional identities contextualize workers’ positive and negative meanings for their performance of dirty work. In other words, the meanings of dirty work are culture-dependent, and research must strive to preserve the experiences of multiple, relevant cultures in any given context. Participants hold expertise in their own cultural histories, and it is the duty of CRT scholars to give voice to the unheard, and to create space for the uninvited.

Lead with a focus on complexity/ anti-essentialism Race is a fluid social construct that is constantly shaped and reshaped by political structures and ethical practices (Calmore, 1992). Racialized experiences are fluid and complex because racial identities intersect with other identities. Therefore, critical race scholars have called for a reassessment of the understanding of race and racialized experiences. For example, the experiences of Black women have often been depicted as monolithic. However, Black women are different from each other (e.g., in ability, class, and sexuality), and respond to intersectional oppression differently (Austin & Cobb, 2021). As a result, research must be inclusive in sharing the intersectional experiences of Black women, while freeing them from

premature and limited comparisons to other groups. For example, avoiding the erasure or simplification of Black women’s experiences as solely steeped in trauma can restore appropriate focus on their resiliency, complexity, strength, need for refuge, joy, and imagination (Austin & Niles Goins, 2023). Below are three recommendations for fostering a more critical qualitative scholarship that is inclusive of the complexities of racialized and intersectional experiences. Analyzing Systems and Intersectionality. Acts of racism should be assessed systematically rather than as individual behaviors (Bell, 1988; Delgado, 1989). Racism is a historically rooted structure of oppression that has directly shaped the development of U.S. systems (e.g., law and education), and the ways people think about the implications of racial categories within these systems (Harris, 1993). Adopting a systematic perspective allows CRT scholars to engage the foundations of racism, which is necessary to sustain racial equity. A CRT and intersectional approach allow us to analyze multiple aspects of these racialized systems. For example, asking questions that include the perspectives of “racism + sexism + ableism + classism” affords us a more nuanced understanding of how U.S. systems marginalize multiple groups sharing multiple affiliations. Place Race Within a Social Context. In communication research, race is often simplified as a demographic factor, and a participant descriptor (Orbe et al., 2022). When race is operationalized in this fashion, issues of power, racism, and white supremacy are disregarded. Limiting race to a descriptor largely ignores the privileged structures of research, addresses only surface-level racial differences in settings, and ultimately simplifies the experiences of communities of color. This simplification illustrates how race is often socially constructed as a hierarchical category. To understand race’s social construction, the history of race relations must first be understood as a record of oppression and violence (Zuberi & Bonilla-Silva, 2008).

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These oppressive forces subsequently inform how privilege and oppression become located within political and social systems. Using a CRT lens provides space for subjective racialized experiences to be highlighted and meaningfully engaged with larger organizational norms and practices. We recommend going beyond merely identifying participants with racial categories, and instead studying how the meaning of their racial identities is communicatively constructed within their organizational environment. This focus would include questioning how their race and/or socially marginalized identities impact their experience, and vice-versa. Researchers can also investigate power dynamics that participants may experience – including how organi­zational policy may be applied differently, depending on their social location. Consider Intersections Beyond Race, Gender, and Class. As discussed above, Crenshaw’s (1989) concept of intersectionality provides a means for understanding the complexity of converging identities and oppression. Crenshaw coined the concept of intersectionality to name the experiences of Black women at the folds of race and gender. Since its inception, critical scholars have applied this concept to study marginalized identities occurring outside of the race/gender binaries. For example, Leonard and Grobler’s (2006) study analyzed how the equity practices of South African corporations shaped the organizational inclusion of traditionally oppressed groups, based on race, gender, and disability. Additionally, as described above, Cruz’s (2015) work also serves as a great example of extending intersectionality to include nationality. Traditionally, organizational researchers have excluded the experiences of historically marginalized communities with varying intersecting identities. Additional intersecting categories meriting consideration here include size, ability, language, sexuality, immigration status, age, neurodiversity, and more. This list is by no means exhaustive. Therefore, it is essential that critical scholars

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continue to investigate how these varying, intersecting identities impact the racialized experiences of these community members, to highlight their voices in ways that dismantle oppressive systems.

Considerations When Conducting a CRT Study The previous section focused on implementing a CRT lens during the initial phases of a CRT study. To continue maintaining a CRT lens, additional steps may be applied to ensure the chosen qualitative research method is grounded in CRT commitments. Thus, our next section will review recommendations for reclaiming traditional qualitative research and analysis practices.

Reclaim tools already given Reclaiming the purposes of conventional qualitative research tools for CRT purposes can be scientifically beneficial for all groups. The existing methodological tools discussed in this section include one-on-one interviews, focus groups, ethnographies, and autoethnographies. Traditionally, these tools have suppressed the voices of people of color due to the racialized standardization of related perspectives and practices privileging the interests of white researchers and participants (Dunbar et  al., 2002; Malagon et  al., 2009). This standardization has excluded as irrelevant the subjectivities of Black and Brown experiences that do not align with related norms. The critical recasting of these tools calls for CRT scholars to center the integrity of participants’ lived intersectional and racialized experiences within the practices of qualitative data collection and analysis that create authoritative knowledge (Thill, 2018). “When marginalized voices and perceptions of the ‘other’ are heard, systems that reinforce power are exposed and become that much closer to being dismantled” (Cobb et al., 2021, p. 191). Qualitative research encompasses the tools to achieve this goal, although a few adjustments

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are needed to fully implement a CRT and intersectional lens. Similar to requirements for the start of conceptualizing a CRT study, researchers should implement accountability measures at the start of their qualitative data collection, in order to check their biases and lack of knowledge regarding race – particularly the race of the community they are studying. One way to do so is to talk to other CRT scholars and get their perspectives before initiating the study. If possible, make sure to talk to scholars who have varying levels of expertise. CRT scholars who are experts in a researcher’s content area can check the appropriateness of their population sample, recruitment material, and question guides to ensure that these tools are valid and representative. Similarly, CRT scholars who are experts on a researcher’s chosen method can also check the appropriateness of recruitment material, question guides, and verification strategies. Again, these checks will help to validate that the researcher is properly on track. We now turn to review recommendations for interviews/focus groups and ethnography/autoethnography. One-on-One Interviews/Focus Groups. Qualitative interviews are great for gathering first-person narratives, counternarratives, and other types of accounts of real-life experiences. Focus groups are comparable in that they can generate similar information from multiple people at once (see Chapter 16 in this volume). It is true that one-on-one interviews allow for more in-depth and individualized experiences to be shared, and could be more psychologically safe and private for some participants. Nonetheless, focus groups can elicit shared memories and experiences between participants. In this way, interviews and focus groups have their respective strengths and limitations. Some of the most impactful data collected in both interviews and focus groups include the real-life experiences of the participant(s), as that information gives us a view into interactions with these

systems and structures. However, as mentioned above, the pre-standardized protocols of one-on-one interviews and focus groups are often insufficient for gathering authentic racialized experiences, as these protocols do not allow for making necessary adjustments. Using a CRT lens grants researchers the space needed to center race in qualitative organizational communication research. As a CRT researcher, one must deploy a CRT lens at every stage of a qualitative project. One of the initial stages involves question development. It is imperative here for researchers to understand that race affects the meaning they elicit from questions and participants’ responses (Dunbar et  al., 2002). This condition includes both the race of the researcher(s) and the participant(s). When developing a question guide, qualitative researchers should be intentional in critically centering race. To achieve this, they should be reflexive with their question development to minimize related assumptions and biases. Problematic questions can arise, for example, when researchers conflate the realities of a participant of color with “normalized” mainstream experiences (often white, heterosexual, cisgendered experiences), or generalize the experiences of all participants of color. For instance, Black participants will not have the same experiences as white participants, and may have differing experiences than Hispanic participants. Furthermore, all Black participants will not have the same experiences as one another. Such biases can be avoided by adopting the following two recommendations. First, qualitative researchers should view participants of color as “distinctly situated individuals,” knowing they have subjective experiences that may differ from the researcher’s prior knowledge (Dunbar et al., 2002, p. 3). Second, they should keep their questions open-ended (i.e., without using leading phrases reflecting racial generalization), and allow culturally subjective experiences to be highlighted. As mentioned above, the race of both the researcher(s) and the participant(s) are

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influential in CRT qualitative research. Thus, the researcher must understand their role and the impact their intersectional identities bring to their research. While prior knowledge of the research community can lead to biases and assumptions, it can also serve as an asset to the researcher. The researcher’s prior knowledge and experiences can lead them to better understand their participants and their experiences (Malagon et al., 2009). For example, Christopher Dunbar, Jr. (2002) shared his experience while conducting a qualitative study focusing on school-aged Black males. In this study, he was able to personally connect with one of the students because they shared cultural experiences as Black men (Dunbar et al., 2002). As a result, the student developed a level of trust with Dunbar which encouraged their co-production of more authentic interaction and interviewing. Trust is imperative in conducting CRT qualitative research, especially given the racist history of research conducted on communities of color. It is the role of the CRT researcher to systematically build this trust with participants. In a related example, Niles Goins (2011) utilized focus groups to analyze how the stories shared in Black women friend groups serve as “negotiation of and rebellion against” the intersectional oppression they experience (p. 532). Here, racism and sexism are seen to simultaneously impact the lives of Black women, and friendship can serve as a safe space. Niles Goins and her research assistant conducted focus groups as an informal gettogether at one of the participant’s homes, which included preparing and serving a meal. This intentional data collection method provided a safe space for participants to freely engage in conversation, as they were in a familiar environment, and meals often serve as a staple of fellowship among the members of Black communities. Further, because Niles Goins and her research assistant are Black women, the participants may have felt more identified with them. The findings from this study indicated that communication

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practices among Black women friend groups sometimes conform to societal norms, and sometimes reject them (Niles Goins, 2011). If the researcher is considered an “insider” with the participant’s culture, their prior experience can benefit them as they may have knowledge of cultural norms. Self-disclosure can also help to build trust as participants of color may initially be mistrusting and remain silent or minimal in their responses (Dunbar et  al., 2002; Malagon et  al., 2009). Treating the beginning of an interview more like a conversation, and sharing personal experiences could help the participant to disclose more about theirs. On the other hand, if the researcher is considered a cultural “outsider”, they will likely have to take additional steps to get to know the participants’ racial culture, and build trust. At the start of the interview, we also recommend explicitly noting the researcher’s “outsider” status, and reassuring participants of their intentions for their study. Acknowledging this elephant in the room can allow for the development of open and honest responses across the duration of the study. Another recommendation is to have another member of the research team that is more versed in the culture conduct—or accompany the researcher during—data collection. Taking the time to bias-check the interview guide and build trust at the start of the interview are strategies that can go a long way in developing a healthy researcher–participant relationship. Ethnography/Autoethnography. Ethnog­ raphy involves the reflexive documenting of a culture or community through immersive participation and systematic observation occurring in its natural environment (see Chapter 2 in this volume). As a related practice, autoethnography involves a researcher documenting and analyzing their personal experiences in a cultural setting, and connecting them to its wider practices, traditions, and norms (see Chapter 12 in this volume). Ethnography and autoethnography are grounded in CRT when their explorations are focused on capturing the existence

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of structural racism, and highlighting the experiences of communities of color. In the field of communication, the goal of CRT ethnography and autoethnography is not only to understand the uniquely discursive production of oppressive practices, but to dismantle them and implement equitable systems. The following recommendations provide the means to do just that. First, as the researcher begins their ethnographic exploration, we recommend they integrate the continuous promotion of multiple forms of consciousness (i.e., points of view) through their observations and writing of field notes (Duncan, 2002). When engaging in participant observation, for example, do not disregard available perspectives, especially if they diverge from institutionally preferred viewpoints. Researchers should actively seek these points of divergence between the community they are observing, and the organizational norms that often perpetuate racialized experiences. This recommendation will allow researchers to expose racist stereotypes, and complicate racialized experiences to create a more truthful and holistic picture of participant experiences. When taking field notes, the researcher should actively search for points of both convergence and divergence between their notes and the participants’ views. Engaging in this reflexive practice will lead the researcher to uncover the influence of power and other systemic issues on their perception of communities of color—most importantly, the community they are observing. Next, the researcher should search for alternative interpretations and explanations that differ from their initial understanding. They should engage the community when doing this, to ensure that these understandings align. This process can include using strategies such as follow-up interviews, member checking, and/ or additional observation. Second, refrain from operating with a savior complex. The savior complex leads to the development of Delgado’s (1996) concept of false empathy, whereby the researcher

places themselves in the shoes of communities of color, and imagines different scenarios for improving their existence (i.e., what they “could” or “should” do). Usually, those alternatives disregard the host of barriers that those communities may have already faced in trying to better their situation. Although such practices often come from a place of “care”, false empathy invalidates the actual historical experiences of participants of color. Instead, the data should emphasize the voice of participants. It is important to note that false empathy can occur among both white researchers and researchers of color, especially if they are observing a community they view as “underprivileged” or “underserved.” Again, the goal is for researchers to collaborate with affected communities to expose systematic racism— not to prematurely or exclusively emphasize the researcher’s own solutions. As an example, Angela Gist-Mackey (2018) studied job search communication training for blue- and white-collar job seekers at an unemployment support nonprofit. This study serves as a great example of an ethnography rooted in CRT and intersectionality. Gist-Mackey (2018) designed her study to understand how participants depicted both classed and raced inequalities, and changed that system through consciousness-raising practices. Throughout her data collection and analysis, she constantly critiqued the influence of her presence on related events, and emphasized comparing marginalized forms of participant experience with those more privileged. Her findings revealed the influence of biased communication norms that devalued classed and racially marginalized job seekers’ communication practices. Ultimately, Gist-Mackey called for a structural shift to emancipate marginalized communication styles. While some researchers are wary of autoethnography, it has its place in critical qualitative research. In research, participants’ experiences are used to inform the development of theoretical explanations, but racialized experiences inform that development as

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well (Chávez, 2012). Specifically, researchers of color have lived experiences that often awaken them to the existence and influence of oppressive systems. CRT-influenced autoethnography can help these researchers make sense of related experiences, while simultaneously exposing those systems through the expression of vulnerability. It is important to note that CRT-influenced autoethnography should by no means be solely relegated to BIPOC scholars. Scholars who have more privileged experiences within the system can also speak out, providing a view different from minority groups of color. Sharing experiences of activism generated from within the system forms another, important opportunity to connect racialized experiences with larger institutional/organizational racisms, and promote change. One way to draw these connections is to problematize organizational practices that inform what people consider the “ordinary” way of doing things and living life. Frequently, these norms are informed by white experiences and neglect the subjective experiences of people of color (Chávez, 2012). Another strategy is to analyze the impact of these institutional/organizational norms on the livelihood of communities of color through reflection and analysis. Here, researchers can use their personal experiences to expose the impact of systematic racism on organizational norms. For example, Cobb (2022) draws on personal experience to both expose structural barriers stigmatizing mental health conditions within the Black community, and provide communicative alternatives. For example, she shares how the lack of public discourse led her to believe that mental health was not something Black people experienced. Thus, discouraging her from seeking professional help until she felt her hardships were unbearable, and realized that other community members might be similarly affected. She concludes with practical recommendations for how researchers, practitioners, and Black community members can all engage in organi­ zing to create a more equitable mental health system.

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It is important to note here that CRT autoethnography can represent either an individual’s personal experience, or a composite narrative of multiple researcher experiences. Cruz et al. (2020), for example, published a collaborative autoethnography sharing their intersectional experiences as foreign-born faculty members. Their personal stories highlight the intersectional nuances and challenges that those faculty experience in navigating academic life. Similarly, Cruz et al.’s (2020) analysis collaboratively reveals the impact of U.S. politics on how foreigners perform gender, class, race, sexuality, and age.

Data analysis strategies The previous three subsections focused on applying a critical lens before and during data collection. This final subsection will focus on strategies of critical research in the post-data collection phase. During their ana­ lyses, researchers can use a few validation strategies to remain sufficiently critical throughout their study (Creswell, 2007). First, they should check for disconfirming instances in their data whenever a persistent theme occurs, to ensure they are accurately representing all relevant experiences. In addition, fully considering the significance of alternate stories (e.g., counternarratives) in their data can provide researchers with a more holistic understanding of the relevant effects of political, social, and economic structures. Second, researchers should engage in member-checking with their participants, in order to solicit their reaction to a study’s findings. If any questions or challenges arise, researchers should ask their participants if they are comfortable with conducting follow-up interviews to explore areas of confusion and concern. If so, researchers should use this additional time with participants to double-check the completeness, accuracy, and sensitivity of their analysis and interpretations. Additionally, researchers can increase the chances of success here by utilizing a cyclical process of

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data collection and analysis, in which they feed the implications of analyzing completed interviews into their remaining interviews and observations. Third, to restate one of our earlier recommendations, researchers should ask a trusted colleague (preferably one familiar with the racialized and personal experiences of the participants) to check the findings and interpretations.

Considerations When Completing a CRT Study Our previous two sections have highlighted recommendations for integrating a CRT lens as the foundation of a qualitative study of organizational communication. This last section of our chapter focuses on maintaining a CRT lens after the study is completed. The two recommendations highlighted here focus on ensuring that participants understand the practical application of the research findings, and identifying ways to incorporate purposeful language in manuscript writing.

Bring the findings back to the community As we have argued above, one of the most impactful ways for researchers to compensate participants is to bring their research findings back to that community. In other words, researchers should ensure that the findings of their studies are available and accessible to participants. This practice honors CRT’s commitment to prioritizing the interests of communities of color in our research, from beginning to end. We can share our findings and their implications with community members via writing white papers, developing community/organi­ zational training programs, participating in the implementation of those programs, or even by preparing a list of relevant resources. White papers are short 1–2-page outlines of the research conducted, clarifying and the main takeaways. These papers are often more

accessible for lay readers as the information is presented less formally and more succinctly than the typical research paper. Developing and implementing community training programs reflect a more hands-on approach, in which researchers can personally ensure that community members benefit from their study’s findings. This process is more in-depth, in that interventions are implemented with the goal of changing structural factors such as organizational policy. Lastly, creating a list of resources is less involved, but these documents can help community members to find the assistance when needed. For example, if a participant is a small minority business owner in need of financial assistance, a list of related grant programs would be useful.

Use purposeful language Too often, studies use equivocal language when referring to uncomfortable topics—for example, calling racism “prejudice,” or calling white supremacists “Karen.”1 We must move away from using vague or ambiguous language to call out structural inequities and oppressive systems, and move towards being intentional and honest when labeling occurrences. Also, the researcher should clearly define terms to make sure they and their audience have a shared meaning of concepts. For example, we should not just say marginalized when describing experiences of racism. Instead, we should define how being marginalized can look, and explain how certain groups are marginalized through racism by providing examples. CRT researchers understand that we must expose, challenge, and dismantle these systems through unmistakable language. Another important aspect is to increase the communicative accessibility of our findings and implications. Our language use should be as concrete as possible to minimize confusion and misunderstandings. The information shared should also be as succinct as possible and make the practical application of the findings/implications clear, so that

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community members can understand how to integrate the findings into their communities and organizations.

CONCLUSION This chapter has called for radical innovation. It called for envisioning qualitative research in organizational communication as a site for justly transforming organizations and institutions that maintain the pervasiveness of racial oppression. It has called for intentional CRT and intersectional organizational communication scholarship that serves as the vehicle for exposing systems of oppressive power, ultimately leading to change. In doing so, we have elaborated how the traditions of CRT and intersectional research fit into the evolving agendas of both the communication discipline, and organizational communication studies. We have outlined considerations and recommendations that CRT scholars should consider as they conceptualize their qualitative studies, collect and analyze data, and complete their research. Overall, our argument demonstrates that the programs of CRT and intersectionality are well positioned for growth in qualitative organizational communication studies. We hope that our readers are now encouraged and better prepared to participate in this growth.

Note 1  A white woman who uses white privilege as an entitlement for personal demands, typically to counter valid experiences of BIPOC community members.

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9 Postcolonial Qualitative Research in Organizational Communication Mahuya Pal, Beatriz Nieto-Fernandez, and Silpa Satheesh

Organizational communication research has taken a fresh turn toward embracing theoretical and methodological approaches derived from postcolonial traditions. This adoption of the postcolonial tradition responds to growing calls for challenging imperial legacies, and including subjugated knowledges in organizational discourses (Cruz & Sodeke, 2021; Pal et al., 2022). To further invigorate this interest, we aim here to discuss the larger ontological, epistemological, and political issues inherent in the postcolonial tradition of using qualitative research methods in organizational communication studies. In particular, we explore the ideological and institutional conditions within which qualitative research in the postcolonial tradition takes place, and highlight the political nature of such research. Generally speaking, postcolonial studies provide theoretical and methodological resources to examine, challenge, and transform power imbalances that sustain imperial legacies through the exercise of economic,

political, and cultural control. We intend to describe key ideas from postcolonial studies in this chapter, demonstrating its salience in politicizing organizational communication research, and calling attention to its epistemological and methodological commitments for qualitative research. In what follows, we first discuss the key commitments of postcolonial qualitative research, before moving on to describing two primary analytics of postcolonial ethnography, namely, dialectics of structure and agency, and solidarity and reflexivity. We argue that engaging with these conceptual categories is central to postcolonial ethnographic work for recovering voices from below, and inverting dominant epistemes. Thereafter, we provide an overview of two major qualitative methodologies in this tradition. First, we review ethnographic research in organizational communication to explain how this body of work stands in relation to postcolonial commitments. We follow by presenting an example from the third author’s

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postcolonial ethnographic work in the Global South. Second, we review the emerging practice of postcolonial critical discourse analysis (PCDA) in organizational communication studies, and illustrate this practice through an example from the second author’s research. While the first half of the chapter elucidates postcolonial methodological commitments in ethnographic fieldwork, the second half of this chapter describes postcolonial discourse analysis for research involving texts and artifacts. We hope our engagement with postcolonial qualitative research in the realm of ethnography and PCDA in this chapter offers entry points for challenging hegemonies, redressing widespread disparities, shifting the unit of analysis from single organization to organization of the political economy, and envisioning alternative social imaginaries. In the following section, we highlight some of the key postulates widely viewed as central to qualitative postcolonial organizational research.

POSTCOLONIAL COMMITMENTS IN ORGANIZATIONAL QUALITATIVE RESEARCH The postcolonial framework examines a wide range of social and political disparities, and uneven power relations, between nations in the Global North, and those in the Global South (particularly located in Asia, Africa, and Latin America), as a consequence of the history of imperialism and colonialism, and their aftermaths (Loomba, 2005; Pal, 2016). For the citizens of nations in the Global South, colonialism has ended in terms of their territorial occupation by imperialists, but unequal relations of colonial rule have been re-established in the new global landscape, and first world nations continue their economic and cultural penetration of the Global South (Loomba, 2005). Committed to social and economic justice, the political agenda of postcolonial studies includes challenging the

unquestioned sovereignty and hegemony of Western categories in our organizing principles—including those that are epistemological, economic, political, or cultural (Prasad, 2003). Engaging these categories demonstrates how Western conceptions of organi­ zations and organizing insidiously colonize rural and indigenous systems of knowledge and ways of organizing (Banerjee, 2011; Pal & Dutta, 2013). As a critical qualitative approach to studying organizational communication, postcolonial studies is concerned with interrogating dominant constructions of knowledge, and retrieving alternative organizing processes. As an intellectual resource, it offers guidance to organizational members and their stakeholders by demonstrating the influence of colonial logics in dominant organizational concepts. Additionally, it problematizes and redresses the erasure of non-Western knowledge systems, and critiques the establishment of Western rationality as a universal principle of organizing. Finally, it challenges practices of appropriation and essentialization performed by the West in its representation of the nonWestern world (Jack & Westwood, 2006). Drawing from the work of foundational scholars such as Edward Said (1978) and Gayatri Spivak (1988), postcolonial studies in organizational communication (Broadfoot & Munshi, 2007; Prasad, 2003) challenges the ideal of “representational neutrality” in the development of disciplinary knowledge, and rejects the “pursuit of ‘pure’ knowledge” (Jack & Westwood, 2006, p. 489). Alternately, postcolonial scholars argue that a key goal is to lay bare research as itself an exercise of (neo-) colonial power, and demonstrate how Western epistemology is rooted in a particular, dubious system of representation. Specifically, that system sustains and governs Western representation of the non-Western world as passive, premodern, and other. Postcolonial epistemology subsequently makes interventions into “the presumed innocence and neutrality of scholarship and scientific research” (Jack & Westwood, 2006, p. 489) that systematically

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produce knowledge of the apparently inferior other, and naturalize discursive and cultural meanings deployed in the process of constructing that other. In the contemporary economy, these cultural and discursive meanings primarily serve to identify geographical zones of “underdevelopment,” and oppose their interests to those of “progress” and “development.” Egregiously, the West has institutionalized this opposition for the purpose of continuing its colonial modes of extraction—creating what Harvey (2005) calls new imperialism (see also Banerjee, 2011; Cruz, 2015; Cruz & Sodeke, 2021; Pal, 2016). This issue of new imperialism becomes relevant at the end of direct colonialism, achieved through territorial occupation, when former colonies are turned into development projects for evolving Empire. Here, historical imperial logics are repackaged through the state-market nexus in the name of development. This state-market nexus is enabled by neoliberal economic practices, which are characterized by private property rights, individual liberty, trade liberalization, and withdrawal of the state from public services. Simultaneously, financial institutions such as the World Trade Organization (WTO) and International Monetary Fund (IMF) play key roles in aligning the newly independent national governments in the Global South with a global market-driven economy (Harvey, 2005). One of the major consequences of the politics of extraction carried out in the name of development involves the dispossession and displacement of communities. This abuse of power leads to the organization of struggle movements by rural and indigenous communities against their own governments and/or transnational corporations, over the control of land and resources (Pal, 2016). To confirm: in this chapter, we primarily view “the West/Global North” and “the non-West/Global South” as discursive and ideological formations, formed by a network of power relations (Banerjee, 2008). The non-West/Global South subsequently

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occupies the space of extraction and exclusion, where communities, their livelihoods and knowledge systems are continually targeted by networks of capital in the West/ Global North under the guise of development (Dutta & Pal, 2020). The conditions of the Global South can exist within the Global North, actively producing raced, classed, and gendered inequalities in these spaces (Dutta & Pal, 2020). For instance, note how colonial legacies (conditions of the Global South) are maintained through extractive regimes within the heart of the empire—i.e., the GlobalNorth—where colonialism has never actually ended for the Native Americans (Pal & D’Souza, 2020). A postcolonial approach thus links development projects conducted in the Global South to colonial ideology, and recognizes the organization of struggle by communities as rightful quests for the control and use of resources. With its emphasis on understanding imperial legacies, a postcolonial framework explores the rationality of communities organizing against dominant development discourses and practices. It unmasks political and ideological agendas masquerading in neoliberal policies as instruments of growth and progress. Subsequent critical questions include: Whose interests do projects of development serve? How is imperial logic sustained by dominant organizations in the name of development? How do communities facing the brunt of development organize their struggles against state and corporations? These questions primarily bring forth two research agendas under the purview of qualitative research in organizational communication. These agendas situate dominant organizations as imperial sites of power, and draw attention to the development of struggle by underprivileged communities through alternative and informal organizing. Regarding these communities, a postcolonial framework suggests that we understand their organizational philosophy from the perspective of their alternative rationalities, rather than that of Eurocentric epistemes—that is,

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as opposed to either conforming to or deviating from conventional Western principles of organization (Pal, 2016). Fundamentally, a commitment to critically understanding alternative rationalities involves uncovering intellectual imperialism, and excavating other knowledge systems. Two key questions follow: How can we understand organizational discourses from the perspective of other? What does it take to make that possible? Hence, postcolonial qualitative researchers are committed to rewriting ideas of organi­ zing and organizations, and defining praxis through engagement with underprivileged communities who have traditionally been absent in dominant organizational concepts and models. Further, they introduce and privilege the voices of local/indigenous/other into the ongoing development and expression of knowledge concerning organizational communication (Pal & Dutta, 2013). Here, we argue that enhanced knowledge of the other can be achieved in dominant academic discourses through the conduct of critical ethnography that is guided by politics of solidarity and reflexivity. Relatedly, we argue, postcolonial scholars, interested in texts and artifacts and concerned with interrogating colonial underpinnings in dominant organizational discourses and recovering hidden scripts, can deploy PCDA. We begin with our discussion of key analytics in postcolonial ethnography in the next section.

ETHNOGRAPHY Despite its problematic history rooted in colonial domination and exploitation (Brewer, 2000; Pels & Salemink, 1994), ethnography can serve as a tool to decolonize the process of research and knowledge production in organizational communication. A critical ethnographic commitment to bringing voices from the Global South to the center of mainstream organizational research fosters the process of theory construction

from below (Charmaz, 2006). This concept expresses how the mobilizing experiences and structures of groups in the Global South challenge and update existing concepts and theories (Paludi et  al., 2019). Additionally, when used as a tool in postcolonial settings, ethnography must not confine its focus entirely to everyday experiences and reflexivity, but place them against structural backdrops such as political economy. In other words, such ethnographies will enable an inquiry into the structural situatedness and everyday operations of alternative organi­ zations, conducted within postcolonial milieux. Finally, as mentioned earlier, scholars have highlighted the importance of articulating and navigating the boundaries of the field, and urged ethnographers to be reflexive concerning their social location (Manning, 2016), in order to ensure representation of participant voices in a given study. Next, we discuss the dialectics of structure and agency in the context of postcolonial ethnography, before moving on to describing the relevance of solidarity and reflexivity.

Teasing Out the Intersection of Structure and Agency Given the complex social, political, and cultural milieux created by the long history of colonial domination, it is important to explore meanings attributed to organizations by indigenous social actors against this backdrop. Due to the prolonged influence of colonial rule, the process of Westernization and modernization that unfolded in postcolonial settings ended up creating what scholars refer to as “modernity with a difference” (Gupta, 1998, p. 11). In this variant, local organizations and their stakeholders sought to embrace a scientific temper, without compromising their values and culture (Chatterjee & Riley, 2001). Postcolonial regimes of development have subsequently sought to shift their subjects from “traditional” to more “modern” societies and economies, which

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has resulted in creating unequal burdens for the marginalized sections of these newly independent nation-states (Kothari, 1996). In such a context it becomes further important to address these unique challenges while devising methodologies to unravel the meanings and practices of everyday life, which are embedded within specific social, political, and cultural discourses and practices surrounding this development. Such considerations assume greater significance in studies that involve nontraditional organizations. The goal here is also not to depict the Global “South” as a monolith or homogenous entity. Rather, the focus is on understanding the local moorings of each setting, foregrounding the importance of social context. Methodologically speaking, it is important to reflect on the problematics underlying purist constructionist approaches to grounded theory, or ethnography that encourage researchers to approach settings by preserving their minds as “blank slates” or tabula-rasa (Charmaz, 2016). In the context of most postcolonial settings, this approach ensures that the researcher will completely overlook the operation of socio-historical forces and systems of oppression. For instance, it would make more sense to study a postcolonial environmental movement by situating it within the backdrop of the political economy of development, neoliberal capitalism, and concomitant environmental burdens distributed among the poor and marginalized sections of society. It is, therefore, important that ethnographic inquiries of the Global South recognize the interactions between the system and the social (Bhambra, 2016; Habermas, 1988), including by linking everyday forms of social struggles to the structure of capitalist production and economic development. By only looking at the processes of meaning-making and their interpretations in this context, researchers may completely miss the operations of power and structural systems of inequality that render some meanings, narratives, and interpretations more prominent than others. This call to focus on structure does not negate the agency of individuals, but

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rather situating them within the structure can shed light on individual actions. However, locating the agency of cultural participants calls for researchers to adopt a politics of solidarity and reflexivity.

Solidarity and Reflexivity in Fieldwork The role of a postcolonial qualitative researcher committed to challenging dominant structures of power, and recovering organizational discourses and practices at the margins, is that of building solidarity and creating spaces for listening to marginalized communities. The philosophy of postcolonial qualitative research is aligned with the ethical considerations of critical ethnography (Madison, 2005), where entering the domain of otherness in the interest of social justice entails ethical responsibility. Here, an important first step is for researchers to recognize that the discursive context for their speaking to communities is inevitably imbued with complex power relations that typically favor Western interests. It is this recognition of embodied privilege of the researcher that is central to the philosophy of postcolonial ethnography. Some of the key elements of the participatory nature of engagement in postcolonial ethnography entail an acute awareness of embedded power structures, the ethics of listening, and the moral imperative for cultural members to be involved directly and actively in the interpretive process of constructing meanings (Dutta, 2008; Pal & Dutta, 2013). For postcolonial organizational communication scholarship, particularly those invested in addressing the politics of indigenous resource extraction, these principles are meant to bring to the fore alternative meanings of development, and alternative organizing principles of social life through dialogues with communities. The oppositional stance of these communities toward hegemonic neoliberal economy enables them to critique related policies, and

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show us a path toward dismantling normative understanding of organizing/organization that is predominantly White, middle class, and Eurocentric (Broadfoot & Munshi, 2007; Escobar, 2008; Pal, 2014). Hence, the goal of qualitative postcolonial organizational research is to legitimize the agency of indigenous communities, and their alternative forms and practices organizing. The politics of solidarity is immensely relevant for this recovery of silenced voices (Beverley, 2004). Solidarity calls attention to relations of power that predispose marginalized communities to oppose the privileged position of the author/academic. The philosophy of solidarity asks a postcolonial studies scholar to recognize his/her/their location within these power structures, and to not represent cultures from an allegedly superior “outside” (Beverley, 2004; Pal, 2014). This project of solidarity is intricately tied to the practice of reflexivity. As such, it necessitates a critique of our own complicity with institutional norms, which often leads us to fail to theorize from the perspective of the other, and instead default to perpetuating dominant practices of representation. This commitment to the politics of location animates Gayatri Spivak’s landmark essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (1988). Spivak argues that the act of allowing  or enabling the other to speak, constructs the dubious impression that we can seamlessly engage in a conversation with the other, negating the differential power between us given our own position of privilege (Beverley, 2022). This issue poses an important question for a postcolonial ethnographer: how can we engage with communities located at the political, economic and societal margins, and instead imagine a process of more authentically and accountably knowing and representing them, thus expressing a commitment to solidarity? Inevitably, postcolonial ethnography requires researchers to practice intense selfscrutiny of their position of power. It also emphasizes that any ethnographic work invested in recovering voices at the margins is also as much about the journey of the

researcher. Enacting solidarity and engaging with reflexivity cannot be put into practice without negotiating the privilege of the academic. As Harasym (1990) and Beverley (2004) argue, the fundamental question of such a research project entails: How can we imagine and engage in a politics that lets communities emerge into hegemony? (also see Pal, 2014). To imagine a system of representation that establishes communities of struggle on their own terms, postcolonial ethnography requires researchers to disembed themselves from dominant conceptual categories in an effort to not imposing their thinking onto organizational and cultural members. Such a reflexive approach has brought forth some alternative organizing principles around the relationship between communities, organizations, and nature. Before moving onto providing an illustration of a postcolonial ethnographic case study from the third author’s research, we offer a brief overview of ethnography in organi­ zational communication.

Ethnography in Organizational Communication The qualitative tradition of ethnography holds a significant place in the field of organi­zational communication (see Chapter 2 in this volume). The paradigmatic linguistic turn in the field contributed to a robust growth in ethnography in the 1980s. Ethnographic research, in particular, fueled the field’s interest in organization-culture metaphor and eventually played an important role in shaping the humanistic understanding of organizational communication. It became a methodological alternative for a scholarly community who situated themselves in critical and interpretive epistemological traditions. It allowed them to generate nuanced and detailed descriptive data and bring in their subjective meaning-making for studying organizations as opposed to producing objective and generalized understanding of

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organizations upheld in the positivistic epistemes. Drawing from a variety of theoretical traditions, these scholars contributed to a body of scholarship focused on topics such as organizational change, collaboration, conflict, control, culture, democracy, gender, identity, socialization and technology, as well resistance and ideology (Taylor, 2016). Ethnographic research in the field also comprised interdisciplinary projects, international collaborations, and research on globalization from below. A number of developments in our social and academic life have led to recent decline in the conduct of ethnographic research. Taylor and colleagues (2021) share their insights on the potential reasons for this decline, and we generally concur. However, we also agree that the field’s renewed interest in social justice and community engagement may reinvigorate ethnographic research in organizational communication. As well, we believe that postcolonial qualitative research may reinforce these heightened interests. A stronger commitment to studying the politics of the Global South may bolster community-engaged ethnographic research, and push the boundaries of qualitative research in organizational communication. A postcolonial emphasis invigorates critique of the dominant modes of knowledge production, recognizes the crisis of representation in ethnographic research, and proposes as solutions epistemic inversions or writing in reverse (Beverley, 2004; Spivak, 1988). Furthermore, the emphasis of postcolonial ethnography on political economic exploitation, and its emancipatory concern shown for the collective’s well-being, disrupt the typical focus displayed in critical ethnographic work on individualistic practices of strategy, conducted in single workplaces (Ganesh et  al., 2005). Alternately, we argue that postcolonial ethnography has the potential to shift this focus to engage in broader structurallevel examinations. The following section describes a postcolonial ethnographic case study in the Global South.

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Case Study: Mapping the Organizational Narratives of Social Movements in Kerala We now turn to illustrate the principles of the postcolonial-critical framework with an example of a postcolonial qualitative study conducted by the third author. This example demonstrates the principles of solidarity and reflexivity in fieldwork, as well as the interplay of structure and agency in the production of knowledge. It also demonstrates how ethnographic research can challenge dominant understanding of organizations, and bring forth alternative ideas about organi­ zational communication. To tease out the importance of postcolonial ethnography as a qualitative research method in organizational communication studies, this section explores the interaction between trade unions and grassroots environmental movements in Kerala, a south Indian state. Kerala has a unique history of working-class movements, communist governments, and a muchacclaimed model of social development. The current study sought to understand conflicts occurring between various labor and green movements in this region, surrounding issues of industrial pollution. It did so by situating these issues within the shifting class politics between labor and capital, the political economy of development, and the growth of industrial capitalism. The union collective discussed here is called the Standing Council of Trade Unions (hereafter, SCTU), and the local environmental movement is led by an organization called Periyar Malineekarana Virudha Samithi (Periyar Anti-Pollution Campaign; hereafter, PMVS). SCTU is a collection of industrial workers’ trade unions, and the grassroots environmental movement is largely constituted of working-class participants from the region. Our mandate here is to demonstrate how postcolonial-critical ethnography evokes the contextual production of meanings associated with theoretical concepts in organizational communication. Additionally, it illustrates

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how the ethnographic method facilitates the process of theory construction from below by uncovering labor-environmental conflicts that challenge mainstream theorizing. Finally, it shows how this method succeeds in teasing out the competing frames and organizational narratives produced by two social movements surrounding an issue of industrial pollution. Reconstructing the history of resourcepoor environmental struggles in the Global South assumes greater significance, given the omission of such movements from mainstream environmental historiography. Using oral history interviews during ethnographic research can bring forth the history of the emergence of local environmental organizations which often goes undocumented in mainstream media and narratives. More so, the mobilizing experiences in postcolonial settings are often enmeshed within existing social, cultural, economic, and political structures. Therefore, using ethnographic methods grounded in an interdisciplinary framework will aid in teasing out the nuances of how contextual factors shape organizational communication as demonstrated below. A few factors played an important role in facilitating the emergence and growth of local environmental movements in the EloorEdayar industrial belt, including the presence of shared environmental grievances, the prior organizational experience of the frontline leaders, the presence of wide base support, and the use of creative protest tactics (Satheesh, 2020b). During the initial phase of the anti-pollution campaign, the increased vulnerability experienced by these workers played a crucial role in motivating them to participate in the movement events. In recounting the emergence of this movement, one participant in the study, Abdu, talked about its strong base of support among the inland fish workers as follows: [T]o fight against this…(Abdu, member of PMVS, personal interview, May 30, 2018) The majority of participants in our first protest were fish workers.

Fishermen from Varappuzha, Kadamakkudy from all these regions…they need no convincing of the issue, you know…they were struggling with it and was looking out for options…openings, to express their dissent….and perhaps, a leadership

The above excerpt shows how the participation of fisherfolk was deeply rooted in the everyday disruptions of the quotidian they faced due to industrial pollution. Interestingly, it appears that these grievances played as much a role as prior organizational experience and political opportunities/threats in the movement’s emergence. Being active members of the People’s Science Movement in Kerala (Kerala Saasthra Sahithya Parishad; hereafter, KSSP) was invoked as an important organizational experience that helped the founders of the green movement to gain legitimacy and collectivize the community. A careful examination of the campaign documents such as posters, flyers, and pamphlets published in Malayalam explicated the various strategies and tactics used by the organization during the initial period. Much of these documents were stored in an old room adjacent to a movement member’s house, and since they were not digitized most of them had been destroyed by termites or water. During a field visit, Kumar, the frontline leader of PMVS recounted how its members decided to form a massive human chain across the river Periyar as follows: During that meeting, we decided that on August 1st (1998), we will organize a protest…we decided to organize a protest on the river. So, what protest? We decided to form a human chain on boats, by parking boats together…so that we can block the waterways through which industrial barges reach Eloor…

This human chain organized on August 1st, 1998, played a crucial role in making the group’s fight against pollution more visible and resonant among the region’s mainstream society, and PMVS was formally launched.

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The success of this event indicates the widespread participation enjoyed by the group among the fisherfolk community, and their use of boats as both a symbolic and practical prop to carry out the protest event. Such details could only be unraveled through ethnographic engagements, as they were not recorded in written or digital forms. In this way, much of the poor and working-class organizational history in postcolonial settings falls outside the domain of research on organizational communication or strategies as they are not in English, and neither are they available online. More importantly, they do not conform to Eurocentric understanding of what an organization ought to be. Similarly, ethnography recenters the contextual production of meanings and interpretations surrounding theoretical concepts. For example, the unique history of working-class mobilizations and communism in Kerala has exposed its residents to Marxian theory and lexicons of class politics, to an extent where these concepts have interpretations rooted in the social and cultural history of the region. Furthermore, in-depth ethnographic interviews uncovered the heterogeneity of the term “working-class” (which is often presumed to be a homogenous category), as it transcends the factory shop floor to include the informal and resource-dependent sectors of the economy. In defining the idea of “work” and “worker,” for example, Kumar exclaimed, “What is the working-class? Who is a worker? There is a certain definition. They [trade unions] are seeing things outside of this definition now. Everyone who toils is a worker. Anyone who sells his labor power is a worker” [emphasis added]. Kumar’s words bring out broader definitions of “work” and “worker” that transcend the shop floor of a factory. Besides, among the green movement groups, PMVS is pronounced in its affiliations with Marxian ideology, and this mainly traces back to the members’ strong ties to the communist movement, communist party, KSSP, and other organizations affiliated with the political left (Satheesh, 2020;

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2021). Moreover, ethnographic observations of movement organizations exposed the problematics of the mainstream (singular) conceptualization of “environmentalism” as a middle-class phenomenon. Citing the strong working-class roots1 of the grassroots environmental organization PMVS, this study showed how many of the environmental movements in the Global South are also struggles for protecting their livelihoods and hence, survival. In this study, the ethnographic facilitation of theory construction from below can be demonstrated with a specific example. The extant literature on labor-environmental conflicts had pinned down class-based tensions between working-class trade unions and middle-class environmental movements as a possible explanation for inter-organi­ zational rifts. However, extensive observations and interviews conducted in the Eloor-Edayar industrial belt highlighted the working-class roots1 of the grassroots environmental movement, thereby challenging the dominant understanding of environmentalism as a strictly middle-class phenomenon (Satheesh, 2020a). Alternately, the majority of the members of the local environmental movement are daily wageworkers and casual workers who are largely located in the informal economy, undertaking precarious work and without a steady stream of income or benefits (Satheesh, 2021). Furthermore, local perspectives unearthed by ethnographic interviews emphasized the need to understand the working-class as a heterogeneous category, to which unions and environmental movements attach varied interpretations. Ethnographic methods also helped to explain the intersection of class and environmental grievances, in which workers are traditionally presumed to develop class consciousness only after demanding the conservation of their local environment and community. Instead, this ethnography vividly depicted the broader definition of class guiding the actions of the green movement –

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one that moved beyond the boundaries of work, production, and the economy. Thus, in-depth engagements with the participants enabled the ethnographer to uncloak the varied operations of concepts in a postcolonial organizational field. Moreover, this approach examined the intersection of a structural concept such as class and its everyday meanings, as attributed by movement actors. This approach located the continued relevance of class in understanding social movement mobilization in Kerala. This was significant considering how much of the extant movement literature has confirmed the “demise of class” (Buechler, 2005). To summarize, ethnographic methods employed in this study unraveled the competing frames (i.e., for articulating grievances) produced by the two social movement groups for their engagement with pollution. Placed in an industrial estate circled by a river named Periyar, much of the stand-off between the two groups narrowed down to the existence of pollution. While the members of the local green movement categorically established the prevalence of pollution, the union leaders actively sought to deny it. This frame dispute came up many times in the ethnographic data. Above all, this ethnographic study, guided by the philosophy of postcolonial critique, invoked an intersectional analysis of class, culture, and nature, to analyze the complex interplay of power dynamics and its reflection in organizational communication. It required an understanding of cultural and historical knowledge that considered the location of different communities within a complex web of power structures and relations. It also required practicing solidarity, mutual respect, and recognition of the lived specificities of communities of struggle, and their entanglements with power on different levels. Next, we discuss the related implications of postcolonial critical discourse analysis for interrogating organizational texts and uncovering layers of meanings.

POSTCOLONIAL CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS In this section, we discuss postcolonial methods for critically reading organizational discourse. Specifically, this section introduces Postcolonial Critical Discourse Analysis (PCDA) as an innovative practice in the field of organizational communication, and concludes with a case study to show how scholars can apply PCDA to examine organizational discourses and social inequalities. Before unpacking tenets of PCDA, it is important to begin by discussing Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA; see Chapter 26 in this volume). Generally, CDA emphasizes “the study of discourse through an analysis of texts in context, rather than as isolated objects” (Leitch & Palmer, 2010, p. 1195), distinguishing itself from traditional linguistic studies by emphasizing a critical lens. CDA typically explores “the use of language and its context” (Sanz Sabido, 2019, p. 24), focusing on social problems, and examining power dynamics, resistance, and systems of domination (Leitch & Palmer, 2010; Mumby, 2004). As a qualitative methodology, CDA emphasizes both text and context within a discursive act (Leitch & Palmer, 2010). “Text” can be conceptualized as either exclusively written language or “potentially anything that is created by humans to communicate meaning,” such as music pieces, interviews, movies, video clips, or images (Leitch & Palmer, 2010, p. 1196). Within organizational studies, “context” entails multiple aspects of the discursive act, such as the “physical setting or location in which the text occurs” the timing of events, the relationship between the text and existing socio-cultural, economic, and political ideologies, and existing power relations in the enactment of discourses (Leitch & Palmer, 2010, p. 1200). Within organizational communication, Chouliaraki and Fairclough (2010) see CDA as a “mode of critical inquiry where theory

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and methodology are inherently linked to one another” (p. 1215), as discourse and power become constitutive of social relations in organizations, allowing for interdisciplinary critical social research. It is through this trans-disciplinary point of entry that postcolonial theory is able to inform the critical analysis of organizational discourse. PCDA draws from both postcolonial theory and CDA to offer a framework for exploring both historical and current discourses that might be “impregnated with postcolonial political, economic, and social structures” (Sanz Sabido, 2019, p. 3). While CDA involves the study of the “relations between discourse, power, dominance, social inequality and the position of the discourse analyst in such social relations” (Sanz Sabido, 2019, p. 23), PCDA focuses more specifically on historical and epistemic power relationships that typically remain hidden within the production and reproduction of discourse, leading to the perpetuation and reaffirmation of unequal power relations in postcolonial contexts. PCDA centers on the discursive reproduction of these inequalities, positioning them as postcolonial legacies and taking into account the historical and socio-political circumstances surrounding their occurrence (Sanz Sabido, 2019). Postcolonial theory has influenced the critical analysis of discourse in the areas of political communication (Ahmed, 2021), sociology and social work (Lee & Johnstone, 2022), and education (Burke, 2015). However, it has been understudied in the field of organi­ zational communication, despite being a promising analytical method. In an exemplar case of PCDA to study organizational phenomena, Karikari and Brown (2018) employed postcolonial discourse analysis to examine interviews of seven college-aged leaders of African student organizations in the United States, examining their enactment of “leadership,” their use of postcolonial communication, and their perceptions of their organizations’ identities.

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In this study, Karikari and Brown (2018) positioned “discourse” not only as a “part of the social world” but as a “perspective” and a “frame through which macro and micro-contexts are brought together to inform everyday practices” (p. 443). For these scholars, this approach was not only a method of analysis, but a tool that uncovered both the participants’ resistance to hegemonic discourses about Africa, and to speakers’ “accommodation” (p. 446) of dominant epistemic discourses depicting African leadership as-if inefficient. The authors demonstrated how PCDA can be used to decenter Western understandings of leadership, especially when examining the discursive realities of non-Western subjects and their perceptions of organizational life. More recently, Taryn Bernard’s (2021) research focused on South African multinational corporations, and the discourses they utilize to represent their corporate social responsibility (CSR) practices. Bernard (2021) employed PCDA to argue that the selected organizations utilize discourses to position themselves as socially responsible, sustainable, and equitable. Nonetheless, they simultaneously cater to neoliberal interests, favor South African settler elites, and maintain racialized representations of worker identities within postcolonial/neocolonial contexts in the Global South. These examples demonstrate the effectiveness of PCDA in uncovering nuances and underlying discursive contradictions in organizational discourses. The following section describes a PCDA case study, taken from the second author’s research on organizational discourses related to Directto-Consumer Genetic testing.

Case Study: Direct-to-Consumer Genetic Testing Organizations In the area of organizational communication, a postcolonial approach offers opportunities

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for recontextualizing and politicizing discourses, in the hopes of recovering hidden scripts, and enabling alternative (and more ethical) ways of constructing meanings within organizations (Jack & Westwood, 2009). Here, we demonstrate a postcolonial reading of organizational discourses in the context of two leading U.S.-based direct-to-consumer (DTC) genetic testing companies, 23andMe and AncestryDNA, which provide services to up to 25 million customers. A PCDA of the texts and advertisements found on their websites reveals that these corporations create and recreate ideas of “race” in several ways for their customers (Nieto-Fernandez, 2022). As a methodological resource, PCDA foregrounds the American context of these corporations as a postcolonial site where race relations and racial identities are punctuated by colonial histories of power and oppression. Furthermore, the power and reach of these types of organizations pose significant ethical questions for stakeholders. By 2025, it is expected that around 60 million Americans will have their genetic information analyzed and stored by these or other companies (Khan & Mittelman, 2018). These organizations use technology developed through human genomic research to analyze saliva samples from customers, track their customers’ ancestry through maternal and paternal lines of descent, and offer their customers information on their ancestral origin, possible family connections, and health predisposition to certain diseases (Roberts, 2011). These organizations capitalize on the quest for identity within the genealogical, Big Data, and medical fields, partnering with companies such as GlaxoSmithKlein, Google, and Calico Life Sciences among others (Nelson, 2016). Additionally, these organizations become mediators for American customers to develop new ways of understanding their ethno-racial identities, family connections, belongingness to a community, and potential genetic predispositions to health conditions.

Here, PCDA offers a mode of ethical critique for the researcher. Considering that postcolonial methods are concerned with interrogating “epistemic coloniality” (IbarraColado, 2006, p. 464), the researcher has so far examined specific instances in which DTC genetic testing organizations deploy Western notions of “science” and genetic knowledge – a practice serving to reify whiteness as part of their organizational infrastructure (NietoFernandez, 2022). As part of this examination, as an integral part of utilizing PCDA, the researcher is able to: a) call attention to the center of knowledge production, and b) understand organizations as linked to global economic systems and flows.

Calling attention to the center of knowledge production PCDA invites us to explore “the dynamics of scientific practice” (Harris, 2011, p. 76) and the ways in which they are tied to places of origin, communication traditions, arbitrary distribution of natural and human resources, and geopolitical and diasporic relationships that might be affected by (or replicate) historical patterns. As an ethical mode of critique, PCDA is concerned with what is known as the “geography of knowledge” (p. 64), drawing attention to the center of knowledge production. It subsequently deconstructs how modernist notions of “science” are imbued with biopolitical exercises of old and new colonial patterns. Different knowledgemaking projects—in this case, the ones discursively constructed by DTC genetic testing organizations—result in “differing patterns of traces” (p. 76), which illuminate how the Global South and the Global North are connected and affected by each other. PCDA is thus concerned with how discourse produces and reproduces postcolonial relations and establishes epistemological dominance. It does so by emphasizing questions of agency, interests, and knowledgemaking in the analysis of text (Sanz Sabido, 2019). A PCDA of organizational texts of

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23andMe and AncestryDNA offers an entry point to understand the underpinnings of colonialist discourses and White supremacy that are implicitly part of the infrastructures created by these organizations (NietoFernandez, 2022). Their reliance on the language of “discovery” not only evokes colonizing logics, but continually reproduces imperialist historical patterns through discourses (Jack et al., 2011). These organizations advance the dominant ideology of Western “science” as a means of inquiry for objective and value-free truth. They reinscribe dominant assumptions of race and power that have historically been instrumental in maintaining hierarchical and unequal social structures between the West and “the rest” (Glenn, 2015; Go, 2018; Prasad, 2003). This is done by incorporating the language of (self-) discovery of internal genetic characteristics, such as ancestry, health predispositions, and racial-ethnic identity on their websites. The organizations promise a journey of self-discovery (as tied to racial identity and uniqueness) to customers through genetic testing—a mechanism for “finding themselves” and discovering new ethnoracial identities and feelings of belonging to a community. AncestryDNA’s website, for example, explicitly claims to provide a product that will allow you to “revolutionize the way you discover your family history.” It also encourages customers to “get more of [their] inside story.” This focus on knowledge and discovery of race is also communicated on 23andMe’s organizational website through the “Customer Stories” videos (NietoFernandez, 2022). Furthermore, a PCDA allows for examination of ancestry categories used by both organizations to organize their website databases. So far, the researcher has analyzed the ways in which AncestryDNA and 23andMe measure and compare their customers’ DNA against profiles of different geographic regions – a process leading to test results depicting customers’ ethnicity (also see Pal et  al., 2022). When combing through the

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regional categories used by AncestryDNA and 23andMe, it was apparent they mostly focused on the European and North American continents, whose referenced populations were further broken down into very specific geographic regions and settler communities. Examples here included “Southern Jaslo & Gorlice Counties” or “Fayette & Walker County Settlers.” Other continents (like Africa, Asia, and South America), despite the enormous genetic variety in the world, were reduced to a handful of large regional clusters, such as “Broadly South Asian” and “Broadly Native American”. In this way, postcolonial decentering enables us to understand how discourses might be operating in invisible ways. It urges qualitative researchers to pay attention to the ways in which specific “knowledges” and takenfor-granted paradigms subsume other ways of understanding the world. Developing a postcolonial method to read organizational discourses subsequently becomes a delicate process of not only studying what exists in the organizational discourses (what is visible, what exists to be analyzed), but also the discourses that might be missing (what is invisible, what the organization doesn’t prioritize), and that might exist at the margins of official organizational discourses. Using a postcolonial approach to understand the discourses used by these organi­ zations, allowed Nieto-Fernandez (2022) to pay attention to missing information, untold stories, and blank spaces existing in the organi­ zational infrastructures of DTC genetic testing corporations. In this case, the dominance and prevalence of data associated with Europe was never questioned, and its normative, hegemonic power is embedded in the database infrastructure. Thus, its prioritization remains hidden from further analysis (Benjamin, 2019; Noble, 2018). A postcolonial lens allowed the researcher to understand how these types of databases serve as social and political artifacts. Specifically, she has argued that these biobanks are built on racialized logics of difference that shape how we understand global

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health disparities and biological differences between racial populations. This human-made process, which is informed by arbitrary, sociohistorical taxonomies of difference, matters— partly because these regional categories are bound to change over time depending on cultural understandings of heritage and ethnicity (Lee, 2015, p. 144). Furthermore, the inherent Western-centrism of the databases prioritizes whiteness as a “kind of unremarked optimum,” in that they appear to be designed with the White customer-user, (and programmer) in mind, biases that help to sustain White dominance and reproduce racial hierarchies (Stevens et al., 2021, p. 114). In the case of the organizational websites studied, both 23andMe and AncestryDNA’s infrastructures center whiteness and Europeanness as a social position, which is privileged through the design and use of their databases. As a result, Direct-to-Consumer genetic testing ends up being more detailed, and more accurate, for customers of European descent, or who align their family history with “settler” communities in the Americas. However, it is important to know that these White supremacist discourses were not explicit throughout the organizational texts studied. Their positioning of “whiteness” as tied to power and status was not consistently evident. For example, the websites do not contain any explicit mention of racial superiority, nor do they acknowledge White customers as having a privileged social position. Instead, the organizational websites position tie whiteness to power and status in a very subtle way, implicitly and indirectly naturalizing its dominance (Karikari, 2022; Nakayama & Kirzek, 1995; Sammel, 2009). One of the ways in which this happens is through sanitizing the role of colonization, slavery, reproductive harm, and exploitation in shaping the realities of human ancestry (e.g., diaspora). The kidnapping and forced migrations of indigenous communities are seldom mentioned on these websites, with slavery only being mentioned or acknowledged once within the 27 advertisement

videos analyzed. These historical realities are instead concealed and sanitized through the use of euphemism and erasure. Here, colonizers become “settlers,” the connections between Black Americans (who in many cases descend from enslaved populations forcefully brought to the Americas) and slavery and reproductive exploitation disappear, and Indigenous Americans become a generalized category with no distinctions made among tribes. This sanitization of history ends up naturalizing White dominance, and these organizational infrastructures become political artifacts that replicate colonial discourses of whiteness. PCDA positions organizations as centers of knowledge production and implementation – particularly when these institutions deal with modernized versions of racial science. As we situate racial constructs within scientific discourses, PCDA problematizes authoritative scientific understandings of racial identity. Considering that an overwhelming amount of genomic data collected and analyzed through these tests have been derived from European ancestral populations, a postcolonial lens implicates clinical bias that affects understudied populations in matters of both health and policy (Popejoy et al., 2018).

Linking organizations to global economic systems and flows One of the biggest challenges facing organizational communication studies involves creating nuanced understandings of how capital accumulation and life within neoliberal capitalism are intrinsically connected to U.S. organizations (Mumby & Plotnikof, 2019). Under traditional Fordist capitalism, valuecreation occurred through production in factory settings, as the point of conjunction between capital and workers’ labor. However, Mumby and Plotnikof (2019) caution that under neoliberal capitalism, economic value in organizations is tied to the control of information and meaning, increasingly encompassing life itself (p. 51). Using a postcolonial approach, we can understand how neoliberal

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organizations have an intimate relationship with global economic circuits, knowledge production, and colonial histories (Karikari, 2022), as they operate in a colonial matrix of power that implicates domination and violence (Toivonen & Seremani, 2021). We see this happening explicitly within DTC genetic testing organizations, where economic value lies in the collection, sorting, analysis, and distribution of genetic information within organizational stakeholders and their connections to others. These organizations become an example of how “communication not only constitutes organization, it also constitutes capital” (Mumby & Plotnikof, 2019, p. 51). Here, we would add that communication also constitutes the coloniality of power (Quijano, 2000). Critical analysis of 23andMe and AncestryDNA presents these corporations as capital- and profit-oriented corporations, even when answering to customers, workers, investors, and stockholders. Like many other organizations dealing with biotechnology, such as pharmaceutical companies and research institutions, these organizations are in many ways determined by “capitalist political economic structures,” which are dependent on and coproduced by capitalist structures (Rajan, 2006, p. 7). Furthermore, because of their management of genetic material, these organizations engage in a system called “biocapitalism,” which involves converting basic units of “life” (such as genes and the information they generate) into a commodity to be traded and sold (Peters & Venkatesan, 2010; Rajan, 2003). Practices of biocapitalism thus prioritize healthcare through the development of science and technology. As biocapitalism makes DNA data into “biocapital,” these types of organizations utilize related information as a form of currency (Merz, 2016; Rajan, 2006). Within a “knowledge economy” (Kuhn et al., 2017, p. 10), data, knowledge, and information become a primary resource for capitalist control of geographically dispersed physical labor. In the emerging era of biocapitalism,

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DTC genetic testing organizations expand the knowledge economy by collecting, utilizing, and harvesting genetic data as a primary means of producing value. A PCDA approach sensitizes us to analytics such as biocapitalism within the global economic system, and helps to contextualize corporate discursive practices within this process of accumulation. Furthermore, its critique of privatization and commodification helps us to further understand how DTC genetic testing organizations use discourse to create “ethnocommodities”—that is, creation of profitable artifacts of race and ethnicity, designed for an ever-expanding market for population genetics (Nash, 2015; NietoFernandez, 2022). Consuming (or discovering) these ethnocommodities creates new possibilities for customers’ racial identities, based on the discursive organization of racial genetics (Morning, 2018). As this enterprise becomes marketized, these organizations reconfigure racial and ethnic identities as distinct genetic categories for consumption, in ways that can reinforce differences for mixed purposes, including discrimination (Bliss, 2018) and selfdetermination (TallBear, 2013). Genetic race, the emerging object of discovery promised by these organizations, in many cases involves the creation of new “DNA Citizens” – categories that bolster user claims to affiliation with African ethnic groups (Nelson, 2016) or membership in American Indian tribes (TallBear, 2013). This biological paradigm for defining race subtly redefines it as a genomic category, one that enables pharmaceutical companies to use and exploit this information as a commodity, and literally profiting from the myth of a postracial society (Bliss, 2012; Merz, 2016). Here, the idea of race becomes more than a specific social identity. It becomes entangled with a corporate strategy that produces bodies and relationships as inherently different, if not inferior. Using PCDA to understand these discourses allows us to see how they align their

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organizations with global systems, making real for their customers fantasies of community, connection, and participation in a wider (international) citizenship (Dean, 2014). For these customers, consuming ethnocommodities becomes “the pleasure of devouring difference” (Benjamin, 2019, p. 149), as they get to know their “genetic race” and play with new racial identities. Clearly, Nieto-Fernandez’s (2022) PCDA of the case of AncestryDNA and 23andMe unpack these organizations as operators within exploitative principles of global neoliberalism. We see how they rely on appropriating and privatizing the world’s biocommons (e.g., genetic communities, vital information, scientific knowledge, social interactions, and racialized experiences, etc.) to create surplus value (Mumby, 2016). As these organizations create meanings for their customers, they engage also in the “discovery” of customers’ own biosocial self, based on the mediation of ethno-racial commodities (O’Riordan, 2017). This case indicates a new chapter in what has previously been termed “corporate colonization of the lifeworld” (Deetz, 1992), in which neoliberal corporations extend their influence by exploiting and conflating the resources of technology, race, and identity.

CONCLUSION This chapter locates and illustrates the significance of qualitative research grounded in postcolonial traditions for studying organizational communication. It does so by focusing on two methods: postcolonial ethnography and postcolonial critical discourse analysis. This effort is especially pertinent, given recent calls to decolonize and decenter the process of knowledge production in the field—including by bringing subjugated knowledges to the center. By engaging with the dialectics of structure and agency, and the conceptual

categories of solidarity and reflexivity, we demonstrate how researchers can recover voices from below and invert dominant epistemes. We argue that adopting postcolonial commitments enables researchers to look beyond the boundaries created by the histories of colonialism, capitalism, and imperial domination to understand how these structures mediate the organizing experiences and articulation of dissent among communities located at the margin. More so, adopting a postcolonial sensibility challenges dominant modes of theorization by constructing theories (as well as categories and concepts) that imbibe contextual specificities and the intersectionality of identities from below. Specifically, the cases used in this chapter underscore the political implications of research, as they explore the ideological and imperial power within which organizational communication takes place. In sum, we hope our chapter offers entry points for transforming power imbalances, shifting the focus of research to organization of the political economy, and envisioning alternative social imaginaries.

Note 1  By combining environmental conservation with livelihood issues, the green movement reaffirms the working-class roots of local environmental politics. In doing so, the movement resembles the features attributed to environmental movements organized in the Global South, where they combine environmentalism and livelihood issues (Martinez-Alier 2003).

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10 Queer Approaches to Qualitative Organizational Communication Research Jamie McDonald and Elizabeth K. Eger

As previous chapters in this handbook have demonstrated, a wide range of critical perspectives have now been established in qualitative organizational research, including feminist, critical race, intersectional, postcolonial, and decolonial approaches. This chapter highlights an additional critical perspective that is rooted in queer theory. Although queer theory is still nascent in organizational communication, there is great potential for qualitative researchers in the field to adopt queer approaches as an analytical and theoretical lens that guides their research. Our chapter showcases how the strengths of qualitative research align well with the philosophical assumptions of queer theory. For instance, qualitative research potentially highlights case outliers, just as queer approaches challenge taken-for-granted understandings of social life. Moreover, qualitative research excels in explaining the processual aspects of social and organi­ zational life, which connects with queer

approaches that view social phenomena as performative and ongoing. Throughout this chapter, we use the term queer in three distinct but interrelated ways. First, we explore approaches to qualitative organizational research that are explicitly rooted in queer theory, which first became recognizable as a body of thought in the early 1990s. Second, we refer to queer as an identity. In this sense, queer is a term that resists definition and categorization, though it broadly refers to subjectivities and experiences that disrupt cisheteronormativity (see LeMaster, 2017)—that is, the ways in which cisgender performances and monogamous heterosexuality structure societal institutions and norms (Yep, 2003). In invoking queer as an identity, we explore how qualitative organizational research can highlight the experiences and subjectivities of those who identify as queer or LGBTQ+. Third, we also invoke queer as a verb. As a verb, queering refers to questioning, challenging, and resisting what is typically considered

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to be normal, taken-for-granted, and common sense (Rumens et al., 2019). As Parker (2001) puts it, to queer is to adopt “an attitude of unceasing disruptiveness” (p. 38) and to make “fluid what was seen as foundational” (p. 52). By deploying queer as a verb, we seek to queer methodologies in qualitative organizational communication research by questioning some of their foundations and opening additional possibilities. In this chapter, we first review the intellectual foundations of queer theory and how it has been taken up in organizational communication. Afterwards, we explore how organi­ zational communication researchers can queer qualitative research methodologies and practices, focusing specifically on the conduct of interviewing, ethnography, autoethnography, data analysis, and reflexivity. To further illustrate how queered methodologies can be practiced, we then offer reflexive accounts of our own experiences queering qualitative research methodologies. Lastly, we reflect on future directions for queering organizational research and argue that organizational communication has much to gain by working in tandem with queer qualitative research in other areas of the communication discipline to both critique and reimagine organizational life in new, liberating, and empowering ways.

INTELLECTUAL FOUNDATIONS OF QUEER THEORY Queer theory has intellectual foundations in many interdisciplinary areas of study, such as feminism, postmodernism, poststructuralism, and gay and lesbian studies (Jagose, 1996). Drawing from these foundations, queer theory became recognizable as a distinct body of thought through the works of scholars such as Teresa de Lauretis (1991), Judith Butler (1990), Eve Sedgwick (1990), Gloria Anzaldúa (1999), Leo Bersani (1995), José Muñoz (1999), Steven Seidman (1997), and Michael Warner (1993, 1999).

One of the distinguishing features of queer theory is to explicitly call into question identity categories that had been seen as foundational to the study of both gender and sexuality, including terms such as women, men, gay, and lesbian (de Lauretis, 1991). Rather than using these categories as a starting point for the study of gender and sexuality, and accepting them as given, queer theory interrogates how they become recognizable in the first place. In this regard, queer theory posits that identities are fundamentally unstable, fluid, and multiple because identity categories only exist contingently— that is, through the performative enactment of the normative expressions that are said to constitute them (Jagose, 1996). As such, there is no identity that pre-exists the embodied expressions of categories like gender and sexuality (Butler, 1990). While identities related to gender and sexuality may appear to be stable and natural, this is only because they are repeatedly enacted through a regularized and constrained repetition of norms that constitutes the subject (Butler, 1993; Jagose, 1996). Because queer theory challenges the foundation of group identity categories of sex, gender, and sexuality, it is decidedly antiessentialist, considering identity categories to be devoid of any essential or stable meanings (Sedgwick, 1990). This rejection of stable, unitary identities and categorical thinking is a distinguishing feature of queer theory and politics. As such, queer theory opposes what has been called an “ethnic” identity model of sexuality, which presumes a unitary gay and lesbian identity (Seidman, 1993). Queer theory challenges the notion of unitary identities that presume sameness within categories and difference across categories because of the varying experiences and nuances that are hidden by these categorizations (Bersani, 1995; Seidman, 1993). So it would be rather, it emphasizes that individuals assigned to a given category cannot be presumed to share common experiences, outlooks, values, interests, or political positions. Because there are

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a host of nuances that “can differentiate even people of identical gender, race, nationality, class, and ‘sexual orientation’” (Sedgwick, 2008, p. 25), relying on categories and unitary identities “may dangerously obscure the way political commitments and identifications actually work” (p. 59) and gloss over the experiences and subjectivities of individuals who are purported to be represented by those categories. In challenging the notion that individuals within particular identity categories share similar experiences, queer theory builds on histories of Black feminism and other feminists of color addressing simultaneous oppression and systemic marginalization from multiple social identities that are experienced together (Combahee River Collective, 1977/2019; Crenshaw, 1989). Queer theory questions and disrupts categories themselves and champions a performative, anticategorical approach to identity. Because queer theory rejects categorical thought, its politics are different from movements that make claims on behalf of a particular group. Rather than attempting to represent the interests of groups such as “women” or “gay people,” queer theory explores how these categories are performatively constituted and serve as regulatory regimes that compel certain performances and constrain agency. Drawing from Michel Foucault (1976), queer theory thus exposes the disciplinary role of identity politics and explains how identity categories can limit the ways in which individuals express themselves by compelling individuals to regulate their desires and performances (Seidman, 1997). In turn, this self-regulation obscures the fluidity of categories by making them appear stable despite being contingent upon their continual and performative reenactment. Consequently, queer theory suggests that recognizing the fluidity and indeterminacy of identity categories can enable individuals to express themselves in more liberating ways that do not always reproduce the status quo. In line with queer theory viewing identity categories as regulatory regimes, queer

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politics celebrates difference and resistance, broadly defined. From a queer perspective, celebrating difference entails challenging both normativity and cisheteronormativity. Normativity refers to what is generally considered to be normal, standard, and desirable in society, whereas cisheteronormativity refers more specifically to the privileging of a narrow form of heterosexuality and cisgender binaries over all other forms of sexuality and gender identity expression (Chevrette & Eguchi, 2020; LeMaster, 2017; Yep, 2003). While some queer theorists have argued that queer theory should limit its focus to the critique of cisheteronormativity (Bersani, 1995), others have suggested that queer theory can critique all forms of normativity that constrain subjectivities and stifle difference (Halperin, 2003; Warner, 1999). Thus, queer theory can expose and critique how cishetero­ normativity intersects with other normativities, such as whiteness, ableism, and classism (Cohen, 2005; Patterson & Hsu, 2020). In this chapter, we use the term (cishetero)normativity to emphasize how cisheteronormativity cannot be disentangled from additional forms of normativity with which it intersects. Queer theory’s embrace of difference and rejection of (cishetero)normativity puts it at odds with the mainstream gay and lesbian rights movement, which tends to adopt a liberal discourse of sameness by claiming that the gay and lesbian community is just like the heterosexual community and thus should be tolerated or accepted (Seidman, 1997; Warner, 1999). By contrast, queer theory promotes a politics that embraces what Parker (2002) calls “a loud and proud assertion of difference, based on a politics of absolute recognition” (p. 150). As such, queer politics boldly assert difference rather than merely seeking acceptance from the dominant group. For example, rather than seeking to allow same-sex couples access to traditional (cishetero)normative institutions such as marriage so that they can have the same rights, a queer perspective questions why marriage should be the basis for additional rights in the

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first place (Butler, 2004; Ford, 2011). Queer politics thus fundamentally challenge institutions that uphold (cishetero)normative societal structures by imagining and demanding alternative possibilities (Butler, 2004; Yep, 2003). Queer politics can be enacted through the process of queering. Following queer theory’s impulse to challenge the status quo and (cishetero)normative societal structures, queering is a deconstructive practice that entails distributing the order of things by questioning foundational assumptions that are typically taken for granted (Ahmed, 2006). To queer is thus to make strange “what is considered known, familiar, and commonplace, what is assumed to be the order of things, the natural way, the normal, the healthy, and so on” (Seidman, 1997, p. xi). What makes queering unique as a deconstructive practice is its explicit political aim to challenge (cishetero)normativity, as well as its focus on interrogating norms that constrain and regulate subjectivities (Rumens, 2018a). Academics from multiple fields have sought to queer their disciplines by questioning their foundational assumptions (Halperin, 2003). In the communication discipline, Manning et al. (2020) suggest that, “queering communication studies means questioning common-sense notions of identities, relationships, and institutions; and, more importantly, acting in ways that defy the rules and rituals imposed by heteronormative attitudes, structures, and expectations” (p. 433). While the first systematic attempt to queer communication studies was arguably in a special issue of the Journal of Homosexuality in 2003 (Yep et  al., 2003), queer theory remains under­ utilized in the discipline at large (Manning et  al., 2020). Moreover, it was only in the mid-2010s that organizational communication scholars began to queer the field (Harris & McDonald, 2018; McDonald, 2015). In the next section, we explore the different ways in which queer theory has been taken up in organizational communication.

QUEERING ORGANIZATIONAL RESEARCH While an exhaustive review of queer interventions in organizational research is outside of the scope of the chapter (see McDonald & Kenney, 2021, for a more in-depth review), this section briefly highlights some of the key ways organizational scholars have mobilized queer theory. Because queer theory gained traction in critical management studies before organizational communication, we also highlight distinctive contributions from organizational communication scholars while also discussing key contributions from critical management scholars. Since queer theory seeks to challenge (cishetero)normativity, queering organizational communication entails disrupting (cishetero) normative assumptions about both organi­ zational life and organizational research. One of the earliest queer interventions in critical management research was Parker’s (2001, 2002) queering of the term management itself, which he shows is a performative accomplishment that cannot be understood apart from its manifestation in the normative practices that are said to constitute it. Critical management scholars have also queered the notion of leadership by conceptualizing it as a performative accomplishment and disrupting the binaries and (cishetero) normative assumptions that underpin it (Bowring, 2004; Ford et  al., 2008; Harding et  al., 2011). For example, Bowring (2004) mobilizes a queer approach to disrupt tacit male/female and masculine/feminine binaries that are embedded into mainstream leadership scholarship. Harding et al. (2011) further queer leadership by showing how sexuality, although considered taboo in organizational contexts, permeates all aspects of organizing and shapes how individuals understand leadership and envision leaders. Queer theory has also provided a framework through which critical management scholars have analyzed how individuals negotiate

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identity. In this regard, Rumens and Kerfoot (2009) demonstrate that even in organi­ zations that openly brand themselves as “gay friendly,” (cishetero)normative expectations of how sexuality should be expressed remain, as dominant understandings of professionalism are infused with (cishetero)normativity. Because sexuality and professionalism are seen as antithetical to each other, constructing professional workplace identities is thus contingent upon upholding (cishetero)normativity (Patterson & Hsu, 2020; Rumens & Kerfoot, 2009; Williams & Giuffre, 2011). Diversity management is another key concept that critical management scholars have sought to queer (Bendl et al., 2008; Bendl et al., 2009). Because diversity management traditionally relies heavily on categorical understandings of identity by classifying individuals as “subjects of diversity” (Just & Christiansen, 2012, p. 322) and into particular categories, this area of inquiry is particularly ripe for queering. Queering diversity management entails viewing identities as performative and fluid, rather than as stable across time, innate, and objectively identifiable (Bendl et al., 2008). While much scholarship that mobilizes queer theory to analyze and deconstruct workplace identities focuses on the experiences of gay men and those who identify as LGBTQ+, queer theory can also be used to destabilize dominant understandings of heterosexuality at work (Rumens, 2018a; Rumens et al., 2019). Such research demonstrates how everyone— including individuals who identify as heterosexual—can be constrained by (cishetero) normativity. Within organizational communication, Compton and Dougherty (2017) coined the term of co-sexuality, which refers to “the process of how humans communicatively organize around sexuality” (p. 875), to conceptualize sexuality as a process negotiated by everyone rather than just individuals who identify as LGBTQ+ (see also Branton & Compton, 2021; Compton, 2020). Organizational communication scholars have also contributed to queering organizational

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research by problematizing the concept of the closet and reconceptualizing it in an intersectional way that examines closeting as a constitutive feature of interactions for all individuals with invisible, stigmatized, and non-normative differences (Eger, Litrenta, et  al., 2022; Harris & McDonald, 2018; McDonald et  al., 2020). Moreover, queering the closet recognizes that individuals negotiate closeting processes as they relate to multiple, intersecting, and fluid identities marked with various degrees of stigma (McDonald et al., 2020). Within the subfield of organizational communication, the large body of research on the communicative constitution of organizations and organizing (CCO) has also been interrogated from a queer perspective (McDonald, 2022). In this regard, queering CCO seeks to expose how (cishetero)normative assumptions are embedded into the communicative processes that are constitutive of organizing and how these assumptions can be resisted and reimagined. In addition to queering theoretical concepts, organizational scholars have explored the implications of queering qualitative research methodologies, which we further explore in the next section.

QUEERING METHODOLOGIES IN QUALITATIVE ORGANIZATIONAL RESEARCH Although it is possible to adopt queer theory as a lens through which to analyze and interpret data collected through conventional methodologies (e.g., Compton, 2020; Harding et  al., 2011), methodologies themselves can also be queered. There are multiple ways researchers can queer methodologies, and our discussion of queering methodology in this chapter is intended to be heuristic and exploratory, rather than prescriptive. Organizational scholars have conceptualized queering methodologies as a continual process that disrupts “the methodological

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norms that currently govern how organizational research has been, and ought to be, carried out” (Rumens, 2018b, p. 107), thereby challenging conventional research practices and exploring new ways of conducting research. Researchers can espouse ontological, epistemological, and axiological commitments of queer theory throughout the research process. In this sense, adopting a queered ontology guides researchers to view the social world as performative and as fluid, thereby deconstructing categories and rejecting essentialist claims (Rumens, 2018b). Queered ontologies avoid reifying identities and social constructs, instead demonstrating how they are performatively enacted. Moreover, queered ontologies view realities as fragmented, situated, and subjective, thereby underscoring that researchers and participants view and understand the world differently (Rumens, 2018b). Epistemologically, queering methodology deliberately seeks to produce knowledge that highlights the subjectivities and experiences of individuals that have been traditionally excluded from research and are located on the fringes of society (Halberstam, 1998). In highlighting these subjectivities and experiences, researchers do not make knowledge claims on behalf of groups, instead showcasing a range of multiple, conflicting identities and rejecting explanations founded on essentialism and reductionism (Kong et  al., 2003). Queered epistemologies also view knowledge as situated and partial. As such, researchers do not claim to objectively represent participants, nor do they attempt to speak on their behalf (Yep et  al., 2020). Additionally, queered epistemologies underscore that knowledge cannot be produced independently of relationships developed between researchers and participants, thereby highlighting the need to situate knowledge claims within reflexive accounts about the performative co-enactment of researcher and participant identities and experiences (Rooke, 2009; Rumens, 2018b). Axiologically, queered m ­ ethodologies are unapologetically value-laden and inherently

political. In particular, queered methodologies celebrate difference and take a bold stance against injustice and violence (in many forms) promoted by (cishetero)normativity (McDonald, 2017). As such, the purpose of research is not just to describe and explain the world as it currently exists, but to advocate for a radically different social world that challenges hegemonic societal structures and ideologies that regulate and constrain subjectivities. Within organizational communication, Kenney (2021) has recently utilized the metaphor of the kaleidoscope to conceptualize a particular type of queered methodology. A kaleidoscopic approach to queering methodology “encourages fixing attention to norms and normativity in organizing via the study of situated practices, to understand how norms emerge in situ and interpenetrate with historical and contextual normative regimes like whiteness and coloniality to shape organizational realities” (Kenney, 2021, p. 31, emphasis in original). As such, queering methodologies through a kaleidoscope approach directs researchers to the ways in which norms and normativity are performatively enacted through communication, rather than viewing norms as immutable and naturally existing. By focusing on norms and normativity rather than on identity categories, a kaleidoscopic approach to queering methodology enables researchers to avoid using identity categories as the central focal point of research studies and thereby enact queer theory’s commitment to viewing identities as fluid (Kenney, 2021). Because qualitative research excels at generating in-depth, contextual, and nuanced knowledge claims, qualitative research methods are highly compatible with research that adopts a queer theoretical perspective. As such, although it is possible to queer quantitative methodologies through practices such as counting in ways that challenge conventional norms (Doan, 2016), organizational scholars seeking to queer methodologies have primarily explored the implications of queering

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qualitative approaches to research. We examine queering (1) interviewing, (2) ethnography, (3) autoethnography, (4) reflexivity, and (5) data analysis and writing.

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and privacy increased by messaging and typing interviewing.

Queering Ethnography Queering Interviewing Queering the practice of interviewing entails reimagining the traditional qualitative interview as a deeply embodied, intersubjective, constitutive encounter that does not merely collect pre-existing data, but that produces data (Burchiellaro, 2021; Kong et  al., 2003). The accounts of interview participants are therefore not treated as revelations of a coherent or transparent self, but rather as fluid selves that are performatively constituted during the interview process (Burchiellaro, 2021). Rather than attempting to capture coherent narratives from participants, researchers instead explore identities and experiences as multiple, conflicting, and fragmented (Kong et al., 2003). Following queer theory’s aim to deconstruct categories, queering interviewing also entails troubling the traditional researcher/participant binary by viewing both parties as active in producing knowledge (Kong et  al., 2003). As such, the interviewer/interviewee distinction becomes blurred in a way that challenges the normative assumption that only the researcher should guide interview questions (Ozturk & Rumens, 2015). Riach et  al. (2014, 2016) further queer interview research by developing the practice of anti-narrative interviewing, which aims to create a space where seemingly coherent narratives become undone through interviewing. As such, antinarrative interviewing sheds light on how participants account for their narratives (Riach et  al., 2014, 2016). By conducting online interviews via instant messaging and online chat rooms in their study on queer Iranian American women, Van Gilder and Abdi (2014) also queer conventional interview practices that privilege interviews where participants speak aloud. Instead, they note how participants’ comfort

Given the long and rich tradition of ethnography in qualitative organizational communication, there is great potential for queering organizational ethnography in communication research. Moreover, ethnography as a methodology is highly amenable to queering, as both queer theory and ethnography adopt an epistemology that views knowledge as partial and contextual and an ontology that recognizes multiple realities (Valocchi, 2005). Queering ethnography entails understanding both participant and researcher identities as performative, fluid, shifting, and emergent in the field, rather than as pre-existing (Gamson, 2003). Moreover, a key goal of queering ethnography is to expose and critique normalizing processes in the field, which requires ethnographers to be highly reflexive about relationships with participants and how (cishetero)normativity can be enacted in fieldwork (Rooke, 2009). In this sense, Kenney’s (2021) kaleidoscopic approach to queering methodology discussed earlier is particularly well suited to ethnography, as it can direct the attention of ethnographers to how norms and normativity are constituted in the field.

Queering Autoethnography Although autoethnography is well established in other areas of the communication discipline, such as performance studies and intercultural communication (Adams et  al., 2014; Johnson & LeMaster, 2020), autoethnography is often underutilized in organi­ zational communication (see Chapter 12 in this volume). Nevertheless, organizational communication scholars have increasingly drawn from autoethnography to explore topics such

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as race and organizing (Cruz, 2017), immigrant identities (Cruz, McDonald, et  al., 2020), and researcher reflexivity (McDonald, 2013, 2016a). Autoethnography and queer theory align in that they are developed largely on the periphery of organizational communication studies, challenge dominant assumptions about scholarship and research, produce localized and contextual knowledge, and adopt a performative ontology of the social world (McDonald & Rumens, 2020). Moreover, the strengths of autoethnography as a methodology, such as exploring taboo topics, valuing the depth of individuals’ stories, highlighting the fluidity and performativity of identities, and interrogating taken-for-granted assumptions about mundane and everyday experiences, align with the goals of queering (Adams et  al., 2014; Holman Jones & Adams, 2010). The project of queering qualitative organizational methodologies thus fruitfully connects to autoethnography. McDonald and Rumens (2020) conceptualize the practice of queering organizational autoethnography as adopting an epistemology that views difference as a constitutive feature of organizational life, an ontology that views identities and social constructs as performative, and an axiology that is committed to critiquing and challenging (cishetero)normativity. Johnson and LeMaster (2020) suggest that one way to challenge (cishetero)normativity in autoethnography is to “connect our bodies and stories to larger political structures and systems of power” (p. 6). Queering organizational autoethnography also entails critically reflecting on the practice of autoethnography itself and en­ables researchers to challenge how autoethnography should be conducted and presented (McDonald & Rumens, 2020). The work of Saoirse O’Shea offers compelling exemplars of how it is possible to queer organizational autoethnography. In a series of evocative accounts, O’Shea (2018, 2019, 2022) queers the practice of autoethnography while highlighting how they navigate

organizational life as a nonbinary person. A key way by which O’Shea (2019) queers autoethnography is by challenging the normative criteria that is used to evaluate what constitutes a “good” autoethnography that is worthy of being published, including the criterion of presenting a logical and coherent narrative. Rather than claiming to write such a narrative, O’Shea (2019) states that their goal in the autoethnography is to attempt “an emotional resonance through an evocation of an abject life not by writing well but by writing badly” (p. 39). Another exemplar of queering autoethnography to highlight trans experiences and subjectivities is Patterson and Hsu’s (2020) autoethnography of the disciplining of ­nonbinary trans bodies in academia. Patterson and Hsu (2020) interweave written accounts, annotations, and photos through their method of “dialogic storytelling as sewing,” creating a fabric of narratives while “exposing the seams—the ableist, racist, classist, cissexist, and heteropatriarchal expectations of professionalism” (p. 92).

Queering Reflexivity Because queer theory breaks down normative assumptions about research practice and destabilizes the idea that research can be conducted by a disinterested researcher and in an apolitical way, reflexivity about how researchers actively shape the project that they conduct and are participants in their own study is an integral part of queering methodologies (Adams & Holman Jones, 2011). As a research practice, reflexivity can also be queered to align with the philosophical and political commitments of queer theory (McDonald, 2013, 2016a). Queer reflexivity recognizes the fluid and shifting nature of both participant and researcher identities, thereby recognizing that assumptions cannot be made on the basis of identity categories. As such, both researchers and participants navigate the disclosure and/

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or closeting of various identities and experiences during fieldwork. Instead of centering identity categories in reflexive accounts, queer reflexivity focuses on how both identities and normativities can be performatively enacted—as well as resisted—in the field (McDonald, 2013, 2016a).

Queering Qualitative Data Analysis and Writing Organizational scholars have identified several ways qualitative data analysis, including coding, post-coding, and the writing and presentation of data, can be queered. For example, Ashcraft and Muhr (2018) queer the practice of coding qualitative data through promiscuous coding, which invites researchers to understand coding as an embodied process and to be attuned to their bodies, senses, and feelings during the coding process. Another way to queer data analysis and writing builds upon post-coding research (see Chapter 33 in this volume). In organizational communication, Eger and Way (2020) utilized post-coding to challenge the “proliferation of coding based in traditional grounded theory as a central, taken-for-granted analysis approach” (p. 79) and explored how researchers could engage comparative data analysis without coding hierarchies. Their new comparative analysis and writing method—called a “comparative constructed focus group”— connected their two separately-designed youth organization ethnographies, resulting in rich, intersectional analysis driven by youth participants’ voices. Eger and Way (2020) describe how they were “constantly challenged by going against our normative qualitative training that taught us to follow coding conventions for publication” (p. 100). They invite scholars to try their method or create new forms of creative, post-coding analysis and writing, challenging normativities of qualitative organizational communication research.

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Similarly, queering can also rethink how qualitative data is presented. In this regard, McKenna-Buchanan (2017) queers the writing and presentation of qualitative data by presenting full texts of narratives in his analysis, rather than following the normative qualitative writing practices that tend to cut narratives down into small pieces in order to fit space requirements. Ultimately, this practice enables participant voices to be honored in greater depth and complexity and invites readers to become more active by participating in the data analysis process, thereby challenging the idea that the author has sole authority over data analysis and how data should be interpreted (Eger & Way, 2020; McKenna-Buchanan, 2017). To summarize, we have explored in this section the implications of queering methodologies and discussed how particular methodologies and practices can be queered in qualitative organizational research. Our review demonstrates that whereas scholars in both organizational communication and critical management studies have developed and reflected on what it entails to queer methodologies, there is a limited amount of research that actually puts these queered methodologies into practice. In the next sections, we each offer reflexive, backstage accounts of our experiences with queering qualitative methodologies in our own research to demonstrate how those methodologies can be queered in practice and to account for the difficulties and tensions that can arise.

QUEERING BACKSTAGES AND EMBRACING METHODOLOGICAL FLEXIBILITY: ELIZABETH’S STORIES In my research, my co-authors and I have written about “backstage stories” that are often cut or hidden from published research (Eger, Pollard, et al., 2022; Eger & Way, 2020; Jensen et al., 2020; Tracy et al., 2014). Through “sharing the difficulties, foibles, uncertainties, tips,

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and tricks that make up ‘backstage’ qualitative research behavior, [we] can provide great pedagogical value and help us learn from others’ experiences” (Tracy et al., 2014, p. 422). I work alongside colleagues prioritizing moving “backstage” communication into public classrooms, conference spaces, organi­ zations, streets, tweets, and publications. We disrupt academic publishing normativities pushing qualitative researchers to quantify their analyses, utilize deductive writing, and engage in performative perfectionism of researcher as expert. Instead, we need reflexive communication about the backstages of our research. I want to rethink these conversations and writings as queering qualitative organizational communication research. For example, “Published research often presents findings as neatly packaged with sparkly bows” (Eger & Way, 2020, p. 100). Queering could begin with disrupting the obligatory nod to what we missed or got wrong in our limitations sections, something I still practice. Instead, what if we discuss our research(er) failures? In Jensen et al. (2020), we used vignette analyses of our unpublished backstage stories to argue that we should reframe failure as productive, as to do so is to center ethics, care, and emotion with our participants. We shared that, “Although we simultaneously know there is no truth to capture, we fear failure in how our scholarly voice speaks with our participants’ truths in print” (Jensen et al., 2020, p. 143). We built on queer theory, like Halberstam (2011), where embracing and queering failure, “makes a detour around the usual markers of accomplishment and satisfaction” (p. 186). Instead, we can “reframe failure—often deemed disastrous—as generative of new theory, method, and practice” (Jensen et  al., 2020, p. 142). Although we did not name these practices “queering,” it has been through organizational communication qualitative collaborations that I have dislodged the researcher as “expert,” marked fieldwork, researcher, and organi­ zational failures (Jensen et al., 2020), disrupted deductive analysis and writing norms (Eger, Pollard, et al., 2022; Eger & Way, 2020), and

embraced emotions and struggles (Jensen et al., 2020; Tracy et al., 2014). Furthermore, my participants have taught me to embrace failure and methodological flexibility and fluidity. Alongside queer, trans, intersex, and disability scholars, activists, and participants, I have learned to disrupt binaries, boxes, and conventions and create new fluidity in research design. Across four long-term organizational ethnographies, I have always implemented a trusted triad of participant observation, interviews, and document and/or artifact analysis. However, relationality with participants in fieldwork can demand methodological flexibility and queer research design previously treated as “fixed” or “complete.” One exemplar comes from my research with the Transgender Resource Center of New Mexico (TGRC). As I was nearing the end of my three years of fieldwork and volunteering as a work outreach coordinator to help trans and nonbinary people seek employment amidst systemic transphobia (Eger, 2018b), I was struggling with a past data analysis challenge where, “I grieve letting go of all the details and nuances” (Tracy et  al., 2014, p. 423). I was also lamenting exiting the fieldsite where I had built extensive relationships and worked as a cisgender person in solidarity with trans and nonbinary people. This was especially palpable as I was theorizing and feeling how TGRC created a chosen family organizational identity (Eger, 2018a, 2018b, 2021). Despite an overwhelming abundance of data, my normative triad of methods were missing facets of TGRC’s organizing and some members (whom TGRC calls “guests”). Participants with whom I had built extensive rapport had to cancel multiple interviews because of the unpredictability of experiencing intersectional impacts of systemic transphobia, colonization, racism, homelessness, addiction, and/or unemployment and underground economy work (Eger, 2018a). I also only had a few interviews with the closed bimonthly support group guests (e.g., Transmasculine Support Group, Nonbinary Support Group, Transfeminine Support Group). As a cisgender

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person, I had participated in and even facilitated the Rainbow Friends Support Group for trans people and their allies, but I rightfully could not visit closed groups. It was in this moment of impending exit from my fieldwork that I reflected back on the first day I toured TGRC where I met guests collaging with magazines. Across fieldwork, I observed and participated in similar impromptu collages, poetry sessions, fashion shows, makeup moments, drawing, and other art that connected guests to one another and to TGRC. I thus amended my IRB and created a new method inspired by my participants and arts-based research that I called a creative focus group where participants collaged about TGRC, and I led a communal focus group discussing their organizational experiences (see Eger, 2018a, 2021). I hosted five creative focus groups with permissions from all the adult closed support groups. I also led an impromptu drop-in center group with mostly indigenous, trans women with the support of Renae Gray (see Eger & Gray, 2018). The creative focus groups helped me not only theorize organizational identity, identification, and culture in new ways (Eger, 2021), but more importantly, it helped participants and me create art and narratives about the beauty, power, pain, and messiness of intersectional transgender grassroots organizing (Eger, 2018a). Their art and our collective conversations queered and transed the boundaries of researcher/participant, of methodological design, and of theory and praxis. I dream for future, intersectional methodological flexibilities and fluidities queering and transing organizational communication research that we can co-create.

QUEERING RESEARCHER REFLEXIVITY AND HIGHLIGHTING FLUIDITY: JAMIE’S STORIES As a doctoral student, I stumbled upon queer theory almost by accident when searching for

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a framework that would help me make sense of shifting sexual identities during fieldwork. My first significant engagement with queer theory was thus to develop a queer approach to reflexivity, discussed above (McDonald, 2013). Since this initial encounter with queer theory, I have continued to explore the implications of queer theory for both organizational communication theory (McDonald, 2015, 2016b, 2022) and methodologies (McDonald, 2016a, 2017; McDonald & Rumens, 2020). In this regard, a primary question driving my work has been: What does it mean to queer organizational communication, and how does queer theory offer alternative understandings of both organizing and research practices that challenge mainstream assumptions? As I’ve sought to practice queering methodologies, I’ve become aware of some of the challenges involved in this process. One of the key challenges that I’ve encountered in attempting to implement queer methodologies has been reviewer expectations that qualitative research is a coherent, linear process that always follows the same basic steps. For example, in a collaborative autoethnography about foreign worker identity in the United States, my co-authors and I engaged in performative, evocative writing that queers the traditional presentation of qualitative data (Cruz, McDonald, et al., 2020). Yet, in publishing this piece, we were asked by reviewers to discuss our research design and our procedures for coding data. As such, in our attempt to queer our collaborative autoethnography through the presentation of our data, we were nevertheless held accountable to normative standards for discussing data analysis that didn’t do justice to the complexity of our approach. As we move forward with the project of queering qualitative organizational communication research, my hope is that the field will do more to recognize that qualitative research doesn’t always follow logical steps and that asking authors to account for a fluid research process in a linear way hinders our ability to discuss and imagine alternative, innovative ways of conducting research.

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In my recent empirical research, I’ve found that a potential strategy for queering methodologies is to reengage with participants several years after the initial encounter to explore what has changed about their identities and experiences and how they account for these changes. This strategy was particularly fruitful for me in an ongoing project that examines foreign worker identity in U.S. academia (McDonald, 2018). When I conducted initial interviews with participants about their experiences navigating the U.S. immigration system in the summer of 2016, neither my participants nor I could have imagined the societal upheaval that would soon pervade immigration policy. Five years later, I reached out to the initial participants to invite them to a second interview that would focus on how they had navigated the turbulent times since the initial interview. In this regard, I found that many participants had experienced significant shifts in their identities and their relationship to the United States. Reengaging with participants five years later thus enabled me to highlight the fluidity of identity that is central to queer theory and challenge the notion that researcher and participant identities are unitary and stable.

FUTURE DIRECTIONS FOR QUEERING QUALITATIVE ORGANIZATIONAL COMMUNICATION RESEARCH In this chapter, we have argued that by queering methodologies, organizational communication scholars can rethink and transform research that highlights experiences, subjectivities, and topics that are outside of the purview of mainstream organizational communication research and that would be difficult to explore using more conventional methodologies. While organizational communication scholars have begun the project of queering methodologies, this project is just beginning—and, in line with the spirit of queer theory, will always be in process. Indeed, to avoid queer theory from

becoming stagnant and cliché, queer theory and queered methodologies must continue to be queered themselves and thus subject to critical interrogation (Halperin, 2003; Parker, 2016). In this concluding section, we look to the future and reflect upon how we can build upon the existing tradition of queer qualitative communication research moving forward. In this regard, we identify four key future directions: (1) queering what counts as work and organization; (2) queering what counts as organizational communication; (3) dewhitening and decolonizing queer theory and queered methodologies; and (4) engaging in queer worldmaking and transformation through queered methodologies.

Queering What Counts as Work and Organization As we have seen throughout this chapter, queering is a process that involves interrogating norms and deconstructing concepts that tend to be taken for granted. As we continue to move forward with queering qualitative organizational research, we call on organi­ zational communication scholars to queer the very notion of work by expanding what counts as “work” in their selection of topics and research sites, and their design of sampling. By queering the concept of work, we can disrupt which types of work and organizing are deemed “legitimate,” “questionable,” or “il/legal” (LeMaster, 2015, p. 86), as well as which types of work are deemed normative and worthy of research. Currently, work is predominately conceptualized in a narrow way with a heavy focus on professional, white-collar workers (Ashcraft, 2011). This narrow focus functions to marginalize and silence workers who engage in other types of work and ultimately limit our understandings of organizing. As Eger, Litrenta et  al. (2022) state, “we need further inquiry into all forms of work beyond academic and white-collar labor to including blue-collar

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work, manual labor, undocumented work, sex work, underground work, and more” (p. 29). Given their flexibility and focus on disrupting normativities, queered methodologies are particularly amenable to exploring these types of work.

Queering What Counts as Organizational Communication We have been intentional in this chapter to queer the boundaries of organizational communication scholarship by including research that, while relevant to organizational communication, is sometimes not considered to be organizational communication proper. Given the overwhelming whiteness of communication studies in general (Chakravartty et al., 2018) and organizational communication in particular (Cruz, Gist-Mackey et  al., 2020), Harris (2019, 2020) has argued that maintaining rigid disciplinary boundaries about what counts as organizational communication functions to uphold whiteness and coloniality. Queering the boundaries of organizational communication is thus a way to help resist and challenge the whiteness and coloniality of the field. Consequently, as the project of queering qualitative organizational research moves forward, we call upon scholars to continue to queer the boundaries of organizational communication itself, and, in so doing, join in conversation with scholars in allied subfields and disciplines who are also queering qualitative research methodologies. In this regard, we especially find that queer organizational communication would benefit from more engagement with queer intercultural communication, which is more established and has significantly enriched our field’s engagement with queer theory (Chávez, 2013; Eguchi & Asante, 2016; Eguchi & Calafell, 2020; Yep, 2013). A key strength of queer intercultural communication has especially been to theorize race and coloniality alongside queer theory, which we examine more closely in the next section.

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Dewhitening and Decolonizing Queer Theory and Queered Methodologies Although queer theory seeks to disrupt normativities, queer and trans people of color (QTPOC) scholars have shown that it can nevertheless reproduce them. In particular, they have illustrated how mainstream queer theory has centered whiteness and Western, cisgender experiences (Asante, 2020; Ferguson, 2003; Manning et al., 2020). One of the earliest queer of color critiques of queer theory was formulated by E. Patrick Johnson (2001), who proposed the term quare as an alternative to queer in order to specifically center racialized and classed knowledges while critiquing stable notions of identity. Quaring queer theory is thus conceptualized as a way of racializing queer theory and decentering whiteness (Eguchi & Asante, 2016; Johnson, 2019; Johnson & Henderson, 2005). For example, quare theory analyzes how “racial identity, like sexual identity, comes with a set of norms attached” (Ford, 2011, p. 125) and thus explicitly seeks to challenge norms related to the performance of both sexual and racial identities. As quare theory has developed, Jones and Eguchi (2021) have noted that it has been taken up often to only examine QTPOC, thereby producing a binary of “queer” as white and “quare” as Black. This consideration leads them to center quare in their work as a way “to acknowledge that race and racial contexts should be a key consideration when discussing performances of queerness” (Jones & Eguchi, 2021, p. 84) for everyone, as the silence of white queer theorists on race functions to reproduce and normalize whiteness. Although quaring has been explored by QTPOC scholars in intercultural communication, organi­ zational scholars have yet to engage with quare theory—further highlighting the whiteness of the queer theory literature in both organizational communication and critical management studies. Moving forward then, qualitative queer organizational communication research would benefit from quaring queer theory.

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In addition to being critiqued for reproducing whiteness, queer theory has been critiqued for its lack of attention to issues of settler colonialism, neocolonialism, and coloniality (Asante & Hanchey, 2021). For example, Asante (2020) argues that a particular form of queer theory—one that is rooted in whiteness and Western epistemologies—is hegemonic and treats African queer theory as merely an addendum. He thus calls for decolonizing queer theorizing to address “the emphasis on the colonial difference in queer theorizing [that] refuses to be named and subsumed under the umbrella of faux universalism” (Asante, 2020, p. 173). An important future direction in queer qualitative organizational communication research is thus to challenge Eurocentrism through the use of queered methodologies in transnational contexts.

Engaging in Queer Worldmaking and Transformation through Qualitative Methodologies Finally, queer worldmaking refers to “the project of building affirming queer life worlds within, among, and between persistently heteronormative and anti-queer societies” (Otis & Dunn, 2021, p. 1). Rooted in the work of José Muñoz (1999), queer worldmaking is premised on the idea that everyday performances “have the ability to establish alternate views of the world” (p. 195). Queer worldmaking can thus serve as a heuristic that enables us to imagine social transformation and alternative, affirming futures for those continuously marginalized by systemic institutional violence. In communication research, Lore/tta LeMaster (2017) offers an example of how queer worldmaking can be put into practice. In founding a Trans Empowerment Group on her campus, she worked alongside students to develop a public speaking series, disrupt normativities, and use bell hooks’ consciousness raising via students’ autoethnography and performances. Their collective organizing

and collaborative use of qualitative methods as a trans and queer organizing group drew “on embodied traumas (injury) as a critical point of departure for critiquing and unlearning normativity (healing) with the goal of transforming those traumas into points of activist intervention (queer worldmaking)” (LeMaster, 2017, p. 128). LeMaster’s (2017) project is thus a model not just for addressing the institutionalization of queer, trans, and intersex experiences, but also considering how qualitative methods can become a praxis of healing and queer worldmaking. Although queer worldmaking is highly influential across queer communication studies, it has generally remained unexplored in organizational communication. We thus conclude this chapter by calling on organizational communication scholars to actively put into practice the concept of queer worldmaking by reflecting on how we can build and transform the future of our discipline in a way that dislodges our methods from colonialism, whiteness, and (cishetero)normativity. To do so, we also encourage more engaged, participatory qualitative organizational communication praxis that amplifies difference and justice.

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violence. Behavioral Sciences, 12(6), 184. www. mdpi.com/2076-328X/12/6/184 Eger, E. K., & Way, A. K. (2020). Reimagining qualitative analysis and writing via a comparative constructed focus group method. Departures in Critical Qualitative Research, 9(3), 78–104. https://doi.org/10.1525/dcqr.2020.9.3.78 Eguchi, S., & Asante, G. (2016). Disidentifications revisited: Queer(y)ing intercultural communication theory. Communication Theory, 26(2), 171–189. https://doi.org/10.1111/comt.12086 Eguchi, S., & Calafell, B. M. (Eds.). (2020). Queer intercultural communication: The intersectional politics of belonging in and across differences. Rowman & Littlefield. Ferguson, R. (2003). Aberrations in Black: Toward a queer of color critique. University of Minnesota Press. Ford, J., Learmonth, M., & Harding, N. (2008). Leadership as identity: Constructions and deconstructions. Palgrave Macmillan. Ford, R. T. (2011). What’s queer about race? In J. Halley & A. Parker (Eds.), After sex?: On writing since queer theory (pp. 121–129). Duke University Press. Foucault, M. (1976). Histoire de la sexualité I: La volonté de savoir. Gallimard. Gamson, J. (2003). Sexualities, queer theory, and qualitative research. In N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), The landscape of qualita­ tive research: Theories and issues (pp. 540– 564). Sage. Halberstam, J. (1998). Female masculinity. Duke University Press. Halberstam, J. (2011). The queer art of failure. Duke University Press. Halperin, D. (2003). The normalization of queer theory. Journal of Homosexuality, 45(2–4), 339– 343. https://doi.org/10.1300/J082v45n02_17 Harding, N., Lee, H., Ford, J., & Learmonth, M. (2011). Leadership and charisma: A desire that cannot speak its name? Human Relations, 64(7), 927–949. https://doi.org/10.1177/ 0018726710393367 Harris, K. L. (2019). Unlearning border defense, undermining white supremacist violence: Renewing the case for interdisciplinary inquiry in organizational communication. National Communication Association, Baltimore, MD. Harris, K. L. (2020). Time to #ToneUpOrgComm. Departures in Critical Qualitative

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Research, 9(2), 147–151. https://doi. org/10.1525/dcqr.2020.9.2.147 Harris, K. L., & McDonald, J. (2018). Introduction: Queering the “closet” at work. Management Communication Quarterly, 32(2), 265–270. https://doi.org/10.1177/0893318917742517 Holman Jones, S., & Adams, T. E. (2010). Autoethnography is a queer method. In K. Browne & C. J. Nash (Eds.), Queer methods and method­ ologies: Intersecting queer theories and social science research (pp. 195–214). Ashgate. Jagose, A. (1996). Queer theory: An introduc­ tion. New York University Press. Jensen, P. R., Cruz, J., Eger, E. K., Hanchey, J. N., Gist-Mackey, A. N., Ruiz-Mesa, K., & Villamil, A. (2020). Pushing beyond positionalities and through “failures” in qualitative organi­ zational communication: Experiences and lessons on identities in ethnographic praxis. Management Communication Quarterly, 34(1), 121–151. https://doi.org/10.1177/ 0893318919885654 Johnson, A. L. (2019). Quare/kuaer/queer/(e) ntersectionality. CrossCurrents, 68(4), 500– 514. https://doi.org/10.1111/cros.12338 Johnson, A. L., & LeMaster, B. (Eds.). (2020). Gender futurity, intersectional autoethnogra­ phy: Embodied theorizing from the margins. Routledge. Johnson, E. P. (2001). “Quare” studies, or (almost) everything I know about queer studies I learned from my grandmother. Text and Performance Quarterly, 21(1), 1–25. https:// doi.org/10.1080/10462930128119 Johnson, E. P., & Henderson, M. G. (2005). Introduction: Queering black studies/“quaring” queer studies. In E. P. Johnson & M. G. Henderson (Eds.), Black queer studies: A critical anthology (pp. 1–20). Duke University Press. Jones, S., & Eguchi, S. (2021). Queerness, sounded: autoethnographic aurality. Review of Communication, 21(1), 82–93. https:// doi.org/10.1080/15358593.2021.1892172 Just, S. N., & Christiansen, T. J. (2012). Doing diversity: Text-audience agency and rhetorical alternatives. Communication Theory, 22(3), 319–337. https://doi.org/10.1111/j. 1468-2885.2012.01407.x Kenney, S. C. (2021). Kaleidoscopic inquires: Queering approaches to organizational diversity work [Unpublished master’s thesis.]. University of Colorado Boulder.

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Kong, T. S. K., Mahoney, D., & Plummer, K. (2003). Queering the interview. In J. A. Holstein & J. F. Gubrium (Eds.), Inside interviewing: New lenses, new concerns (pp. 91–110). Sage. LeMaster, B. (2015). On strike!: A poetic autoethnography of labor. Departures in Critical Qualitative Research, 4(2), 83–95. https://doi.org/10.1525/dcqr.2015.4.2.83 LeMaster, B. (2017). Unlearning the violence of the normative. QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking, 4(2), 123–130. https://doi. org/10.14321/qed.4.2.0123 Manning, J., Asante, G., Huerta Moreno, L., Johnson, R., LeMaster, B., Li, Y., Rudnick, J.J., Stern, D. M., & Young, S. (2020). Queering communication studies: A Journal of Applied Communication Research forum. Journal of Applied Communication Research, 48(4), 413–437. https://doi.org/10.1080/0090988 2.2020.1789197 McDonald, J. (2013). Coming out in the field: A queer reflexive account of shifting researcher identity. Management Learning, 44(2), 127–143. https://doi.org/10.1177/ 1350507612473711 McDonald, J. (2015). Organizational communication meets queer theory: Theorizing relations of “difference” differently. Communication Theory, 25(3), 310–329. https://doi.org/ 10.1111/comt.12060 McDonald, J. (2016a). Expanding queer reflexivity: The closet as a guiding metaphor for reflexive practice. Management Learning, 47(4), 391–406. https://doi.org/10.1177/ 1350507615610029 McDonald, J. (2016b). Occupational segregation research: Queering the conversation. Gender, Work & Organization, 23(1), 19–35. https://doi.org/10.1111/gwao.12100 McDonald, J. (2017). Queering methodologies and organizational research: Disrupting, critiquing, and exploring. Qualitative Research in Organizations and Management, 12(2), 130–148. https://doi.org/10.1108/QROM-062016-1388 McDonald, J. (2018). Negotiating the “closet” in U.S. academia: Foreign scholars on the job market. Management Communication Quar­ terly, 32(2), 287–291. https://doi.org/10.1177/ 0893318917740428 McDonald, J. (2022). Queering CCO scholarship: Examining communication as constitutive of

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11 Ethnography of Communication Approaches to Qualitative Organizational Communication Research Tr u d y M i l b u r n a n d S u n n y L i e O w e n s

One qualitative research tradition that has not yet made as prominent a contribution to organizational communication as it might, is the ethnography of communication (hereafter EC). Founded by Dell Hymes in the late 1960s and furthered by him and his students at the University of Pennsylvania (LeedsHurwitz, 2010), this tradition was diffused within the field of communication by Gerry Philipsen and his University of Washington students—perhaps most prominently, Donal Carbaugh. Although more commonly considered a micro-analytic tradition1, EC researchers share three commitments that span analytic contexts. These commitments include culture, community, and practices. Before we proceed with a review of those commitments, however, we offer a brief note of explanation. Potentially, our commitment here to studying “culture” may trigger fears among some readers that we are naively depicting organizations as a backdrop (or “container”) within which communication occurs, and culture as a homogeneous entity

that serves only the interests of the powerful. From those readers, we request both patience and a suspension of preconceptions. While admittedly the EC tradition is historically grounded in a perspective on culture subsequently abandoned by organizational communication scholars2, we argue that the full scope of EC scholarship may yet offer good reasons for those scholars to reconsider their conventional conceptions of the relationships between communication, culture, and organization.

SHARED COMMITMENTS: CULTURE, COMMUNITY, AND WAYS OF SPEAKING Culture The first key commitment EC scholars share is to the concept of culture. The roots of this commitment stem from Dell Hymes

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(1962, 1972a) whose most well-known theoretical contributions to the study of culture and communication is the SPEAKING 3 mnemonic device. Hymes created this etic framework (Pike, 1967) to be used in analyzing all communicative activities performed in particular cultures.4 In his framework, the concept of culture is manifested in two main ways. The first is culture as “S”—cultural scenes or settings wherein certain communication acts occur. The second is “N”, which includes (a) cultural norms for interaction, or how to communicate in culturally appropriate ways, and (b) cultural norms for interpretation, or how to make sense of a person’s acts based on what a certain culture prescribes. A more recent and thoroughly explicated treatment of “culture” in the EC tradition is Carbaugh’s communication theory of culture. Carbaugh (2013) introduces a way to conceptualize culture that is tightly interwoven with communication. According to Carbaugh, culture is “a social-construction produced through communication within cultural discourse…” (p. 74). He defines cultural discourse as “a historically transmitted expressive system of communication practices, of acts, events, and styles, which are composed of specific symbols, symbolic forms, norms, and their meanings” (Carbaugh, 2007, p. 169). Culture is thus a complex and layered outcome of communication practices, rather than a pre-existing entity. It is created, recreated, negotiated, and altered through the enactment of certain symbols, symbolic forms, and practices. In other words, as we go about performing our communicative routines, we are producing culture.

Community To narrow down the production of culture, researchers examine specific communities. Towards this end, Hymes (1964, 1972a) advocated a focus on one “speech community” or a group of people who share at least

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one rule for conducting and interpreting communicative conduct (Hymes, 1962, 1964). Such rules produced a “repertoire” of “ways of speaking.” That is, members of a particular speech community could be distinguished by their patterned interaction, including speaking styles, contexts of discourse, and appropriate intersections between styles and contexts. By locating EC studies within a speech community, a researcher delimits the boundary within which to situate their investigation of culture. For early EC scholars, the boundaries of a speech community were not recognized as problematic. Researchers would go into the field to examine the practices of pre-identified speech community5 members. In EC research, there is good reason to view the entity of “speech community” as synonymous with “organization” (Milburn, 2009, 2015). That is, EC researchers study how enactments of certain cultural communication practices within a speech community “member” (Philipsen, 1987) persons in relation to a group. In this process, the researcher can gain a deeper understanding of how participants enact their “we-ness,” or shared identity, as a speech community. This process overlaps considerably with distinctive, fundamental processes of organizing, such as bounding, categorizing, ordering, and coordinating. In this way, EC scholars focus on the communicative practices that bind people together. Because a speech community is defined as participants who share a way of speaking, this often means that EC scholars examine how participants identify as a group. Those who share similar practices and the interpretation of those practices can frequently be found comprising organizations. Examining identity is of course a shared interest among organizational communication researchers. Having entered the field through the scholarship of Tompkins and Cheney (1983; Cheney & Tompkins, 1987), organizational communication researchers have used this concept to understand both how organizational members identify with

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their organization, and how the organization generates a sense of identity as an entity. In contrast, EC scholars do not initially enter a speech community to focus on individual or group identity, but rather base their analysis on the actual speaking practices that matter to the community.

Ways of Speaking Initially, EC differentiated itself from the Chomskian (1968) notion of grammatical competence, focusing instead on rules or norms that characterized a group’s communication. Hymes (1972b) advocated for communicative competence, whereby the everyday, social use of language becomes the focus of one’s analysis. Hymes called for a programmatic approach which would treat “speaking” as an object of study in its own right, and one that treats speaking as a social, instead of an individual and psychological “in-one’s-head” phenomenon. An early example of an investigation into an EC practice within an organizational context is Wendy Leeds-Hurwitz’s (1989) study of naming behavior within an office setting. Specifically, she analyzed how different forms of address display member competence. By using role titles, first names, or nicknames, speakers indicated relational status or intimacy. Several studies of personreference have followed, but in this one, Leeds-Hurwitz makes note that it was not common for workplace literature to attend to cultural orientation in their investigations. She thus demonstrated the importance of how communicative practices can and do affect workplace cooperation. Kristine Fitch (1998) further contributed to our understanding about how people form and maintain relationships by relying upon community-specific ways of speaking, especially among those in Bogotá, Columbia. She described participants within her research as comprising a class of “professionals,”

or those who did not participate in manual labor, and the way they form ties among their “workmates.” The terms used by participants, and the way speakers identified themselves, although not contextualized by a specific organization, illustrates how EC research reveals cultural speaking practices that categorize speakers organizationally. Like the way ethnography of speaking was reframed into the ethnography of communication, the micro-level concept “ways of speaking” has transitioned into an examination of communicative practices. This is especially evident in Scollo and Milburn’s (2019) edited volume whereby most EC researchers began their analysis by identifying distinct practices, rather than starting from the more traditional, speech community approach.

ETHNOGRAPHY OF COMMUNICATION METHODS As we have explained, to make claims about culture, ethnographers of communication examine communicative practices performed by members of speech communities. Accordingly, EC scholars are careful to split their methodological practices into two phases: data collection and data analysis. The choice of data collection methodology relates specifically to the commitment to learn from the people communicating. Therefore, participant observation is a frequent and primary means to collect actual talk between people. When this is not possible, EC researchers may use observations alone (such as lurking in online forums), making recordings, or conducting interviews (i.e., while recognizing the limitations imposed by the artifice of this speaking situation itself; see Briggs, 1986, and Tracy & Robles, 2009, 2010). Regardless of their collection of primary or secondary orders of data6, researchers may describe this step as “data gathering,” whereas it is important to note that EC recognizes these

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acts as “data generation.” The seemingly neutral description of “data collection” is a point whereby EC researchers are attentive to the ways in which this process itself impacts the interpretive claims that can be made. EC research is particularly known for its descriptive rigor during data analysis7. Traditionally, the starting place for EC researchers was to use Hymes’ SPEAKING framework. Subsequently, two additional theoretical-analytic frameworks have gained a more robust following (see the discussion of Speech Codes Theory and Cultural Discourse Analysis below). Although known for descriptive work, EC scholars also delve into interpretive, comparative, critical, and theoretical work (Carbaugh, 2007; Carbaugh, Nuciforo, Molina-Markham, van Over, 2011). By examining patterns of communicative practices, EC analysts are able to make claims based on participants’ display of interpretive norms. EC researchers may also make claims based on theoretical constructs, like politeness or agonistic stances, especially with reference to alternate ways of speaking within different communities. Because of the commitment to descriptive interpretations of communicative patterns, EC researchers have frequently been asked if they engage in critique. EC researchers have addressed this question by differentiating their involvement in one of two types of critique (Carbaugh, 1988, 1989/90): (1) critique that stems from larger theoretical questions or, (2) critique emerging from within, where community members actively seek to make purposeful changes to their communicative practices (Carbaugh & Hastings, 1992; Leighter, Rudnick & Edmonds, 2013; Rudnick & Boromisza-Habashi, 2017). Similar to critique that comes from within the community itself, when talk about organizational culture is valued in an organization, that discursive practice is worth looking into on its own. In other words, EC researchers value what participants value. They study what matters to those participants and how that, in turn, constructs their daily social realities. When

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“culture” is incorporated into member ways of speaking, it becomes both an object and outcome of EC analyses. To further address the similarities and distinctions between EC and organizational communication, the following two sections provide examples of recent outgrowths of EC research that have developed their own theoretical and methodological nuances. Each is considered an EC “strand” due to its shared commitments to studying culture, community, and ways of speaking. Its researchers pursue similar goals of explicating culture by exploring member practices. In reviewing these strands, we focus primarily on how they analyze organizational aspects of communicative practices.

SPEECH CODES THEORY Although Philipsen began developing Speech Codes Theory (hereafter, SCT) in 1997, it was not until 2005 when he and his coauthors developed a more comprehensive treatment in Philipsen, Coutu, and Covarrubias (2005). In that latter work, the authors argued that SCT encompasses six propositions. These propositions refer to the relationship between speaking and the codes members produce. For instance, the first proposition, “wherever there is a distinctive culture, there is to be found a distinctive speech code” (p. 58) was expanded to include the potential for multiple codes. Interpretation is addressed in subsequent propositions, whereby the premises and meanings of communicative acts are understood through members’ speech codes. While none of the six propositions explicitly related to organizations, the first and second, referencing culture and community, provide links to the places within which speech codes occur— invariably, within organizations. It is the concept of a code that ties the community together which we believe may provide a key resource for further collaboration between EC and organizational communication.

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Initially, because SCT situated its research within a speech community, related scholarship has described various organizations as the places from which findings emerged. Within these settings, SCT researchers examine specific practices, which they then formulate through the process of analysis into codes. Codes are defined as “a system of socially constructed symbols and meanings, premises, and rules, pertaining to communicative conduct” (Philipsen, 1997, p. 126). When SCT researchers formulate a code, they provide evidence about the way the code may be inferred from communicative practices conducted by those within an organization. Through the assertion of a code, a researcher can illustrate the “communicative conduct” such as that of relationships between members. SCT researchers articulate codes as an artifact of member interaction, where the primary task of the researchers is discovery and documentation; although it may also be true that the code itself is, at least partially, an artifact of the researcher’s data analysis. For instance, when labeling a code, such as a code of honor, an SCT researcher may not generate that code from terms used by speech community members, yet the patterned interaction is evident to all8. Thus far, speech codes have not often been used to argue explicitly about the creation, maintenance, or dissolution of organizations themselves. As will become clear below, the focus of SCT has centered on communication within an organization (not communication “as” organization). However, SCT researchers recognize that when they propose the existence of a speech code, it conveys information about a culture’s psychology (personhood), sociality (relations), and rhetoric (speaking norms), among other things. In this way, SCT does provide information about communication “as” organization. As Hart (2017) pointed out, “communication serves to constitute, organize, and give meaning to social life” (p. 2). We return to this issue f­ollowing several examples.

Intersections between Speech Codes Theory and Organizational Communication Research Although organizations have long been popular contexts for EC dissertations (Covarrubias, Ruud, Sprain, etc.), Ruud (1995; 2000) was among the first to publish a distinctively organizational EC study in the communication discipline9. His study focused on the workings of a regional symphony (particularly, a financial crisis and ensuing labor conflict between its subcultures of performers and managers). Although subsequent research has situated SCT studies within diverse institutional contexts, we review here three studies that explicitly use SCT to understand organizational codes. Two years after Ruud’s second publication, Covarrubias (2002) published research from a construction company—Groupo Industrial Gutiérrez de Velasco (GDV)— located in Veracruz, Mexico. In this study, she explains that GDV is a conglomerate with approximately 350–500 employees. Its business markets include industrial and commercial construction. Covarrubias described the norms that guide cultural communication within and between the subcultures of labor and management. According to Covarrubias, these norms both reflect and constitute social institutions and organizations (see p. 8); and culture and communication are inextricably linked—as constitutively and reflectively interdependent (see p. 10). Covarrubias describes how EC research leads to “…meaning-centered organizational communication” (p. 12). In her research, she explores the question of what constitutes organi­zational life for people across multiple cultural contexts and concludes that social meanings in the workplace influence members’ development of cooperation. This, in turn, influences an organization’s overall development of communicative goals and strategies. Another example of an SCT organi­zation study was conducted by Ho (2006), who

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collected participant-observation data in an acupuncture clinic in Washington. She describes the organization thus: GFAC is very small and quite informal compared to other acupuncture clinics in the area. Housed within a larger Asian social services agency…the clinic “space” was actually a multipurpose room that was transformed every Monday into an acupuncture clinic. The space was about 30 ft × 40 ft with a walk-in closet and kitchen attached. All three of these spaces (main room, closet, and kitchen) were used for meeting and treating patients. (p. 419)

The physical space of the clinic provides the setting for Ho’s (2006) examination of employee references to the term “Qi” and its use in healthcare treatments. A third example of SCT research reporting explicitly about an organization was written by Hart (2016), who studied an online software start-up she called Eloqi. Hart (2016) describes the two co-founders’ technology platform and an internet protocol that their company produced, as well as the content that comprised their language-learning model. From these organizational materials, participants created a virtual community populated by language teachers and learners. Hart (2016) addressed the following research question: “What are the local norms, premises, and rules guiding oral communication in this virtual learning community?” (p. 290). Hart explains that the ethnography of communication provided a descriptive lens, whereas SCT provided an interpretive one, facilitating commentary on personhood, sociality, and rhetoric. Although these three studies examine specific organizations, over the past thirty years, speech code analysis has been conducted within a wide range of industry settings (see Milburn, 2021). These include fundamentalist churches, healthcare settings (Ho, 2006; Roscigno et al., 2013), news and entertainment (Coutu, 2000, 2008; Edgerly, 2011; Ruud, 1995, 2000; Simmons, 2014), and educational institutions such as high schools (Chang, 2011; Philipsen, 1990), universities (Bassett, 2017; Kotani, 2008; Philipsen, 2000), and an

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online learning platform (Hart, 2016, 2017). Furthermore, Chornet and Parr (2017) advocate using the SCT framework to conduct intercultural employee training, presumably by human resources personnel. Speech codes generated and used within these industries can now be compared to one another as well as inform literature outside SCT.

Speech Codes Theory Impacts on Organizational Communication Studies Within the International Communication Association (ICA), its Language and Social Interaction (LSI) division has historically served as a forum where EC and organizational communication scholars have cultivated a shared agenda. Towards that end, Philipsen was invited to attend an LSI pre-conference in May 2001 to provide an EC analysis of communication, among other interpretations, about the practices occurring within one corporation’s management retreat (Cooren, 200710). This event illustrated common interests between EC and “pragmatic” organizational communication scholars (see Chapter 4 in this volume). In order to further illustrate the impact SCT research can have for those who are interested in how organizations are constituted and how they situate common practices, consider the way a speech code was articulated within the Eloqi organization. Hart (2016) posited a “code of English logic.” This communicative code relates to Eloqi’s larger cultural system that includes preferences for actions (e.g., proactively towards one’s learning), relatedness (e.g., in a supportive manner), and values (e.g., honesty). The code is embedded with beliefs about the ontology of this organizational culture, or what it is to be a person in this online space, as well as their epistemology—how Eloqi participants learn and demonstrate their knowledge. Although often written as descriptive accounts of what occurs within a speech

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community, in many organizational cases, SCT findings provide evidence for how participants work together in “negotiating their community membership” and how they collaboratively sustain communal life (Hart, 2016, p. 309). This social constructionist perspective informs how SCT researchers address organizations as entities comprised of people who figure out how to be with one another to create and sustain the organization. A second illustration of SCT’s impact on organizational communication can be drawn from Ho’s (2006) conclusions in her abovementioned study: As a speech community, what draws this group of acupuncture practitioners together is their common usage of a Qi-based speech code. This work builds on research that has argued that it is the code, and not geography, that holds speech communities together (Fitch, 1994) … It is the use of this Qi-based speech code that allowed practitioners to actively construct a boundary around themselves that excluded those who might practice scientifically based acupuncture. (p. 435)

Her conclusions about the organization stem directly from her recognition of participants’ use of a Qi-speech code. In practice, this particular organization can be differentiated from others based on the specific speaking practices its members use. These examples may illustrate changes within SCT over time. Covarrubias’ (2002) study posited GDV more as an organizational container for the politeness actions of its members, where we did not learn how codeuse differentiated this particular organization, like we did within Ho (2006). Ten years later, Hart (2016) illustrated how one online organi­ zation became constituted by the Englishspeaking communicative code advocated and reinforced by its members.

CULTURAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS Cultural discourse analysis (hereafter, CuDA) (Carbaugh, 2007) is another EC theory,

method, and philosophy that can be used to investigate communicative practices. It follows the intellectual tradition of ethnography of communication (Hymes, 1972a; Philipsen & Carbaugh, 1986) and stands at the juncture of theories of cultural communication (Philipsen, 1987, 2002) and communication codes (Philipsen, 1997; Philipsen, Coutu, & Covarrubias, 2005). Beneath seemingly routine and mundane social interactions, CuDA recognizes the existence of a meta-cultural commentary working to shape speaker conceptions of: (1) who we are (identity); (2) how we relate to one another (relations); (3) what our actions mean to us (acting); (4) how we display emotions (feeling); and (5) how we situate ourselves (dwelling) (Carbaugh, 2007; Carbaugh & Cerulli, 2017). This framework renders explicit taken-forgranted cultural understandings about identity, relations, actions, emotions, and dwelling displayed within the communicative practices of a certain speech community (Milburn, 2004). Understanding and interpreting these cultural aspects is based on an analyst’s ability to “penetrate the surface of meanings, to [access] the deeper (cultural) significance and importance” (Carbaugh & Cerulli, 2017, pp. 6–7) of communication practices. CuDA devotes primary attention to culturally distinctive communication practices. The three main research questions this theory is designed to address include: (1) the question of functional accomplishments (what is getting done when people communicate in this way?); (2) the question of structure (how is a particular communication practice put together? What are its main cultural ingredients, elements, or features); and (3) the question of cultural sequencing (what act sequence constitutes this communication practice?) (Carbaugh, 2007, p. 169). CuDA assumes that people create and use localized communicative means and meanings, that these vary cross-culturally, and these should be investigated and interpreted on and in their own terms (see Cerulli, 2017, p. 249). A main premise of this theory is that

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social life is formed and shaped by communicative practices. Similar to Martin’s (1992) conceptualization of organizational culture as a “nexus”—or, a site in which cultural forces interact—organizations in CuDA-related studies have mostly been treated as a context or locality, in which culturally distinctive communicative practices occur11. An early example of EC research situated within particular organizational contexts can be found in Carbaugh’s (1996) Situating Selves. Therein, the organizational contexts include: a college, a television station, and a series of governmental meetings. The scene of “work” comprises two chapters. Carbaugh’s analysis teases out ways that discursive tensions develop to divide or unite different categories of workers. His research explicitly defines the concept of organizational culture as an “expressive system of symbols, symbolic forms, and meanings that, when used, constitutes a common sense of the working self and work-life” (Carbaugh, 1996, p. 63). The discursive practices themselves, although they may appear to potentially transcend any one organization, are situationally and organi­ zationally specific. The communication practices in his analysis are described as common resources to which participants have access.

Intersections between Cultural Discourse Analysis and Organizational Communication Research Subsequent studies of organizations or organizational communication using the CuDA framework have mostly treated organizations similar to Carbaugh (1996)—as a scene or locality, in which culturally distinctive communicative practices occur. For instance, Morgan (2007) explores the sense of place and regional communication developed within the Department of Energy’s Waste Isolation Pilot Plant. Likewise, Graham and Hastings (2019) describe ritual practices occurring during a

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funeral, making only passing reference to the scene taking place within a specific religious denomination and physical location of a church. In fact, religious organizations form the backdrop to a number of CuDA studies including Alyan (2016), Lie (2015, 2016, 2018), and Molina-Markham (2016). The similarity between these studies is that although they explicated cultural communicative practices in different religious settings, and how participants express specific ways of acting, relating, and emoting, the authors rarely made a connection to how these practices constitute the religious organizations themselves. Additional institutional contexts of education and government have situated CuDA studies. Brownlee (2021), Leighter, Grimshaw and Braithwaite (2019) and Boromisza-Habashi and Reinig (2018) explore U.S. educational contexts whereby instructional practices have demonstrably cultural nuances. Rudnick, Witteborn and Edmonds (2019) made passing reference to the governmental and nongovernmental organizations within which asylum seekers and refugees must navigate. Further scenes situate Native American Ojibwe ways of speaking about the “wolf” within governmental agencies in the upper Midwestern part of the U.S. (Cerulli, 2017), and end-of-life conversations in a military educational setting (MacKenzie and Tenzek, 2019). In the aforementioned studies it is easy to miss that the communication practices under investigation take place in organizations, but once we notice that they do, the question becomes, of what consequence do these organizational scenes lend themselves to this form of inquiry (Sigman, 1995)? That is, do the practices simply happen to take place within particular organizations, or do the practices create and reify what it means to be a particular organization? Said another way, how does the organizational context matter in either constraining or enabling the particular communicative practices under investigation? These questions have been explored a bit within those CuDA-based studies that are deliberately situated in an analysis of

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communication in organizations. In a recent compilation of CuDA studies, for example, we find several that interrogate how participants’ discourse is influenced by or influences the organization itself. For instance, Hart and Milburn (2019) examined how users of the online networking platform LinkedIn present a professional identity, as well as establish and maintain relationships with others on the platform. They found that the platform used the term “professional” to broadly apply to users from a variety of industries. Rather than a company influencing how users act, Flanigan and Alvarez (2019) described an intentional living community, “Twin Oaks,” wherein members negotiated the organization of the community itself in order to ensure they were in the midst of “like-minded” others. Another example involves Wilkins, Wolf and Gulinello’s (2019) research about museum tour guides. Here, we notice that although one can examine tour guide practices outside of museums, (see Carbaugh & Rudnick, 2007, who describe tours taking place in national parks), it is specifically within the context of museum docent training and practice that the questions posed to visitors engage them in a new discussion, and what it means to appreciate art changes. Museums (as an organizational type) are places within which participants have modified their communicative practices. Wilkins, Wolf and Gulinello’s (2019) study is a form of organizational critique, wherein their ana­ lysis provides a lens into the way that organizational participants actively craft new ways of speaking in order to reimagine and alter the organization itself. Another study that intentionally aligned CuDA and organizational communication involves the second author (Lie Owens, Boyraz & Horowitz, 2023). Sunny collaborated with organizational communication scholars to collect interview data about what the term “polytechnic” means to various stakeholders in the institution during a period of organizational change. CuDA’s theoretical lens enabled the co-authors to

unveil a layered and multifaceted understanding of organizational identity generated through member conversations, beyond official accounts in organizational documents. Moreover, prior to publication, the authors of this study were able to share their findings with university administration in an effort to positively influence the continuing conversation regarding the university’s unique identity as a polytechnic institution and the way that members’ meaning could be shared outside the institution with prospective students, stakeholders, and the public. It is noteworthy that Sunny was “doing being” (Wieder & Pratt, 1991) a member of the polytechnic institute, while interviewing other members of the institution. By discussing the institution in a certain way, the conversational participants (researchers-interviewees) were generating organizational identity, and subsequently, organizational culture.

LINKING TRADITIONS Using Culture to Tie SCT and CuDA to Organizational Communication If we step back and consider how EC contributes to organizational communication, we must first address the related concept of culture. Similar to Eisenberg and Riley’s (2001) description of ordinary language as conveying cultural meaning, EC is based on the assumption that everyday language provides a window into culture, and cultural premises for action. Although cultural practices may appear to exist a priori, or before an outsider enters the scene, it is the ethnographer of communication’s task to demonstrate how culture is achieved by participants (organizational members); if not in its entirety, at least significant elements of an organization’s culture (such as norms, premises, etc.) are expressed through recurring communication practices (Carbaugh, 1989/90, 2007; Philipsen, 1987).

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As previously mentioned, following the CuDA framework (Carbaugh, 2007), culture is conceptualized as a product of communication practices within cultural discourse. Cultural discourse itself is an expressive system containing various symbolic forms, norms, and their meanings (Carbaugh, 2007). SCT treats culture both as the source and product from which speech codes emerge and reify (Philipsen, 1997). Not only are the concepts intertwined in this understanding of culture, they also generate one another12. Years ago, Eisenberg and Riley (2001) predicted that as organizations become less definite (i.e., virtual), the study of organi­ zational culture would be less about “organi­ zations” and more about “…the organizing and structuring of…discursively produced environment(s)…” (p. 300). Environments that are discursively produced are those that rely on everyday communicative performances for their creation and sustenance. These organizational environments are distinctly cultural because the practices that produce them do not exist outside of culture. Although these arguments took place twenty years ago, our examples have illustrated that EC scholarship remains committed and engaged in this quest (to learn how communication and culture are expressed within and generative of organized communities).

Meso-Level Analysis of Speech Events: Meetings While culture is often perceived as a macrolevel concern based on an analysis that occurs at a micro-level, EC scholars have most frequently sought to understand organizational communication within the meso-level of meetings (Milburn, 2009, 2012; Sprain & Boromiza-Habashi, 2012). Meetings are considered bounded, communication events13 where one investigates the unique ways organizational members enact culture.

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Several EC studies have been undertaken based on an explicit examination of meetings (Fitch & Foley, 2007; Milburn, 2009; Philipsen & Leighter, 2007). Since the purpose of meetings is typically related to the functioning of an organization, any time people meet to exchange opinions, solve problems, or make decisions, they do so for the purpose of organizing or furthering an organi­ zation’s mission. As Sprain and Boromisza-Habashi (2012) remind us, whether routine practices, or single instance events, it is within meetings where members create, interpret, and evaluate their professional relationships and social systems. EC scholars use Hymes’s SPEAKING framework (1972a, 1974), SCT, or CuDA to examine participant actions and norms for interpretation. By examining communication practices within meetings, as well as the function of meetings within broader organizational discourse, researchers learn more about what it means to be a specific organization or to organize. One example whereby the concept of a meeting itself was explored was in Sprain’s (2016) examination of discourse conducted within a Nicaraguan coffee cooperative. She was able to learn the distinction made between activities that are deemed a “meeting” versus those considered a “dialogue.” This is in contrast to another type of meeting referred to specifically as “mediation.” Vasilyeva’s (2016) study explored institutional roots of mediation described within U.S. discourse and ways these compare and contrast with those found in Belarus. Outside of business settings, EC scholars have examined meetings whereby citizens “speak to the issue” in political and public deliberations (Leighter & Black, 2010; Townsend, 2006, 2009). An example of the way discourse is shaped by the meeting setting can be found in Peters’ (2015)14 analysis of how members of a nonprofit organization related as a team during their hybrid-online meetings. Her study explicitly used EC and CuDA to examine values and beliefs of organizational members.

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She focused on the ways technology supported or challenged those values. Two types of organizational talk were featured in her analysis: “business work” and “joking around.” The video conferencing software adopted by the organization facilitated the first type of talk, but hindered efforts by online participants to enact joking (e.g., due to time lags and not being heard clearly by those who attended in person). The affordances and constraints of the technology impacted the valued ways of acting (work) and relating (team joking). Meetings both ground and situate patterned practices. They also provide a place whereby organizational communication can be transformative. Milburn (2009) described strategic planning meetings and retreats as designated events whereby organizational participants engaged in intentional organizational change (also see Milburn, 2012; Milburn & Hansen, 2015; Milburn, Kenefick, & Lambert, 2005).

OPPORTUNITIES AND CHALLENGES IN ASSOCIATING ETHNOGRAPHY OF COMMUNICATION AND ORGANIZATIONAL COMMUNICATION Organizational communication scholars have been grappling with issues that EC scholars have also been considering, yet the two areas have proceeded on their own trajectories, seldom intersecting. Issues addressed by each

group, however, include culture and identity, as well as actions and accountability. Although EC scholars have examined these areas, their findings have not been fed directly back into the organizational communication literature. This section is an attempt to redress that gap. To assist with the alignment of our joint interests, we offer the following table (see Table 11.1).

Ontology Written EC reports reference the community under investigation as a relatively fixed entity, like a television station (Carbaugh, 1988; Simmons, 2014) or construction company (Covarrubias, 2002). Unsurprisingly, critiques of EC organizational research fault it for as a single-case micro-analysis (Klein, Tosi, & Cannella, 1999). However, this critique misses the nuance of the multilevel theoretical contributions that EC research attempts to provide. Although EC scholars try to faithfully represent how an organi­ zation IS at a given point in time, based on how people who participate in that organi­ zation interact, they also recognize that change may be afoot (see Wilkins, Gulinello, & Wolf, 2019). EC scholars recognize that they are only capturing patterns from those interactions to which they have access. In fact, depending upon their points of access and length of tenure, their very presence in an organization during fieldwork may

Table 11.1  Key Points of Comparison Between Ethnography of Communication and Organizational Communication Scholarship Ontology Epistemology Theory

Methods

Ethnography of Communication

Organizational Communication

Quality of Relationship

Organizations as relatively stable Participants’ knowledge foregrounded Processual and constitutive view of communication (and organizations) Generating data to illustrate patterned interaction that is evident to most

Organizations as “in flux” Researcher knowledge foregrounded Processual and constitutive view of communication (and organizations) Generating data to illustrate organizing as an ongoing accomplishment

Different emphasis Different emphasis Similar

Different emphasis

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influence the organization’s culture. Whether they are already members or new entrants into an organization, once they talk with fellow participants explicitly about “culture,” they recognize that they may be co-creating or reifying a particular sense of culture. This brings us to the issue of how stable EC scholars consider any organizational entity to be. Historically, some organi­ zational theory has implied that “change” was a temporary state; for instance, one reads about how organizations are undergoing intentional strategic change. Over the years, however, how EC and organi­ zational communication account for “flux” and “indeterminacy” (McDonald & Mitra, 2019) has varied. As we have mentioned, it is often during meetings where proposals for changes are raised, debated, and decided upon by organizational participants (Milburn, 2009; Sprain & BoromiszaHabashi, 2012; Witteborn & Sprain, 2009). Disagreements, conflicts, or turmoil (Flanigan & Alvarez, 2019), or simply differences in the use and meaning of naming or address practices (Covarrubias, 2002; Leeds-Hurwitz, 1989; Milburn, 2009) provide evidence of EC studies that illustrate the existence of competing codes or norms (Covarrubias, Kvam, & Saito, 2019) used by community members. We agree that although EC studies have traditionally focused more on the stability and endurance of patterned interactions, EC scholars need to be more explicit about the implications for communication to continually shift and for members to display more impermanent, temporary, or unique ways of working together when presented with unexpected or novel situations. Both EC and organizational communication scholars seem to recognize that the balance between finding patterns that illustrate both the existence of a community/organization (or culture), and the tensions that make that unity precarious, is an ongoing challenge.

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Epistemology Following closely on the heels of questions about the constitution of organizations are those concerning member knowledge. Ways of speaking may be akin to ways of knowing in some realms, yet for EC scholars the distinction between these phenomena is what differentiates the ethnography of communication from the field of psychology. In fact, the third proposition of SCT states that codes implicate a “culturally distinctive psychology.” As communication scholars, we hold fast to our disciplinary sine qua non: expressed communicative practices (see Chapter 6 in this volume). Accordingly, we are careful not to tread onto the psychological territory of explaining the inner workings of persons’ thinking and knowing. This is not to say that the cultures we examine do not offer their own accounts for how personal knowing is achieved or expressed. Folk beliefs regarding knowledge about how to act appropriately fall into the realm of ethnomethodology. This is one reason Milburn (2009), like others, included EM in her description of nonprofit organi­ zational practices. Members communicate how they know what they know, such as good reasons for making organizational decisions, and researchers can examine their communicative practices to learn more. To differentiate member knowledge from researcher knowledge is another matter. Here, we align well with Tracy and Geist-Martin (2013) who describe three main themes that distinguish qualitative methods in the study of organizational communication: research design that attends carefully to context, an emic foundation, and the use of “sensitizing concept[s]” in data analysis that provide researchers with a lens, but do not obstruct what can be seen when one iteratively returns to the field. These themes certainly apply to the ethnography of communication. Like other qualitative researchers, EC scholars piece together various types of data to develop an interpretive “gestalt.” Researchers choose data that provides a “thick”

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representation of an insider’s perspective (Geertz, 1973). Towards this end, EC researchers are “instruments” within their investigations, generating interpretations filtered through their own experiences. Field-notes taken during data collection provide EC scholars a particular “way of knowing,” yet our published accounts do not typically reveal our interpretive processes (or use as a “form of inquiry,” see Tracy, 2014) because they are designed to foreground cultural members’ voices. In fact, EC scholars could be recognized for “decentering” the organization because our focus falls squarely on the communicative practices taking place (see Taylor, Irvin, & Wieland, 2006). As Scott, Corman, and Cheney (1998) explain, organizational communication—and hence, some EC—researchers recognize that everyone has resources (cultural, discursive, communicative) at their disposal to interact and accomplish their goals—which includes building relationships, getting work done, living in the world, and formulating stances about themselves. The resources we have (or believe we have) enable and constrain both interaction and who we can be/become. Traditionally, EC researchers have focused on providing the descriptive evidence for how some people do this. Their more recent work has demonstrated the ways communicative resources can be used when community members face unique challenges or may seek to collaborate across traditional boundaries (Milburn & Hansen, 2016) like Keyton, Ford, and Smith (2008) suggested for OC.

organizations) is similar to those of their organizational communication colleagues.

Theory

The ties between organizational and ethnography of communication have not always been obvious. In this review, we have demonstrated a vast array of EC research involving organizations. The research includes communicative practices performed by people who identify as members of organizations, and the way communication is conducted reveals how organizational members form relationships, accounts for their actions or decisions (Castor, 2005), and constitutes

Within the field of communication, EC includes two distinct strands. Both SCT and CuDA have been created as an attempt to connect what it means to communicate to the creation of culture. EC scholars examine communicative acts as ways to learn how communities and cultures are built, reified, or change. This commitment to a processual and constitutive view of communication (and

Methods EC has often been noted as a robust methodology. In common with their LSI colleagues, EC scholars ground their claims in communicative data. They differentiate the process of data generation from data analysis. They recognize various orders of data collection, from the present-focused primary order of participant observation, to secondary orders of recorded interactions. They explore a variety of types of data such as material artifacts, including books, newspaper stories, meeting minutes, by-laws, etc. SCT has provided EC scholars with a more nuanced way to explain codes that are embedded in communication, whereas CuDA further enables them to explore cultural premises manifested as identity, relationships, action, emotion, belonging, and time. Each EC strand depends upon a sequence of analysis beginning with description to interpretation to comparison to critique. While we have written more about how data reveals patterns that demonstrate recognizable patterns across interactions within the same community, we are poised to shift to a shared focus on novel or momentary communication practices.

CONCLUSIONS

ETHNOGRAPHY OF COMMUNICATION APPROACHES

organizational codes. By contrast, organi­ zational communication scholarship may reference its data collection methods as ethnographic; an organizational researcher may acknowledge or even focus on cultural premises or beliefs of organizational members; those examining organizational practices, such as meetings, may give passing reference to an EC researcher; however, more often than not, both research strands have operated largely independently15. From the perspective of EC, some of us may believe that our work has been relegated to the realm of macro-cultural analysis that is no longer valued by organizational communication researchers. EC researchers may suggest that organizational communication research move beyond describing its data collection methods and provide more details about the interpretive, analytic tools used to draw conclusions. We posit that organizational communication scholars could benefit from delving more closely into EC studies to learn about how communicative practices organize speakers. Using EC’s specific methods for micro-analysis, future scholars can explore how relationships are formed and reified and how normative codes are enacted. Alternately, EC researchers can pause in the midst of their research to consider how our micro-level findings impact how organi­ zations are created, before moving to reflect on the macro-cultural level. By considering how organizations form the boundaries of prototypical speech communities, EC scholars can reflect on how specific communicative practices reveal both consistent and inconsistent dimensions about the institution (or organization) within which it occurs. Organizations have been described as places and settings, yet EC scholars could spend more time elaborating on the process of organizing itself. For example, both organizational communication and EC researchers examine meetings. These communicative events are designed and enacted with the goals (ends) towards which participants engage to get

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things done together (Witteborn, Milburn, & Ho, 2013). Therefore, we propose that meetings may be one of the best settings for jointly demonstrating both how organizational communication and EC examine patterned actions and norms, what it means to make decisions within particular organizations, and how members organize (see Shavit, 2022). Finally, EC scholars should consider publishing in journals related to organi­ zational research for it is within these venues whereby their work can be examined from an organizational communication lens. Some of the EC findings that rely upon demonstrating consistent patterns may be challenged as lacking representation from employees occupying roles whose discursive practices are not observed. More likely, however, we believe that these studies will encourage researchers to move participant voices to the foreground when considering organizing, and organizational structuring.

Notes 1  See House, Rousseau, and Thomas-Hunt (1995); others note EC explores both etic and emic levels (Carbaugh, Gibson, & Milburn, 1997; Zhu & Bargiela-Chiappini, 2013). 2  See Taylor, McDonald, and Fortney (2013). 3  S.P.E.A.K.I.N.G. stands for setting, participants, ends, acts, key, instrument, norms and genre. 4  The framework was proposed to facilitate crosscultural comparisons. 5  Later work called the a priori constitution of speech communities into question (Milburn, 2004, 2015, 2021). 6  The phrase “orders of data” draws attention to and recognizes that data are raw materials from the social reality we build; they are part of the constructed research enterprise (Carbaugh, personal communication). 7  Ojha and Holmes (2010) describe the challenge of EC when collaborating to interpret themes among more than one researcher. This conclusion may have been formed because they lacked the analytic frameworks described below. 8  Based on our reading of the literature, we believe that SCT researchers would agree that they generate codes by staying close to the data. Had participants themselves been making

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metacommunicative commentary, the SCT researcher may have articulated their own role in that process. 9  We discuss Carbaugh’s earlier contribution below in the CuDA section. 10  The published work contains EC chapters from Philipsen and Leighter (2007) and Fitch and Foley (2007). 11  In the past, EC and Organizational Communication researchers who adopted a shared metaphor of “organization as container” seemed to be aligned in their interests. 12  As we understand it, proponents of CCO maintain that its innovation is to demonstrate how this process and its outcomes occur (see Chapter 6 in this volume). Thus, CCO-Organizational Communication and EC diverge on this issue because we do not believe that our research lacks a focus on process. 13  Hymes (1972a) described communication (or speech) events as activities “governed by rules or norms for the use of speech” (p. 56). Speech events typically consist of more than one speech act. The three levels he defines are exemplified by a party (speaking situation), a conversation (speech event), a joke (speech act). 14  The book that includes this example explores local strategies within several organizational contexts: a software company, the automobile industry/ car manufacturer, a nonprofit, etc. (see Milburn, 2015). 15  The publication of Kalou and Sadler-Smith’s (2015) article missed an opportunity to forge these ties since they failed to cite EC literature from communication studies.

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12 Autoethnography and Organizational Communication: Tracing their Convergence and Divergence K u r t L i n d e m a n n a n d Ye a - W e n C h e n

*** To support myself in graduate school, I used to clean office buildings. I worked for a nice couple who started the business from the ground up and, when I was hired, employed a total of four people. We usually started our night at the offices of a shipping company. It was an open floor plan, few cubicles, and all the sales desks had toy semi-trucks or trains on them, as if to remind the staff where they were and what they were doing. I would stand at the floor entrance and squint my eyes: gleaming white desk-tops, blinking buoys in a sea of generic brown and steel gray desks and filing cabinets. We’d occasionally show up as the last of the salespeople were leaving. One guy in particular was always finishing up his paperwork. I’d roll the unplugged vacuum by him to start in the corner, and catch his eye. He never smiled. Never said “hi, how are you,” “have a nice night,” anything that resembled an acknowledgement I was even there. At the

time, I thought he was just rude. But thinking back, I’m more convinced he hated his job. I wasn’t crazy about my job either, but I knew it would be temporary. Maybe my time there would become part of a funny story I’d tell to my students later on. But I knew I’d always return to that moment, or non-moment, I shared everyday with that employee. *** “Unlike your brothers, you and your parents have strong bonds but are not destined to spend much time together in life,” a fortuneteller declared to me in front of my parents, siblings, and their spouses. Considering that I had already moved from my native Taiwan to live and work in the United States, I thought it was a convenient prediction, but it still saddened me. However, if that same fortuneteller would have predicted to my 20-year-old self (then known as Rita) that 12 years later, in September 2010, I would become a tenuretrack assistant professor of intercultural and

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organizational communication at Ohio University, I would not have believed him. On a chilly Monday morning in fall 2012, a White female senior colleague and I casually commiserated, as we got ready to teach our 8:30 am classes. When I told her that my second class was not until 3:00 pm and I wrapped up teaching on Fridays at 3:55 pm, she was surprised. She gave me this unexpected piece of advice, “When you [and we] discuss teaching assignments in the future, you should remind the school director that you were given a Monday/ Wednesday/ Friday 8:30 am and 3:00 pm schedule this semester.” Her surprise validated the frustrations that I had been feeling but hesitated to share. As a third-year assistant professor of color going up for mid-tenure review, I had been frustrated in silence about how this teaching schedule was challenging in many ways, but I did not know if I should or should not say anything. The uncertainty of whether to complain is actually part of a much larger story about complaints against institutions (Ahmed, 2021). I started and ended the week with seemingly unmotivated and/or reluctant students, both at 8:30 am on Monday mornings and 3:00 pm on Friday afternoons. Until receiving my colleague’s advice, I thought that not complaining was my best option. As a woman who was raised to be a team player, I did not complain because I genuinely thought that maybe all faculty members should endure a terrible schedule once. As an immigrant still figuring out how U.S. academia worked, I also did not complain because I expected the school director to have considered all options before giving me this unusual schedule. In hindsight, knowing what I know now about U.S. academic work, I should and would have complained. Since fall 2012, reading and researching how women of color and immigrant women navigate U.S. academia (e.g., Chen & Lawless, 2018; Griffin, 2012; Gutiérrez et al., 2012) has shifted how I make sense of whether to complain. Ahmed (2021) reminds us that complaints about

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harassment and unequal working conditions in academia are frequently unheard, ignored, dismissed, or silenced. As she puts it, to truly receive and hear complaints is not just to hear what is said but also “to hear that silence: what is not being said, what is not being done, what is not being dealt with” (Ahmed, 2021, p. 7). *** These accounts, written by us respectively, are different in numerous ways, including subject matter, standpoint, and theoretical engagement. They are also similar in several ways. Specifically, they are both autoethnographic accounts of experiences in organizations. Distinctively, they share an impetus to examine their respective organizations from their particular point of view as an insider; and, although they provide only small excerpts, it is clear they approach the understanding of organizations inductively, using a singular viewpoint to make larger claims about membership, culture, values, and other attributes of organizations. The interior life of organizational members—their thoughts, wishes, hopes, dreams, and emotions—have often proved elusive to organizational communication scholars. Historically, these scholars have approached this knowledge through selfreport surveys and observations, and examinations of artifacts like plaques, signage, and the types of cars in the parking lots (Goodall, 1994). It has been only relatively recently that researchers have turned the lens on ourselves and written about our own organizational experiences as a form of scholarship with any degree of regularity. However, some of the first communication scholars that used what was then referred to as narrative inquiry were organizational communication researchers. Researchers like Pacanowsky (1988), Goodall (1994), and Trujillo and Krizek (1994) demonstrated the utility and appeal of first-person narratives in organizational communication research. Pacanowsky’s (1988) first-person narrative weaves a fictional

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account of an untenured scholar’s struggle to make narrative fit into a more traditional academic paradigm, and vice-versa, with an autobiographical reflection on scholarly literature that problematizes this very struggle. Arguably, Pacanowsky’s (1988) piece can be thought of as a touchstone for organizational scholars who not only turned the investigative lens inwards, but began writing about organizational experiences in a narratively-nuanced, ­aesthetically-shaped manner. Indeed, the turn to this type of writing by organizational scholars signaled, in part, a shift in communication research and writing. Taken together with writing from scholars in related disciplines (Denzin & Lincoln, 2018; Jewkes, 2012), one could argue that organi­ zational autoethnographies set the stage for what was to become a movement in communication research that has resulted in hundreds of journal articles and chapters, multiple handbooks, and a journal devoted to autoethnography. While the predominant, or at least most recounted, narrative of early organizational autoethnographies are populated by White, cisgendered males, this imbalance is part and parcel of the communication field as a whole (Chakravartty et al., 2018). Autoethnography has since been extended and revised by minoritized groups, ensuring its applicability to an even wider range of communication phenomena. Surprisingly, even with these expanded potentialities and two edited collections of organizational autoethnographies (Herrmann, 2017, 2020), the promise of this method in the field of organizational communication has gone largely unfulfilled. In this chapter, we offer a brief overview of the current state of autoethnography in organizational communication, and trace the shift in organizational autoethnography to address previously overlooked issues of identity and culture. We frame a few of the many potential organizational experiences that might be examined using a working definition and dimensions of organizational autoethnography, providing exemplars of each. We link these dimensions to some of

the persistent issues in organizational communication (McDonald & Mitra, 2019), including Mumby and Stohl’s (1996) central problematics of organizational communication: voice, rationality, organization, and the organization-society relationship. We then consider some methodological challenges in using autoethnography to study organi­ zations and communication. Throughout, we provide snapshots of organizational autoethnography in practice, from our own member experiences, in what is often called a “layered account” (Ellis et al., 2011; Ronai, 1995; Tracy, 2010). In this way, our autoethnographic narratives inform, and are informed by, the literature as well as by each other’s narrative.

TRACING AUTOETHNOGRAPHY IN ORGANIZATIONAL COMMUNICATION RESEARCH Just as the term “ethnography,” from the Greek “ethno” (culture) and “graphy” (writing), refers to the writing of culture, the term “autoethnography” evokes the writing of self in culture. Autoethnography is distinguished from other types of qualitative research not just by a focus on the personal or the use of the first person, but by evocative writing that connects theory and personal experience in a reflexive and rigorous way. As such, autoethnography is well suited for the study of identity and communication processes connected therein. Identity and organization are inextricably linked. For better and worse, we often derive our identities from our workplace experiences, whether we work for our family business (Lindemann, 2017), for a predatory boss who challenges our sense of who we are (Denker, 2017), or in U.S. academia as immigrant women faculty (Chen, 2018). A reflexive examination and critique of organizational identity, identity work within that organization, and the communication that links the two is at the core of what organi­ zational autoethnography is. Herrmann (2020)

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writes that organizational autoethnography can interrogate organizational beliefs and practices to imagine different, more liberating and empowering, ways of organizing and alternate versions of the organization itself. *** To tell the truth, I wasn’t entirely used to working in an organization as traditional as the office cleaning company I worked for that summer. I grew up working for our family business (Lindemann, 2017), did brief stints in carpentry and restaurants, but finally found a place of comfort in academia. My office cleaning job provided a window into corporate life—what could have been, where I could have been: at a desk in a cubicle, claiming a small patch of beige-carpeted real estate as my own. Whenever my eyes locked with that employee who always seemed to stay late, I noted resigned sadness and a look of superiority. Maybe he was miserable; I knew I would be. But perhaps I was projecting that onto him. Maybe he thought he had it better than the lowly cleaning crew, coming in at 5:00 pm and working through the night. I hated that power dynamic: his perception that he was better than me, or my perception that he thought as much, and my sympathy— or was it pity?—for this person living a traditional corporate life that repelled and fascinated me. *** “How do you work under stressful conditions or in high-stress situations?” This was one of the memorable questions posed to me when I was interviewing for my current position at San Diego State University. As an immigrant worker and woman faculty, my survival depends on my ability to navigate not only racialized/gendered/classed U.S. academia but also the U.S. immigration system. Both are opaque, nebulous, and at times contradictory. Thus, becoming an immigrant worker implicates choices of uncertainty, stress, and possibility over comfort, ease, and predict­ ability. The significance of this interview

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question did not hit me until I realized that something had to change; my husband and son, a two-and-a-half-year-old toddler, were involved in three rear-ended car accidents— my first semester and first time working in California as a new 7th-year assistant professor, soon to go up for tenure. As a result, I was accustomed to an academic grind culture of overworking in the evenings and on weekends in order to achieve and publish regardless of personal, relational, and health costs. Then my husband and son were in a car accident, shortly after I reinjured my lower back during the second week at my new job. We brushed off the severity of the accident since no physical harm was evident. For weeks, I walked around with a slightly twisted and bent back, with the help of ibuprofen for pain management. At one point, my husband complained to me about a stiff neck, but we thought we had no other options but to grind on. I thought the most important thing at the time was for me to work as hard as possible to become a tenured associate professor, as soon as possible. So we carried on in our weary and wounded bodies without complaints, as any good immigrant workers would. *** Even when researchers set out to examine other things, they cannot set aside the ways they are implicated in their research. This dilemma is what arguably gave rise to the contemporary practice of organizational autoethnography. In his book, Casing a Promised Land, Goodall (1994) details his journey from university professor to organi­ zational consultant, bringing to the forefront his uncertainty of his place in the companies he was researching, and his lack of confidence in applying his “fuzzy” qualitative and rhetorical approaches to folks more concerned with hard and fast measures of productivity. While Goodall (1994) addresses things like class privilege, he does not reflexively engage issues of race and gender in the ways later scholars do. He was certainly not the first to employ what we now call autoethnography.

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Its roots in the practice of scholars like Arthur Bochner, Norman Denzin, and Carolyn Ellis can be traced even further back to Hayano’s (1979) reflections on fieldwork in non-Western cultures. Nonetheless, Goodall’s (1994) was one of the first extended organizational autoethnographies. Since then, what we now call autoethnography has become more common in organizational communication research (Herrmann, 2017, 2020), although there is a relative dearth of such writing in the pages of the preeminent organizational and management journals (Taylor et  al., 2021). In what are mostly book chapters, scholars have explored a variety of organizational settings, including member accounts of military service as a woman (Hunniecutt, 20017) and family businesses (Lindemann, 2017; Tull, 2017). This collection of work writ large may seem to elide, blur, or otherwise ignore traditionally explicit definitions of organizational communication, as they are written from personal and scholarly perspectives that do not immediately come to mind when thinking about organizational communication (Taylor et al., 2021). Doloriert and Sambrook (2012) note three current streams of organizational autoethnography: autoethnography within higher education; autoethnography within “previous/other life” organizations (i.e., prior experience in organizations); and autoethnography as complete member research in other organizations. These categories, taken together with Taylor et al.’s (2021) observations, raise some questions. First, is there a difference between autoethnographies about organizations (i.e., their structure and culture) and autoethnographies simply conducted within organizations (i.e., involving the personal experience of work)? Second, to what extent can organizational autoethnographies also work on organizations to analyze, interrogate, and critique how power operates within them? Third, what makes an organizational autoethnography? In the following sections, we engage these questions.

AUTOETHNOGRAPHY IN THE CONTEMPORARY STUDY OF ORGANIZATIONAL COMMUNICATION Despite two edited volumes devoted to organizational autoethnography published since 2017 (Herrmann, 2017, 2020), there seems to be a lack of organizational autoethnographies elsewhere in the academic literature. For example, Management Communication Quarterly registers a total of nine online hits with a keyword search of “autoethnography,” and almost half of those articles are discussions of autoethnography as a method, not autoethnographies themselves. The Academy of Management Review shows no articles with the keyword “autoethnography,” the Journal of Business Communication reveals only four such articles, and the Journal of Management Inquiry offers three articles with this keyword. A search of the past five National Communication Association (NCA) online convention programs (which includes the virtual convention of the COVID-19 pandemic) shows a total of 3 papers with “autoethnography” in the title presented in the Organizational Communication division, with one in the Applied Communication division, and one in the Training and Development division. Papers with this keyword are plentiful in other NCA divisions, including Ethnography, Health Communication, and Critical and Cultural Studies. Granted, some of these latter papers may address organizations and organizational communication, but were not submitted to the Organizational Communication division. The Organizational Communication division of the International Communication Association shows a total of one paper with “autoethnography” in the title over that same time span. One thing is clear: organizational communication scholars, in large part, do not seem to be writing autoethnographies to submit to the pre-eminent—albeit predominantly Western, English-language—organizational communication journals noted here. We might also

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surmise that work submitted is not being positively reviewed for these journals and organi­ zations. One reason may be that organizations are so ubiquitous (everybody works, right?), they end up serving as backdrops for investigations of other issues like gender, class, race, and sexuality. Additionally, these studies may not explicitly engage the organizational communication literature as much as reviewers would like. As a result, we might find such papers in outlets other than organizational communication journals and divisions, even if the authors initially intended to submit them to organizational communication-specific outlets. Similarly, those most inclined to practice autoethnography—including scholars interested in issues of marginalized identities, power, and culture—may feel that issues important to them are not effectively addressed by current organizational communication theory or literature. Further, we might ask whether the knowledge produced by autoethnographies on, about, or within organizations is undervalued or overlooked because such knowledge (directly or indirectly) challenges existing organizational communication agendas. Indeed, Taylor et  al. (2021) note the “reigning” theoretical perspective of the field, the Communicative Constitution of Organizations (CCO), does not easily lend itself to ethnography as it is commonly practiced in the Communication discipline. One can only imagine the difficulty engaging with CCO theory in conducting an autoethnographic study. One might subsequently argue that the marginalization of autoethnography in major outlets for organizational communication research, whether intentional or not, serves the disciplinary pursuit of theoretical coherence and closure. There are a variety of factors that potentially impact the application of ethnographic methods in organizational communication (Taylor et  al., 2021), many of which might also be ascribed to the lack of autoethnography in the field. These include the time required to produce autoethnography relative

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to other methods, as well as its characterization in some circles as lacking rigor or theoretical engagement. Part of this characterization may be due to autoethnography being both a process and product of research. In their discussion of the process of autoethnography, Adams et al. (2022) emphasize the importance of following a systematic plan of examination and offering contributions to knowledge that can be built upon by other scholars. As a process of inquiry, few other approaches offer more robust access to the author’s thought and feeling processes. Autoethnography allows researchers to remain reflexive about their topics and experiences, and doing so helps them to remain open to shifts in understanding (Mosleh, 2020). Making sense of “data” is played out on paper or a computer screen as the author writes. Lindemann (2009) notes that autoethnography problematizes the notion of writing as “a stable and untroubled form of representation” (para. 28). Autoethnography thus maintains a focus on both the subject (the author) and the object (what is being written about) and, in that way, invites the reader into a co-construction of meaning. Regardless of how systematic the process of analysis and construction is, an autoethnography must be a well-constructed product. Lopez and Tracy (2020) note that organi­ zational autoethnography “encompasses issues of self-reflexivity and sincerity” (p. 389). Lopez and Tracy ask, “does the study move the reader—is the reader better able to make sense of something in [their] own life, or see things through a slightly different lens?” (p. 389). To accomplish this, researchers might use the first person pronoun “I,” employ imagery, metaphor, and poetic language, and/or write in formats that mirror what is being written about (e.g., the expression of disjointed experiences may be formatted on the page in ways that mimic that experience; emotional experiences may be written with emotion-heavy language, etc.). Potentially, these aspects work against the influence of

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other evaluative criteria (Tracy, 2010), like meaningful coherence, or whether the study achieves what it says in a way easy for readers to follow. Nonetheless, this tension begs the question, paraphrased from Lopez and Tracy (2020), as to whether the product of autoethnography should even be evaluated using traditional (i.e., postpositivist) criteria. Some qualitative methods scholars (Ellis et  al., 2010; Lather, 1993; Sparkes, 2022; Tracy, 2010) have long argued that terms like validity, reliability, and generalizability need to be reconceptualized, if not tossed out altogether, when assessing qualitative research. This chapter is not meant to provide an exhaustive overview of its history and practice, in communication nor in organizational research. There are many scholars who can provide such a foundation. From Boylorn and Orbe (2021) to Adams et  al. (2022) to Herrmann’s (2020) thorough tracing of autoethnography and qualitative inquiry in organizational communication, those wanting a deep dive into the history and variety of autoethnographic research have plenty of options. Rather than repeating what others have said, we offer here a tentative definition of organizational autoethnography: the systematic and aesthetically-shaped interrogation of one’s vivid experiences, in order to reflexively illuminate and/or critique communication processes unique to organizational membership, and to allow readers to draw conclusions about organizational structures, cultures, and processes. In the following section, we unpack the major dimensions of this definition.

DIMENSIONS OF ORGANIZATIONAL AUTOETHNOGRAPHY In this section, we offer an examination of three key dimensions of organizational autoethnography, drawn from our working definition. We also apply those dimensions to discuss existing autoethnographies which, as

explained earlier in this chapter, sometimes necessarily exist outside of traditional organi­ zational communication research outlets. These dimensions include: (1) AestheticallyShaped, Carefully Crafted Writing; (2) Reflexive Critique; and (3) Crystallized Focus. These dimensions, we emphasize, are not exhaustive, nor are they mutually exclusive. In discussing each dimension, we emphasize its relevance to persistent problematics in organizational communication (Mumby & Stohl, 1996) such as voice, rationality, organization, and the organi­ zation-society relationship, and explain how each dimension offers an entrance point into advancing our understanding of these issues.

Aesthetically-Shaped, Carefully Crafted Writing The language used in organizational autoethnography should not be an emotionless reportage of events. Granted, there may be times such a tone is used to achieve a certain effect, like emotional detachment. But in general, writing should be evocative, conjuring in readers emotions and feelings similar to what the author is writing about. This crafting accomplishes the sincerity and resonance that are hallmarks of good qualitative research (Lopez & Tracy, 2020) in several ways: the researcher renders themselves vulnerable through disclosing gaffes, mistakes, uncertainties, frustrations, as well as more positively perceived emotions like happiness and elation. The language should evoke similar emotions in readers, or prompt them to consider their own, similar or complementary experiences. Apart from evocative language, the author(s) should work to draw the reader into a collaborative relationship. This may sometimes mean avoiding closures in the spirit of “therefore, I can conclude the following…”—which may also mean asking readers to draw their own conclusions about events and experiences (Lindemann, 2016). While we anticipate

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resistance to this in the name of “good” social science research, this sort of writing addresses issues of voice and rationality in organizational communication (Mumby & Stohl, 1996). Organizational autoethnography offers an avenue to bring to the front previously muted or unheard voices that may not be privileged due to their unique experience. These writing aesthetics can also highlight how multiple rationalities operate simultaneously in organizations. For example, Miller (2002) weaves her own experiences into sensemaking of organizational responses surrounding the Texas A & M bonfire collapse in 1999. Her voice provides an “understanding [of] a concept through experience” (p. 596) that makes her rethink both the institutional rationality in addressing the tragedy as well as her own “rational” approach to researching and teaching about social support. In short, her autoethnographic approach helped her address the problematics of voice and rationality in organizational processes, the study of those sometimes-hidden processes, and helped her interrogate her unique organizational experience.

Reflexive Critique Regardless of what experiences one writes about, there is a critical component to autoethnography. Ideally, autoethnography should prompt the researcher to engage in reflexive critique of culture and one’s place in that culture (Boylorn & Orbe, 2021). Organizational autoethnography can be used to reflexively examine how the personal and the cultural intrude upon and interrupt each other, an effect that offers important insight into the communicative constitution of organization, particularly organizational membership. For example, Bhattacharya (2021) employs an autoethnography that toggles between memories of growing up in India and navigating a new world of higher education in the U.S. as a way of understanding and resisting organizational regulations. Bhattacharya (2021) is

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able to represent her experiences in academia through a series of time shifts and extended examinations of ancestral stories and spiritual meditations. Finding strength there, she is ultimately able to resist and reject murky organizational dictates, opaque and partially applied rules, and create a place in her organizational membership for her own cultural beliefs. Bhattacharya’s (2021) piece illustrates the ways reflexive critique functions to connect personal experiences inside and outside the organization, each informing the other. As noted in the autoethnographic portions of this chapter, non-Western scholars often face difficulties in navigating U.S. institutions of higher education, and value the importance of networks in navigating organizational processes. This piece illustrates a focus on micro-level communication processes of organizing, illustrating the problematic of organization (Mumby & Stohl, 1996). An interrogation of multifaceted identities of organizational members is something for which autoethnography is especially wellsuited. Tull (2017) uses autoethnography to explore her identity as a member of a family business, and her identity as a woman from southern Appalachia, with all the requisite stereo­ types that accompany those intersections. Writing about growing up in the region and learning the family business, she provides a “criticism and an indictment of the caricature of southern Appalachia” (p. 84). At the same time, she roots her identity in the concept of homeplace and the ways it has allowed her question gender stereotypes and appreciate the strong women role models from which she learned the ins and outs of running a business. Her piece explores the complexity of multifaceted organizational identity. It also illuminates how members traverse the permeable bound­ aries in the organization-society relationship (Mumby & Stohl, 1996). Each example in this section illustrates the ways autoethnography can offer an avenue for a reflexive critique of organizations, organizational membership, and organizational culture. Taylor et al. (2013)

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note the benefit of “novel” approaches, like performance to examine the verisimilitude of communication processes that constitute organizational culture. Here, the utility of autoethnography to do the same is on display.

Crystallized Focus The metaphor of a crystal, developed by Laura Ellingson (2009) from Laurel Richardson’s original conceptualization, has been extended notably by other organizational scholars (Tracy & Trethewey, 2005). A crystal is multifaceted, like many organizational communication phenomena. Researchers are not able to represent all facets of the phenomenon under study, and acknowledging this relative impossibility is, ironically, crucial to creating a fuller representation. Of course, most researchers recognize the provisional status of their work in the process of theory building. In embracing the provisional and necessarily partial understandings afforded by qualitative research, organizational autoethnographers can begin to embed this understanding in the work itself. This crystallization can take the form of distinct voices of co-authors. For example, Kjær and van Amsterdam (2020) use autoethnography to explore a range of experiences of disability and identity in an organization. The use of time shifts, changes in perspective from interview participant to a personal narrative, and variations in voice from academic to something more colloquial, are all ways that researchers acknowledge the difficulty in representing all facets of the research process and phenomenon being studied. As Kjærsgaard and Larsen (2020) note, such moves in autoethnographic writing can illuminate sensemaking that is part and parcel of being an organizational member. These modulations— ranging from subtle to radical—function to “turn the crystal,” allowing each facet to shine, however briefly and imperfectly. In this way, a more complete picture of the organi­ zational experience comes into focus.

The device of crystallization offers organizational autoethnographers myriad ways to investigate organizational communication. Defenbaugh et  al. (2020) layer their narratives of experiences as healthcare educators to examine micro processes and the authors’ role in producing, maintaining, and transforming macro-level rules and regulations. Their collective autoethnography helps illuminate the tensions inherent in a system that is complex and ambiguous but strives for predictability and rationality. It does so by providing a micro- and macro-, multi-member perspective on communication in a healthcare organization. Brommel (2017) writes about his status as an organizational scholar who is also a patient in a dialysis clinic. His narrative jumps from a present-tense experience in the clinic to a researcher engaging the scholarly literature to help him make sense of his experiences. Toggling back and forth, turning the crystal to expose different facets of the experiences, provides a view that is both broad and focused. This crystallized focus—writing that attempts to capture multiple experiences of organizational life with necessarily provisional understandings rather than an overarching monolithic narrative that closes off other possibilities—is perhaps autoethnography’s greatest potential for the study of organizational communication. Once again, we can see that this approach directly engages the problematics of voice (who speaks for whom, when, and why), rationality and organization (how institutionally-sanctioned communication works and does not work in micro- and meso-level everyday communication), and the ways permeable boundaries between the organization and society (Mumby & Stohl, 1996) are navigated and negotiated. Clearly, organizational autoethnography can offer researchers multiple ways to engage organizational issues and theories in systematic and resonant ways. *** Early evening, before my shift starts. I’m sitting in my car in the parking lot of the first

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building on our cleaning routine. The rain beats down on the windshield. I think back to some of the other non-academic jobs I held while getting my degrees. My favorite, and probably the hardest, was working on an assembly line making car door locking mechanisms. That summer was hot and humid. The large building that housed the assembly lines, machine shop areas, offices, storerooms, and loading docks didn’t have air conditioning. Instead, several large fans sat at either end of the main floor. A giant clock hung on one side, along with large white boards that listed our quotas and totals for the day. “Everyone should know how to break their machine, just in case,” I was told during my first week. I didn’t ask why, but soon found out. On the hottest day of that summer, in the 90s with close to 100% humidity, we needed a break: to cool off, cool down, and step away from the repetitive physical movements. Jan, who had been working there since the plant opened, casually walked around and nodded, a sign that we’d be shutting down the line soon; someone was going to have to break their machine. You weren’t supposed to irreparably damage it, that would be too obvious and be grounds for your termination. You were just supposed to help it along to the point where it might temporarily break down from “normal” wear and tear—just bad enough for the foreman to shut the line down for a few hours while it was repaired. But who would be the one to do it? I looked across the line to Matt, his eyes squinting under his backwards baseball cap. We were hired at the same time. The difference was: I was only here for the summer; he was planning on staying long term. In fact, if anyone could afford to get suspended or fired, it was probably me. The problem was, I had never engaged in workplace resistance, never thought about it. Even though I studied organizational communication in graduate school, I wasn’t yet familiar with the concept of workplace sabotage (Analoui, 1995), much less the role of communication in resistance to power, which

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hadn’t yet been theorized (Zoller, 2014), certainly not to the extent that it has now. Not that the literature would have helped me better understand what to do. It’s different when you’re embodying the theory. *** In the process of publishing my struggle with voice and silence as an Asian woman and an immigrant faculty, one of my submitted pieces (Chen, 2018) was first rejected. Having an autoethnographic manuscript rejected was different from and more complicated than other rejections I had experienced. Beyond intellectual critiques to help me strengthen my argument, I felt personally questioned: “In what ways were you brave while making the decision to switch institutions?” For days, my tears reminded me that I felt hurt being judged not brave enough to be included in a collection about brave women of color academics in U.S. academia. Reading this sentence, “the paper reads as if you avoided confrontation rather than embraced courage to stand up for yourself,” still fills my body with mixed feelings: sad, ashamed, dejected, and rattled. To what extent might equating bravery with speaking up be Western-centric or problematic? I felt that my nuanced argument addressing dynamic tensions between bravery and vulnerability was neither heard nor appreciated. Once the hurt feelings eased, however, I realized that perhaps bravery was not the key construct in my autoethnography. As a U.S. permanent resident without legal rights and protection afforded to citizens, my bravery was always-already intermingled with the precarity, insecurity, and vulnerability facing non-citizen Others. Still, I questioned the extent to which the editors were open to complex notions of bravery from the standpoints of immigrant Others, notions that defied expectations of White/patriarchal/heteronormative/neoliberal U.S. academia. My mother has rarely raised her voice, and she is one of the bravest persons I know. ***

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To this point, our chapter has traced autoethnography from some of its early uses in the study of organizational communication to many of its current incarnations. Its aesthetic crafting of language and form, reflexive critique, and crystallized focus ensures that scholars can deploy it to address any number of organizational issues, particularly those having to do with voice, the rationality of micro- and meso-structures, and how each concept organizes members with regard to the societal contexts. But organizational autoethnography’s potentialities are no more visibly on display than in the recent shifts in autoethnography to study organizational communication.

RECENT SHIFTS IN ORGANIZATIONAL COMMUNICATION AUTOETHNOGRAPHY Paralleling the study of communication broadly and organizational communication specifically, organizational autoethnography expands and shifts in exposing, interrogating, and decentering the dominant White, cisgendered male standpoints that have long defined the standard, or hegemonic, cores of organizations. Put differently, ongoing efforts to interrogate communication, power, and “diversity” in organizations (e.g., Allen, 2004; Mumby, 1988) have shifted the focus of organizational communication autoethnography from depicting the organizational center to highlighting its margins. Straddled in between that center and those margins, various and intersectional positions of historical marginality (e.g., people of color, women, LGBTQI+ individuals, immigrant Others, etc.) constitute unique vantage points allowing us to better see and experience how power functions in organizations, and organizes communication. As an example, Allen (1996) interrogates organizational socialization literature as a Black woman at a predominantly White research university and offers rich

insights from her standpoint as an “outsider within” (p. 257). This and other examples we offer in this chapter bolster our working definition of organizational autoethnography, as these shifts allow for a systematic interrogation to reflexively illuminate and critique communication processes unique to organizational membership. There are many ongoing turns and shifts in organizational communication autoethnography. We highlight three major developments here: (a) intersectional organizational autoethnography, (b) postcolonial organizational autoethnography, and (c) queering organizational autoethnography. All three shifts encourage autoethnographers to consider questions such as: Whose voices have been historically excluded or left out in organizations and organizing, and why? Whose ways of being, communicating, knowing, and doing organizational work have been privileged and/or marginalized? How can organizations care about, listen to, and thus learn from historically marginalized voices, experiences, and stories? How does critical “reflexibility” (Garfinkel, 1967) look, sound, and feel in organizational communication research to decenter hegemonic norms, narratives, and practices? An intersectional approach to organi­ zational autoethnography (a.k.a. intersectional organizational autoethnography) promises to redress organizational theorizing and practices that have co-opted, misappropriated, and depoliticized intersectionality (De La Garza, 2004; Liu, 2020). Rooted in Black feminist thought and activism (e.g., Crenshaw, 1991), intersectionality has been developed to recognize the embodied standpoints at interlocking systems of racial and gender oppression, and confront racism, heterosexism, classism, and more within and across feminist movements (see also Chapter 8 in this volume). Co-optation, misappropriation, and depoliticization of intersectionality happens when it is used in ways divorced from its root in Black feminist thought and racial struggles, thus reproducing White supremacy

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and interlocking systems of domination (e.g., Eguchi et  al., 2020). For instance, this can happen when intersectionality is used as merely a descriptive tool rather than an avenue for interrogation. Putting one’s body on the line figuratively or literally, intersectional autoethnography is critical, reflexive, embodied, situated, and at times painful to write and read. In essence, “intersectional autoethnography is about challenging the systems of patriarchy, white supremacy, imperialism, heteronormativity and ableism so that it may ameliorate the conditions of those subjugated in a culture of violence” (Liu, 2020, p. 5). Challenging corporatized and disembodied notions of work and career, De La Garza’s (2014) autoethnography offered her spiritual journey as “incorporation of work into the greater project of spirituality” (p. 604). Speaking as a Native American woman and Jew who was raised a Roman Catholic in a traditional Mexican American family, De La Garza approached (academic) work as a public embodiment of her spiritual sensemaking that interrogated critical questions of meaning(s) of work. Intersectional organi­ zational autoethnography can not only illuminate interlocking power lines that structure organizational communication, but also open up spaces for alternatives, either to different conceptions of rationality in the workplace or to different, liberatory work processes (Mumby & Stohl, 1996). Departing from a Eurocentric paradigm, postcolonial organizational autoethnography seeks to challenge, interrupt, and undo the absence of marginalized voices in mainstream organizational autoethnographies that “have focused on Western experiences of organizing and neoliberal institutional experiences situated in the Global North” (Pal et al., 2020, p. 88). Broadly, postcolonial studies— rooted in the intellectual labor of scholars such as Fanon (1967/1952), Said (1979), and Bhabha (1994)—tackles, critiques, and theorizes the problematics, contexts, and histories of colonization and decolonization such as settlement and dislocation, resistance

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and belonging, and relationships between the colonizer and the colonized (see Chapter 9 in this volume). Shome and Hedge (2002) offer an introduction to postcolonial approaches to communication. Chawla and Atay (2018) more specifically argue that both postcolonial theory and autoethnography are “local practices that necessitate a centering of both the subject-object within a local and historical context” (p. 4). Pal and colleagues (2020) synthesize four ethical guidelines for conceptualizing postcolonial organizational autoethnography: (a) accountability in the use of the method, (b) attending to context, (c) truthfulness on the part of the researcher, and (d) recognizing the role of community connections to one’s story. These guidelines offer a way to navigate the challenges of postcolonial autoethnography and help researchers push open existing boundaries demarcated by colonial Eurocentrism, carving new spaces for the marginal voices of cultural experiences with colonial histories. Put simply, the study of organizational communication stands to “gain by queering organizational research through autoethnography” (McDonald & Rumens, 2020, p. 70). As an interdisciplinary and contested body of thought troubling gender, sexuality, heteronormativity (e.g., Butler, 1990; Yep, 2003), queer theory complements organi­ zational autoethnography by queering (hetero) normative, essentialist, and taken-for-granted assumptions about organizational phenomena (see Chapter 10 in this volume). Queer theory and organizational autoethnography are both committed to deconstructing binaries, challenging hegemonic understandings, and to approaching research as political endeavors, among other things. McDonald and Rumens (2020) argue that queering organizational autoethnography—that is, applying queer theory to organizational autoethnography— can make at least four promising contributions. The first is understanding difference as a constitutive feature of organizing. Second, we can expose the (hetero)normativity of organizational life. Third, we can trouble and

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deconstruct grand narratives to offer fragile and illuminating insights on organizational life. Fourth, researchers can engage in reflexivity queerly with fluid and anticategorical conceptualizations of identity (McDonald, 2016). Intersectional, postcolonial, and queering organizational autoethnography exemplify three turns in organizational communication autoethnography invested in shifting marginalized and silenced voices to the center of both organizational scholarship generally and organizational autoethnography specifically. These shifts highlight the complex and often invisible ways in which organizational life is hierarchically raced, gendered, sexualized, and Eurocentric. More importantly, seeing and centering marginalized voices can infuse the survival strategies of minority subjects to help diversify and improve organi­ zational practices to be more human, open, and ethical. Along with the intersectional, postcolonial, and queer turns, the sites of organi­ zational autoethnography have shifted from mainstream and traditional organizations to “non-traditional,” new and emerging forms of organization and organizing, such as member-owned cooperative businesses (or co-ops), social enterprises, nonprofits, prisons, brothels, sports teams, transnational organizations, nongovernmental agencies, and more. For instance, Griffin (2012) has developed Black feminist autoethnography to witness the productive anger of Black women academics, and account for the pride and pain of Black womanhood in U.S. academia. Shoemaker (2019) uses autoethnography to examine experiences as a co-facilitator and volunteer participant in prison settings. Adams (2020) deploys autoethnography to explore important experiences with safety, community, and sex at queer bars. We expect the future(s) of organizational autoethnographies to be diverse in stories, methodologically innovative, and spotlighting new forms of organization or organizing, provided more scholars are willing to take up the challenge.

CHALLENGES IN CONDUCTING ORGANIZATIONAL COMMUNICATION AUTOETHNOGRAPHY Earlier in this chapter, we offered a working definition of organizational autoethnography and delineated three dimensions of organi­ zational autoethnography. We understand these dimensions to encompass some advantages of conducting autoethnography in the study of organizational communication. These dimensions necessitate a decidedly interdisciplinary approach that integrates non-disciplinary literature with that of the field. In fact, with the relative dearth of intersectional approaches in organizational communication, one could argue that some of the work necessary may ironically de-center (at least temporarily) organizational communication. As the organizational communication field evolves, there are numerous opportunities for organizational autoethnography to grow in relevance and value. Each opportunity, however, comes with its own set of challenges. These challenges clarify the ethical and political texture of the interdisciplinary landscape in which organizational autoethnographies are conducted. Doing organizational autoethnography is an iterative, self-reflexive, and sense-making process of remembering, writing, and theorizing one’s lived experiences in organizational settings or about organizing in an increasingly complex social world. As hooks (1988) reminds us, “The longing to tell one’s story and the process of telling is symbolically a gesture of longing to recover the past in such a way that one experiences both a sense of reunion and a sense of release” (p. 158). With this in mind, we highlight three specific challenges of doing organizational communication autoethnography. The first challenge is that writing autoethnography can take time, effort, and awareness to do well. Telling one’s story by turning the gaze inward is not a simple and straightforward task. hooks (1988) describes trying

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to tell her story year after year, never writing more than a few pages: “My inability to write out the story I interpreted is an indi­ cation that I was not ready to let go of the past, that I was not ready to be fully in the present” (p. 155). Writing autoethnography also requires the effort to learn and apply writing aesthetics that can invite readers into experiencing someone else’s lived sociocultural reality viscerally. That is, writing autoethnographically is also seeing, thinking, feeling, observing, remembering, reflecting, and analyzing. Furthermore, theorizing one’s lived experiences requires knowledge of and the ability to interweave relevant scholarship at the intersections of personal, social, and cultural identities. Taylor et al. (2021) argue that increasing difficulty gaining access to organizations is a potential impediment to conducting ethnographic observations of organizations, cultures, and identity. Existing membership in organizations might ease the difficulty with access in some cases. The second challenge is that autoethnographers must be prepared to be vulnerable. Vulnerability is necessary to be liberatory. hooks (1998) depicted vulnerability as the longing to “kill” that self in writing (i.e., the Gloria of her childhood) so that she could break its hold, heal, invent, and become her desired “me.” On the other hand, being vulnerable—exposing metaphorical skin—in White/patriarchal/neoliberal/heteronormative academia can be risky and bear unintended consequences for one’s safety, reputation, career advancement, etc. As long as racism, sexism, and homophobia live on, scholars and scholarship that challenge such systems are potential threats. Though we are not aware of scholars being trolled because of their organizational autoethnographies, communication scholars have been trolled and harassed by right-wing media for their critical views and research for social change (e.g., Lawless & Cole, 2021). The unintended consequences are often differentially experienced by scholars from dominant and minoritized groups. For instance, prior to queering

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communication becoming accepted and more widely circulated (see Yep et al., 2003), YeaWen was once asked by a graduate student if and how outing himself as gay in a publication might affect his job prospects down the road. While this question might not seem necessary in 2022, feeling compelled to ask such questions illustrates the uncertain, unpredictable, and unknown risks that folks who occupy marginalized identity positions worry about facing. Ethical considerations of what and how to disclose in autoethnography presents another important challenge. Autoethnography implicates others involved in our stories, whether voluntarily or involuntarily. Ellis (2007) reminds us that relational ethics in autoethnography goes beyond the granting of IRB approval and following protocols of informed consent. To Ellis (2007), doing autoethnography itself should be an ethical practice. Organizational autoethnography, in particular, can expose current and former colleagues we have worked with, as long as readers already know (or are able to acquire) publicly available information about our professional lives. Different from conventional ethnography, it may be harder to keep participants confidential in autoethnography. Individuals and coworkers in our lives might become involuntarily exposed in autoethnography even when no identifiable information is used. Although an autoethnographer does not necessarily need others’ consent to write their own story, autoethnography implicates others. Thus, dedicating time and care to ethically think/feel through potential and possible implications of how to disclose what and why in autoethnography is a responsible thing to do. As an example, as soon as Yea-Wen’s submitted essay (2018) was accepted for journal publication, she reached out and notified a close former colleague. She was told that her former colleagues decided to discuss her piece at a faculty retreat, leaving Yea-Wen a bit uneasy. Deciding when and how to ethically disclose what kinds of knowledge requires us to consider the potential implications for those who

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may not understand or anticipate the consequences of their representation in our work. *** I didn’t end up breaking the machine at my station that day. I chickened out. Someone else did, one of the long-time workers, and I benefited from the line being shut down anyway. As I sit in my car, rain thumping the windows, I wonder: Did that make me a coward? Am I really that beholden to authority? While I don’t know the answer, I imagine at least part of it lies in my upbringing, working in the family business where the boss was also my father (Lindemann, 2017). I do know that my work experience is tied to so many other life experiences it’s hard to locate the boundaries of my work identity. Little did I know then, waiting to head into that office building to clean up after others’ corporate work day, that my work life as an academic would blur those boundaries, and that my way to tease out those work-life identities would be to embrace academic research, blurring the boundaries all the more. *** It is unsurprising yet odd to acknowledge that I have never once talked with my parents about how my pursuing a career in U.S. academia has changed not just my life but our lives. Last night when talking about where to place the urn containing Agong’s (my grandfather’s) ashes, Dad suddenly declared that, after his passing, he would like an eco-friendly burial with the planting of flowers or trees. I wanted to, but did not, ask in-depth questions via video chat. I struggled to know how to talk about tender feelings with Mom and Dad, especially online. I will follow up with Dad when we are together in person. The last Lunar New Year I spent in Taiwan with my family was 18 years ago on January 22, 2004. I have missed 18 reunion dinners on the eves of 18 Lunar New Years there when I have classes to teach here. I could not bear to ask about the reunion dinner menu. Some years Mom and Dad forgot to call

me on the Lunar New Year’s Eve. Perhaps burying myself at work makes these difficult times go faster. Perhaps I have hoped that working through holidays can save myself from having to feel homesick. Perhaps I have bought into the idea that I need to work twice or three times harder as an immigrant woman of color. Regardless, the bond between my parents and me will depend on how we can go through, share, and talk about our tender and vulnerable experiences. I don’t need a fortuneteller to predict this, because I know that I am destined for strong relationships with Mom and Dad, regardless of the 6,850-plus miles between us. As an immigrant, I cannot afford to take my family for granted. Writing autoethnographically can serve to process what is difficult to talk about yet important to feel, breathe into, and document.

CONCLUSION Despite the demonstrated value of autoethnography in examining a variety of organi­ zational communication phenomena, it continues to be relatively underrepresented in the organizational communication literature. Organizational autoethnography’s dimensions of aesthetic crafting, reflexive critique, and crystallized focus allow researchers to address persistent problematics in the study of organizational communication. These dimensions also ensure that this method is adaptable enough to accommodate its current shifts and future directions, including moves toward more intersectional organi­ zational autoethnography, postcolonial organi­ zational autoethnography, and queering organizational autoethnography. There are certainly challenges to conducting organi­ zational autoethnography, and it is worth exploring whether resistance from the field itself poses an additional one. Throughout this chapter, we have woven our own story of organizational sensemaking

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and membership, navigating cultural tensions, and exploring intersections of identity in organizations. Our narratives intersect in the process of inquiry, as colleagues and coauthors, and in the finished product. But they extend beyond the pages of the chapter, moving in directions that will continue to explore, examine, and engage our organizational lives.

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13 Engaged Scholarship Approaches to Qualitative Organizational Communication Research J. Kevin Barge and Anna Wiederhold Wolfe

Over the last 25 years, engaged scholarship has emerged in organizational communication research as an important approach aimed at generating relevant knowledge, used by organizations to address crucial practical problems and facilitate social innovation. In this tradition, research programs tackle important issues such as building the capacity of women of color for transformative leadership (Parker, 2020), facilitating peacebuilding initiatives in communities afflicted by political violence (Connaughton et  al., 2017; Kellett et  al., 2020), addressing food insecurity by creating community-based partnerships (LeGreco & Douglas, 2021), leveraging the power of storytelling to enhance community-based healthcare (Harter et al., 2017), and developing safety cultures within high-risk organizations (Barbour & James, 2015). While these programs vary in terms of the problems they address, they share a common methodological orientation that emphasizes the co-creation of knowledge through the joint action of academic

and nonacademic partners. Given the conceptual shift from organization as container of communication to organization as process, potential research partners may involve more than organizational members. In this way, engaged organizational communication research involves collaborating with a range of individuals and groups involved in organi­ zing processes, including practitioners and external stakeholders, to help organizations address meaningful and practical problems. Engaged scholarship can be practiced in many ways that generate different approaches to this co-production of knowledge. However, as Van de Ven (2018) observed, the character of the co-production process between academic and nonacademic partners varies depending on the onto-epistemological approach (e.g., postpositivist, interpretivist, or critical paradigm) and research orientation (e.g., basic, collaborative, evaluative, or action research). For example, some basic research conducted from a postpositivist paradigm may view the process of co-production as primarily limited

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to the activity of problem formulation, where academic and nonacademic partners negotiate the focus and scope of the research. On the other hand, interpretive scholars engaging in collaborative and action research may view the process of co-production as involving a larger set of activities where academic and nonacademic partners not only negotiate the focus and scope of the problem, but also the parameters regarding research design and how the data is interpreted and used to construct organizational interventions. The question that inspires this essay is, “What does it mean to conduct engaged organizational communication scholarship as a qualitative relational practice (hereafter, QRP)?” This question is motivated by our identification as qualitative communication scholars interested in conducting research that makes a meaningful difference in organi­ zations and the lives of their members, as well as for external stakeholder groups whose experiences are shaped by organizational activities. Qualitative approaches are inherently concerned with describing, understanding, and explaining how communication and meaning-making may influence organizing practices related to articulating important problems, critiquing existing structures, and co-creating new patterns of communication. Our approach to QRP aligns closely with Connaughton et al.’s (2017) relationally attentive approach to conducting engaged communication scholarship, which centers on: “(a) engaging in ongoing co-construction, (b) embracing the reciprocal relationship between (communicative) choices made when doing engaged collaboration and the impacts achieved from engaged collaboration, (c) fostering conditions for inclusivity, and (d) practicing reflexivity about a relational orientation” (p. 519). Our focus in this essay is to articulate a pathway toward engaged organizational communication scholarship that centers on QRP. To do so, we begin by contextualizing engaged scholarship as a qualitative relational practice, and then focus on its implications for an

organizational communication researcher’s positionality. Specifically, we examine how consultative, participatory, and collaborative positionalities inform a QRP approach to engaged organizational communication research and highlight the methodological and ethical choices that are associated with each positionality. We conclude by offering some practical advice regarding the kinds of research temperaments and strategies for getting started with a QRP approach to engaged organizational communication scholarship.

CONTEXTUALIZING ENGAGED SCHOLARSHIP AS A QUALITATIVE RELATIONAL PRACTICE Communication has been characterized as a practical discipline which focuses attention on the important communication problems that people in organizations and institutions encounter, and must manage in their everyday lives (Craig, 2018). This focus has led communication scholars to study these problems, and generate knowledge that increases participants’ options for understanding and addressing them. Engaged scholarship thus reflects a historical concern in the communication discipline with generating theory and research that increases our capacity for building better social worlds. However, engaged scholarship as a qualitative relational practice is more than problem-centered research. What distinguishes engaged scholarship as a qualitative relational practice from other problem-centered approaches is its commitment to a mode of inquiry that focuses on the negotiation of meaning-making when co-developing and coproducing knowledge among academic and nonacademic communities. Engaged scholarship is concerned with issues of knowledge production and requires that scholars and practitioners actively engage one another, in order to “open communication spaces, develop collaborative relationships, and

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co-produce knowledge by incorporating principles of democracy for conducting research” (Van de Ven, 2007, in Putnam & Dempsey, 2015, p. 13). At the heart of engaged scholarship as a qualitative relational practice is a concern with managing the way academic scholars and practitioners manage the meaning-making process in order to leverage their differences so that knowledge can be generated that simultaneously advances the interests of both parties. In surveying the different research programs in engaged scholarship, Putnam and Dempsey (2015) propose five “faces” to categorize its diversity: (1) applied communication research, (2) collaborative learning, (3) communication activism and social justice, (4) practical theory, and (5) public scholarship. A qualitative relational approach is particularly well suited to the faces of applied communication research, collaborative learning, and communication activism and social justice, as these embody relational approaches to inquiry that emphasize directly working with people and organizations and reflect a strong commitment to the qualitative values of participatory design and reflexivity. These three “faces” have distinct goals and aspirations but share a view that the negotiation of meaning and the development of new interpretations through close contact between academic scholars and practitioners is important to facilitate social change and innovation. Though practical theory and public scholarship are concerned with the integration of theory and practice, neither necessarily requires the level of relational attunement that is inherent to the conduct of engaged scholarship as qualitative relational practice. Practical theory is more concerned with establishing a normative foundation for developing a mode of theorizing, which allows engaged scholars to integrate theory and practice but does not necessarily involve academics and practitioners in active conversation to co-create knowledge and invention. Public scholarship is associated with an institution-based model of civic engagement,

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characterized by producing “campus-community partnerships, designing pedagogy in which teachers and students become action researchers, and offering courses on social problems and community concerns” (Putnam & Dempsey, 2015, p. 16). Here, the emphasis is more on how academic institutions can mobilize academic expertise on behalf of nonacademic communities through pedagogical and outreach activities, rather than how individual researchers or research teams can build academic-practitioner collaborations. In contrast, the three remaining “faces” highlight different approaches to the researcher-practitioner relationships and knowledge production, as well as the way meaning-making processes are managed between academic and nonacademic partners. First, applied communication research tends to translate research findings, post facto, intervening after data collection and analysis to offer practical advice and guidance for nonacademic audiences. In this way, researchers are often positioned in a consultative role relative to “clients” who are essential partners in providing context expertise but may benefit from scholarly insight and expertise in diagnosing problems and offering research-driven solutions. In contrast, collaborative learning prioritizes the co-creation of knowledge, which often involves iterative processes of identifying relevant stakeholders, fostering participatory relationships, and co-developing action steps (Barge & Shockley-Zalabak, 2008). Despite the egalitarian goals of collaborative partnerships, work in this domain regularly struggles with managing differences in views of reality between academics and practitioners, which is required to integrate knowledge for commonly valued ends. Finally, activism and social justice orients academics and community partners toward embracing “a critical and moral imperative to act; to do something about sustained inequalities; and to make a difference in the lives of those who are disadvantaged in social, political, and economic systems” (Putnam & Dempsey, 2015, p. 15;

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see also, Dempsey et al., 2011). In this way, researchers are cast as “co-conspirators” (De Los Santos Upton, 2020), working alongside community members to advocate for change and organize action. Wolfe and Champine (2022) bring the qualitative relational focus of conducting inquiry within engaged scholarship into sharp relief by adopting a “community of practice” perspective. They contend that engaged scholarship can be distinguished by a recognizable set of practices and normative expectations regarding its conduct, ethics, and what counts as excellent scholarship. In keeping with previous research, they argue that a primary tension engaged scholars must manage is balancing the simultaneous pulls to produce abstract theory and concrete intervention. One strategy for managing this tension is to integrate theory and practice in collaborative research processes and products. As one example of engaged scholarship as qualitative relational practice, consider Wolfe and colleagues’ extended collaborations with the City of Wilmington to address the ripple effects of organizational change in a rural Ohio community (Wolfe, 2016; Wolfe et al., 2017, 2020). Rooted in a commitment to collaborative problem-solving, the research team merged their knowledge of organizational communication and dialogic and deliberative theories with rural leaders’ intimate familiarity with local economic conditions and policy gaps to collaboratively design and facilitate focus groups geared toward understanding how local government and businesses could better attract and retain young people following the loss of the area’s largest employer (Wolfe et al., 2020). The rich conversations at these events led to policy generation and new organizing practices, including the development of the Wilmington Succeeds Program, which provided homesteading grants, scholarship opportunities, and loan-forgiveness incentives to address practical concerns made visible through these meetings. Reflecting on these processes tested communication theory against the challenges of actually-existing

democracy, developing insights into how young people participate in civic activities in stigmatized places (Wolfe et  al., 2017), and examining the relationship between sense of community and migration intentions (Wolfe et al., 2020). In this way, theory-practice integration occurs through a mode of relational inquiry where academics and practitioners leverage their respective expertise with one another as they talk about, plan, and execute a research project. A hallmark of qualitative inquiry is the importance of researchers acting with reflexivity and being aware of their positionality within the process of inquiry. Wolfe and Champine (2022) have highlighted two sets of tensions that engaged scholars must work with as they manage their positionality when developing joint research projects with practitioners. First, engaged scholars face a tension between the valued identities of being an academic scholar and a socially relevant scholar. Engaged scholars desire that their research has both uptake within the scholarly community and impact for the people and organizations with whom they collaborate. Wolfe and Champine (2022) employ the notion of hyphenated dual roles to capture this tension pairing the role of researcher identity with different practitioner roles including consultant, consultee, and mediator. Here, the use of a hyphen indicates that the role of researcher is never fully separated from, or collapsed within, its relationship with the practitioner role. Rather, the hyphenated roles of consultant, consultee, and mediator each foreground different dynamics between researchers and practitioners in the nature and timing of relational activities. Specifically, they highlight three dual identity roles, each of which expresses a different perception of the relationship between scholars and research participants. In the first of these roles, the researcher-consultant offers scholarly knowledge, theory, methods, and the like to help address collaborators’ situated problems. In the second, the researcher-consultee seeks out

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participant-stakeholders’ knowledge, expertise, and lived experiences in order to answer key questions brought forth by an engaged scholar. Finally, the researcher-mediator situates themselves between relevant stakeholders as a relatively independent convener and facilitator of collaborative problem-solving processes. These different positionalities suggest distinctive ways that scholars approach the way they facilitate meaning making among relevant stakeholders. As a way of more clearly distinguishing between these three positionalities, let us consider an extended example of engaged organi­ zational communication research. Anguiano and colleagues (2012) were approached by two nationwide environmental organizations that were seeking to “incorporate Hispanic voices, and localize knowledge and cultural values into their environmental policy agenda” (p. 129). A researcher-consultant might approach this project by interviewing members of the environmental organizations, collecting and analyzing their past outreach activities, offering research-based critiques and suggestions of possible strategy changes, and working with organizational leaders to devise a new outreach plan. A researcherconsultee would likely approach the project from a different entry point, one that centers on stakeholders’ lived experiences and situated knowledge. From this positionality, a researcher-consultee might design a project that involves embedding themselves in localized ways of speaking and being, drawing on interviews or ethnographic observations to better understand cultural practices, opinion leaders, and density points in local Hispanic communities, and working with Hispanic community members to develop a deeper understanding of local meaning systems, relational flows, and community concerns. These insights could be analyzed to inform the environmental organizations’ future strategic plans. The third positionality, that of researchermediator, aligns most closely with the approach Anguiano and colleagues (2012) actually did

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take when they collaborated with the two initial nationwide environmental organizations and two additional local cultural advocacy organi­ zations to convene a series of creative writing and storytelling workshops with members of two Hispanic New Mexican communities. This project modeled research-based processes of outreach and engagement, centered on community members’ ways of speaking and making meaning within local cultural networks, and served as a site of collaboration and coalition building between the nationwide environmental organizations, cultural advocacy organizations, local community members, and the research team. As demonstrated in this example, all three projects—that of the researcher-consultant, researcher-consultee, and researchermediator—enact engaged organizational communication scholarship as qualitative relational practice. Each project involves collaborative interaction between researcher and organizational partners and/or stakeholders, working together reflexively and reciprocally to leverage their differences to address a concrete problem; however, the research design and dynamics of knowledge production are meaningfully shaped by the researchers’ positionality relative to their collaborators. In the second set of tensions discussed by Wolfe and Champine (2022), engaged scholars must be reflexively attentive to their positionality in relation to agency when managing power dynamics within their relationship, which may alternate between discouraging domination and deploying expertise. On one hand, QRP encourages that the interests of different research partners are strongly represented in the negotiation of the research process. While the notion of being equal partners may be difficult if not impossible to achieve, engaged scholars strive to create an academicpractitioner collaboration that recognizes and values the interpretations, voice, and contribution of practitioners in developing and executing the research project. On the other hand, engaged scholars operating within a QRP positionality do bring a particular subject

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matter and research expertise to a research project that their nonacademic partners may not have. The tension for engaged scholars is how to deploy their expertise without dominating the meaning-making process and co-creating a set of conditions where their partners have a sense of agency during the research process. Reflexivity becomes an important skill that allows engaged scholars to navigate this tension and manage issues of control between them and their nonacademic partners. In their work with the Purdue Peace Project, for example, Connaughton and colleagues (2017) highlight three facets of reflexivity developed in their intervention work. These include: (1) seek to do no harm to collaborators or the local community; (2) ask critical questions about process and goals, such as, “who is our work serving?”; and (3) acknowledge and account for positions of relative privilege and power every time people are brought together for collaborative work.

QUALITATIVE RELATIONAL PRACTICE AND METHODOLOGICAL POSITIONALITIES A qualitative relational mode of inquiry entails academic researchers managing the meaning-making process regarding the touchpoints or interactions they have with their nonacademic partners concerning the way the research process will unfold and their relational accountabilities to one another during the research engagement. Managing these touchpoints requires academic researchers and organizational practitioners to make choices over what they talk about, which concerns different aspects about the research process; and how they talk about it, which regards managing power, authority, and expertise. The range of issues and topics developed in these discussions combine to shape different methodological positionalities adopted within engaged scholarship.

Research Touchpoints Creating an engaged qualitative research project requires academic researchers and organizational stakeholders to discuss and manage meaning about various aspects of the research process and how it will unfold. It also requires conversations regarding what shape the academic-practitioner collaboration will assume. Two models of engaged scholarship have emerged that address the touchpoints that are involved with co-creating a research project. These include (1) Van de Ven’s (2007, 2018) Engaged Scholarship Diamond Model, and (2) Barge and Dempsey’s (2014; Barge, 2015) engaged scholarship as democratic practice. Though both of these models were developed for engaged scholars across methodologies, their insights offer valuable guidance for qualitative organizational communication scholars more specifically as well. Van de Ven (2007, 2018) provided one of the earliest models describing the necessary touchpoints for creating an engaged scholarship project. This Engaged Scholarship Diamond Model depicts the importance of researchers mindfully engaging the perspectives of other partners when co-creating four primary activities that characterize their study: 1 Problem formulation: Grounding the research problem in regards to who is involved, what activity is in focus, where does the problem occur, when does the problem occur, why has the problem emerged, and how does the problem make itself visible. 2 Theory building: Developing potential theoretical frameworks that explain the dynamics of the problem as it occurs in this particular context. 3 Research design: Developing a strategy or plan for collecting data that explores the relationship between proposed theoretical explanations and empirical observations. 4 Problem solving: Engaging the intended audience to help interpret and make sense of the findings and to work through potential uses.

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Van de Ven’s (2018) argument is that researchers are more likely to substantively advance knowledge about theory and practice when they engage other subject matter experts (read researchers) and practitioners in these steps. This occurs because a researcher’s account­ ability is not only to the pursuit of theoretical knowledge that is important to a community of scholars, but also to generate concrete actionable knowledge that enhances practitioners’ ability to address practical problems within a professional domain of practice. Bringing academics and practitioners to talk and form partnerships allows the differences between and among values, interests, aims, and purposes to be named and deliberated on. While the co-production of knowledge and the negotiation of meaning through conversation is key, Van de Ven (2007) does not specify how the research relationship should unfold nor how issues of power and authority may be negotiated allowing for a variety of potential research relationships. This allows the process of co-creation between academic researchers and nonacademic partners to take many forms including forms of collaboration where the researcher’s expertise and values could be emphasized, the nonacademic partners’ expert­ ise and values could be emphasized, or both. Dempsey and Barge (2014) have created a similar model; however, their model explicitly treats engaged scholarship as a form of democratic participatory practice that seeks to democratize knowledge production. Such an approach directly attends to issues of power and authority by emphasizing co-generative theorizing. Drawing on Gergen (1978), Deetz (2008) argues that our impact on the world is facilitated through the creation of generative theories as opposed to findings. Generative theories serve up compelling ideas that capture the interest and curiosity of the public providing them with new interesting ways to think and act. Applying this framework to the conduct of qualitative organizational communication research, scholarship is “engaged” when a project serves as a site of invention where

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the quality of conversation enables different communities—academic and practitioners— to engage in co-generative theorizing. In this way, co-generative theorizing may create a voice within the qualitative research conversation where different voices and views are heard, acknowledged, valued, and responded to. Co-generative theorizing is constituted by taking seriously the claims and values of all parties within the research process. Deetz (2008) highlighted that co-generative theorizing adopts a particular take on whose voice is privileged within the conduct of research, “Most in research communities are used to their knowledge claims being privileged based either on methodology or expertise. Other communities and organizations have their own versions of authority and knowledge preferences. Engaged scholarship strips both of privilege” (p. 296). Engaged scholarship becomes a site for democratic conversation where different voices are heard, and individuals can participate as partners. Qualitative organizational communication scholars hoping to embark on engaged research projects would be well advised to consider how these democratic conversations occur within the four key activities Barge (2015) and Dempsey and Barge (2014) articulated as important to the development of any engaged research project: 1 Co-missioning refers to conversations that help academics and practitioners explore mutual expectations about the problem frame, what values and interests are important to each party, and how they should manage their relationship. Co-missioning conversations answer the question, “How can we cocreate a focus for the research project that adds new insight into the problem at hand and articulates our relational accountabilities to one another?” 2 Co-design refers to conversations that help academics and practitioners jointly determine how the research project should be structured, who should be involved with data collection, what research methods should be used to collect data, and how these various activities should be

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sequenced. Co-designing conversations address the following question, “How can academics and practitioners co-create conversations about the way the research project can be structured and sequenced to facilitate new patterns of meaning making and action?” 3 Co-reflection involves stepping back from the inquiry at different moments and pondering the meaning of the empirical material that is generated through the process of inquiry. Co-reflecting questions involve academics and organizational practitioners coming together to try and make sense of and interpret the data. Such conversations usually involve bringing in different reflecting positions so the data can be looked at from differing perspectives paralleling Ellingson’s (2009) notion of crystallization. Co-reflecting conversations answer the question, “How can we co-create conversations by asking questions and offering reflections that foster deep contemplation on the experience of organizational members?” 4 Co-action refers to conversations that help develop concrete future action based on the interpretations co-created by academics and practitioners. Co-acting addresses the following question, “How can academic researchers co-create conversations with nonacademic partners that enable future action among academics, organizations, and internal and organizational stakeholders?”

Dempsey and Barge (2014) conceive of academic-practitioner collaboration as a democratic conversation where the purpose of knowledge production is not to pursue a single party’s interests and values, but to navigate a pathway where all parties are able to voice their needs and interests and create a way forward that allows them to meet them. Such conversations have a particular flavor to the way that academics and practitioners negotiate meaning and are complex, requiring creativity and imagination to manage them.

A Continuum of Methodological Positionalities Engaged scholarship as a qualitative relational practice embraces a broad methodological orientation that emphasizes the co-production of knowledge and working with the

differences that academic researchers and practitioners bring to the engagement in order to craft research projects that reflect their respective interests. From a qualitative relational practice perspective, it is important to recognize that different researcher positionalities will shape the form of an academic-practitioner collaboration and how the process of co-production of knowledge and the management of meaning is managed. Moreover, these different methodological positionalities have implications for ethical practice. A continuum of methodological positionalities for engaged scholarship as a QRP can be created using the number of touchpoints that academics and practitioners interact about the way that research should be conducted and the way that power and authority are managed within those interactions. Intuitively, the number and type of touchpoints that are discussed within an academic-practitioner collaboration and how the meaning about these touchpoints is negotiated would lead us to characterize the kind of engagement in different ways. Moreover, the degree to which these conversations treat parties as equal partners and making substantive contributions to the inquiry would also influence the contour of the academic-practitioner collaboration. For example, there is a difference between soliciting the views of organizational members and incorporating them into the pre-existing interests of the research and practitioners versus being treated as an equal partner who can frame the problem and direction of the research. As Deetz (2008) observes, there is a difference between research of and about the world which tends to emphasize the researcher’s interests as opposed to research in the world which is developed through close collaboration with participants and partners in the world that keep the interests of researchers, participants, and partners in a constructive tension. The implication that qualitative engaged organizational research could be distinguished by being about the world and being in the world and that a variety of activities

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constitute the research process creates the opportunity for a continuum of engagement to be created. Based on Deetz (2012, cited in Dempsey & Barge, 2014) and Wolfe and Champine (2022), we distinguish three methodological positionalities based on the number and type of research activities that involve conversations between academic and practitioners: (1) consultative, (2) participatory, and (3) collaborative. Inspired by Vaughn and Jacquez’s (2020) mapping of research choice points, Figure 13.1 integrates these three methodological positionalities with the phases of the engaged research process, from co-missioning to co-action (Barge, 2015; Dempsey & Barge, 2014). As this figure illustrates, at each phase in the research process choices are made about the nature of the relationship between academic and nonacademic partners. When qualitative organizational communication scholars design engaged research projects, each of these touchpoints represents consequential choices for the selection of research methods and approaches to inquiry. In what follows, we

elaborate on the methodological positionings of consultation, cooperation, and collaboration and sketch out the ethical implications of each positionality regarding knowledge production for qualitative organizational communication scholars (see Table 13.1).

Consultative A consultative positionality presumes that professional expertise flows from the researcher to the nonacademic partner, who needs academic expertise to help solve the problem. In this way, a qualitative organi­ zational communication researcher would be situated as an expert consultant who has the necessary subject matter and/or methodological expertise to help their organizational partner(s) collect data and reach conclusions regarding the problem and possible solutions. This methodological positionality tends to be associated with traditional approaches to applied communication research where preexisting theory is applied to solve a communication problem. Deetz (2012) suggests that such a positioning prioritizes the values of the

Collaborate Participate

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Figure 13.1  Relational Touchpoints in the Engaged Research Process

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Table 13.1  Methodological Positioning and Key Questions Consultative Co-missioning

Co-design

Co-reflection

Co-action

Participatory

Collaborative

How can researchers’ professional expertise and resources serve to address the need of this external community?

How can nonacademic How can all affected partners’ lived stakeholders leverage experiences differences in resources, (phenomenological training, and expertise to expertise) inform or work toward integrative challenge what we know knowledge and action? of the world? How can traditional methods How can research methods How can all partners work of data collection be be adapted to involve together in dialogue applied to the specific more frequent, longer, to develop contextcontext of a localized and/or more meaningful appropriate protocols, problem? encounters with questions, and processnonacademic life worlds? cycles of brainstorming, critique, and refinement? How can researchers check How can nonacademic How can all partners emerging understandings partners have engage in processes of and perceptions against opportunities to debrief, interlistening-agonistic nonacademic partners? contemplate, and make struggle for recognizing sense of their experiences points of (mis) and insights? understanding? What does the research How can community How can researchers and process suggest as members mobilize nonacademic partners advisable next steps coordinated action leverage their different to address external around shared insights? networks and platforms community’s problems? to maximize impacts?

client and emphasizes the researcher conducting studies in the world that collects data to help the nonacademic partner assess the situation and develop plans to address the problem. Importantly, any phase of a qualitative research process can be more or less consultative, depending on the relational choices made. Consultative co-missioning occurs when academic partners consider how their professional, scholarly expertise and resources serve to address the needs of an external community. Consultative co-design is characterized by the application of traditional methods of data collection to a specific context of a localized question. Consultative co-reflection involves processes like member-checking, whereby researchers check their emerging understandings, perceptions, and interpretations against nonacademic partners and create opportunities for feedback and corrections. Finally, consultative

co-action is exemplified by consultant-generated recommendations, in which a researcher summarizes the research findings in order to suggest advisable next steps for the external community to take to address their problems.

Participatory A participatory positionality privileges phenomenological expertise, or the skills and knowledge generated from individuals’ lived experience of the world. In this way, in a qualitative organizational communication research project, expertise may flow from the organi­ zational partner, who is intimately familiar with the dynamics and pressures shaping their organizational reality, to the qualitative researcher who seeks to understand, describe, and analyze this experience. Researchers subsequently shift from the consultant to the consultee and open themselves up to receive the wisdom, knowledge, or specialized insights that nonacademic partners have to offer (Wolfe

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& Champine, 2022). The underlying assumption of a participatory methodological positionality is that academic researchers are committed to engaging the problems that are presented to them by practitioners but actively work with them to “reframe and reconfigure external community understandings and actively aim at reforms based on values such as social justice” (Deetz, 2012, cited in Dempsey & Barge, 2014, p. 669). This is the domain of action research. While this positionality “still makes use of communication theory and academic research methods to interpret and synthesize existing needs and desires of participants, emphasis on listening and advocacy goes beyond equality between the academic-community poles, and the researcher-consultee is characterized by a systematic deference to participant-stakeholders, particularly in marginalized communities (Dempsey et al., 2011, p. 269)” (Wolfe & Champine, 2022, pp. 18–19). Examples include Connaughton et al. (2017) and Villanueva et al. (2017). Tracking participatory positionality across the research process highlights key questions at each stage. Participatory co-missioning asks researchers how nonacademic partners’ lived experiences can inform or challenge what existing scholarship claims to know of the world. Participatory co-design considers how research methods can be adapted to involve more frequent, longer, and/or more meaningful encounters with nonacademic lifeworlds. For example, rather than conducting phone interviews or online focus groups about an organizational issue at a distance, qualitative researchers may engage in shadowing (Gill et  al., 2014), photo and video methods (Wilhoit, 2017), or mobile interviewing methods (Wiederhold, 2015), which incorporate more embodied, sensorial encounters alongside nonacademic partners. Participatory co-reflection demands that nonacademic partners have opportunities to debrief, contemplate, and make sense of their experiences and insights in conversation with researchers. Finally, participatory co-action encourages planning around how

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a research project can catalyze community members to coordinate action around shared insights.

Collaborative The basic premise of a collaborative positionality is that multiple forms of expertise flow between the researcher and nonacademic partner. As such, both sets of stakeholders in the research process cooperatively develop problem orientations and both have the needed expertise to answer the problem. There is a commitment to producing something together and accomplishing mutually desirable goals. In a qualitative organizational communication research project, a fully collaborative positionality would cut across all the activities associated with the project as the problem focus, strategies for collecting and analyzing data, and using the project to take future action would be negotiated between the academic researcher and nonacademic partner. Deetz observes that a collaborative mode of engagement moves researchers to engage in participatory action research and co-generative theorizing (Deetz, 2012). Examples of a collaborative methodological positionality are provided by Anguiano et al. (2012) and Broad et al. (2013). As with each of the other methodological positionalities, relational choices at each phase of the qualitative research process will determine the extent to which a given project may be considered collaborative. Collaborative co-missioning raises the question: How can all affected stakeholders leverage differences in resources, training, and expertise to work toward integrative knowledge and action? Collaborative co-design calls on all partners in a research process to engage in dialogue with one another to develop context-appropriate protocols, questions, and procedures through iterative processes of brainstorming, critique, and refinement. Collaborative co-reflection invites research partners to recognize points of mis/understanding as generative spaces for learning. While points of understanding are useful for locating common ground and

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shared goals, Lipari (2014) notes that “misunderstanding opens the doorway to the ethical relation by inspiring (or frustrating) us to listen more closely to others, to inquire more deeply into their differences, and to question our own already well-formed understandings of the world” (p. 8). Collaborative co-reflection, at its best, promotes deep consideration of the differences that pervade research partners’ positioning relative to the project, in order to move toward action with intentionality and humility. On that point, collaborative co-action considers how researchers and nonacademic partners can leverage their different networks and platforms to maximize impacts.

ETHICAL CONSIDERATIONS Engaged scholarship highlights a number of ethical concerns that qualitative researchers need to consider regarding (dis)engagement before, during, and after the research project. We use the term (dis)engagement to highlight the challenges of both engaging with a particular research project and nonacademic partner, as well as the possibility of disengaging from them at different points in the project or at the end of the project. We suggest that all engaged scholars confront a similar set of ethical entanglements and respond to them differently depending on whether they adopt a consultative, participative, or collaborative methodological positionality. For example, Cheney (2008) highlights a number of ethical tensions engaged scholars must manage including how they manage the tension between listening to their partners and providing them advice. We imagine how and when researchers listen and provide advice depend on how they envision their expertise, which will vary according to whether they adopt a consultative, cooperative, or collaborative methodological positionality. We now turn to some of the common ethical questions that engaged scholars often confront before, during, and

after a qualitative project based on their own experience and the experiences of others within the engaged scholarship community. There are a number of ethical considerations to consider before the onset of the qualitative research project. The overall burning question is, “Do I take this project on?” which highlights how the ethical boundaries of the researcher influence what projects may be selected for a collaboration and what won’t. These kinds of considerations involve questions concerning the nature of the proposed task, access, and theoretical and/or practical impact. For example, suppose an organization approached you to help them design a process aimed at downsizing the organization by outsourcing jobs, but wanted to limit your access to senior-level management given the sensitivity of the topic. Your ethical boundaries may lead you to decline this project for a variety of reasons: it violates your ethical code of “do no harm”: the task is close-ended with a specific purpose in mind and does not allow new possible lines of action to emerge; and finally, who you are able to engage in serious talks about this issue excludes those organizational members who are directly affected. On the other hand, if the organization had approached you about having an organization-wide dialogue about creative ways to respond to emerging budgetary constraints, you might take that project on because it better aligns with your ethical commitments. Engaged scholars also need to consider ethical issues that may emerge during the conduct of the qualitative research project. An important question during this stage of the research is, “How do I manage emerging insights, changes, or disruptions that pose ethical dilemmas?” For example, what do you do as part of your engagement if you surface instances of unethical or illegal practices such as workplace bullying or unfair labor practices such as the exploitation of migrant workers? Should you report this behavior and, if so, to whom? What are the consequences of making such a report? We have also talked

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to colleagues who engage with very difficult issues, such as child advocacy, racial injustice, and poverty, and the stories they hear and experiences they have profoundly affect them. Such engagement requires managing the tension between distance and empathy and involves ethical issues pertaining to selfcare and determining whether you can continue with the project. What do you do if the nonacademic partner changes the data collection plan by heavily restricting access and meeting less frequently, which leads you to question your ability to obtain the data you need as well as the nonacademic partner’s commitment to the project? Issues regarding how you manage challenges due to the information you surface about the nonacademic partner, the impact of the project on your well-being, and changes in the co-mission that was originally co-created require serious ethical reflection. Engaged scholars also need to consider the ethical issues regarding how they conclude a qualitative research project and how the project may live on (or not) within the lives of nonacademic partners. A key question that engaged scholars have to ask at this point in the research project is, “What should my relationship be with nonacademic partners once this project ends?” This involves considering what kinds of downstream effects and consequences the research project may invite and the role of the research in helping create them. There has been a recent interest in how researchers can take steps that lead to the persistence of intervention effects (Bailey, Dunan, Cunha, Foorman, & Yeager, 2020); however, there has been relatively little exploration regarding how to sustain and nourish the impact of an engaged research project once it has concluded. Researchers need to be mindful that nonacademic partners may become dependent on them to provide their expertise and labor after a project. Researchers should consider issues such as what the nature of their future relationships with their nonacademic partners should be, how they manage the transition to closing

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the project, and how they may work with their partners to sustain the benefits and consequences of the project in order for it to have an afterlife as they wind down. As engaged scholars, we have professional codes that emphasize ethical research practice and, as engaged scholars who are also committed to relationality in the conduct of research, we are also committed to co-producing knowledge in a fashion that is beneficial to all parties. Engaged scholars need to exercise reflexive ethical practice in order to find ways that their research interests and aspirations align with practitioners in a way that fits within the ethical values of their methodological positionality. Connaughton et  al. (2017) highlight the use of an ethical practice that seeks to do no harm to the community, is mindful of who benefits from the research, and acknowledges power differences within the conduct of the research. Sometimes, one can anticipate potential ethical concerns while at other times, that is not possible. For example, an engaged scholarship project we were part of was disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic, which meant the original plan for the project was no longer possible. It would have been possible to walk away from this project as everyone understood the problems posed by the pandemic. However, our ethical commitments led us to offer an alternative approach to the project as a way of signaling our commitment to our partners.

GETTING STARTED We conclude by talking about how to get started with engaged scholarship as a qualitative relational practice. We have been involved with the Aspen Conference on Engaged Scholarship (see: www.aspenengaged.org/) for a number of years, and the recurring questions that are continually raised by new participants at these conferences include, “How do I get started? How

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do I design and conduct engaged scholarship? What are the qualities of an engaged scholarship research project?” These are not easy questions and involve wrestling with tensions between being an academic scholar and a socially-relevant scholar as well as the tension between producing abstract theory and concrete interventions. There are multiple ways to develop an engaged approach to the conduct of qualitative organizational communication research and the following suggestions are based on the realities we have heard participants discuss at the conference and some of the strategies people have developed for beginning their journey of engaged scholarship. First, keep in mind that there is a difference between an engaged research project and an engaged research program. A qualitative researcher who conducts an engaged project works with a specific group of people or organization regarding a particular problem, while a qualitative researcher who builds an engaged research program accumulates different research projects that they have conducted over time that center on a particular problem area or domain. We suggest that an engaged research project requires a substantive academic-practitioner collaboration that is concerned with coproducing knowledge through relational inquiry over a wide range of research activities including problem formulation, analysis, and implementation of future actions. However, a program of engaged scholarship may have a research portfolio that has a mix of research projects that are based in action research, participatory research, and participatory action research as well as more theoretically-oriented or topic-driven research that is driven by the researcher’s and academic community’s interests. An engaged scholarship sensibility recognizes that collaborative research projects can inspire a theory building project or researcher-driven topic research and vice versa. Simply, our engagement in the world and “knowing how” a practice works in local context can

inspire projects that situate the qualitative researcher more as a third-party observer who is concerned with research that helps “know about” the world and conducting research projects that are about the world can prepare us for entering it. Second, qualitative organizational communication researchers should listen carefully to stories of practice and connect them with important academic stories within your professional life. You will be better able to understand and engage with the concerns of practitioners if you make a habit of going out into the world and listening to their concerns and needs. This can range from simply talking to people in your personal and professional networks, attending public meetings in your community, joining professional organizations such as the Association for Talent Development and the International Association for Public Participation, reading practitioner-oriented journals, volunteering at local organizations, actively inviting practitioners into collaborative research projects, and conducting informational interviews with practitioners. It is important to do the preparatory work for conducting an engaged scholarship project by having a general sense of the kinds of problems and issues people within a particular community of practice encounter. Starting the journey of engaged scholarship begins by immersing yourself in the life worlds of practitioners. However, the stories of practice you hear and resonate with must also be connected to issues of concern for your academic community of practice if your qualitative scholarship is going to have uptake within the academic community. Barge (2015, 2017) suggests that engaged scholars should learn to work with “triple translation.” Triple translation means that you should be able to take a situated problem that has come to your attention by working with practitioners and reflect on this problem using the lenses of theory, practice, and research. For example, suppose you have several friends that are pharmaceutical representatives and they consistently complain

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about how much data they have to enter into company databases on a daily basis because it disrupts their work flow and hurts their ability to go and meet with clients. They commonly lament, “All we ever do is enter data and run reports and don’t get to do what we were hired to do, meet with clients and get them to use our product.” Moreover, it causes your friends to spend evenings and weekends entering data and getting caught up on reports. Using the practice of triple translation, we can see that the way pharmaceutical representatives have constructed the meaning of the presenting problem is that a data reporting system, that was probably intended to help pharmaceutical representatives become more efficient by using data to plan and track their client calls, is actually disrupting their efficiency. The presenting practical problem could be linked to different theories and theoretical communication problems such as communication technology theories regarding the design of information technology, theories of managerial communication and the evolution of management by algorithm, and theories of temporality and issues regarding work cycles and pace. Here, the challenge for qualitative researchers is to move from a concrete local problem and consider it as an example of a larger theoretical issue that is of interest to a scholarly community. Once you have made choices about the framing of the theoretical communication problem you wish to engage, it is important to connect it to the body of research regarding this domain of study. Simply, what research literature helps explain the problem or issue? The ability to tack among the stories of practice, stories of theory, and stories of research make it more likely you will generate a qualitative research project that has uptake in both academic and practitioner communities. The uptake of your research in an academic discipline is tied to finding creative ways to connect concrete problems with the existing literature (Shepherd & Sutcliffe, 2011).

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Third, be transparent with your organi­ zational partners about your pressures and priorities. Academic scholars are expected to publish research on a regular basis as part of their job. This pressure is particularly acute for beginning scholars in tenure-track positions as there is a fixed probationary review period where they must meet certain publication standards in order to be tenured and promoted. As a result, the cost of having an engaged research project fail can potentially be devastating as it may significantly disrupt one’s research program. To be sure, some engaged research projects will not come into fruition or produce the outcomes you might desire. Nevertheless, qualitative researchers can and should communicate these expectations, pressures, and priorities to their community partners early as they are developing their relationship in order to minimize potential disruptions. For example, we had a colleague who was working with an organization and discovered that any article they published needed to be vetted by its legal department. This was not discussed upfront during the co-missioning process. It was successfully resolved, but delayed the writing process by several weeks and had the possibility of not allowing the academic scholar to write up their experience for publication. Fourth, develop your skills at meeting management. A hallmark of engaged scholarship is the need for academics and practitioners to meet with one another throughout the research project to sustain the collaboration. Such meetings are crucial to negotiating meaning about the different elements of an engaged scholarship research project. Meeting management refers to the capacity for designing and facilitating meetings. More doctoral programs tend to focus on teaching how to use particular research methods to collect and generate data. What gets neglected in the pedagogical process is how to structure meetings that allow academics and practitioners to surface and deliberate about important issues that are associated

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with the research process. As Van de Ven (2007) observes, some of the key meeting facilitation skills an engaged scholar needs to develop, center on conflict management and negotiation. It is not surprising that if one forms a research partnership based on the differences various partners bring to the research process, that conflicts may emerge regarding the aims and purpose of the project, its design, and desired outcomes. There are a number of resources that are beginning to meet this challenge in terms of engaged scholarship methods courses (e.g., at Texas A&M University, University of Texas at Austin, University of Washington) as well as training and certificates in participatory research (see University of North Carolina’s Certificate in Participatory Research as an example, https://participatoryresearch.unc. edu). Fifth, consider using quantitative methods with an eye toward facilitating conversation and meaning-making among partners. Engaged scholarship as qualitative relational practice does not prohibit the use of quantitative research methods. In fact, engaged scholars often employ quantitative methods as a means for collecting data (see Shockley-Zalabak et  al., 2017). However, the way that quantitative methods are used within a qualitative methodological position is different from the way they are used within a traditional positivist hypotheticodeductive model (see Chapter 1 in this volume for a related discussion of “mixed methods” research). Rather than collect and analyze quantitative data in the pursuit of hypothesis testing and the development of propositional knowledge claims, the collection and analysis of quantitative data is used to inspire future conversations and meaning-making among academic and nonacademic partners by helping describe the contours of the organization, the problem, who is impacted, etc. We would suggest that qualitative researchers who are interested in engaged scholarship should also have a

basic understanding of how to construct and conduct quantitative surveys and program assessment and the ability to use simple statistics to analyze the data. Another possibility would be to assemble research teams that have expertise in multiple methods. Inspired by Stephens (2016), we would suggest that dividing research methods and methodologies into quantitative or qualitative camps does not capture the rich diversity of research methods and how they can be used in specific research studies. We agree with Stephens (2016) that methodological curiosity is important and that engaged scholars operating from a qualitative relational methodological framework should explore the creative use of quantitative research methods in their research. Sixth, be mindful of time. Barbour et  al. (2017) highlight the way that time and temporality play out in engaged scholarship research projects. Engaged scholarship is a time-intensive enterprise as building research relationships that allow you to partner with and gain access to organizations takes time. The timescapes of academic scholars and practitioners vary as scholars may have a longer slower time frame toward their work in order to have sufficient time to think about and plan the project and analyze the data while practitioners may have a shorter faster time frame as they have to solve problems quickly. Academic scholars have to produce multiple articles in shorter time frames. Barbour et al. (2017) suggest that it is important to “knit together different temporalities.” We have noticed that the temporal realities of engaged scholarship sometimes pressures scholars to choose between short-term projects or long-term engagements. We believe that is a false choice. Individuals wishing to pursue engaged scholarship may need to have a mix of projects with differing timelines in research programs. Moreover, scholars need to be intentional in designing qualitative projects that allow them to produce multiple projects from the same project.

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A FINAL REFLECTION Engaged scholarship as a qualitative relational practice generates research and inquiry that is intentionally designed to benefit both organi­ zational communication scholars and practitioners. For academic scholars, using QRP when conducting engaged scholarship allows them to fulfill a need to help people and organizations and have impact within the world while simultaneously pursuing the academic tasks of research and publication. This chapter has suggested that the work of being an engaged scholar requires reflexivity about one’s methodological positionality and the way they create consultative, participatory, and collaborative relationships with practitioners. Engaged scholarship requires qualitative researchers to manage multiple research projects that have different timelines and may be fraught with tensions over divergent interests. We believe that managing the complexity associated with engaged scholarship requires a research temperament that is infused by passion, patience, and faith. Passion provides the drive to take on different projects with practitioners. Patience is a needed resource when the demands of the situation change and you need to make difficult decisions about what to do next. Faith is about having the confidence that things will work out and you have the needed skills to persevere in the face of adversity. Our hope is that this chapter helps you tap into and develop your passion, patience, and faith when conducting engaged scholarship as a qualitative relational practice.

REFERENCES Anguiano, C., Milstein, T., De Larkin, I., Chen, Y., & Sandoval, J. (2012). Connecting community voices: Using a Latino/a Critical Race Theory lens on environmental justice advocacy. Journal of International and Intercultural Communication, 5(2), 124–143. http://dx.doi. org/10.1080/17513057.2012.661445

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Bailey, D. H., Duncan, G. J., Cunha, F., Foorman, B. R., & Yeager, D. S. (2020). Persistence and fadeout of educational-intervention effects: Mechanisms and potential solutions. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 21(2), 55–97. https://doi.org/10.1177/1529100620915848 Barbour, J. B., Ballard, D. I., Barge, J. K., & Gill, R. (2017). Making time/making temporality for engaged scholarship. Journal of Applied Com­ munication Research, 45(4), 365–380. https:// doi.org/10.1080/00909882.2017.1355556 Barbour, J. B., & James, E. P. (2015). Collaboration for compliance: Identity tensions in the interorganizational and interdisciplinary regulation of a toxic waste storage facility. Jour­ nal of Applied Communication Research, 43(4), 363–384. https://doi.org/10.1080/009 09882.2015.1083601 Barge, J. K. (2015). Consulting as collaborative co-inquiry. In G. Bushe & R. Marshak (Eds.), Dialogic organizational development: Theory and practice (pp. 177–196). BerrettKoehler. Barge, J. K., & Shockley-Zalabak, P. (2008). Engaged scholarship and the creation of useful organizational knowledge. Journal of Applied Communication Research, 36(3), 251–265. https://doi.org/10.1080/00909880802172277 Broad, G. M., Ball-Rokeach, S. J., Ognyanova, K., Stokes, B., Picasso, T., & Villanueva, G. (2013). Understanding communication ecologies to bridge communication research and community action. Journal of Applied Com­ munication Research, 41(4), 325–345. https:// doi.org/10.1080/ 00909882.2013.844848 Cheney, G. (2008). Encountering the ethics of engaged scholarship. Journal of Applied Communication Research, 36(3), 281–288. https://doi.org/10.1080/00909880 892172293 Connaughton, S. L., Linabary, J. R., Krishna, A., Kuang, K., Anaele, A., Vibber, K. S., Yakova, L.. & Jones, C. (2017). Explicating the relationally attentive approach to conducting engaged communication scholarship. Jour­ nal of Applied Communication Research, 45(5), 517–536. https://doi.org/10.1080/009 09882.2017.1382707 Craig, R. T. (2018). For a practical discipline. Journal of Communication, 68(2), 289–297. https://doi.org/10.1093/joc/jqx013

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Deetz, S. (2008). Engagement as co-generative theorizing. Journal of Applied Communica­ tion Research, 36(3), 289–297. http://dx.doi. org/10.1080/00909880802172301 Deetz, S. (2012). Personal communication. De Los Santos Upton, S. (2020). The co-conspiring methodology: An invitational approach to action research. Action Research, 18(3), 387–403. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/ 1476750317725389 Dempsey, S., & Barge, J. K. (2014). Engaged scholarship and democracy. In D. K. Mumby & L. L. Putnam (Eds.), The Sage handbook of organizational communication: Advances in theory, research, and methods (pp. 665– 688). Sage. Dempsey, S., Dutta, M., Frey, L. R., Goodall, H. L., Madison, D. S., Mercieca, J., Nakayama, T., & Miller, K. (2011). What is the role of the communication discipline in social justice, community engagement, and public scholarship? A visit to the CM Café. Communica­ tion Monographs, 78(2), 256–271. https:// doi.org/10.1080/03637751.2011.565062 Ellingson, L. L. (2009). Engaging crystallization in qualitative research: An introduction. Sage. Gergen, K. (1978). Toward generative theory. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 36(11), 1344–1360. https://doi.org/10.1037/ 0022-3514.36.11.1344 Gill, R., Barbour, J., & Dean, M. (2014). Shadowing in/as work: Ten recommendations for shadowing fieldwork practice. Qualitative Research in Organizations and Manage­ ment, 9(1), 69–89. https://doi.org/10.1108/ QROM-09-2012-1100 Harter, L. M., Pangborn, S. M., Ivancic, S., & Quinlan, M. M. (2017). Storytelling and social activism in health organizing. Management Communication Quarterly, 31(2), 314–320. https://doi.org/10.1177/0893318916688090 Kellett, P. M., Connaughton, S. L., & Cheney, G. (2020). Transforming conflict and building peace: Community engagement strategies for communication scholarship. Peter Lang. LeGreco, M., & Douglas, N. (2021). Everybody eats: Communication and the paths to food justice. University of California Press. Lipari, L. (2014). Listening, thinking, being: Toward an ethics of attunement. Penn State University Press.

Pangborn, S. M. (2017). Reimagining interdisciplinary team communication in hospice care: Disrupting routinization with narrative inspiration. Journal of Applied Communication Research, 45(5), 455–473. https://doi.org/10. 1080/00909882.2017.1382710 Parker, P. S. (2020). Ella Baker’s catalytic leader­ ship: A primer on community engagement and communication for social justice. University of California Press. Putnam, L. L., & Dempsey, S. E. (2015). The five faces of engaged scholarship: Implications for feminist research. Women & Language, 38(1), 11–21. Shockley-Zalabak, P., Barge, J. K., Lewis, L., & Simpson, J. L. (2017). Engaged scholarship. In C. R. Scott & L. Lewis (Eds.), International encyclopedia of organizational communica­ tion. Wiley Blackwell. https://doi.org/ 10.1002/9781118955567.wbieoc071 Shepherd, D. A., & Sutcliffe, K. M. (2011). Inductive top-down theorizing: A source of new theories of organizations. Academy of Management Review, 36(2), 361–380. https://doi.org/10.5465/amr.2009.0157 Stephens, K. K. (2016). Adapting and advancing organizational communication research methods: Balancing methodological diversity and depth, while creating methodological curiosity. In P. Salem & E. Timmerman (Eds.). Transformative practices and research in organizational communication (pp. 151–167). IGI Global. Van de Ven, A. H. (2007). Engaged scholarship: A guide for organizational and social research. Oxford University Press. Van de Ven, A. H. (2018). Academic-practitioner engaged scholarship. Information and Organization, 28(1), 37–43. https://doi. org/10.1016/j.infoandorg.2018.02.002 Vaughn, L. M., & Jacquez, F. (2020). Participatory research methods – choice points in the research process. Journal of Participatory Research Methods, 1(1), 1–13. https://doi. org/10.35844/001c.13244 Villanueva, G., Gonzalez, C., Son, M., Moreno, E., Liu, W., & Ball-Rokeach, S. (2017). Bringing local voices into community revitalization: Engaged communication research in urban planning. Journal of Applied Commu­ nication Research, 45(5), 474–494. https:// doi.org/10.1080/00909882.2017.1382711

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Wiederhold, A. (2015). Conducting fieldwork at and away from home: shifting researcher positionality with mobile interviewing methods. Qualitative Research, 15(5), 600–615. https://doi.org/10.1177/1468794114550440 Wilhoit, E. D. (2017). Photo and video methods in organizational and managerial communication research. Management Communica­ tion Quarterly, 31(3), 447–466. https://doi. org/10.1177/0893318917704511 Wolfe, A. W. (2016). Organizing collective action amid the ripple effects of change: Narratives of crisis, disaster, and opportunity. Journal of Applied Communication Research, 44(1), 1–21. https:// doi.org/10.1080/00909882.2015.1116704 Wolfe, A. W., Black, L. W., Munz, S., & Okamoto, K. (2017). (Dis)engagement and

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everyday democracy in stigmatized places: Addressing brain drain in the rural United States. Western Journal of Communication, 81(2), 168–187. https://doi.org/10.1080/105 70314.2016.1236980 Wolfe, A. W., Black, L. W., & Welser, H. T. (2020). Sense of community and migration intentions among rural young professionals. Rural Sociology, 85(1), 235–257. https://doi. org/10.1111/ruso.12289 Wolfe, A. W., & Champine, T. (2022). Developing a grounded practical theory of engaged communication scholarship: Theorizing communities of practice in NCA journals. Journal of Applied Communication Research. Advanced online publication. https://doi.org/ 10.1080/00909882.2022.2127120

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PART II

Data Collection in Qualitative Organizational Communication Research: Methods and Issues

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14 Research Design in Qualitative Organizational Communication Research B r y a n C . Ta y l o r a n d R y a n S . B i s e l

This chapter aims to shed light on an oftenneglected element of qualitative organi­ zational communication research: its design (Gorard, 2013, pp. 3–12).). This scholarly neglect of—or at least, ambivalence towards—research design can seem confusing. On the one hand, “design” is a powerful symbol associated with valued products and services in contemporary society—one suggesting their desirable qualities of planning, precision, efficiency, reliability, and elegance. Indeed, scholars and professionals increasingly advocate for designing communication itself, in order to realize its potential benefits (Aakhus, 2007). This tradition has contributed to a general appreciation among organizational communication scholars for the role played by qualitative research design in many groundbreaking publications (Tracy & Geist-Martin, 2013), marked by strong theoretical contributions (Bisel et al., 2014), original insights about organizational behavior (e.g., Zoller, 2003), revision of previously held assumptions (e.g., Eisenberg, 1984),

and the development of new concepts (e.g., Barley, 2015; Wilhoit & Kisselburgh, 2015). On the other hand, we contend that this appreciation for qualitative research design has become increasingly superficial and taken for granted. Why might this be so? One explanation is that a persistent, competing aura surrounding qualitative research depicts it as a relatively informal, creative enterprise—one in which the organic development of knowledge requires improvisation, not rule (or theory) following. This laissezfaire approach, subsequently, contradicts images of design as a relatively strategic (if not technocratic) practice, in which rational planning determines (for better and worse) process outcomes. By implication, then, this approach associates design with positivist (i.e., hypothetico-deductive) logics typically opposed by qualitative researchers (Johnson & Harris, 2002). Finally, because successful design requires qualitative researchers to ask and (at least provisionally) answer difficult questions about their studies, before they are

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able to respond with certainty, it can seem like a pointless, unnecessarily strenuous exercise. In this chapter, we argue that while this contradiction is relevant for organizational communication scholars, it should not be overemphasized. That is, we believe it is inaccurate and unhelpful to depict design as inherently opposed to the spirit of qualitative research. Instead, we argue that some form of research design is appropriate (if not necessary) for all qualitative studies of organizational communication, for at least two reasons. First, dismissals of research design overlook its considerable flexibility in adapting to researchers’ choices concerning theoretical agendas, practical procedures, and chosen settings. This does not mean anything goes: it means that research design is not one-size-fits-all. Second, the prospective logic of qualitative design, in which researchers imagine how their studies may go, before the fact, is a beneficial activity. This is true not because their planning ensures preferred outcomes. Instead, it is because conducting this kind of exercise helps them to surface potential issues, and stimulate their consideration of contingencies, before those issues fully arise, and they need those contingency plans. As a result, researchers gain sensitizing devices and timely options that increase their chances of success—whether or not those options are completely used. To invoke another image: Just as athletes mentally rehearse (i.e., visualize) complex routines before physically performing them, qualitative researchers benefit from sending their minds (i.e., their ability to anticipate dynamic environments) into the field, before fully committing their bodies. Our argument proceeds below as follows. First, we review general definitions of “research design”—including what it is, and what it is supposed to accomplish. Second, we discuss eleven elements of qualitative research design, focusing on the specific components that make this process unique for qualitative scholars. Third, we review four key principles of qualitative research design in organizational communication. Here, we

focus on the conditions that shape scholars’ practical configuration of those elements, and the ideals they aspire to uphold in that process. Fourth, we ensure that this chapter’s argument is current and relevant by presenting findings from our interviews with leading organizational communication scholars, who shared their stories of qualitative research design.

RESEARCH DESIGN: GENERAL DEFINITIONS Among social scientists, the term “research design” has at least two meanings (Gibson & Brown, 2009 (pp. 47–64)). Conventionally, it refers to a category of methodology, such as “experiment,” “survey,” “action research,” or “autoethnography.” Here, the term designates a unique set of features and commitments that characterize any particular study as an example of a more general type of study. For the members of research communities, these terms function as a kind of shorthand, efficiently configuring their expectations for that study’s form and content. As those expectations grow and are automatically applied in evaluating new studies, popular research designs can assume the status of “templates”—that is, models that inspire researchers to engage in mechanical imitation—often with mixed results (see Köhler et al., 2022). A second meaning for research design— and one we adopt in this chapter—describes an ongoing, systematic process of planning and accounting, through which researchers encourage their stakeholders to endorse the quality of their study (Cardano, 2020). Here, rather than a formal category used to classify a study, “research design” describes an activity that is alternately intellectual, social, and practical in nature. As an intellectual activity, research design calls upon a qualitative researcher’s knowledge of theory and methods to establish logical consistency between their study’s intended goals, chosen strategies,

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and unfolding outcomes. As a social activity, it requires researchers to engage in ritual performances (e.g., dissertation proposal defenses, journal article submissions, etc.), in which they assert and defend their study’s displayed qualities (e.g., of coherence and sufficiency) publicly. Here, researchers anticipate and respond continuously to questions, criticisms, and suggestions from their stakeholders. Ideally, these responses serve to clarify a researcher’s operating assumptions, confirm the wisdom of their decisions, and spur debate concerning alternative courses of action. Finally, as a practical activity, design occurs as researchers respond (whether spontaneously or deliberately) to developments occurring in their research environments. These developments may include expected and surprising changes, originating either internally or externally at a chosen research site. They may also include consequences created by researchers’ prior choices. These initial definitions establish qualitative research design as a strategic undertaking, one intended to translate a study’s initial ideas into viable plans, create desirable relationships between its elements, and increase the likelihood of producing successful outcomes. This undertaking logically connects the conceptualization, conduct, and contributions of a particular project (Cheek, 2008). What are these elements of research design, exactly? A witty answer here might be “all of them,” but this quip needs unpacking. On the one hand, research design seeks to optimize alignment (i.e., congruency) between the diverse elements of qualitative studies, and this effort continues throughout their lifecycle stages. On the other hand, research design tends to dominate the early (i.e., planning and implementation) stages of that lifecycle. Because qualitative studies are typically nonlinear and iterative in nature (discussed further below), the concerns of research design inevitably (and unpredict­ ably) recur throughout their subsequent stages (e.g., of data analysis). At that point, however, the concerns of research design occur

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relative to the activities defining those later stages (e.g., developing explanatory models). Put another way, the implications of research design persist throughout a qualitative study, but they do not always show up in the same form, or land with the same urgency. This is partly because as the consequences of design choices accumulate throughout a study, it becomes less possible (and hopefully, less necessary) for researchers to unmake or remake those prior choices. Having established this foundation, we now turn to review specific elements of research design in qualitative organizational communication studies. We proceed by discussing these elements in three categories. In the first category, “Logical Hierarchies and their Outcomes,” we discuss the importance of achieving consistency between research para­ digms, theories, topics and problems; and research questions. In the second category of “Data Collection,” we discuss the challenges associated with selecting field sites, obtaining site access, conducting sampling, and honoring ethics. In the final category of “Data Analysis,” we discuss generic concerns related to that topic, and the more specific concern of data management and security. Throughout this discussion, we emphasize elements that are not otherwise treated explicitly or extensively in this volume. Occasionally, however, we refer to specific chapters in which readers may find additional information about related topics and issues. Overall, these elements guide qualitative researchers toward important questions in designing their studies.

KEY ELEMENTS OF QUALITATIVE ORGANIZATIONAL RESEARCH DESIGN Logical Hierarchies and their Outcomes Research paradigms Research paradigms reflect basic assumptions about phenomena, held by the members of a

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scholarly community. These assumptions establish the nature of that phenomenal reality (e.g., its ontology), and how it might be known through inquiry (i.e., its epistemology; Greckhamer & Cilesiz, 2022). A famous example here involves Morgan’s (1986/2006) distinction between foundational metaphors in different theories depicting organizations as— for example—machines, organisms, and brains. Typically, qualitative researchers do not discuss these assumptions extensively in their published work. Instead, they signal their influence more indirectly through their selection of theories, methods, and questions. Nonetheless, qualitative researchers must remain aware of how these choices activate the enabling and constraining features of associated paradigms, and stimulate audience expectations for commensurate choices in other areas. Three paradigms most relevant for qualitative studies of organizational communication include postpositivism (i.e., emphasizing reliable explanation of the causes and outcomes of detectable patterns of communication); interpretivism (i.e., emphasizing empathic understanding of meaningful symbolic activity, practiced among cultural members); and critique (i.e., emphasizing the role of communication in developing and transforming organizational systems of power) (see Lindlof & Taylor, 2017).

Theories Conventionally, theories include formal, systematically developed accounts that seek to describe and explain chosen phenomena by specifying their essential features, the relationships between them, and the effects produced by those relationships. In the social sciences, theories often invite audiences to (dis-)confirm and revise their claims by conducting empirical studies of related cases. Theories logically affiliate with paradigmatic assumptions about phenomenal reality (discussed above), although the boundaries between paradigms, theoretical “perspectives,” and actual theories can sometimes be fuzzy. In any case, theories

provide inherently abstract narratives, deliberately representing phenomena through the language of concepts and constructs, which isolate and clarify the relevant features of those phenomena. These devices encourage researchers to transcend their situational experiences of phenomena, and compare and contrast their diverse, dispersed manifestations. The river of theories historically used by qualitative organizational communication scholars is wide—and is currently growing wider (Nicotera, 2019). These theories range from postpositivist exemplars such as Adaptive Structuration Theory (Rains & Bonito, 2017), to interpretivist traditions such as Ethnomethodology (Ten Have, 2016), and critical projects such as Feminism (Ashcraft, 2014) and Postmodernism (Taylor, 2005). Importantly for this discussion, qualitative research designs vary in how theory is used. In some designs, for example, theory may be used in a relatively deductive fashion (i.e., as a pre-existing explanation that will be systematically used to test a study’s findings). In other cases (most famously, the Grounded Theory approach), theory is developed in a primarily inductive fashion—that is, painstakingly built not from pre-existing assumptions, but from the displayed features of collected data (see Holton, 2018). Finally, qualitative researchers may use theory in an abductive manner. Here, theory serves as a resource employed to explore data tentatively (i.e., as a sensitizing device), and to reflectively stimulate (but not predetermine) the emergence of relevant findings (Tavory & Timmermans, 2014). Additionally, qualitative research designs may vary in the scope of their theoretical usage (i.e., comprehensive vs. selective).

Topics and problems This component of research design answers basic questions commonly asked by researchers’ friends, family members, and colleagues: What are you studying? Why did you choose that topic? What do you hope to find out?

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These questions invite us to identify some type of organizational phenomenon—an object, a figure, an event, a condition, or a process. One example here would be “evolving forms of workplace discrimination, practiced against differently abled workers.” Typically, these kinds of statements specify the spatial and temporal contexts of our topic/problem (e.g., “… in current U.S. government agencies”). They also establish its relevance for key organizational stakeholders, including workers, managers, owners, clients, suppliers, regulators, as well as associated institutions, communities, and publics. How exactly, researchers ask, are these groups affected by this phenomenon? Finally, topic/problem statements confirm the costs created if researchers collectively fail to understand accurately and intervene successfully in this phenomenon—as well as the potential benefits of their doing so (e.g., new options for organizational members’ understanding and practice).

Research questions Research questions have a distinctive form and function in qualitative research design. First, drawing from their topic/problem statements (described above), these questions identify a researcher’s chosen object(s) of study. Second, they suggest how various features of these objects interact to create, maintain, and transform their manifestations. Third, they suggest how a focused exploration of these features and their relationships can generate new and beneficial knowledge. Finally, research questions should be phrased clearly, precisely, and directly. This is for two reasons. The first reason is because research questions do not merely express a researcher’s curiosity. They also establish a kind of contract between researchers and their stakeholders, concerning the bedrock agenda to which a study’s findings will ultimately be held accountable. The second reason is that good research questions protect researchers from the

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influence of “confirmation bias” (i.e., the pre-existing desire for achieving a preferred outcome), which can lead them to cherrypick only favorable cases and evidence in developing their arguments. Instead, research questions should be phrased in an open fashion (i.e., using “what” and “how” clauses), or in any other manner that increases the chance of generating significant findings— whether or not they are expected. Where do these questions come from? Sometimes, as with choosing a topic/problem, researchers experience an epiphany (e.g., a sudden, overwhelming recognition) that crystallizes their focus. In other cases, influences accumulate more gradually in different areas of their lives—and at various levels of awareness—eventually achieving critical mass as a coherent, viable agenda. Here, three sources of influence on research questions are common. The first is a researcher’s personal or professional interest in the topic/problem. The second is society’s level of concern regarding the topic/problem, and institutional investments in managing it (e.g., reflected in funding agency calls for research proposals). A final source of influence involves perennial questions explored in scholarly knowledge (e.g., the structure vs. agency debate), and associated gaps existing both in that knowledge and practitioners’ capabilities. Let’s pause on this final influence listed above, because it is usually a priority for researchers in developing qualitative studies. First, research questions should indirectly establish a reciprocal, mutually beneficial relationship between existing scholarly knowledge (e.g., a particular set of theory and concepts), and a researcher’s chosen topic/problem. That is, they should suggest how applying existing knowledge will illuminate covert or misunderstood qualities of that topic/problem—and, in turn, how this application will valuably extend, challenge, and refine that knowledge. Here, by promising to create new knowledge, research

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questions imply that a researcher is duly familiar with relevant existing knowledge. As such, they confirm the originality of a proposed study. Looking more closely, developing research questions requires qualitative scholars to specify concrete phenomena in their chosen topic/problem that are amenable to empirical study. That is, research questions challenge scholars to define carefully or (to borrow a positivist-leaning term) “operationalize” their objects of study. In this process, they specify the relevant empirical features of those objects, and how those features correspond with their employed concepts. Here, the phrasing of research questions helps scholars to answer a question potentially asked by their stakeholders: “How will you know if you have successfully collected data about this phenomenon?” (see Gobo, 2018). An appropriate response here begins with “Because that data will include, depict and/ or emphasize …” When scholars design research questions carefully, they serve to anchor subsequent moments of reflection and decision-making in the research process. They offer a litmus test researchers can use in those moments: What choice here will best facilitate answering my research question?

Data Collection Research questions specify a topic/problem, and the type of knowledge that scholars seek to gain about it. Consider one recent example: How does crisis communication among counter-terrorism professionals contribute to their (potentially fatal) misidentification of terrorist suspects (Cornelissen et al., 2014)? In this way, research questions imply the kinds of evidence that are necessary and appropriate for creating that knowledge. In this example, those data included an official transcript of real-time communication (created in a subsequent government investigation) that displayed the unfolding sensegiving

and sensemaking of those personnel over the course of a particular tragedy. Subsequently, qualitative researchers must specify the types of methods that are capable of generating the data they need. Conventionally, these types include observation, interviewing, and in situ artifact analysis (e.g., of documents and architecture). Increasingly, as well, organizational communication scholars are exploring whether and how collecting “Big Data” created by the users of social media platforms serves the goals of qualitative research (Bisel et al., 2014). Whatever methods they choose, qualitative researchers typically do not argue that these methods are perfect, or that they will inevitably succeed. Instead, they argue that they are—among the available options— best suited to produce relevant data that are rich in information-value (i.e., substantive), given a study’s research questions. Chapters 16 through 19 in this volume provide detailed discussions of these methods.

Field sites Ultimately, scholars create research questions to be used. These questions guide them in selectively exploring the maps of their chosen topics/problems, and in generating new knowledge about their significant features. Inevitably, qualitative researchers must then wrestle with important questions concerning where, when, and with whom they will generate this knowledge. In this section, we focus on selecting an appropriate, viable “site” for this kind of field research (i.e., that is deliberately conducted in naturally occurring settings, in order to document their local situations and meaningful activities). Here again, the research design process moves researchers from vague abstractions to concrete specifics. In choosing such sites, qualitative researchers often begin their studies by considering categories associated with familiar schema for organizational ontologies and sectors. “Given my paradigmatic and theoretical commitments, and my research questions,” they ask, “what kind of organization/

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organizing, and what kind of communication, will yield the best possible data?” To answer this question, researchers consider a variety of scenarios: Should they focus on communication occurring in a commercial, nonprofit, governmental, or community-level type of organization? In a social movement? Should they focus on organizations that are associated with a specific industry, occupation, or profession? Should they focus on organi­ zations with a particular kind of mission (e.g., maximizing shareholder profit vs. fostering clients’ resiliency)? On an organization’s formal structures or informal processes? On organizations that operate domestically or internationally? On their members’ in-person or online interaction? How are common organizational characteristics such as size, age (i.e., life-cycle stage), structure, and culture relevant for their research questions? Admittedly, there can be many different choices to consider here, and this process can become complex. As a result, we offer two recommendations for this process. First, qualitative researchers should jettison the fantasy that there already exists a single, correct choice of site, waiting “out there” to be uncovered. Instead, we encourage researchers to view their answers to the above questions as diagnostic and tentative. That is, they should serve to reduce researchers’ uncertainty and ambiguity, guiding them towards increasingly better choices. We also recommend that researchers approach this process through the lens of accountability. That is, their goal should be to make a successful argument for their site selection, one that, ideally, will seem appropriate, interesting, representative, challenging, and original. Second, to achieve that goal, we recommend that qualitative researchers engage in visualizing optimal scenarios—that is, by describing the ideal characteristics of the kind of organization they might study. As noted above, the value of this exercise does not depend on researchers ultimately getting everything they want on this list. Instead, it serves to sharpen their awareness of the

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relevant and desirable features of potential research sites, and increases the chances that their chosen procedures will help them to discover those features (Cardano, 2020). Finally, this exercise helps researchers to clarify their priorities in designing their studies. Among these listed relevant features, for example, which are necessary (i.e., must-have) for conducting a particular study? Which may not be necessary, but are still desirable (i.e., nice-to-have)? The next stage in this process involves researchers using this list to identify and evaluate (e.g., compare and contrast) their available options for actual study. Here, in addition to valuing organizations that display their most-desired characteristics, researchers typically consider practical questions about their own needs. How accessible are these organizations? What levels of sponsorship (i.e., endorsement) and acceptance (i.e., inclusion) would researchers likely enjoy from their members and stakeholders? How might that sponsorship alternately enable and constrain a researcher’s opportunities for collecting data? How convenient is it for researchers to travel to organizational locations from their home and work? What expectations do organizational members have for researchers sharing the findings of their studies? We acknowledge that our discussion here depicts site selection as something that occurs after qualitative researchers have already identified their topics, questions, and methods. This ideal “linear” design sequence is frequently modeled, and sometimes actually happens. But not always: Alternatively, researchers may be unexpectedly exposed to an organizational setting that they find compelling and convenient on its own terms. In these cases, researchers may subsequently gain access, and design their studies to fit the opportunities characterizing these emergent sites, instead of the other way around. In whatever sequence this process occurs, we recommend that researchers engage in careful reflection to surface all of the reasons they

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are choosing to associate a particular set of topics, questions, methods, and sites.

Site access In organizational communication studies, qualitative researchers frequently experience a certain kind of reflexivity (and sometimes irony) in their work: Their success in studying organizational communication depends on the quality of communication they engage in with organizational members. The concept of access captures this pervasive importance of interaction by describing how researchers identify, approach, appeal to, and negotiate with figures at their sites who have formal or informal authority to approve their proposed study. Traditionally, these figures are called “gatekeepers.” The specific opportunities and challenges surrounding this process are explored in Chapter 15 of this volume. Generally, it unfolds as researchers draw upon their available forms of capital (e.g., institutional status, personal reputation, network connections, infectious enthusiasm, etc.) to convince organizational members that admitting a researcher to their midst is beneficial (or at least not harmful) to their interests. Here, researchers are wise to engage in careful research and planning. They can do so by familiarizing themselves with how organizational members at their desired site currently experience relevant problems, what solutions those members have already developed and applied, and the success to date of those applications. Ideally, researchers will find somewhere in this set of circumstances an opening to establish that their agendas are relevant—and their anticipated findings valuable—for organizational needs. In this process, researchers will inevitably run into challenges. In the best-case scenario, these will be minor, secondary sources of friction (e.g., logistics and timing) that can be smoothed out. In the worst-case scenario, major issues emerge that reflect organizational defenses against perceived threats (e.g., posed to work group cohesion).

Here, gatekeepers may sink a proposed study with rationales that discourage outside scrutiny of their personnel and operations (e.g., “Everything you need to know is already available on our website”; see Land & Taylor, 2018). These conflicts are most likely to be resolved if qualitative researchers and organizational members are willing to reflect on and express their respective concerns honestly, to extend trust and goodwill in listening to each other, to explore alternatives leading to compromise (e.g., the researcher’s provisional conduct of a trial study), and to rely on third parties to mediate intractable disagreements. Increasingly, field researchers are challenged in obtaining site access by the ambiguity, complexity, and volatility of contemporary organizational structures and identities. When encountering organizational phenomena such as (sub-)contracted operations, hybrid work arrangements, supply chains and strategic partnerships, it is often difficult to discern where one organizational phenomenon (e.g., a role, unit, firm, etc.) ends and another begins. Here, further, qualitative researchers may find that the identity of relevant gatekeepers are both unclear and contested. In such cases, it is less useful to view the goal of obtaining site access as penetrating a single, physical location. Instead, researchers must design studies that distribute their presence and activities strategically across multiple, linked sites (e.g., offline and online), that document the relationships between those sites, and that adapt to their inevitable fluctuations (Bengry, 2018). Here, researchers seek to design a particular configuration of sites adequate for their purpose.

Sampling Concerns of sampling are tied to a broader recognition that, typically, researchers’ chosen topics/problems involve social collectives that are characterized by different degrees of structural complexity and cultural diversity. As a result, the relevant features of those topics/problems are dispersed across an organization’s social,

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spatial, and temporal contexts—including its subcultures, work shifts, field-offices, time zones, supply chains, and project teams. Researchers subsequently seek to understand how organizational meanings and practices have produced this dispersal (i.e., it is probably not random), and design their data collection accordingly. Occasionally, qualitative researchers can document the occurrences of desired phenomena comprehensively. More typically, however, they have only finite (i.e., insufficient) resources of time, energy, and access available for doing so. As a result, they must formulate plans for engaging in opportunities for data collection selectively. These plans must demonstrate that their limited collection of data from known sources (a.k.a., an existing “population” of individuals, groups, or events) is reasonably consistent with their research goals. They must also explain how this collection will produce data that are responsive to knowledge gaps identified by their study’s research questions. This process requires researchers to conceptualize carefully (e.g., by drawing upon existing theory) key conditions that surround their phenomenon of interest, and that influence its varying qualities, manifestations, and effects (e.g., its location, intensity, and duration). As a result, researchers are better able to specify which real-world occurrences of this phenomenon (i.e., actual people, places, moments, events, and relationships) are most useful and desirable for exploring their research questions. In research design terminology, these relevant, preferable occurrences are known as “cases” (Piekkari & Welch, 2018). Qualitative researchers subsequently specify which cases they should prioritize—and how—in their collection of data. For example, they may sample types and numbers of cases that correspond with the categories conceptualized in their theoretical explanations, or that “purposively” correspond with the focus of their research questions. Alternatively, they may deliberately contrast a focus on “typical”

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occurrences of a concept (e.g., socialization) with “extreme” cases that—while they may occur less frequently—usefully challenge existing assumptions about what constitutes normal and legitimate organizing (Chen, 2015). Other popular sampling plans include the snowball approach, in which researchers ask their initially selected participants for recommendations concerning other persons they should observe or interview, and the potentially dubious rationale of “convenience” (i.e., sampling a group of participants merely because they are readily available; Saunders & Townsend, 2018). In a final (and unique) category, Bisel, Kavya, and Tracy (2020) have recently advocated for sampling “honorable” communication behaviors that appear to “bolster communicative excellence and thriving in the workplace” (p. 279). Ideally, this process of conceptualizing and prioritizing cases leads researchers to develop a concrete plan that targets specific categories of cases, and specific cases existing (i.e., as diversity) within those categories. It should also lead researchers to plan how they will access and engage these opportunities to collect related data (e.g., by creating a schedule of observations and interviews). As a result, qualitative researchers can confirm how their sampling plans are consistent with their conceptualization of meaningful variation within—and also of associations between—their selected cases. That is, if their research questions propose that a difference in one feature or type of case (e.g., an organizational member’s age, gender, sexuality, race or ethnicity) produces an important difference in another feature or type (e.g., the receptivity of those members to externally-imposed change programs), researchers’ related sampling plans must include an amount and range of cases that are sufficient to produce evidence of that co-variation (Flick, 2007). Overall, researchers’ specification of data collection methods and sampling should converge to reassure their stakeholders about the plausibility (e.g., authenticity)

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and trustworthiness (e.g., accuracy and consistency) of their anticipated findings. Depending on a researcher’s paradigmatic and theoretical choices, these quality standards go by different names—ranging from the “rigor” and “validity” traditionally valued in postpositivist traditions (e.g., the generalizability of findings), to those more valued in interpretivist and critical traditions (i.e., credibility and resonance; see Amis & Silk, 2008; Tracy, 2010). Typically, qualitative researchers succeed here by describing how their conduct of data collection and analysis will minimize the occurrence of lost, erroneous, and wasted data. Additionally, they emphasize how these procedures will permit them to consider alternative conclusions, and rule out those that are premature and mistaken (discussed further, below).

Ethics This component of research design is difficult to place in a linear sequence of elements, because it ideally pervades each one of them. “Ethics” is also irreducible to a brief or technical discussion (e.g., of “human subjects protection”), for at least two reasons. First, because it possesses its own philosophical level of significance—known as “axiology” —which is concerned with fundamental questions of what kinds of values we should hold, and how we should express them. Second, because ethics involves the vital, expansive, and vexing concerns that arise as researchers balance their (often-conflicting) moral obligations to the other beings they encounter in conducting studies. Speaking generally, however, qualitative organizational researchers are obligated to ensure—as much as possible—the health and well-being of the individuals and groups they study, as those persons are potentially affected by exposure to harm created by a study’s procedures. Generally speaking, “harm” refers here to significant injury and loss that research participants may experience concerning their valued possessions—including, for example, their privacy, intellectual property, strategic

advantage, trusted relationships, and public reputation. But it can also include lower-level (but still problematic) experiences created by clumsy, misinformed, and self-centered researchers—including distracting participants from completing important tasks, disrupting the progress of their important projects, and communicating disrespect (usually inadvertently). These statements are not intended to minimize a separate, but also related problem— the frequent dilemmas and potential harm that researchers experience in conducting their studies (e.g., from racist, sexist, and homophobic organizational members). However, because even qualitative researchers often enjoy relatively greater levels of authority and autonomy in conducting their studies, and because the history of academic research includes ample (and egregious) examples of violated ethics, it is essential that researchers adopt a presumption of care and protection towards their research participants. For these (and other) reasons, this element of research design is typically regulated at multiple levels, including by professional associations and universities’ institutional review boards. While the former set of bodies establish general guidelines for their members, review boards are charged with scrutinizing a researcher’s proposed study to ensure that it meets governmental and institutional standards, before approving it. Typically, these standards require researchers to demonstrate to review board members that their studies will ensure: • Informed consent: Individuals should only participate in a study voluntarily, making their decision based upon a researcher’s clear, accurate, and complete disclosure of its purposes, procedures, and known risks. • Confidentiality: Researchers should restrict access to collected information that might enable others to identify sources of data. One common (although imperfect) means of achieving this goal involves maintaining the anonymity of informants in publications of a study’s findings. • Avoiding harm: Researchers should minimize— if not ensure against—the possibility that

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p­articipants may experience distress, loss, or injury through their involvement in a study. • Integrity and professionalism: Researchers should consistently display beneficial qualities such as openness, fairness, collaboration, and accountability in their interaction with a study’s participants.

Data Analysis Our final category of research design elements involves how qualitative organi­ zational researchers use procedures (and increasingly, computer software) systematically to format, categorize, explore, connect, verify, prioritize, and transform their collected data. Proactively designing this process enables researchers to anticipate how they will selectively reduce and refine the initially large volumes of their collected data (e.g., through strategies of coding; see Kvale, 1996). Ideally, these procedures serve to separate inaccurate and irrelevant information (e.g., as determined by a study’s research questions) from more valuable information. They should also stimulate higher-order processes of reflection and interpretation by researchers, encouraging them to make increasingly more substantive and insightful claims (e.g., through conceptualization and modeling). Specific approaches to qualitative data analysis are discussed further in Chapters 20 through 30 of this volume. One important concern here includes “data management and security.” Here, qualitative researchers specify how their collected data will be stored and secured against unauthorized access and usage. This process requires researchers to plan their creation and maintenance of backup files, and the locations for storing their digital and hard copy data formats (e.g., thumb-drives and notebooks locked in safes, cloud servers using twofactor authentication, etc.). Since researchers’ archives remain vulnerable to hacking and exposure following their achievement of short-term project goals, this process also requires researchers to confirm and justify

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their long-term intentions for preserving and working with collected data.

KEY PRINCIPLES OF QUALITATIVE ORGANIZATIONAL RESEARCH DESIGN We pause here to acknowledge the number and complexity of research design elements listed in the previous section. For novice readers, this discussion may seem daunting, partly because we have implicitly encouraged qualitative researchers throughout this chapter to approach the process of design holistically. This means that researchers should not just consider these elements in isolation, or in a linear sequence. Instead, they should think about how—because they are inevitably connected and mutually influential—these elements should be deliberately connected (e.g., to achieve logical consistency). Admittedly, this approach can create an overwhelming experience of qualitative research design as “everything, everywhere, all at once.” While we cannot prevent the occurrence of this experience, organizational communication scholars nonetheless have numerous options for minimizing and usefully channeling it. These options include understanding, accommodating, and leveraging the overarching principles that establish research design as a unique—and often exciting and rewarding—enterprise. By embracing these principles in the design of their qualitative studies, organizational communication scholars can experience greater coherence and less anxiety concerning both predictable and surprising developments. We focus here on four sets of these principles. First, as we have already emphasized, a desirable qualitative research design is dynamic and adaptive, rather than static or rigid. The design process encourages (if not requires) researchers to monitor vigilantly and respond flexibly to the emergent

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features of their field sites, and their implications for an ongoing study (Schwandt, 2007, pp. 82). Upholding this principle may mean carefully revising one’s research questions following an unexpected development—for example, the sudden emergence of a stakeholder group whose radical demands transform a suppressed organi­ zational issue into public controversy (Taylor, 1997). It may also mean rejecting the false binary posited between rational planning and improvisational response in qualitative research design (discussed above in our introduction). Instead, researchers should view qualitative design as a dialectical process: it requires them to maintain a tension between strategic thinking and intuitive tactics (Schwandt, 2007). Consider, for example, one qualitative study in which researchers observed municipal firefighters over many months. After one particularly chaotic structure fire, the firefighters engaged in an after-action review (AAR) and heavily criticized decisions made by one of their members. This study had already commenced under a different research design that did not emphasize AARs or intra-team criticism, and the researchers could not have known if or when these events would occur. Nonetheless, they presented the researchers with a great opportunity to explore new research questions, and they immediately began to redesign their study accordingly (see Minei & Bisel, 2013). Although these events can be inconvenient, qualitative researchers are often excited when they occur, because they guide researchers to new—potentially more valuable—questions. We offer one important caveat here, however: Research designs should not respond to every change in a research site. Instead, those changes invite us to consider which of them are sufficiently important to merit this consideration. Second, qualitative research design is nonlinear and iterative. That is, the nominally distinct stages of qualitative research depicted in textbooks are, in practice, not self-contained. Instead, they co-occur (i.e., overlap) and

recur unpredictably—potentially in a circular process (Pratt, 2016). Leaning into—rather than resisting—this continuous turning of the wheel increases the chances that researchers will conduct a successful qualitative study. Repeatedly considering, for example, the implications of sensemaking practiced in data analysis for the ongoing procedures of data collection is highly desirable (for a specific approach exemplifying these qualities, see Chapter 20 in this volume). Third, qualitative research design is uniquely collaborative and reflexive in nature. Researchers and their actions are not viewed as existing separately from the objects of their studies. Instead, as noted above, the quality of their data depends on their interdependency and interaction with their participants. For this reason, qualitative researchers must constantly monitor, explore, and account for how their motives and decisions—and their consequences, both intended and otherwise— influence the events they study, and the claims they make about their significance (Staller, 2010). Here, qualitative researchers are wise to devote a portion of their time and energy to documenting these developments—for example, in personal journals that allow for emotional venting, perspective taking, and brainstorming. Ideally, that reflection will enhance their ethical displays of consideration toward and cooperation with organizational members—for example, by clarifying when and how those members should be consulted about their preferences. Finally, qualitative research design is an eminently pragmatic exercise. Its developments cannot be scripted or staged in advance, and it often requires real-time adaptation. As a result, we support qualitative researchers in the practice of making reasonable decisions, learning from experience, and integrating that learning into their subsequent practices of interpreting and explaining organizational communication. As we have argued above, this approach seems preferable to awaiting the revelation of a single “right” choice. Better, we believe,

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to make reasonable choices, and manage the consequences.

QUALITATIVE RESEARCH DESIGN IN ORGANIZATIONAL COMMUNICATION STUDIES: CURRENT ISSUES In the previous sections of this chapter, we have reviewed elements and principles of research design established in the literatures of qualitative research and organizational studies. Along the way, we have noted relevant connections to the more specific agenda of organizational communication scholars. In planning this chapter, we wanted to check and refine those claims. We did so by conducting interviews with twelve senior scholars and rising stars in organizational communication studies. We solicited qualitative researchers with different paradigmatic orientations, and a variety of topical expertise. We designed these interviews as relatively informal conversations that explored their general beliefs about qualitative research design, their priorities in practicing this craft, and issues they have encountered in teaching this material and directing their advisees. Among their responses, five themes were especially prominent. In the following paragraphs, we explain each theme briefly. First, our interviewees unanimously agreed that design (still) matters in qualitative research (for a critique of conventional design logic, see Chapter 33 in this volume). They were adamant that ignoring design in conducting a study, or failing to emphasize it in graduate education, leads organizational communication scholars to pay three undesirable costs. First, they are not able to justify their choices to important audiences. Second, their experience of data collection and analysis becomes increasingly incoherent, frustrating, and unsuccessful. Third, their findings are more likely to be inaccurate, underdeveloped, unoriginal, and/or unhelpful.

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In a second theme, some of our interviewees emphasized the importance of positionality for qualitative research design (see also Chapters 30 and 33 in this volume). Studying organizational communication often requires that we understand how our participants’ identities and relationships are configured by relations of power embedded in both history and culture. As one scholar put it, “Something interesting I see [about design] is positionality, because power is such a common relational context [in organizations].” In this view, executives, middle managers, supervisors, subordinates, teammates, vendors, clients, regulators, community-stakeholders, and perhaps most importantly, researchers are all enmeshed in power relationships that must be considered in collecting and analyzing data. Yet, understanding these relationships is rarely as simple as matching data to positions listed on an organizational chart. Instead, researchers must consider how their status as outsiders and newcomers complicates what can be known about these relationships— indeed, even the range of interpretations they are able to imagine. As one interviewee explained, we need “to think about … our position as researchers and explicitly [think] about the ways in which that affects what we can and cannot study.” Here, some interviewees elaborated the importance of bodies positioned in organizational sites. In conducting qualitative fieldwork, the researcher is the research instrument. Being physically present with participants means that researchers’ bodies— marked as they are by signs of important identity categories such as age, race, sex, and ability—will shape the kinds of access and interactions they develop with organi­ zational members. As one interviewee stated, “It’s very much related to design in terms of thinking about what we—as people with bodies—are positioned in various contexts can and cannot see and can and cannot access.” Another interviewee offered a related reflection on her study of a men’s sports team: “Bodies matter. I wasn’t allowed certain

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places because I am a woman. But I probably had other advantages too.” Here, the implication is that researchers may need to forge strategic partnerships with different kinds of bodies at their sites, in order to achieve the goals of their studies. However, we do not endorse essentialist claims that only particular types of bodies must be matched to particular research sites, or that particular researcher identities will be—inevitably, automatically, or permanently—positioned as particular subjectivities at those sites. Instead, we view these fields of force as being—at least potentially—fluctuating and negotiable (although certainly not equally, for everyone). However, if we do not reflect on how our ethnic, gender, sexual, religious/ spiritual, and partisan-political (etc.) identities structure (i.e., both enable and constrain) our possibilities for acting and understanding with research participants, we will fail to produce knowledge that is either accurate or progressive. Third, our interviewees emphasized that good research design often requires managing logistics—that is, coordinating complex operations required to achieve a desired outcome. These operations typically involve clerical, technical, and/or financial concerns needing close and constant attention throughout the research process. To fail in this process could prove the difference between achieving desired outcomes (e.g., gaining access to desired interviewees), and those that are less desirable (e.g., losing data, damaging our credibility, etc.). Consider, for example, the effort required to conduct the following activities simultaneously in a qualitative study: documenting the endorsement of participating organizations; completing background reading required to conceptualize research questions; crafting interview guide questions; conducting pilot interviews to test and refine those questions; obtaining institutional review board approval; soliciting and scheduling potential participants; building rapport and negotiating research goals with those participants; and finally, recording and managing

(e.g., digitizing) field notes. Technical issues arising here may include obtaining and learning how to operate videoconferencing technologies; considering options for file storage and transfer formats; reviewing transcripts; and learning qualitative data analysis software. Financial issues may include applying for funding needed to buy out time from teaching assignments; to pay for travel to research sites; to acquire needed hardware and software; and to compensate participants. Such lists could go on, depending on a project’s unique circumstances. Managing logistical concerns can be time and labor-intensive. One interviewee, for example, described completing “twelve months” of “preparatory work” in a large project—work that was not mentioned in its final publications, but which was “essential” to its success. Fourth, our interviewees cited three concerns clustered around the theme of site access. First, they cited our field’s important tradition of case-based qualitative research (see Bisel et al., 2020). That is, unlike other communication subfields that often rely on conducting surveys of college students, organizational communication studies is committed to sampling working adults in their actual teams and organizations. Honoring this legacy, however, can be complicated and arduous. Here, our interviewees shared that they used a variety of means for cultivating desirable research sites, including soliciting trusted personal and professional network links; engaging in persuasive and persistent requests; and, for lack of better terms, relying on dumb luck, fate, or providence. Nonetheless, they conceded that organi­ zational gatekeepers seem to be increasingly overworked, and skeptical (or worse) about qualitative research agendas. Partly as a result, our interviewees also conceded that they sometimes reverse engineered their site access. To explain, as we have noted above, a powerful research myth is that we develop our research interests before seeking and gaining organizational access. Nonetheless, our interviewees noted

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that savvy qualitative researchers continuously and prospectively cultivate the possibilities of desirable site access (e.g., in casual conversation with friends, neighbors, colleagues, and family members). Potentially, this investment yields two sets of benefits: First, they might access a site that conforms to their existing interests, and second, they might unexpectedly access one so intriguing that it triggers spontaneously their retroactive development of a formal research design. Finally, our interviewees noted a potential pitfall of this strategy: that serendipitously accessing an exciting site might create a premature feeling of success, leading researchers to merely describe its figures and scenes, rather than completing a rigorous analysis. Here, the seductive “cool factor” of rare or famous sites tempts us to ignore the important work of asking and answering compelling questions. The lesson is that the most important thing about access is what we do with it. Fifth, our interviewees offered three claims that clustered around the theme of ensuring the significance of collected data. First, they noted that designing an organizational communication study involves predicting what kinds of claims one wishes to make about communication, and then reflecting critically on what kind of evidence one needs to do so (or, as in the words of one scholar, “Don’t wing it!”). For example, another scholar reported asking his students “to think ahead to what kind of data are needed … [I ask them, Do you need] to capture actual talk [to support those claims]?” Here, we are reminded that a design for capturing naturally occurring talk (e.g., through field notes or recordings) inherently differs from a design for capturing reports of talk (i.e., offered by interviewees about others’ communication). Similarly, another scholar reported that he encourages graduate students to “avoid getting [mere] opinions of communication.… [because] people give [self-serving] accounts and motivations [that cannot necessarily be trusted].”

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Additionally, our interviewees stated unanimously that crafting (and recrafting) research questions was essential for ensuring the significance of collected data. As one noted, the development of research questions “always guides everything. I mean [they] determine … everything that follows [in a study’s design].” Another interviewee elaborated that there needs to be a “theoretical motivation for a research question, [and] that can only happen if you’re well-read… Otherwise you’re asking a question that nobody may care about or you’re asking a question that may have already been asked [and answered].” Indeed, our interviewees reported that developing research questions can seem so vital that they sometimes focused excessively on this design element, and neglected others. These questions, they confirmed, are thus a design element where the needs of theory and method converge. Nonetheless, few (if any) original research questions make it to the end of a study unchanged. Instead, they undergo revision as needed, based on changes in our thinking throughout the research process. Finally, our interviewees cautioned against qualitative research designs that neglected to consider and eliminate plausible alternate explanations. In the late stages of their studies, researchers sometimes become overconfident about their interpretations, and they fail to address inconvenient insights and objections that may arise in the minds of educated readers. Yet, good design—even conducted in the late stages—can help researchers to avoid the perils of confirmation bias, and remain open to latearriving—but still worthy—explanations. Here, one senior scholar noted that good design provides “confidence in … [our] findings” when asking ourselves, “Can I really say this?”

CONCLUSION This chapter has covered considerable ground in defining qualitative research design,

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summarizing its key elements, describing its distinguishing principles, and reviewing the current wisdom of leading organizational communication scholars. In this way, the chapter provides an anchor for subsequent chapters contained in Sections II and III of this volume, which focus on different traditions of qualitative data collection and data analysis. We encourage readers to see those chapters as—whether they say so explicitly or not—examples of how qualitative organizational communication research can and should be designed. We acknowledge that this discussion may seem complex and foreign to novice readers—particularly if they have not (yet) been trained in social-scientific worldviews. Here, it may provide some small comfort to note that even experienced qualitative researchers can be humbled by the responsibilities of design—but also that they find comfort and gratification in the benefits it delivers. These benefits include reducing the uncertainty and ambiguity that often characterize qualitative studies, and enhancing confidence that our hard work will produce useful, original, and credible findings. As a result, we encourage all readers of this chapter to see research design as a means not of enduring isolated burdens, but of conducting an ongoing conversation with their trusted advisors and peers, as well as with curious stakeholders. The goal of that conversation is to ask important questions, carefully explore available choices, and select our best possible options. The process does not stop there, however: This conversation continues as we monitor the consequences of those choices, and consider whether and how our research designs need to be adapted. Obviously, some of this work only we can do as the researchers of record for a particular study. Ultimately, though, research design is not some object that we build to deploy on someone, located somewhere else. It is more like a vessel that we build for a journey,

onto which we invite our participants and stakeholders as fellow passengers, and that we all play a part in navigating. With skill, persistence, luck (and a little help from our friends), we do not just arrive at the journey’s end intact (we use the term “end” here, because the “destination” of qualitative research cannot be fully known at its outset). Instead, we arrive having shared an important experience that may help us all to communicate and organize with greater insight and creativity. As well, our work may provide future researchers with a model of design enabling them to meet their responsibilities. For all these reasons, we hope that readers of this chapter will now see research design as something far more than a trivial, technical, or tedious exercise. Instead, it is how we make the possibilities of our inquiry real in the present, so that our learning can shape the future.

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Bisel, R. S., Barge, J. K., Dougherty, D. S., Lucas, K., & Tracy, S. J. (2014). A round-table discussion of “big” data in qualitative organizational communication research. Management Communi­ cation Quarterly, 28(4), 625–649. https://doi. org/10.1177/0893318914549952 Bisel, R. S., Kavya, P., & Tracy, S. J. (2020). Positive deviance case selection as a method for organizational communication: A rationale, how-to, and illustration. Management Com­ munication Quarterly, 34(2), 279–296. https://doi.org/10.1177/0893318919897060 Cardano, M. (2020). The qualitative research design. Defending qualitative research: Design, analysis, and textualization. Routledge. Cheek, J. (2008). Research design. In L. M. Given (Ed.), The Sage encyclopedia of qualitative research methods (pp. 762–763). Sage. Chen, K. (2015). Using extreme cases to understand organizations. In K. D. Elsbach & R. M. Kramer (Eds.), Handbook of qualitative organizational research: Innovative pathways and methods (pp. 33–44). Routledge. Cornelissen, J. P., Mantere, S., & Vaara, E. (2014). The contraction of meaning: The combined effect of communication, emotions, and materiality on sensemaking in the Stockwell shooting. Journal of Management Studies, 51(5), 699–736. https://doi.org/ 10.1111/joms.12073 Flick, U. (2007). Qualitative research designs. In U. Flick (Ed.), Designing qualitative research (pp. 109–114). Sage. Gibson, W. J., & Brown, A. (2009). Working with qualitative data. Sage. Gobo, G. (2018). Upside down-reinventing research design. In U. Flick (Ed.), The Sage handbook of qualitative data collection (pp. 65–83). Sage. Gorard, S. (2013). Research design: Creating robust approaches for the social sciences. Sage. Greckhamer, T., & Cilesiz, S. (2022). Qualitative research: Foundations, approaches, and practices. In M. A. Hitt (Ed.), Oxford research ency­ clopedia of business and management. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/ acrefore/9780190224851.013.214 Holton, J. A. (2018). From grounded theory to grounded theorizing in qualitative research. In C. L. & S. Taylor (Eds.), The Sage handbook of qualitative business and management

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15 Challenges Faced by Qualitative Researchers in Negotiating Access to Organizational Communication Settings Keri K. Stephens, Craig R. Scott, and Nancy H. Carlson

One of the most exciting aspects of organizational communication research pertains to working with organizations and people to collect the type of data needed to answer important and meaningful research questions. Successfully negotiating access to those organizations is not only personally rewarding, but also key to producing great research. It can be very satisfying to secure entry into an incredible nonprofit for interviews, get permission to do observations in a high-profile corporate setting, and/or nail down details for fieldwork in what others might consider a difficult place to access. But as exciting as this can be, the thought of getting access for research is often daunting and surrounded by fears of rejection. It can be easy to doubt that others will grant researchers entrée into their workplaces and organizations, especially if the research might not seem immediately relevant to them. We suspect many good research ideas have been postponed or thrown out entirely

because the access issues appeared to be too overwhelming. Although many research methods textbooks contain considerable guidance on negotiating research access (e.g., Tracy, 2019), our focus in this chapter is about negotiating access that is relevant for organizational communication scholars at many different career stages— especially when doing more qualitative or mixed methods research. The chapter begins with a focus on understanding and negotiating access through defining access negotiation, discussing and overcoming common concerns, building relationships, integrating cultural concerns, and addressing deal breakers in the process. We then turn to specifics on preparing students for negotiating access, especially for theses/dissertations and for building confidence in such negotiations. We close by discussing access negotiation in dangerous/ difficult contexts, with a specific emphasis on disaster-related research. Throughout, we use stories and extended examples to help illustrate aspects of the access negotiation

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process. We believe that even though negotiating access can be challenging, there are concrete strategies that can help overcome those hurdles and lead researchers to make even stronger research contributions.

UNDERSTANDING AND NEGOTIATING ACCESS Defining Access Negotiation Gaining and negotiating access should not be narrowly viewed as a single administrative step early in the research process. Riese (2019) argues that access is a relational process (between researchers and their environments) and defines access in the context of qualitative research this way: “the process by which a researcher and the sites and/or individuals he or she studies relate to each other, through which the research in question is enabled” (p. 671). Thus, negotiation of access is also very much a relational process. Furthermore, Riese suggests that access is ongoing and dynamic, and lasts as long as the research project does. Our experiences have revealed that issues of access negotiation often begin even before any specific project starts (e.g., while building a network of contacts or gaining prior experience with this skill) and can continue well after (in terms of follow-up and future projects). Researchers negotiate and renegotiate throughout the field research endeavor. Riese (2019) suggests that access depends on the researcher’s ability to access and to be accessible to others. This is more than just competency when it comes to issues of access negotiation (though certainly that too is important). As she describes it, being given access is only part of the equation— researchers also have to give themselves “access” to be able to relate to participants and research sites. It works in reverse as well in that the researcher and the outcomes of that research need to be accessible to others

in the research process. We suspect this sort of orientation is useful in the ongoing negotiation of access as well. Finally, Riese argues that access is fundamentally related to the research process and the research results (which are influenced by a wide variety of power dynamics involving people and institutions). As she explains, interpretations depend on access to multiple realities, especially in qualitative research. We also see the more specific aspects of access negotiation as fundamental to the research process, as influential in the type of results that can be obtained, and as very much wrapped up in power dynamics involving a wide range of stakeholders connected to the research site and other organizations. These negotiations may be even more complex for qualitative researchers who approach the research in more open-ended ways. Beyond Riese’s (2019) useful ways of thinking about access, Peticca-Harris et  al. (2016) focus on more than just process models, useful tips, and the role of informants and other gatekeepers. They remind us that what is often missing in the context of organizational research discussions of access are failures, nonlinear elements and emotional aspects. They offer a model that notes rejection, restrategizing, and resilience as key. These points are important to consider in the context of access negotiation as well. Later in this chapter, we share some specific examples of challenges—including many not in the published manuscripts—faced by doctoral students and authors of this chapter as they successfully negotiated access. In that spirit, we turn next to a discussion of common fears when negotiating access and ways to overcome those challenges.

Common Concerns When Negotiating Access Most people are uncomfortable emailing or calling someone they do not know and asking for a meeting, yet this is often a first step in

NEGOTIATING ACCESS TO ORGANIZATIONAL COMMUNICATION SETTINGS

negotiating access. There are several reasons for this anxiety, but the most common is a fear of rejection (Cooper, 2017). This fear can really hold people back in many careers, not only academic research. This is so common that Jia Jiang (2017) has created an entrepreneurial empire around the notion of rejection therapy—or reframing rejection in productive ways—and his YouTube video, www.youtube. com/watch?v=-vZXgApsPCQ, has received millions of views. Fundamentally, we do not like to hear “no,” so we procrastinate and dread contacting someone. People often frame their own fear as, “I do not know what to say,” or “I’m uncomfortable asking someone for a favor.” This anxiety and fear of rejection can sometimes lead organizational communication researchers to try and get around some access issues by turning to various forms of online research that might bypass gatekeepers or rely exclusively on available online data. In fairness, scholars note that online qualitative research has opened numerous options for accessing participants by lifting geographical limits and potentially increasing convenience (Carter et  al., 2021; Stephens et  al., 2021). However, jumping to online research prematurely may also limit access to the specific types of participants needed to make meaningful contributions. Taking time to think through, what at first seems overly complex when working with an organizational sample, can often be addressed through mindful choices about the research (audio vs. video interviews; using mobile platforms; data vouchers to reduce costs, etc.; see Carter et al., 2021). There are other types of concerns people experience when negotiating access, and to understand these, we turn next to literature describing anxieties in business interactions. In the career of professional selling, where salespeople are not only constantly negotiating access, but also trying to get people to make purchases, these concerns are called sales call anxiety, and scholars have identified four dimensions that conceptualize these

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feelings (Verbeke & Bagozzi, 2000). The first dimension is negative self-evaluations, the insecurities people feel that often originate from thinking about past failures. When people imagine that a given situation will be difficult and result in failure or that others may judge them negatively, this is called imagined negative evaluations. The final two dimensions are physiological responses— like becoming panicky—and protective actions people take to avoid putting themselves in uncomfortable situations (Verbeke & Bagozzi, 2000). All of these forms of sales call anxiety are also common when organizational communication researchers try to negotiate access for research, and having a framework to understand why we have concerns can be a great tool for sensemaking. Doubts are normal, so the goal when negotiating access is to learn to cope with those doubts and not let them get in the way of a productive conversation with organizations who might benefit from working with us. For some people, it helps them to remind themselves that feelings of concern or fear are normal. When struggling with imagined negative evaluations or when researchers over-focus on their own negative self-evaluations, it is important to remember that becoming more knowledgeable about potential research partners and our own areas of expertise can help to build confidence. Those are areas we can control. Leveraging our own knowledge and surrounding ourselves with supportive people who will also reinforce these positive actions can make a substantial difference when negotiating access. In addition to self-doubt, we can also be concerned that the organization we plan to contact might not be interested in the research project we propose, and instead try to get us to change our research questions or approach. Another common concern is what if the organization agrees to provide access, but then insists we complete legal documents like nondisclosure agreements (NDAs) or say research cannot be published

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without their approval. These are all legitimate possibilities when negotiating access, and they all contain hints of the dimensions uncovered around sales call anxiety. But as seen in the next section of this chapter, there are proactive ways to plan for and overcome these fears and concerns.

Overcoming Concerns Around Negotiating Access Scholars have explored ways to help people overcome their sales call anxiety, and they can also be helpful when negotiating research access. We break these approaches into three categories: doing research on the organi­ zation, reconfiguring unproductive mental models, and concrete actions that overcome the inertia of procrastination. Regardless of the level of a person’s career, the best way organizational communication scholars can prepare to negotiate access is by doing research, something that is second nature to a scholar. Research the organizations where we want to partner; learn about their values and their people. Research, also happens by asking a colleague, a faculty mentor, and people we know who work with organi­ zations as part of their research if they can provide advice on how to approach others and negotiate access. Finally, having requests well defined and written down on a single sheet of paper or on a single computer screen not only forces us to organize thoughts, but also provides a concise summary of how we want to work with the organizations we approach. To make the request more relevant and less impersonal, think about the benefits to an organization or a group of individuals if they participate in the research. Jahn (2018) explains that organizational members will often understand communication research in a more practical way than we do, so we must build a bridge to connect our interests. One way to build this bridge is to write down the benefits of a collaboration

and create an outline that communicates our request in mutually beneficial ways. Good organizational communication research is characterized by projects that not only add to our scholarly knowledge, but that also add value to various organizations and their members. Being able to articulate this benefit enhances confidence and helps with negotiating access. It is also important to be able to concisely and clearly explain the research process to a nonexpert, someone like friends and family. It is possible that some organizations may have a difficult time seeing the value in qualitative research that does not produce hard numbers; but the potential richness and detailed insight that qualitative research provides can be a strong selling point when negotiating access. When we know someone who can introduce us to a decision-maker in the organi­ zation, that is a great approach, called using a referral. We can ask them to send an email and copy us as a way to make the introduction. When using this approach, give that person one or two sentences about the project so they introduce it accurately. Sometimes, a person we know may give us several names and not make a direct introduction; in that case, ask to use their name when contacting potential organizational partners. For example, we might say: “Keri Stephens suggested I reach out to you because you are running a successful nonprofit that builds relationships with your stakeholders in meaningful ways.” Follow this statement with details around the research and how there is a connection between the project and their organization. The final request is for a meeting (phone, video, or in person). This approach works well when sending an email, talking on the phone, or leaving a voicemail as the first contact. These first meetings should be brief, and in most cases, the goal is to set up a longer meeting to discuss details, address concerns they may have, and determine if they are a good potential partner. All of these approaches help us build relationships with organizational partners.

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Building Relationships In an ideal world, negotiating access with organizations would begin by first building strong relationships with them, engaging in some form of mutually beneficial activity, and not requesting any favors. It is always easier to negotiate access to collect data with an organization if they have had a successful partnership in the past. Being able to show a history of successfully working with others can help develop these new relationships as well. Yet, this sort of past history does not always exist, especially for early career scholars. In those cases, it is important to build relationships and use a form of swift trust to gain organizational access. Part of the effort in this relationship building is considering reasonable places to gain access. Keeping track of professional contacts, staying engaged with various organizational networks, and leveraging weak ties can all be useful strategies when it comes time to begin negotiating potential research access. In some early research led by one of the authors of this chapter (Scott) s­ uccessful access negotiation was facilitated in part by identifying contexts that often attract less attention (so members were not overburdened with research requests) but could really benefit from research findings that might be shared back (perhaps because they could not afford to pay for this type of research on their own). As a result, numerous research projects (e.g., Scott et al., 1999) were conducted in the context of state government agencies, which seem to be an under-tapped site for organi­ zational communication scholarship. Another aspect of this relationship building concerns the specific person or persons involved in the access negotiation. Obviously, it is important to identify decision makers who have the authority to grant access and to try to involve them as soon as possible. But, that might not always be the point of entry or someone who is an advocate for the project. We have found that employees/members of the organization who have an interest in

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the research—e.g., human resource experts, internal auditors, various communication professionals, and even hospital chaplains (Harrison & Stephens, 2019)—can be useful allies when negotiating access. On the reverse side of this relationship, Riese (2019) notes that participants may or may not trust researchers depending on who in the organization grants access (and whether that gatekeeper is trusted). This is an important caution that all researchers should consider when beginning a research project with an organizational partner. Another time these relationships are increasingly important is when teaming with organizations on grant applications. An increasing number of grant applications (e.g., federal, state, foundation, industry) require researchers to partner with organizations during their research projects (e.g., see the National Science Foundation Civic Innovation Challenge: https://nsfcivicinnovation.org/). These partnerships often necessitate more than just asking an organization to provide access to a population for data collection, but they also can actively involve the organizational partner to ensure the research is grounded in both practical and theoretical ideas. Such relationships are a hallmark of engaged scholarship, which has become widely accepted in organizational communication (see Barge & Shockley-Zalabak, 2008; Lewis, 2012; Stephens et al., 2020). One potential challenge with this type of access negotiation is communicating expectations and helping the partner understand that even after co-designing the project and writing the grant proposal, the project may not get funded. Quite often in the process of working with an organization to co-design a meaningful project, that organizational partner becomes excited and committed to the project, and thus an expectation for doing the project regardless of funding can result (Hughes et  al., 2022). Identifying other options for funding can be an important consideration and improve the odds of receiving some support to do the collaborative work.

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As more organizational communication researchers receive funding for their work, finding meaningful ways to engage partners will be a growing concern, one that hopefully universities will be prepared to help researchers manage.

Integrating Cultural Considerations When negotiating access, cultural backgrounds are a fundamental piece of the process, especially in qualitative research. Culture is central to who we are as scholars and can influence how we communicate and negotiate access to organizations. Brett (2000) argues that people from different cultural backgrounds bring their own way of thinking and that breakdowns in the negotiation process are often attributed to cultural differences between the two parties. Brett (2000) states that culture forms a basis for how negotiation is interpreted through Western vs. Eastern perspectives, individualism vs. collectivism, egalitarian vs. hierarchical orientations, and direct vs. indirect communication. Beyond Brett’s (2000) perspective on cultural backgrounds, Rivera-Lopez et  al. (2020) moves past the differences and presents community-engaged approaches useful when negotiating access. Rivera-Lopez et al. (2020) suggest that all researchers need to develop cultural humility. This means we need to be mindful of our positionality as researchers affiliated with institutions; that we have the privilege to exit organizations/ communities at will. In addition, we need to consider sustainable exit strategies that will continue to be successful after our data collection or project is complete. Furthermore, being considerate of cultural differences requires researchers to become familiar with the political climate affecting organizations and communities. For example, in some instances, immigration status will play a

significant role when negotiating access and safeguarding participant confidentiality will be crucial. Ensuring language accessibility can also be a significant factor in successfully negotiating access. Providing materials in the participant’s language will not be enough. In these situations, Rivera-Lopez et  al. (2020) suggest bringing in at least one research team member with decisionmaking power who will be able to relate to or be familiar with the organization or community you are entering. Bridging cultural backgrounds while also negotiating access to organi­zations may not always be easy, and intercultural negotiations will pose some strategic challenges; however, if both parties are motivated by a shared goal it can lead to a successful collaboration and strong relationships. When negotiating access, it is important to explain exactly what can and cannot be provided to the organization providing the access, and in the next section we discuss times researchers may want to find a different organi­zational partner.

Dealbreakers in Negotiating Access Although we believe that most situations can be worked out in ways that are satisfying to all parties, there may be some times where access for qualitative research cannot be negotiated and the researcher will need to walk away. Occasionally, these are based on timing. Perhaps the organization cannot grant access soon enough or allow the research team on site for long enough to do the research, in which case it is best to pursue other options and save this potential contact for a future study. Perhaps the potential partner will only grant general access and not allow the level needed for the project (e.g., employees are not allowed to do interviews during work time, but would be expected to do this on breaks or before/after shifts); in such cases, pursuing other options

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that are mutually beneficial could be a better decision. In other instances, there may be a lack of enthusiasm from top leadership, a lack of logistical support (onsite rooms for interviews, access to key observation areas), or overly controlling restrictions on access to people (e.g., they decide who will be part of the focus groups) (Tracy, 2019); again, often such issues can be resolved, but if they cannot researchers can decide to pursue other options better aligned with the research needs. One larger area of concern is that many organizations typically do not understand institutional review board (IRB) or human subjects requirements, and they can be unaware of how seriously researchers take ethics and confidentiality of data. Organizational partners might ask for a complete copy of the raw data or even copies of recorded interviews. Many times, these requests originate from their curiosity, but it is vital for researchers to explain that they take ethical responsibilities and the IRB guidelines seriously. If there is any chance a demographic variable (e.g., race/ethnicity, managerial role, type of work, or specific work unit) or an interview quote might allow a manager to identify certain types of employees, raw data should never be provided. Instead, researchers can offer to provide an executive summary, or to answer specific questions the partner finds helpful for their operation. This is also an important consideration with the growing trend of pre-registering a study, including qualitative studies, and providing open access to data collected in a specific organization. If there is any chance the data collected could reveal an individual’s identity or a group’s identity, carefully think through the steps needed to protect the participants. These ethical issues are best dealt with at the outset of a project to avoid problems later to make certain everyone’s expectations are aligned. In the early 2000s, there was a graduate student who had defended his prospectus and returned from his final visit reporting his findings to his organizational partner. He approached a faculty member to get advice

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about the best way to provide the raw data to the organization. The faculty member asked why he wanted to provide the data, and the student said, “because they asked for it.” The faculty member opened his datafile and found many demographic variables that potentially could be used to identify specific groups of employees. After seeing this, the student said, “I really shouldn’t share the raw data, should I?” The student went back to the organi­zation and explained why he could not share the data, and they were completely satisfied that he had given them a detailed report. It would have been even better had he established those sharing conditions up front because protecting participants should be the top priority. Another potential deal breaker in negotiating access may concern agreements about disseminating findings with organizational members who participate in the research. Many researchers in organizational communication believe it is important to share findings back with the organization and its members. We may feel an ethical obligation to do this and it may also increase the willingness of individuals to participate in the research. Arranging for this up front can be helpful and we may think twice about doing research in a place that does not wish to share findings back with its members. Having a roadmap to rely on, such as the one proposed by Hintz and Dean (2019) when we negotiate sharing research findings, can help researchers be prepared to advocate for this step in the research process. In reality though, a researcher may have limited control over this. Two of the authors of this chapter (Scott and Stephens) were involved with a major study at a large nonprofit in Texas where we thought we had agreement about sharing findings back with members, but when organizational leadership realized members were more frustrated than they presumed, they reversed course and decided not to share those findings with the employees. Even subsequent meetings with nonprofit leadership did not change their views.

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An even bigger deal breaker is if the organi­ zation might be doing something that could limit dissemination/publication of research findings (wanting prior approval of manuscripts, signing of NDAs, etc.). We suggest that researchers not agree to such restrictions unless this is a means to even broader access to an organization where such restrictions will not be in place for subsequent research. Witman (2005) presents a set of guidelines, like publishing timelines, for researchers to consider when negotiating and reviewing NDAs prior to conducting research. In some universities and research organizations, researchers have access to legal advisors who can help them negotiate these challenges. Having described how to address some concerns in negotiating access, we turn next to the important role of preparing students to negotiate access for their qualitative research.

PREPARING ORGANIZATIONAL COMMUNICATION GRADUATE AND UNDERGRADUATE STUDENTS Negotiating Access for Theses and Dissertations Organizational communication students have been negotiating access to collect their thesis and dissertation data for decades, because in our field, it is common for graduate students to find an organization where they can collect data. Even though there are many types of organizations that might provide a relevant sample for a thesis or dissertation, thinking through the guiding research questions and/or hypotheses and determining a meaningful approach to finding a research site and collecting data are important steps. To help students and early career scholars get ideas around the types of organi­ zations they might approach to negotiate access, we provide a set of real examples compiled by Stephens and Scott. Both of us have been advising students for decades, and

we share a philosophy that negotiating access is an important step in becoming an organizational communication scholar— even though that can look somewhat different from project to project. In her intensive observational and interview study of a hospital and the workplace wellness program that medical resident physicians tried to implement, Millie Harrison provides a strong set of details around this study (Harrison & Stephens, 2019); but what we often omit due to page limits in journals is the process used to negotiate access. Stephens had been working with the leadership in this hospital and introduced Millie in the second year of her Ph.D. program. She took the ball and ran with it! She worked closely with the Chaplain and Chief Medical Residents to conduct intensive observations, interviews, and focus groups. She developed such a strong relationship with the Chaplain, that, when she returned to share her findings from her dissertation, the Chaplain said to the executive board of the hospital, “Millie has the trust of our hospital. The research she and her team have conducted will make a difference in our decisions for years.” It is worth it to not only negotiate access, but also to continue giving back to the organization in meaningful ways; offering an executive summary and a presentation to the organization’s stakeholders can be an excellent way to accomplish this (Jensen et  al., 2020). Millie secured a wonderful industry internship, took an additional semester to finish her dissertation, and is now successfully pursuing a career as a qualitative researcher in the technology industry. Brett Robertson’s negotiating access story is a bit different. He became interested in studying disaster preparedness as the lead graduate research assistant on a mixedmethod NSF-funded project studying how social media was used to help rescue people during Hurricane Harvey (Robertson et  al., 2019; Stephens et  al., 2020, 2021). As he was reviewing the literature for his comprehensive exams, he realized that he had a passion for helping older adults get

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prepared for disasters. He had a close relationship with his grandparents, and he talked with them at length about his interests. As he began approaching retirement communities, to see if they would allow him to collect data from their residents, he hit many brick walls. He wanted to get access to coastal communities—specifically California and Florida—and he secured California fairly quickly by using a referral. His cold calling into Florida retirement communities was not successful, and it was delaying his progress on his dissertation. He decided to pivot and find a community closer to his university so the travel and data collection would be more feasible. During negotiating access, he had to work directly with his university’s IRB because they required him to create a consent form stating that older adults could only participate if they had the “decisional capacity” (that was the IRB’s specific wording requirement). Once he secured the second community, he immediately began traveling to better understand his two organizational sites. He used best practices in working with older adults by bringing reading glasses and printing the questions in 14–16-point font. He also read the questions to participants who felt uncomfortable reading but wanted to participate. By the way, he also completed his dissertation in a year from the time he defended his dissertation prospectus and had a working paper ready as he began his first academic job. We share this detail for inspiration; roadblocks can slow us down, but they do not have to derail our progress. Katie Kang’s access to Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) was quite challenging and required building trust and credibility as she developed an understanding of AA’s organizational culture even prior to her dissertation research (see Kang, 2020). Due to the history of stigma and social judgment toward AA, some organizational members were concerned about being misinterpreted and attacked by outsiders, like researchers, and some members were even offended by existing studies that focused on the

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(in)effectiveness of AA. To overcome that, Katie began attending open AA meetings long before seeking formal access in an effort to develop that understanding and demonstrate a genuine interest in learning AA’s anonymity principles. Since these AA groups did not have a single designated leader who could grant access, it was often her attendance at these AA meetings and her helping out (arranging the meeting rooms, greeting others, and financially contributing to each AA group’s meeting as most attendees do) that eventually opened formal and informal conversations with various AA members who observed her respect for this community. After several months, she was able to ask meeting attendees for permission to formally observe and even interview some of them before/after meetings. In some cases, groups said no; but in others, she had developed relationships with people who became advocates of her project. When there were difficult group members who did not welcome her or who criticized her project, the supportive AA members helped her feel safe and inclusive in each meeting. Some of them eventually even helped her gain access to closed meetings of AA groups that have been even harder to observe historically. Müge Haseki had a different type of challenge in negotiating access for her study of immigrant women entrepreneurs. In one sense, there was no single organizational gatekeeper with whom she had to negotiate access; but in another sense, each of these business owners had to be individually accessed. For this mixed-methods project, Müge initially tried recruiting participants online through various lists and emails she obtained through governmental and private sources. That approach did not attract a single participant—making her realize she was going to have to take a more personal approach to build trust and negotiate access. Armed with some records and existing knowledge of the New York communities where many of these entrepreneur businesses operated, Müge met with each potential participant in person to explain the goals of the

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research about them and their businesses. This was time-consuming and expensive in some ways—and it was very challenging to find time to speak with them in their busy schedules as business owners—but the results were remarkable. She ended up with interviews and completed questionnaires from 60 immigrant women entrepreneurs from a wide range of countries and occupations. In meeting individually with these business owners, Müge was also better able to draw on her own identity as an immigrant woman entrepreneur (among other things). Other details about the project are available in some of her published work on this (Haseki et al., 2021). Similar to Müge, Hyunsook Youn needed to access a large number of workers for a survey questionnaire and interviews. Her approach was to identify organizations hosting events that would involve volunteer workers and to negotiate access to the volunteers through those events (various marathons and fun runs, holiday gift wrapping to raise funds for Ronald McDonald House or Toys for Tots, performance events, local fairs, etc.). She contacted the organization sponsoring the event in advance to get their permission before visiting the site, where she planned to speak with volunteers before or after their volunteer shift. This strategy was often successful for gaining access through the volunteer coordinator or the organi­ zation’s director—and having that approval also helped encourage volunteers to participate in the projects. For example, she accessed an event sponsored by 4-H in New Jersey and that connection she developed beforehand gave her efforts legitimacy and helped recruit participants. In some cases, the sponsoring organizations would not respond but the event was public (e.g., a state fair) so Hyunsook still attended; however, at these it was difficult to start conversations and participants were often suspicious—both of which resulted in limited recruitment success (fewer than 10 respondents across 3 days at a state fair). Another successful strategy Hyunsook used was signing up to volunteer at the

events, which helped her identify and later speak with other volunteers who had seen her volunteering there. In this sense, there was the formal access granted by the sponsoring groups but there was another level of access better facilitated by her also serving as a volunteer at events. These examples provide many different real-world ways that researchers need to pivot when negotiating access. Being a graduate student, or helping graduate students through the process of finding good organizational partners for data collection, is important for the field of organizational communication. Yet, it is also common in our field to help undergraduate students learn how to negotiate access to support projects and conduct their own research.

Building Confidence for Undergraduates Needing to Negotiate Access Even though more senior faculty often provide undergraduate students with introductions to organizations that help them successfully negotiate access, sometimes those students do an excellent job of negotiating access themselves. A key way to help them be successful is to provide extensive training, model the desired behaviors, and build their confidence. Here we summarize the role of a formal training workshop used to help students negotiate access for qualitative research on their own.

Home to Texas and the Community Learning Exchange Undergraduate students can build their confidence in negotiating access to diverse types of organizations by participating in a summer research program. The experience of having a faculty mentor for a summer period can help students gain independence and motivation to learn, and it can increase active participation after completion of the program—especially for minority students (Lopatto, 2007). Stephens has mentored and

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trained undergraduate students in research, conducting interviews, and negotiating access to local organizations as part of the Home to Texas program that helps them grow as scholars. In this program, the students were guided through the theoretical and methodological lens of Community Learning Exchange (CLE) of storytelling and lived experiences (Guajardo et  al., 2015). This entailed sharing impactful stories in a group setting and being raw, humble, and vulnerable with peers in a gracious (and safe) space. A foundational piece of this training was gaining insight into the local history—expanding the significance of learning about geographical locations and potential barriers when negotiating access to organizations. The training was structured to help students build community and gain contextual awareness that enabled them to create a framework useful for pursuing their individual research projects. Additionally, the students observed a graduate student (i.e., one of the authors of this chapter, Carlson) conduct a mock interview. The process familiarized them with information required by the IRB, the importance of obtaining informed consent from a participant, and an example of an interview schedule. At the end of the interview the students shared key takeaways with the group and they discussed challenges and best practices when conducting interviews. For example, during the workshop a student asked if there was a dress code they should follow when meeting in person for an interview. The students also received training and mentorship in reaching out to local small businesses and emergency managers. Carlson was a member of the community where this workshop occurred and she coordinated a visit for Stephens and the undergraduate students to a fire department, where the fire chief (who also served as the emergency manager) and his staff shared information about how disasters, such as flooding, have impacted the community. Small organizational settings like these can be a beneficial way to introduce students to negotiate access. For example,

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after our meeting with the fire chief, he told the students to “feel free to use his name” as a referral when reaching out to other firefighters. To help the students get started in negotiating access to businesses and organizations in their community, Stephens provided them with draft emails. Advisors/mentors can often provide this type of support; they have experience in reaching out to different people in organizations and they may be willing to draft an email that will help students be successful. Not all settings are as easy to access as firefighters and small businesses; next we discuss these more difficult contexts.

SPECIAL ISSUES OF NEGOTIATING ACCESS IN DANGEROUS OR DIFFICULT CONTEXTS Peterson et  al. (2022) note that some contexts, typical in organizational communication research, are especially difficult, or potentially even dangerous, to access. These include, for example, what Scott (2015) has called hidden organizations (e.g., secret societies, criminal rings, hate groups, covert military units, intelligence organizations, terrorist cells, anonymous support groups, etc.). They also include contexts with vulnerable populations (e.g., prisoners, children). Here we also include research on “disaster” contexts (including natural disasters as well as war zones and other places of intense conflict).

Hidden Organizations When the identity of the organization and/or its members is communicatively concealed, we can describe that as a hidden organization. Negotiating access may look rather different here. Peterson et al. (2022) note that if we are formally turned down, which is perhaps even more likely in these types of settings, we may pivot and collect data outside the walls of the organization but still with some of their

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members (in cafes and malls near the worksite, for example). They also suggest some organ­i­ zations do not provide access for fear of being misunderstood or misrepresented—and this can be especially pronounced in more dangerous and difficult contexts. Guaranteeing privacy and not using names can often help with access in addition to protecting participants (though we would also note that in some instances giving the option to have an organi­ zation’s name used may help gain access). Starting with places where we have contacts can help, but it is no guarantee and may be overly limiting; furthermore, referrals into these more dangerous contexts are far less likely for most of us. Planning for what is possible if we cannot get the type of access we want is important; we may need to pursue a different study (e.g., talking only with organizational leadership) or a different type of access (where you gain “entry” through ex-members or analysis of existing documents). Although true even beyond more difficult and dangerous contexts, Peterson et  al. (2022) remind us that access is not just a single decision where everything will be fine once initial access is granted. There is constant negotiation of access (as stakeholders and situations change) and there is access to specific levels/types of information, even after organizational access may be granted (just getting to observe a meeting of some hate group does not mean you will also have access to more secretive leadership meetings). These authors also discuss unwanted access such as examining criminal activity or pursuing information that might then prevent publication because it is classified, for example. Secretive government organizations are one of the more hidden types of organizations, and Monahan and Fisher (2015) offer specific advice for accessing these unique organi­ zations. Some of these tips are potentially good advice with any type of organization: attending industry/government conferences, communicating legitimacy as researchers, and choosing words carefully to reduce threat

perception. Other strategies are more uniquely applicable to these contexts: coordinate coincidence and make barely announced visits (if more formal efforts do not work), mobilize indirect access (hanging out where members hang out), making freedom of information and open records requests, triangulating with online data, and initiating and following-up on multiple leads simultaneously as part of a multi-pronged approach to access more secretive organizations. Jiwani and Krawchenko (2014) specifically talk about accessing retired public servants as a way to tap into government information that may be important to study, but difficult to access in more formal ways. In short, the idea of negotiating access may have a more clandestine feel to it when the organizations themselves are more concealed.

Vulnerable Populations Negotiating access with vulnerable populations (e.g., prisoners in a correctional institute or patients in a mental institution) is another complicated context. Here, the rules are often well established and opportunities for negotiation somewhat more limited. Negotiating access for qualitative research is often even more challenging, because it regularly involves extended time spent in close contact with or in observing members of these vulnerable populations—and such needs in qualitative research can appear even more potentially demanding on these participants. Molloy (2015), talking about accessing vulnerable populations, suggests that the access process itself can be rewarding even though incredibly difficult. In her view, access is not only a means to an end. Indeed, failed attempts at access still bring researchers into contact with interesting people. Molloy suggests deep learning may rely on distress. Sometimes the process of looking for proper access can help reveal everyday access we may already have. We suspect this

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is often true for the more specific elements of negotiating access—and that it applies to both traditional sites as well as those that might be described as dangerous, vulnerable, and/or difficult to access.

Disasters and Private Social Media Going into a community that recently has been devastated by a disaster requires a particular type of access negotiation. It can be challenging to negotiate with organizations and individuals who are vulnerable, especially when participants are in severe emotional and financial distress. Layer onto this the fact that some people in a disaster area might be dealing with immigration status issues, and this further complicates access negotiation. These issues were all present when Stephens and her field team collected photo-elicitation interviews and private social media data (see Stephens, 2020, for examples of these stories). When Stephens and her collaborators wrote the grant to fund this work, they imagined collecting a type of data no one had collected in this context: private social media data. They wanted to learn what was happening in private Facebook and Nextdoor groups, and on WhatsApp and WeChat, in addition to what they could find on publicly available Twitter and Reddit social media feeds. To collect this data, they designed a study (and received IRB approval) to interview people who had been rescued or rescued others and used private social media. While interviewing people, the field team asked people to open their social media accounts, find images around the rescues and talk through how the rescue situation happened (a strategy known as photo-elicitation interviewing; ClarkIbáñez, 2004; Wilhoit, 2017; see also Chapter 19 in this volume). They also asked participants to take screenshots and transfer them to a dedicated mobile device that could securely handle this data, and they used this private social media data for additional analyses

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(e.g., Robertson et al., 2019; Stephens et al., 2020). Diversifying the sample was important, so their team negotiated access with a nonprofit who was using space in a local church to meet one-on-one with disaster victims who needed help completing their forms to get disaster assistance. The nonprofit and the church allowed them access to private rooms to conduct interviews, and they allowed them to recruit people as they were waiting for their appointments. They set up a table next to the area where people checked in and provided them with a recruitment flyer. Because they asked people to use their own mobile phones to access the social media images they shared, they also provided charging stations and dedicated hotspots so people would not need to use their own resources. They also negotiated access through a nonprofit that was providing mucking— removing sheetrock and debris from flooded homes to avoid mold issues—and then helped homeowners restore their walls. They volunteered to help homeowners, worked through Thanksgiving break, and also had Thanksgiving dinner at the home of one of the leaders of the nonprofit. They worked hard to understand the disaster victims, because through their research, they hoped to share stories and find ways to help these disaster victims in the future. They did not want to be the type of researchers who gather data and never give back to the organizations and participants in their research study. Access was negotiated and continually renegotiated during this study for over a year. They talked with organizations, individuals, public entities, employees who had left their official jobs due to disaster burnout, and emergency responders. Their field team trained before entering this difficult field situation (for great online training in working with vulnerable and disaster populations see the CONVERGE system outlined in Adams et  al., 2021), and they supported one another through the emotions experienced both during and after

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interviewing the participants. All their team members are much more aware of the ethics and personal responsibilities of negotiating access and collecting this type of qualitative data after this multi-year experience.

Negotiating Access During a Crisis Negotiating access to communities that have been historically affected by disasters requires taking an approach that centers the community and collectively constructs knowledge (also known as taking a community-engaged approach; see Barge & Shockley-Zalabak, 2008). In these circumstances researchers are interacting with community members and organizations that have been marginalized, and do not have resources needed to combat issues that affect their community regularly. Gaining access to similar communities that are under-resourced can be challenging— even more so as they deal with additional external stressors. When COVID-19 swept across the world it halted research projects almost overnight. This was an unprecedented challenge that the research team (including Carlson and Stephens) had to navigate as they began conducting interviews in a predominately Hispanic community repeatedly impacted by flooding events. Early in the project, our team was having tremendous difficulty getting the community members to respond to our emails, text messages, or phone calls to set up times for online interviews. We were told that our best strategy was to work through the trusted community leader and have her set up interviews for us, but she was very busy, and we did not want to bother her constantly. So, we tried contacting people on our own. We had limited success with this effort because the people in this community did not recognize our phone numbers, and when we tried to use

our university’s name to enhance the credibility of our request, it backfired. We later learned that members of the community do not trust researchers and representatives of our university because our city and university have a history of racial segregation and unequal treatment that often excluded this community. To try to combat these challenges, our team needed to first build relationships and establish trust. Cultivating trust in communities works best in person but there are emerging practices for virtual engagement when being in close contact is not considered safe (in this case being in person was not possible due to the uncertainty of the COVID-19 pandemic). An alternative method to begin cultivating this relationship was making a genuine effort to show up—even when it is through a mediated context. This was accomplished by using virtual platforms such as Zoom, Google Meet, or Microsoft Teams and verifying the platform chosen also worked for the organizational partner. For our team, being present at the start of the pandemic came in the form of attending online trainings and workshops. We made a collective effort to be engaged and introduced ourselves to members actively involved with the organization. We started each training by having the research team share a story of our own personal motivations to be a part of the project. For example, Stephens shared her story of losing her home to a flood when she was growing up. By relating her experience to members of the organization (and showing up to trainings and workshops), she was able to connect with them and build on an approach to gain access to this community. Carlson shared her own stories of growing up in a flood-prone community and experiencing forms of marginalization because this part of the state speaks predominantly Spanish and is often ignored in flood messaging. Establishing an online presence with communities is a strong way to start fostering a

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relationship; nevertheless, as circumstances permit, it is important to be physically present. For example, as COVID-19 cases began to decline and restrictions began to ease, our team worked with the nonprofit organi­zation and government agencies to coordinate a community event. In preparation for the event, we created a flyer and shared it with community members. We set up tables alongside a creek in their community and offered activities for families, disaster preparedness information, and food/drinks. The in-person event was an opportunity to learn more about the community and continue the process of negotiating access. Negotiating access into under-resourced communities requires being aware of the issues that impact the community and the needs of the people living in them. The pandemic added a layer of complexity to establishing relationships and building trust within community members. It took the dedicated effort of our team as we participated in trainings and workshops, shared our stories, and entered the community over a span of a year. Our team gained significant insight into the importance of learning and understanding the challenges communities face when trying to negotiate access. Negotiating access without having an opportunity to meet with people face-to-face (i.e., during a pandemic) is really challenging because building trust is important and doing that in a mediated context takes much longer than building relationships in person. Stephens and colleagues (2021) outline the procedure they used to develop and build relationships online because gaining access can be a multi-faceted challenge.

SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION Negotiating access is one of the most important and exciting aspects of the research process. This may be especially true for qualitative

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organizational communication research that can involve extended time at a research site and more direct contact with research participants. At the same time, it can be daunting and difficult in a variety of ways. In this chapter, we have attempted to articulate some of the common concerns and strategies of organi­ zational communication scholars to overcome them through concrete actions, building relationships, considering cultural dynamics, and recognizing dealbreakers. We have also described examples of graduate student struggles and successes in negotiating access as well as ways to help prepare undergraduate students for this important work. Finally, we have considered additional issues when organi­ zational communication researchers negotiate access in dangerous and difficult research contexts, including hidden organizations, vulnerable populations, and disaster areas. More specifically, experiencing concerns and anxiety when navigating how to negotiate access is normal for organizational communication scholars at all stages of their careers. Being aware of the root of why these feelings arise can help people develop concrete tools to overcome internal feelings of doubt. Anticipating potential problems that may arise and having contingency plans if organizations grant access but impose restrictions on the direction of the research process or violate the privacy of study participants is beneficial. Relationships are vital, but can take months (or even years) to cultivate. Waiting until the beginning of a research project to initiate relationships with organizational leaders, gatekeepers, or decision makers may delay data collection. Having conversations about the expectations and deliverables between the organization and researchers at the beginning of a research process can be helpful for a successful exit at the end of the project. It may also help surface potential deal breakers—and sometimes walking away from a research site is the most responsible choice. Additionally, building a culturally relevant team is important

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for both negotiating access and conducting qualitative research. Being aware of issues that organizations or communities have faced in the past can help to negotiate access successfully. There may be times when taking a more proactive approach to being present in the community will be necessary to build the trust needed to enter these places. Finally, we note that negotiating access can be even more challenging when dealing with dangerous organizations, vulnerable populations, or difficult to access research sites. Research in disaster zones provides a useful illustration of this. We are only now beginning to pull together some best practices in this area. In closing, knowing how to negotiate access is a vital skill for any researcher—and for qualitative organizational communication scholars studying organizations, being able to identify and secure the research site is especially crucial. Because so much qualitative research demands a deeper and longer commitment with organizational participants, the costs of access are inherently greater. But the benefits to qualitative researchers and participants are different as well, and that is often key in negotiating access for this type of work. Moreover, successfully gaining access is essential for collecting meaningful data that can benefit the researchers and the broader scholarly community. The successes can be great, but we also learn from the failures to be more successful in the future. It is our hope that some of the insights in this chapter will be beneficial to organizational communication scholars at all career stages as they negotiate access for their qualitative and mixed-methods research.

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Hintz, E. A., & Dean, M. (2019). Best practices for returning research findings to participants: Methodological and ethical considerations for communication researchers. Communication Methods and Measures, 14(1), 38–54. https:// doi.org/10.1080/19312458.2019.1650165 Hughes, A., Stephens, K. K., Peterson, S., Purohit, H., Harris, A. G., Senarath, Y., Jarvis, S. A., Montagnolo, C. E., & Nader, K. (2022). Human-AI teaming for COVID-19 response: A practice & research collaboration case study. Proceedings of the 19th International ISCRAM Conference, Tarbes, France. Jahn, J. (2018). Doing applied organizational communication research: Bridging a gap between our and managers’ understandings of organization and communication. In P. Salem & E. Timmerman (Eds.). Transforma­ tive practices and research in organizational communication (pp. 221–234). IGI Global. Jensen, P. R., Cruz, J., Eger, E. K., Hanchey, J. N., Gist-Mackey, A. N., Ruiz-Mesa, K., & Villamil, A. (2020). Pushing beyond positionalities and through “failures” in qualitative organi­ zational communication: Experiences and lessons on identities in ethnographic praxis. Management Communication Quarterly, 34(1), 121–151. https://doi.org/10.1177/ 0893318919885654 Jiwani, F. N., & Krawchenko, T. (2014). Public policy, access to government, and qualitative research practices: Conducting research within a culture of information control. Cana­ dian Public Policy, 40(1), 57–66. https://doi. org/10.3138/cpp Kang, K. K. (2020). Managing the second “A” in Alcoholics Anonymous. Journal of Organi­ zational Ethnography, 9(1), 80–93. https:// doi.org/10.1108/JOE-03-2018-0011 Lewis, L. K. (2012). Becoming useful: Using engaged scholarship as a means to move NPO scholarship forward. Management Communi­ cation Quarterly, 26(1), 186–192. https://doi. org/10.1177/0893318911423763 Lopatto, D. (2007). Undergraduate research experiences support science career decisions and active learning. CBE Life Sciences Educa­ tion, 6(4), 297–306. https://doi.org/10.1187/ cbe.07-06-0039 Molloy, C. (2015). Getting by or getting in? Grappling with access and affect in qualitative

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Mediated Communication (pp. 1–14). Kendall Hunt. Ted. (2017, January 6). What I learned from 100 days of rejection | Jia Jiang [Video]. YouTube. www.youtube.com/watch?v=-vZXgApsPCQ Tracy, S. J. (2019). Qualitative research meth­ ods: Collecting evidence, crafting analysis, communicating impact (2nd Ed.). Wiley Blackwell. Verbeke, W., & Bagozzi, R. P. (2000). Sales call anxiety: Exploring what it means when fear rules a sales encounter. Journal Marketing, 64(3), 88–101. https://doi.org/10.1509/jmkg. 64.3.88.18032 Wilhoit, E. D. (2017). Photo and video methods in organizational and managerial communication research. Management Communica­ tion Quarterly, 31(3), 447–466. https://doi. org/10.1177/0893318917704511 Witman, P. (2005). The art and science of nondisclosure agreements. Communications of the Association for Information Systems, 16, 260– 269. https://doi.org/10.17705/1CAIS.01611

16 Interviews and Focus Groups in Qualitative Organizational Communication Research Brenda L. Berkelaar

Interviews are a widely used, yet underappreciated method of research (Gerson & Damaske, 2020). Misunderstandings occur because interviews capitalize on a familiar, essential practice for data collection: conversation. Scholars have long agreed that conversations go beyond ritualized interaction to become sites of information exchange (Goffman, 1971), promising compelling sources of data and tactics to help establish the trusted cooperation needed to secure detailed information from people and organizations. Urban sociologist, Vivien Palmer (1928), was one of the first to offer guidance on research interviews as conversation: The ability of the objects of social research to converse with each other and with the scientific investigator is so vital a characteristic of the social sciences that it cannot be disregarded in any wellrounded study. It is also a fact that cannot be overlooked, for this ability to converse makes human beings what they are; it is the reality which makes human society. (p. 168)

This chapter reinforces Palmer’s assertion that “well-rounded” human research must attend to conversation as method and as focus of inquiry. Specifically, it addresses calls to think collectively (Brummans, 2014) and conscientiously (Gist-Mackey & Kingsford, 2020) about the use of interviews and focus groups in organizational communication. The following sections situate interviews as purposeful conversation and craft, before considering how history and philosophy influence contemporary practices and representations of interviews and focus groups. It then examines how interviews and focus groups are represented in recent organi­ zational communication publications. The chapter concludes by offering future possibilities for collective understandings and representations of interviewing and focus groups when studying organizational communication.

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INTERVIEWING AS PURPOSEFUL CONVERSATION AND CRAFT Interviews—and by extension, focus groups— offer researchers opportunities to apply everyday conversational skills to data collection. Organizational communication scholars often frame interviews as guided, intentional conversations (e.g., Lindlof & Taylor, 2019; Tracy, 2020) which provide the rich, voluminous, messy datasets that offer the “value and vitality of research interviews” (Palmer, 1928, p. 6). For novices, connections to conversation make interviews and focus groups tempting defaults—potentially breeding false confidence given possibilities of replicating everyday behaviors in and for research. For experts unfamiliar with interviewing’s nuanced possibilities, conversation’s familiarity can prove off-putting, leading to disregard of interviews as mundane or routine—rather than skilled— practice. As a “purposeful coordinated conversation between two or more people,” interviews are “designed to gather information about an individual, [organization], or topic” (Berkelaar & Murphy, 2017; para 1). Focus groups are specific types of multi-person interviews designed to collect data from induced interactions between participants (Hoffman & Ponce-Terashima, 2017). Thus, interviews and focus groups offer distinct forms of social interaction (i.e., specialized, structured, institutionalized, and formal with salient power differentials; e.g., see Tracy, 2020), even as they overlap with everyday conversational practices of “asking for reasons and giving answers” (Lazarsfeld, 1935, p. 26). Consequently, interviews should neither be oversimplified as “technique-for-getting-data” nor as “human-encounter-leading-to-in-depthshared-meaning” (Alvesson, 2003, p. 31). As Palmer (1928) summarized a century earlier, “Interviews assume the appearance of a natural and interesting conversation,” even as skilled interviewers craft a “controlled conversation” in service of research interests (p. 171).

Focusing on research interviews (rather than employment, entertainment, screening, journalistic, or diagnostic interviews) highlights interviews empirical purpose as creative, systematic work for understanding how the world has been, is, or could be organized. Interviews’ instrumental-relational tension is reflected in handbooks and encyclopedias that situate interviewing as guided or purposeful conversations (Berkelaar & Murphy, 2017; Lindlof & Taylor, 2019), and therefore art and science (Tracy, 2020)—and by extension, craft (Gubrium et al., 2012). Framing interviewing as communicative craft emphasizes the learnable and evolving set of skills and practices needed to gather data via interviews or focus groups. Framing interviewing as craft also highlights how relationships, norms, and rules for “the way things are done” shape whether and how organizational communication is practiced, represented, and habitualized (Berkelaar, 2021; Gubrium et al., 2012). Although communication scholars initially faced resistance when advocating for qualitative interviews (Putnam, 1983), recent publications suggest qualitative interviewing offers a legitimate, popular, and habitualized method of inquiry (e.g., Fairhurst, 2014; GistMackey & Kingsford, 2020). Habitualization is evident in shared vocabularies and representations that order and fix the world in specific ways, collectively shaping interviewing’s methodological trajectory: influencing who is interviewed, by whom, about what, in which contexts, with what interpretations (Alvesson, 2003; Berger & Luckmann, 1990). Evidence of methodological habitualization does not suggest that the results produced fail to meet quality standards, nor that habitualized approaches should necessarily be discounted (Brummans, 2014). Habitualized patterns can offer economies of effort while also revealing some level of collective acceptance and community identity—akin to Thomas Kuhn’s (1970) normal science, whereby distinct specialties offer a familiar, shared, and relatively straightforward set of practices and

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commitments that inculcate particular mindsets, practices, and ideals. Yet, habitualization is, by definition, relatively inflexible. When (re)presentations routinize vocabularies and ways of doing interviews and focus groups, they can, ipso facto, become seen as the pattern or way of doing interviews or focus groups. Consequently, any anomalies or expectancy violations that cannot be easily ignored must be explained (Kuhn, 1970; see also Fairhurst, 2014). Moreover, habitualization can background alternative ways of doing interviews and focus groups, miscueing how data collection can, could, or should be done (see e.g., Gist-Mackey & Kingsford, 2020). As the next sections highlight, history and philosophy often solidify approaches to data collection. History and philosophy can also expand possibilities by revealing, rediscovering, and reinventing ways of doing and representing interviews and focus groups as purposeful conversation.

SITUATING INTERVIEWING IN HISTORY Over time, beliefs and practices emphasize different interviewing practices as desirable or undesirable; routine or unusual. Despite interviewing’s “long and complicated history” (Tadajewski, 2016, p. 319), considering historical touchpoints encourages conscientious (re)consideration of how mythologized or marginalized histories (could) inform present practice (Decker et al., 2021). Although organizational communication research has delineated the development of qualitative methods in the field (e.g., Kuhn, 2005; Putnam, 1983; Redding, 1979), interviewing-specific histories are often appropriated from other disciplines (Taylor & Trujillo, 2004). Interviews took their “recognizably modern form” in the 1920s (Lee, 2004, p. 870), becoming taken-for-granted data collection methods

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during the following fifty years (Platt, 2002) as modern organizational communication began coalescing (Taylor & Trujillo, 2004). Contemporaneous handbooks encouraged avoiding interruptions to allow people “tell their stories in their own way” (Young & Schmid, 1939, p. 190); using as few questions as possible; and writing notes or the next question “on the back of an envelope” to “appear informal and spontaneous” (Platt, 2002, p. 11). Verbatim interviews offered anecdotal commentary of gestures and expressions reconstructed from shorthand or by memory (Burgess, 1928) rather than the word-for-word transcriptions one might imagine today. Such naturalistic approaches evolved from structured, functionalist origins. For example, interviewers with Elton Mayo’s renowned Hawthorne Studies initially employed directive, structured 20- to 25-minute interviews before shifting to oneto two-hour unstructured conversations when they realized that encouraging each employee “to express himself [sic] freely upon any topic of his [sic] own choosing” (Harvard Business School Historical Collections, n.d., para 3) offered more useful and uniform insights (Roethlisberger, 1977). In the 1930s and 1950s, crafting naturalsounding conversations was often backgrounded to establish legitimacy by shifting toward standardization. Aligning interviewing with scientific ideals promised the prediction and control efficiencies demanded by the industrialized modernist war machine (Taylor & Trujillo, 2004). Interviews were framed as tools for collecting survey data using question-based protocols moderated by trained researchers, whereas questionnaires were unmoderated surveys using questionbased protocols. Protocol design served the quantitative demands of extant information technologies: Questions were worded and data coded to work with punch cards required by electrical Hollerith machines (Rowland & Simonson, 2014). Researchers persisted in advocating for less structured, qualitative interviews, even

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as controversy about “neat reliables” of close-ended questions and “sloppy valids” of open-ended questions animated research communities (Platt, 2002, p. 168)—including the adolescent field of organizational communication (Taylor & Trujillo, 2004). Despite pressures to encourage methodological alternatives, functionalist, structured, and quantitative approaches persisted (e.g., Putnam, 1983), in part due to the costs of transcribing and analyzing open-ended questions and to the shortage of interviewers capable of handling unstructured interviews (Taylor & Trujillo, 2004). Mythology credits focus groups’ popularization to Robert Merton’s 1941 dinner with Paul Lazarsfeld, although Emory Bogardus had earlier introduced a “discussion type of group interview” (1926, p. 277, emphasis in original). Merton’s (1987) self-accounting and codification of focus groups in print informed the New York Times 2003 obituary crowning him the “Father of the Focus Group” (also see Merton et al., 1956/2008). Unfortunately, this origin myth ignores foundational contributions by Herta Herzog—a researcher then married to Lazarsfeld. Trained as a psychologist, Herzog was a groundbreaking and established communication and listening researcher in the Lazarsfeldled Office of Radio Research. Herzog had already incorporated in-depth interviews 1-to-1 interviews and group interviews as a centerpiece of her research program before Merton adopted conversational approaches to assist his endeavors (Tadajewski, 2016). Decades later, Herzog’s methodological innovations earned her a 21st-century pop culture nod: Hertzog’s work promoting conversations that could reveal deeper meetings inspired the character of Greta Guttman, an advertising phenom who facilitated focus groups for the Lucky Strikes campaign in 2007’s Mad Men pilot (Engel, 2016). Following World War II, market researchers adopted focus group interviews eagerly. Advocates like Herzog and Thomas Greenbaum converted “entire floors of Manhattan office blocks” to “recording facilities and moderators,”

even as academic use of focus groups “faded into relative obscurity” (Conradson, 2013, p. 130)— as academics raised concerns about questionable misappropriation of focus groups by industry and the military (Liamputtong, 2011). Still, by the 1970s and 1980s, interviews and focus groups were recognized as “scientific” methods (Tadajewski, 2016), worthy of systematic study themselves (Platt, 2002). Merton had begun prescribing “focused” interviews as “qualitative adjuncts to the experimental design” (1987, p. 557); however, his codification framed focus groups as second-class citizens—subordinated helpmeets in service of functionalist scientific craft—useful for making sense of numbers more equivocal than desired. Over time, growing numbers of scholars begin to rest assumptions that interviews and focus groups should necessarily replicate, signal, or support functionalist approaches (Putnam, 1983). Countercultural movements in the 1960s contributed to a growing push to broaden inclusion and address power differentials (Taylor & Trujillo, 2004). Feminist and critical theorists had long argued for the inclusion of marginalized voices (Harding, 1987; Mumby, 1988). Yet, just “add[ing] women” was insufficient; rather, feminists sought to correct “the invisibility and distortion of female experience” (Lather, 1988, p. 571) to enable greater voice and agency (Buzzanell, 1994). Feminists also suggested the need for distinct data collection methods (Harding, 1987), given suspicion and skepticism of codified quantitative approaches with their illusions of objectivity (Taylor & Trujillo, 2004). Qualitative, conversational approaches like interviews and focus groups promised desirable alternatives. Some organizational communication scholars began to emphasize human interaction and meaning-making during data collection rather than data extraction (Putnam, 1983). With ideals and techniques borrowed from participant observation, ethnography, and semiotics, this interpretive turn allowed for—yet did not require—greater degrees of (inter)subjectivity (Taylor & Trujillo, 2004). Researchers were advised to be conscious and

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reflexive: “actively looking for surprising and potentially disconfirming results rather than focusing on the findings that were expected and hoped for” (Gerson & Damaske, 2020, p. 24). Romanticized in institutionalized narratives (Kuhn, 2005), the interpretive turn sought to address burgeoning dissatisfaction with functional, quantitative data collection (Taylor & Trujillo, 2004). These now-labeled “qualitative scholars” argued for the value of gathering richer data “bought at the expense of sample size” (Platt, 2002, p. 15). Openended questions offered increased exposure and promised greater contextualization of participant lives. Consequently, interview methods and entangled philosophical perspectives decamped from mainstream functionalism. This decampment created “longstanding fissures and debates among epistemological perspectives and related qualitative and quantitative methods” (Myers, 2014, p. 467) as interviews and focus groups were moved out from under the standard of survey research— divorced from criteria espoused by postpositivist approaches (where quantitative data, large samples, and closed-ended questions signaled scientific quality) to form influential interpretive-critical approaches (where qualitative data and small-n in-depth datasets offered a (re)new(ed) standard of quality). “There is a sense in which interviewing [had] come full circle…[T]he interviewer again [had] a high degree of freedom and initiative and [could] make direct use of personal experience” (Platt, 2002, p. 23; see also Putnam, 1983). By the 1980s, at least two distinct research guilds had formed as organizational communication scholars divided philosophical perspectives, data types, and question types, often overdetermining methods based on (implicit) philosophical memberships (Taylor & Trujillo, 2004). Enabled by technology and broader social changes, the 1990s and beyond evidenced an explosion in possible features and forms of interviewing (e.g., distributed, asynchronous, computational, unmoderated, social media, email, text, photo elicitation; see Bampton &

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Cowton, 2002; Canipe, 2020; Wilhoit, 2017). The contemporaneous availability of affordable, portable, and popularized recording technologies made it easier for researchers to transcribe and analyze rich datasets for small details of interaction. Yet, even as these technologies encouraged freedom and innovations for purposeful conversations, they also afforded new possibilities for surveillance and control, potentially influencing interviewer and interviewee behaviors via actual or imagined surveillants. By the early 2000s, the default interview approach converged around qualitative, open-ended, semi-structured protocols using face-to-face, phone, or videoconference media—especially, yet not exclusively, for scholars who identified, or were identified by others as interpretive, critical, qualitative, or otherwise not neo/postpositivist (Alvesson, 2011; Tracy, 2020). This default often included a concomitant mistaken, yet persistent, assumption that semi-structured (and unstructured) interviews desirably or necessarily required adhering to interpretive, critical, feminist, or postcolonial epistemologies and ontologies (Taylor & Trujillo, 2004). Therefore, history is entangled both in how organizational communication scholars do interviews and focus groups, as well as how scholars conceptualize the epistemological and axiological purposes toward which interviewing and focus groups are directed. Accordingly, the section that follows addresses philosophical approaches that have influenced individual and collective practices of interviewing and focus groups in organi­ zational communication research.

CONCEPTUALIZING PHILOSOPHICAL APPROACHES TO INTERVIEWING Steiner Kvale (1996) first introduced two metaphors to help conceptualize philosophical approaches to research interviews—expanding (Kvale & Brinkmann, 2009) and inspiring

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responses that introduced overlapping and alternative philosophical types (Alvesson, 2003; Buetow, 2013; see Figure 16.1). Although metaphors are not the only way organizational communication scholars have sought to untangle epistemological assumptions (May & Mumby, 2004), metaphors offer a familiar and useful way to navigate the fuzzy boundaries between perspectives often treated as discrete. Moreover, conceptual research on interviewing philosophies often respond to Kvale’s framework (e.g., Alvesson, 2011; Buetow, 2013; Qu & Dumay, 2011), and his work is often cited in empirical organizational communication publications (e.g., Compton, 2016; Treem, 2016; White & Gilstrap, 2017). In his original framework, Kvale (1996) framed some interviewers as miners who see knowledge “waiting in the subject’s interior to be uncovered, uncontaminated” (p. 3). Like Mats Alvesson’s (2003) neopositivist, and Stephen Buetow’s (2013) cleaner, miners work to craft neutral knowledge transmission

pipelines: “seeking to cleanse, as far as possible, the interview questions from bias” to provide “authentic, uncontaminated” data (Buetow, pp. 52–53). Strategies designed to mitigate interviewer influence include phenomenological bracketing (see Chapter 5 in this volume); recording technologies that enable word-for-word transcription; and efforts to neutralize language (Lindlof & Taylor, 2019; Tracy, 2020). Echoes of miner approaches are often evident in the structure and language of empirical publications as people navigate (perceived) gatekeeping (Fairhurst, 2014; Myers, 2014). Advocates highlight data and ethical benefits that can arise from carefully considering interviewer influence; however, such strategies can incur risks. Attempts to neutralize language may result in language familiar to researchers, yet unfamiliar to participants. These attempts can encourage superficial, cautious, or non-response reactions as participants struggle to make sense of

Figure 16.1  Comparing Approaches to Interviewing

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a social situation distanced from familiar norms and expectations of everyday conversation and interview types (Gist-Mackey & Kingsford, 2020). Kvale’s (1996) second metaphor describes interviewers who see themselves as travelers. Travelers often leverage phenomenological, interpretive, or social-constructionist approaches and use semi-structured or unstructured protocols to craft “human encounters” that aid in accessing, interpreting, and coconstructing meaning in each interviewee’s “foreign country.” Interviewees craft in-depth meanings (Kvale & Brinkmann, 2009) or engage in sensemaking (Weick et  al., 2005) individually or collectively with interviewers who are “deeply implicated in the production of answers” (Schneider, 2000, p. 162). For example, writing about how her “own position influences the interview process,” Jennifer Mease (2021) framed interviews as opportunities to “put forth the assumptions, questions, and thoughts [she] had gathered from previous research for critique and ‘correction’ by the interviewees” (p. 67). Advocates assert that traveler approaches respect participant expertise and afford opportunities to uncover hidden insights by more naturally aligning with conversational expectations; yet, critics argue traveler approaches introduce individual and contextual bias and entanglement, undermining researchers’ ability to gather authentic or trustworthy data (Alvesson, 2003). Alvesson (2003) extended Kvale’s (1996) traveler metaphor with romantic and localist perspectives. Like travelers, interviewer-asromantic approaches seek meaning in human encounters. However, unlike travelers, romantic approaches often employ personal experiences or conversational strategies borrowed from therapeutic interviewing to solicit “interviewees’ personal views and confessions” and inner worlds (Flick, 2021, p. 40). Allusions to romantically-inspired approaches are evident in Sarah Jones’s (2020) reports of “co-constructing narratives as ‘cathartic outpourings’” (p. 258) when interviewing participants navigating trans* identities at work.

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Romantic approaches contradict recommendations that research reflects a “considered, manifestly dispassionate, and quasi-realist tone”—an assumption Shiv Ganesh also questions (2014, p. 449). Advocates of romantic approaches to interviewing argue crafting indepth, shared understanding affords opportunities to authentically hear and respect the development of human connection, whereas critics suggest that facilitating intimate conversation is disingenuous given the ethical complications of simulated intimacy, dual roles, and power asymmetries of new or existing research relationships (Alvesson, 2003). Romantic approaches may also dilute research literacy as interviewees and interviewers struggle to differentiate research interviews from more familiar types of interviews. In contrast to emphasizing interviews as instrumental (miner), meaning-oriented (traveler), or human encounters (romantic), interviewer-as-localist approaches view each interview as a unique empirical situation or “‘mini-paradigm’” (Alvesson, 2003, p. 20)—a temporary conversational pocket universe for particular people in a particular place at a particular moment. Foregrounding interviews as conversation in situ (Alvesson, 2003), localists often recommended strategies like conversation or discourse analysis. As a post-structural approach, localists assume few, if any, objective shared facts, focusing instead on co-constructed or epistemic hyper-situated meanings (Berner-Rodoreda et  al., 2020). This hyper-situatedness inspires critiques of myopia, limited utility, and failure to consider broader social systems and structures—even as localist perspectives offer unique opportunities to examine how diverse, local aspects of people, spaces, time, and factors influence the conversational moment in which interviews occur (Alvesson, 2003). Emphasizing the implications of asymmetries of voice and power when collecting data, feminist, critical, and neocolonial scholars often situate the interviewer as Other. Such approaches often seek to empower people and to transform the local situations and

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systems within which data are collected by crafting “an emotionally emphatic, egalitarian and reciprocal rapport” (Oakley, 1981, p. 55). Viewing interviewers as Other counteracts tendencies to view interviewees as Other; and requires embracing individual and collective discomfort. This approach challenges how we, as interviewers, see ourselves; and how we, as researchers and authors, craft knowledge (while working to manage past, present, and future identities, communities, and ways of knowing; see Chilisa, 2019; Ellingson, 2012; Gist-Mackey & Kingsford, 2020). Researchers benefit from becoming aware of the limits, as well as the opportunities of their philosophical assumptions—especially when the epistemological “country” is familiar, not foreign (Alvesson, 2003). For example, Jodi Jahn (2016) used her eight years of wildland firefighting experience to negotiate access to and legitimize her expertise with current members of the West Fork station where she had previously worked (also see Tracy, 2020). Unclear whether her “deep socialization” with the work group might be impeding her ability to detect nuanced insights (p. 370), Jahn contacted Manzanita, a work group with which she had no prior experience. Similarly, at a more abstract level, a researcher’s deep socialization into particular philosophical or methodological assumptions can impede their ability to understand and adapt to the local research context when evaluating, designing, or doing research—embracing perspectives grounded in other philosophical approaches can therefore prove protective as well as generative (Alvesson, 2003). Indeed, one persistent misconception (often disguised as a heuristic shorthand) suggests that qualitative interviews and focus groups necessarily align with and require committing to a particular research philosophy (Taylor & Trujillo, 2004). Correspondingly, different philosophical approaches are treated as discrete and essentialized—i.e., key criteria for methodological selection and valuation (Myers, 2014; Taylor & Trujillo, 2004) or individual and group identities that people implicitly rank to bolster self-worth, strengthen

group memberships (Myers, 2014), or navigate gatekeepers (Fairhurst, 2014). However, philosophical boundaries blur in identity and practice, taking pragmatic forms as researchers “shift between idealized roles” (Buetow, 2013, p. 53) to accomplish the work of interviewing. When done “unknowingly,” such philosophical shifts may create contradictions or problematic divergences (Buetow, 2013), even as they afford possibilities for adaptive innovation when done with reflexive pragmatism (Alvesson, 2003). Reflexive pragmatism avoids a priori privileging of a favored perspective by remaining open to the idea that multiple interpretations can co-exist and may even offer better or supplementary alternatives for data collection (Alvesson, 2011). Interviewers, thus, become conductors who bring differences “into the open [to] orchestrate their voices” (Buetow, 2013, p. 53), balanced by pragmatic constraints because “time, space, and patience” have limits (Alvesson, 2011, p. 25). Alvesson does not suggest philosophy should be inconsistent, nor that shifting perspectives is simple; rather, he acknowledges that “jumping between paradigms is a very difficult sport,” even as it helps “widen and vary one’s horizon” (p. 25) by encouraging conscious, consistent, and intentional efforts to (re)examine how interviewer, interviewee, situation, and interview accounts are typically understood, enacted, and represented when doing interviews—the focus of the next section.

EXAMINING CURRENT REPRESENTATIONS OF INTERVIEWING Choosing familiar, standardized, or popular designs for data collection can help streamline processes, mitigate uncertainty, or signal disciplinary standards (Alvesson, 2003; Fairhurst, 2014; Kuhn, 2005). However, language does not just describe things, language does things (Alvesson & Kärreman, 2000).

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Thus, how organizational communication scholars represent interviewing and focus groups as practiced draws attention to certain aspects of interviewing and away from others (Alvesson & Kärreman, 2000; Fairhurst, 2013). Converging around particular cultural scripts, storytelling, accounts, and vocabularies, language establishes and perpetuates basic assumptions about how interviewing does (or is expected to) work in organi­ zational communication. Favored vocabularies offer a disciplinary shorthand—a welcome respite to reviewers and editors fulfilling (often unpaid) commitments given unrelenting work demands (Fairhurst, 2014). Yet collectively such shorthand can stunt empirical inquiry making one “less sensitive to the site’s nuances and culture” (Jahn, 2016, p. 371). Insights may only become visible when juxtaposed with the strange, unfamiliar, or even the slightly different. Focusing on anomalies can simultaneously illustrate the routine and taken-forgranted, as well as the adaptive (Brummans, 2014). The different, therefore, offers insight into current disciplinary uses of interviews and focus groups, while also inspiring future research by highlighting missed opportunities or problematic assumptions, which inevitably, if unintentionally, exist. As the next sections illustrate, the presence of (relatively) more detailed explanations often betrays research that differs from routinized or accepted practices. When violating or straying beyond what is expected, justification is needed (Kuhn, 1970) or requested (Fairhurst, 2014). Researchers who report atypical interviewing practices (or who report typical practices in atypical ways) have to persuade readers who may struggle to imagine, and consequently may question, methodological choices that differ from the expected or idealized (Fairhurst, 2014). In contrast, absence or brevity often betrays methodological patterns because normative representations frequently signal quality by referencing a shared, tacit vocabulary and canon (e.g., Lindlof & Taylor, 2019; Tracy, 2020). Although such

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habitualization is efficient in time and word count, it can also keep the methodological details and decisions hidden or absent to the uninitiated (or uninvited). In reviewing the abstracts, keywords, and method sections of recent empirical articles from organizational communication’s flagship journal, Management Communication Quarterly,? (2016–2022, online first), interviews remain a popular choice for data collection. Sixty-eight of the 178 (39.3%) empirical studies evaluated for this chapter, reported using interviews (63) or focus groups (6) for data collection as interview-only, ethnographic, or “larger” projects. Methodological clues are evident elsewhere in these publications; however, method sections ostensibly offer the formal accounting of how the research was done (or was expected to be done): Designed to convince readers of the value of the findings and analysis that follow, this routinized, if seemingly mundane, section offers a tacit handbook that helps signal current disciplinary “rules” for interviewing and focus groups. Small clues (e.g., word choice, word order, absences/presences, citations from the implicit canon) often offer underappreciated methodological insights (Alvesson & Kärreman, 2000). The next section evaluates a corpus of published empirical articles in which authors reported using interviews or focus groups for data collection. It attends to how organi­ zational communication scholars represent the interview context (i.e., interviewers/facilitators, interviewees/participants, situation, and accounts) highlighting the effective (i.e., publishable) warrants for typical, as well as irregular (i.e., adaptive), representations.

Interviewers The role of interviewer is often backgrounded, especially when interviews are the sole or primary method of data collection, with readers expected to infer who interviewed participants. Backgrounding the interviewer as a conversational actor may

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result from myriad reasons (e.g., to neutralize or deprioritize the interviewer/facilitator role or gaze, to prioritize participant voices, or to reduce word count), yet the collective effect is similar: Interviewers are often (relatively) invisible as conversational actors, with few exceptions. When interviewers are referenced explicitly, writers employ third-person language (“the interviewer,” “the first author”) or first-person pronouns (e.g., “We collected background data on surveys before conducting 1:1 interviews;” Long et al., 2023, p. 232). Who among the “we” interviewed or moderated participants is rarely stated, except in situations where translation is required (e.g., ter Hoeven et al., 2017). Personification (“This study interviewed”) and the passive voice (“a series of focus groups was conducted”) are noticeably evident in multi-method studies that used focus groups or interviews as a precursor to quantitative data collection. Assistant moderators, observers, notetakers, or translators are also notably absent or invisible across texts—perhaps replaced by digital recorders and smartphones, or invisibilized given common advice to operate as non-interventionist fail safes “in the action but apart from it” (Pickering & Watts, 2016, section 5.2, para 4, emphasis in original). Authors often make interviewer characteristics visible via one to three brief sentences highlighting demographics (e.g., “grew up in”) or expertise (e.g., “The authors have studied…”). These statements take a standardized form that references one to three familiar characteristics relevant to the study at hand (e.g., country of origin, gender/sex, topical or industry experience). Explicit consideration of positionality tends to be included if the participants or topic signal insider-outsider tensions or provoke questions of marginalization or power asymmetries (see also Chapter 30 in this volume). Some authors hint at the necessary incompleteness of reflexivity reports. David Novak (2016), for instance, prefaced his self-reflexivity with an explanatory statement that summarized his data

collection process before offering a brief, yet consequential “for example” to situate his perspective and privilege when studying urban homelessness. A few researchers, such as Jahn (2016), offered lengthier responses, weaving their background (“8 years as a wildland firefighter,” p. 369) with methodological citations to help situate and legitimate their methodological choice (“the dangerous and unpredictable nature of wildland fires…prohibits researchers from observing communicative interactions directly and in real-time… Instead, I conducted interviews,” p. 370). In contrast, the brief routinization of most reflexive statements has invoked critiques of performative, “dreary” formulae (Ganesh, 2014, p. 449) with overly individualized confessionals (Alvesson, 2003). Perhaps designed to signal personal authority and competence efficiently they seem to follow fill-in-theblank or Mad-Libs™-type recipes.1 Formulaic statements may help authors efficiently signal recognition and (presumed) compliance with agreed-upon rules for self-reflexivity, while also avoiding questions or concerns triggered when expected content is absent (Fairhurst, 2014). Empirical research highlights how interviewers are “differently calibrated instruments”— influenced by training, philosophy, personality, and relationship (Pezalla et  al., 2012). If interviewer calibration occurs, authors rarely considered it notable—perhaps finding it philosophically unnecessary or methodologically banal. Joshua Barbour and Jacquelyn Manly (2016) provide an exception when studying emergency response preparedness: “At first, we conducted interviews as a team. After each, we reflected together, adjusting how we planned to use the protocol. After reaching consensus, we conducted the remaining interviews separately” (pp. 339–340). Researchers who framed their research as ethnography were more likely to explicitly foreground the interviewer as conversational actor (e.g., Branton & Compton, 2021; Cruz, 2017; Novak, 2016). Such foregrounding may result from methodological training or because

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interviews’ conversational interactions become salient in contrast to observational techniques. Joëlle Cruz (2017) dedicates almost two-thirds of a page to “Researcher’s Positionality” when studying susu, a type of grassroots organizing, in post-conflict Monrovia, Liberia. Cruz’s framing helps position her as a conversational actor within intentional and serendipitous conversational encounters. Her methodological explanation considers the interplay of interviewer, interviewee, location, and accounts in the research context: “A woman of Ivorian and French descent, I am usually read as métisse or a person of mixed race in Francophone West Africa” (p. 621). In describing her “encounters with the women,” (p. 622), Cruz offers brief exemplars of exchanges, relevant communication challenges (i.e., becoming fluent in Liberian English), and opportunities (e.g., being female) in her method section. Cruz’s reflexivity addresses—yet does not overemphasize—her role as conversational agent, offering instead a dramaturgical presentation that positions interviewer and interviewer as relevant communicative agents within the broader conversation in which data are collected. That authors foreground or background the interviewer role differently depending on reported methodological design (e.g., interview versus ethnography) cannot easily be attributed to pragmatic limitations like word count (e.g., authors had similar page limits; ethnographic data are often more abundant). More likely, particular language choices evidence differential methodological socialization and expectations. For example, whereas interviewing is seen as a process of data collection, ethnography is viewed as both a process and outcome of mindful inquiry (Agar, 1980). Language choices may also reference signals of “scientificity” aligned with historic norms for how particular methods are reported in a particular publication outlet (Fairhurst, 2014). Unfortunately, reasoned and justified efforts to background the interviewer as conversational agent may (unintentionally) erase the interviewer’s presence

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and influence in and on the communicative situation. Such erasure can be consequential for understanding research findings; for historical reflection and recognition (e.g., Herta Herzog); and for recognizing communication as method and focus of inquiry (Gist-Mackey & Kingsford, 2020). New and emerging technologies offer opportunities to rethink how interviewers and facilitators are represented as embodied conversational actors (see Ellingson, 2012). The pragmatic and ethical consequences of embodiment suggest the need to conceptualize the interviewer more explicitly in the method section, especially given the growing need to distinguish between human and nonhuman agents. Advances in information, communication, and computational technologies (ICCTs) including machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) afford opportunities for nonhuman moderation—“machine agents [chatbots] that serve as natural language interfaces” (Brandtzaeg & Følstad, 2018, p. 38; see also Vézy, 2022). Chatbots promise time and money savings via nonhuman conversationbased data collection, increasing disclosure by simulating closeness and immediacy (Vézy, 2022; cf. romantics in this chapter). Digital conversational agents also create nuanced and consequential ethical challenges, altering perceptions of risk with nonhuman consent and information asymmetry in simulated conversations, while reinforcing the need to understand human implications of algorithm design, including managing the security and privacy of the people interviewed (Vézy, 2022).

Interviewees Interviewees are more visibly represented in the Management Communication Quarterly articles reviewed here. Historically, described as “sources,” “subjects,” or “informants,” these authors typically reference “participants,” which helps “supply readers with the conceptual anchors they expect” (Fairhurst, 2014, p. 438). Many researchers also describe

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participants in terms of their organizational, organizing, and occupational role(s) or title (e.g., emergency response volunteer, librarian, firefighting crew, public safety officers and their families, consultants, mid-level managers, leaders, board members, employees). Role-specific language can humanize participants while also priming relevant contextual knowledge. It may also simply result from attempts to add lexical variety. Regardless, language choices and labels influence interviewer attitudes toward participants and inform what questions are likely to be asked, how questions are asked, and how the data collected are interpreted (Alvesson & Kärreman, 2000). Interviewees reported in the reviewed articles tended to be recruited from paid, whitecollar, relatively prestigious, occupational roles in conventional organizations (e.g., leader, consultant, board member, executive, mid-level manager, doctor, banker), despite recommendations to foster inclusion of blue-collar communities (Gist-Mackey & Kingsford, 2020) and from organizing in non-employment contexts such as families, students, flash mobs, refugee camps, and religious organizations (Berkelaar, 2013). A few studies described participants occupying volunteer roles (e.g., Barbour & Manly, 2016), consistent with calls to recognize the importance of unpaid, volunteer work (Kramer, 2011). Interviewees occupying stigmatized roles were rare (e.g., Jones & Tracy, 2022; Novak, 2016). Samples using students were also rare and often included either a multi-role interview (e.g., Long et al., 2023) or a multi-role recruit (e.g., Rice, 2021). Recruitment of intact groups was employed regularly (e.g., Novak, 2020; Rice, 2021), with most other studies reporting snowball or purposive samples of loosely connected or unconnected individuals. Only a few studies reported pre-existing relationships between interviewers and participants despite the popularity of snowball sampling. In the few situations where preexisting relationships were disclosed, warrants

were provided which seemed designed to justify the implicit violation of the “professional stranger” mindset (Agar, 1980). Interestingly, Jahn’s (2016) warrant for initially recruiting a firefighting group with which she had worked; and Ziyu Long and Patrice Buzzanell’s use of guanxi (2022) offered similar methodological warrants, justifying the value of existing connections to garner access and trust in specific occupational and national cultures respectively. Authors often summarized samples using easy-to-quantify and familiar demographics (e.g., age, race, sex, geography, occupation, position). A few authors added study-relevant characteristics that differed from the norm (e.g., self-identified gender, Jones, 2020; life stage, ter Hoeven et  al., 2017; political status, class, Tian, 2022). Thus, it seems that most authors defer detailed commentary on participants to qualitative findings in subsequent sections, if detailed commentary were included at all. Participant count was included in every study. Authors typically report interviewing 25 to 35 participants, with focus groups ranging in size from three to fifteen participants, although four to six participants per group was typical (ter Hoeven et al., 2017). In general, sample size was warranted by noting the achievement of “saturation.” Several authors reported interviewing more than 40 people as part of ethnographies (e.g., Cruz, 2017), multi-method studies (e.g., Kopaneva & Cheney, 2019), or when facilitating focus groups (e.g., ter Hoeven et  al., 2017). In contrast, the few studies with less than ten participants offered explicit justification for sample size. Typically, small samples inform multi-method studies (e.g., initial insights to fuel survey design; (Lee & Flores, 2019) or are used to contextualize the results of textual analyses (Frandsen & Johansen, 2018). Such warrants were brief. In contrast, Zhenyu Tian (2022) provided a multi-pronged justification for her findings, likely because her data came exclusively from interviews with six Han women. Confirming that representation was

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not the study goal, Tian noted her interviewees represented a “difficult-to-reach population” in Chinese leadership boards, adding that some recruits expressed concerns about being “too conspicuous,” since they occupied a role “scarce across all levels and branches” (p. 9). Drawing on a recognized organi­ zational communication expert, Tian emphasized: “Tracy (2010) suggested, ‘if data are new, unique or rare, a valuable contribution could be achieved with very little data (p. 841)” (p. 9).

Interview Situations Most studies provided only brief information about the interview situation (e.g., country; technology medium used) even though the context of the interview situation influences the conversation itself and evaluations of the data gleaned (Alvesson, 2003; Tracy, 2019). Common types of situational information shared included geographic location; organizational or occupational context; and data collection format. Most of these studies occurred in the United States (e.g., Treem, 2016), although some studies (also) interviewed participants located in Brazil, Bulgaria, China, Denmark, Ghana, India, Liberia, the Netherlands, Singapore, and Uruguay (e.g., Cruz, 2017; Kim, 2018; Long et al., 2023; ter Hoeven et al., 2017; Tian, 2022). Only a few authors offered additional information about national and regional cultures to help contextualize the conversational situation (e.g., Cruz, 2017; Long et al., 2023). Authors typically employed brief phrases about the occupational, industry, and/or organizational situations within which interviews or focus groups occurred. For example, these studies considered interviewees from organizations such as international cooperatives, national fast-food chains, house churches, gay bars, grassroots organizations, national-level public relations firms, nonprofits, libraries, milk banks, interagency task forces, or homeless support agencies with

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participants who reported working as nurses, CrossFit coaches, student-athletes, working parents, coaches, doctors, zoo docents, vendors, and lay church leaders, among others. Information about the occupational, industry, or organizational situation was often more detailed when gathered as part of an ethnography (e.g., Novak, 2016); when considered salient to the study (e.g., Jones, 2020); or anticipated as unfamiliar to imagined readers (e.g., Tian, 2022). Cruz (2017) again offers a notable example, employing multiple paragraphs to situate readers into the complexities of susu groups—the grassroots organizing she studied in the food market in Fiamah, Liberia. The general format of data collection is often visible, especially when interviews were explicitly reported or implied to be one-to-one single interactions (for exceptions with group interviews, see Frandsen & Johansen, 2018; and multiple interactions, see Treem, 2016). Until recently, interview situations were often assumed to be co-located, face-to-face, synchronous interactions—with authors more likely to describe the medium if communication technologies were used. In contrast, publications from the last two years are more likely to explicitly state the media used (i.e., face-to-face, videoconference, phone) and, in a few cases, the communication technology employed (e.g., Skype, QQ, WeChat; Long et al., 2023). Remote communication necessitated by the COVID-19 pandemic may have altered implicit assumptions that assumed face-to-face data collection is (or should be) the default (see Chapters 27 and 34 in this volume). Few details were provided about the versions or specific brand(s) of communication technology used, although different technological affordances influence communicative behavior and outcomes (Treem & Leonardi, 2013). Notably, the specific location in which each interview or focus group occurred was rarely described, except in situations in which privacy or confidentiality were addressed explicitly by authors—e.g., Jones (2020) indicated that

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she met people in the public library and Pride offices, and Jahn (2016) referenced “private closed-door offices.” These studies offer limited examples of the use of group interviews and focus groups by organizational communication scholars (e.g., ter Hoeven et  al., 2017). Group interviews are typically considered focus groups only when the focus of data collection shifts—from asking and answering questions between the interviewer and multiple interviewees (group interview) to facilitating and encouraging interactions between multiple participants (focus group;see Liamputtong, 2011).Thus, studies that described collecting data via focus groups typically emphasized the goal of studying interactions or “discussion” between participants (e.g., ter Hoeven et  al., 2017). Although group conversations can provide an avenue of support and comfort (e.g., Bochantin, 2017), they can also dampen disclosure, reduce diversity of opinions, encourage endorsement of each other’s views, or increase challenges for researchers committed to protecting anon­ ymity (Liamputtong, 2011). In brief, descriptions of the interview situation remain brief, relying on broad categories. This thin description is especially evident in method sections that report using interview or focus group data exclusively. In contrast, studies that use interviews as part of ethnographic or observational approaches provide more detailed context within the method section. Offering richly narrative multi-paragraph descriptions of the research site (e.g., Cruz, 2017) or multi-page explanations (e.g., Kim, 2018) helps readers imagine the conversational situation beyond broad geographic or occupational contexts, which in turn helps readers make sense of participant accounts.

Accounts The Management Communication Quarterly studies reviewed here provided minimal data

about the conversational accounts collected via interviews and focus groups—an understandable choice, since qualitative accounts are often, although not necessarily, provided in detail in results sections. Most authors typically, albeit inconsistently, reported at least one of three types of information about the interview accounts researchers: quantitative summaries, purpose, and content solicited. These types of information can help gatekeepers and readers situate and understand the data collected within the overall empirical, philosophical, and communicative logic(s) of the specific study— while also explicitly signaling research value (Fairhurst, 2014). Most authors represented accounts collectively via a quantified data summary, with few exceptions (e.g., ter Hoeven et al., 2017). Data commonly included recorded minutes (e.g., average, range, total), page counts for transcripts and/or field notes, occasionally including relevant descriptors (e.g., “singlespaced”, “typewritten”). The range and average length of interviews were most common, with interviews typically ranging from 30 to 90 minutes (averaging around 60 minutes, e.g., Branton & Compton, 2020; Long & Buzzanell, 2016), with an eight-minute minimum and 150-minute maximum across these studies. Many authors reported variability in average time spent conversing (e.g., 24 to 101 minutes, Novak, 2016; 40–110 minutes, Long & Buzzanell, 2016; 28–150 minutes, Branton & Compton, 2020), rather than reporting a standard length. Quantification varied in precision, with a little more than half of the authors reporting specific values in terms of average length, total audio hours, word count, and/or page count. Many authors also reported vague estimations (e.g., “about an hour”)—a linguistic choice that offers a token nod to expectations for quantifiable summaries while acknowledging the still-questioned practice of quantifying qualitative data and treating equally-sized interviews (e.g., number of words or minutes) as equivalent in

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value. Although quantified summaries operate as a recognized quality signal, denoting “rich” data criterion via minute or word counts can bias samples because class status, culture, and personality influence language characteristics (Gist-Mackey & Kingsford, 2020). In contrast, a linguistically inclusive approach does not necessarily discount the use of numbers, but necessarily complicates and questions the assumption that higher numbers signal higher quality (Gist-Mackey & Kingsford, 2020). Accounts are also shaped by researchers’ epistemological purposes. Most authors briefly cued the types of accounts desired by sprinkling brief phrases throughout the method section that provide clues about epistemological assumptions and conversational goals (e.g., sensemaking; “gathering” versus “co-constructing narratives,” “ventriloquized,” “dialogic manner,” “critical incident”, “memorable moments” “critical discourse,” “discussion between participants,” “help control”)—on occasion bolstering the language with references to well-cited theorists (e.g., Cooren, Weick). A few authors explicitly stated their epistemological assumptions (e.g., “The interactional interpretive activity that takes place during the interview…represent[s] reality,” Golden & Jorgenson, 2022, p. 9), sometimes sharing how empirical assumptions informed their research process (e.g., “We approached the study as bricoleurs—quilters piecing together a mirage of partial and mismatched representations across sensitizing concepts to discern a complex situation,” Jones & Tracy, 2022, p. 528). The reported epistemological focus also informed the structure of interview protocols and questions used to elicit or construct interview accounts. When described, authors overwhelmingly reported using semi-structured interview protocols, with proximal citations of names referenced from the implicit organizational communication canon (e.g., Charmaz, Lindlof & Taylor, Patton, Tracy). Semistructured protocols likely provide a flexible

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structure that allows interviewers the flexibility needed to navigate instrumental-relational tension of purposeful conversation—without being structured so as to thwart a sense of natural conversation or unstructured so as to trigger questions or methodological rigor (Alvesson, 2003; Fairhurst, 2014; Palmer, 1928). Many authors explicitly reported using open-ended questions (Branton & Compton, 2021), with a subset of authors providing explicit reasons why and how accounts were elicited. Most authors did so by providing example questions connected to the research purpose and the intended kinds of accounts desired (e.g., Treem, 2016). Some researchers also reported examples of what questions they did and did not ask (e.g., Long & Buzzanell, 2022), intentionally recognizing how present and absent messages influence accounts elicited during interviews and focus groups.

MOVING FORWARD This chapter opened by considering how qualitative interviews and focus groups operate as purposeful conversation and craft, in which communication is both method and focus of inquiry. Although history and philosophy offer diverse, and at times contentious, recommendations, the doing of qualitative interviews has become relatively habitualized in organizational communication—at least as presented in contemporary empirical work. Collectively, the empirical studies reviewed here offer insights that have increased understandings of organizations and organizing, including key theoretical concepts such as identity, socialization, and (in)visibility; alongside important practical outcomes such as burnout, grassroots organizing, leave policies, and technology adoption. Reviewing this corpus of empirical studies also reveals missed audiences and missed opportunities. Researchers tended to report using semi-structured protocols when

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interviewing between 25 and 35 people in white-collar, often prestigious or respected roles associated with paid or unpaid work (for exceptions, Jones & Tracy, 2022; Novak, 2016)—typically in U.S. contexts, albeit less predominantly than prior decades. Certainly, researchers must necessarily limit target samples and make methodological decisions for each study given pragmatic constraints. Still, individual choices have collective consequences. Thinking conscientiously about how the field of organizational communication represents qualitative interviews and focus groups collectively requires rethinking how individual practices reinforce accepted patterns for doing interviews and focus groups in organizational communication; and with what outcomes (see Brummans, 2014; Gist-Mackey & Kingsford, 2020) for research practice, representation, reflexivity, and innovation. First, foregrounding the conversational aspects of interviewing and focus groups highlights that interviews and focus groups use communication as method and focus of inquiry (Gist-Mackey & Kingsford, 2020). Regardless of one’s philosophical commitments, organizational communication researchers recognize that the people, situations, and purposes affect how findings can or should be understood by evaluators and readers. Considering the communicative aspects of interviewing and focus groups offers an opportunity to bridge differences and encourage communication among researchers (Alvesson, 2003). A communicative focus can also broaden participation across contexts and populations by encouraging scholars to rethink what constitutes valuable and valued communication as both method and outcome of data collection (see e.g., Berkelaar, 2013; Gist-Mackey & Kingsford, 2020). Foregrounding the communicative aspects of interviewing also expands possibilities for imagining different forms of purposeful conversations beyond the typical default (i.e., moderated, one-to-one semi-structured interviews conducted face-to-face, or by phone or videoconference). It considers how

combining interviewers, interviewees, and/or situations in novel ways alters the accounts solicited or constructed. In turn, such communicative changes alter the content, tenor, and trajectory of purposeful conversation as data and as method, offering promising and potential avenues for future empirical and methodological work. Second, foregrounding the conversational aspects of qualitative interviewing and focus groups requires rethinking how interviewing and focus groups are represented in published empirical work. Being explicit about essential elements of the conversational situation provides guidelines for gatekeepers evaluating the study, as well as for disciplinary outsiders or novices who may be unfamiliar with the processes and assumptions that keywords or the implicit canon intend to signal. Linguistic and narrative representations can either situate readers in the conversational situation or distance them from it. Authors like Jahn (2016) and Cruz (2017) highlight the value of framing the method section as essential to understanding the conversational situation within which interview and focus group data are gathered—in ways that are accepted and publishable given current gatekeeper expectations. By applying “thick description” to the method section as well as to the findings, authors can bolster credibility by crafting methodological narratives that demonstrate sincerity, meaningful, coherence, and rich rigor while also considering the trade-offs and implications of the communicative and methodological choices made (Tracy, 2020). Such approaches require risking the rejection that can come when presenting unfamiliar research designs or when presenting familiar research designs in unexpected ways to gatekeepers (Fairhurst, 2014). Authors may also need to commit additional time to writing in order to successfully navigate expectations while situating the readers within the conversational situation in which the interviews or focus groups took place.

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Third, reimagining how reflexivity is done in practice could assist scholars in expanding how the field understands and represents interviews and focus groups as forms of data collection. Recommendations from within and beyond organizational communication offer opportunities to build on current approaches that typically emphasize selfreflexivity. For example, James McDonald (2016) draws on conversations of queer reflexivity when recommending a “closet” metaphor to reflect on how people reveal or conceal different aspects of themselves individually and collectively in research, since (non)normative identities may shift given interactions inherent in data collection. Alvesson (2003, 2011) takes a complementary approach when proposing pragmatic reflexivity—encouraging researchers to consider the interviewer(s), interviewee(s), situation(s), and accounts using metaphorical insights garnered via multiple philosophical lenses. Both McDonald and Alvesson recognize that material, temporal, and psychological constraints limit each author’s ability to represent the whole research process and dataset (see also Brummans, 2014). Finally, imagining how different characteristics of interviews can be (re)combined in different ways during design, embodiment, representation, and evaluation can spur incremental or transformational innovation. Such imaginative bricolage allows for, yet does not limit, the use and representation of interviews and focus groups to habitualized patterns. Applying David Boje’s (2011) theorizing on antenarratives—i.e., “bets” on the future pattern of stories—to the practice of interviewing encourages “prospective sensemaking” about possible and probable interview and focus group designs. It encourages methodological experimentation before methodological pieces sediment during the unfolding of design, recruitment, enactment, analysis, representation, and habitualization. Such anteinterview thinking is neither intended to complicate nor to discount practical constraints. Rather, its goal is to mitigate human

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tendencies toward efficiency via standardization and habit by encouraging researchers to imagine what and how different characteristics might be assembled into interviews and focus groups yet to be. The goal here is not advocating innovation for innovation’s sake. Rather, managing the tension between the values of habitualization and innovation provides room for routine, as well as adaptive ways of doing interviews and focus groups. Both stability and generativity are needed. They operate in tension. Openness to nonstandard choices allows for design with individual and collective intent, rather than habit or orthodoxy. Reframing interviews and focus groups as purposeful conversations “yet to be” (Boje, 2011) invites researchers to set aside taken-for-granted way(s) of doing interviews and focus groups, while staying focused on the shared goal of collecting imaginative, generative, inclusive, and useful accounts via purposeful conversation. In sum, interviews and focus groups offer a popular data collection based on a core and essential practice of human experience: conversation. Thinking conscientiously about the collective consequences of how the field of organizational communication uses and represents interviews and focus groups highlights the rules and norms for how interviews and focus are done, while also considering possibilities for how the use of interviews and focus groups may evolve going forward. The choices we make individually are consequential to our craft collectively. How organizational communication scholars do interviews—when designing, enacting, representing, or evaluating interviews—shapes who is interviewed, in what ways, for which types of accounts, and with which types of evaluative, theoretical, practical, empirical, and ethical outcomes. When done with intention, reflexivity, imagination, and humanity, interviews and focus groups offer an essential and flexible form of data collection that is inspired by the predictive flexibility of everyday conversational practices that “[make] human beings what they are” (Palmer, 1928, p. 168).

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Note 1  The U.S. word game Mad Libs™ involves a short story where a person prompts others for a list of words (e.g., an adjective, noun, verb) to substitute for fill-in-the-blanks in the narrative. On completion, the second person reads the story aloud, often to laughter.

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17 Participatory Methods in Qualitative Organizational Communication Research Rebecca Gill and Joshua B. Barbour

Participatory research methods in organizational communication go by many names: participant observation, witnessing, shadowing, fieldwork, riding along, being a fly on the wall, ethnography, and more. These methods are crucial for providing rich accounts of the day-to-day experience of organizing, and in this chapter, we offer an overview and synthesis of participatory methods as deployed by qualitative organizational communication researchers. It is important to acknowledge up front, however, that no review can fully capture the richness and complexity of participatory research in our field. Effective fieldwork produces extensive data, and is difficult, time consuming, and does not fit neatly into short accounts. Even fieldwork that is event-based and more “bounded” still involves a great deal of time, labor, and energy (e.g., Ganesh & Stohl, 2013). Qualitative organizational communication scholars spend considerable time in the field, ranging from over 100 hours (e.g., Branton & Compton, 2021; Cruz, 2017; GistMackey, 2018; Jensen & Meisenbach, 2015;

Rennstam, 2013), 200 or more hours (e.g., Ashcraft, 2000; Barbour & Gill, 2017; Eger, 2021), to 700 hours or more (e.g., Wieland, 2010). Journal articles necessarily leave out much of the depth, insight, and guidance that we might otherwise gain, and this chapter faces a similar challenge. Organizing occurs in multiple and varied ways, and for this reason, we refer to “organizing” and “sites of organizing” in this chapter. Organizational communication researchers collect data in both orthodox and less-well-studied organizing (e.g., Cruz, 2017; Gill, 2011; Jensen & Meisenbach, 2015). They conduct field research with Tibetan Buddhist monks (e.g., Brummans, 2008), witness across multiple sites (e.g., Barbour & Gill, 2017; Gist-Mackey, 2018), experience organizing alongside flight attendants, correctional officers, and firefighters (e.g., Murphy, 1998; Tracy & Scott, 2006), witness in bars (e.g., Branton & Compton, 2021), conduct mobile research in their hometown (e.g., Wiederhold, 2015),

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attend protests (e.g., Ganesh & Stohl, 2013), and more. Participatory research must itself account for—and shape itself to—the site of organizing, however defined. Researchers construct and define the field, or “the stage on which the social processes under study take place” (Burrell, 2009, p. 182), and this chapter aims to provide a synthesis of participatory research conducted by organizational communication researchers that speaks to the impressive variety of research sites and array of questions that represent our field. We begin by reviewing a well-established typology of participatory research methods, illustrated with examples from organizational communication. We then consider phases of participatory research and techniques that can be adapted to a variety of studies, as well as relational and ethical issues that often accompany participatory research. The chapter concludes with our contemplation of developments in participatory research in organizational communication. Throughout, we draw on the rich work of organizational communication researchers who have advocated for, cautioned about, and questioned ethnographic and participatory methods (e.g., Jensen et  al., 2020; Stephens et  al., 2020; Taylor et al., 2021).

the field while also representing those observations and experiences for analysis, often in field notes. The strength of participatory research is in the researcher’s “being there,” such that they are able to gain a sense of the setting or context and a familiarity with organizing at the site. Participatory research has long been categorized into four researcher “stances,” discussed below. These stances are models that reflect differing commitments to engagement in organizing and the disclosure and management of researcher identity; such choices also tend to align with ontological, epistemological, and axiological commitments. Yet, most agree that such stances are not mutually exclusive, and despite researchers’ intentions, can be challenged and shifted by participants and other exigencies. The practice of participatory methods is messier than these neat categorizations, as Czarniawska (2007) noted:

A TYPOLOGY OF PARTICIPATORY RESEARCH IN ORGANIZATIONAL COMMUNICATION

In this chapter, we take seriously that all witnessing is a kind of participation. To allow for the likelihood of shifting researcher identities or intentions, we represent the typology on a continuum (see Figure 17.1), also acknowledging that fieldwork “is an intensely personal and subjective process, and there are probably at least as many ‘methods’ as there are fieldworkers” (Kunda, 2006, p. 237).

Participatory research in organizational communication occurs when researchers engage with sites of organizing to experience, interact, or involve themselves with the activities, individuals, objects, and other elements of

Complete witnessing

Focused participating

Figure 17.1  The Witnessing Continuum

Anyone who has ever been in the field knows that such classifications are useless. You cannot say “Sorry I am not doing a participant observation” when somebody asks you for help with a falling shelf, and neither can you say “You forget I am shadowing” when the person you shadows [sic] instructs you to stay in the office and not to follow her. One glides into another; in that sense, all direct observation is indeed participatory—one’s mere physical presence and human decency requires participation. (pp. 54–55)

Active participating

Complete participating

PARTICIPATORY METHODS

Complete Witnessing On the left side of the continuum is complete witnessing. Although historically (and still) called observation or complete observing, we adopt Tracy’s (2020) “witnessing,” a term that she sourced from colleagues as a way to shift away from ableist language and acknowledge the disciplinary gaze of participatory methods (p. 77). In this style of participating, “the research is usually covert and participants do not know they are being studied. However, rather than participating in the scene, fieldworkers in this role stand at the periphery, and participants may be un­aware of being studied” (p. 135). This kind of stance is colloquially referred to as being a “fly on the wall,” but this characterization misunderstands the nature of most participatory research. It is axiomatic that measurement is not traceless; witnessing changes what is being witnessed. Organizational communication scholars who emphasize complete witnessing tend to do so from a (post)positivist paradigm, where they aim to access objective, “knowable” data through quantitative and/or qualitative measurements. To conduct this work, researchers are encouraged to be watchful and unobtrusive, making notes and then analyzing them away from the site. Treem’s (2012) study of public relations professionals at Alpha and Beta provides a helpful example. Although not complete witnessing per se, he engaged in observations and interviews in ways that minimized his influence on the site, where his goal was “recording the actions of individual employees as they performed their daily tasks” (p. 28). Treem described a structured plan for when and how often to conduct observations (e.g., multiple sessions, sampling stratified by time of day) and focused his notes on “behavioral actions of employees, with time codes recorded at least every five minutes.” He coded for specific behaviors in his field notes and compared how often experts and

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non-experts, identified through interview data, engaged in those behaviors (also supplemented with recordings). This example emphasizes witnessing with minimal direct interaction with participants. Although complete witnessing may be impossible, Treem provides a rich example of research that emphasizes witnessing while minimizing influence on the site.

Focused Participating A second representation on the continuum is focused participating. In this, the researcher identifies themselves as a researcher and interacts with others in the field. Tracy (2020) further clarifies that the focused participant researcher “enters a scene with an explicit and clear agenda of the topics they are interested in studying, the people they want to interact with, and the time period they will be active in the scene” (pp. 133–134). Because these researchers know what they are “looking for” in the site of organizing, they may find that they are less enmeshed in the field and spend less time there. Organizational communication researchers who adopt this stance typically embrace (post)positivist or interpretive metatheoretical commitments. An example of focused participating is found in Scarduzio and Tracy (2015), who witnessed arraignments at two different municipal courts to better understand the role played by the courtroom bailiff. In the first part of the study, Scarduzio was approved to “observe/ take notes on public interactions that included defendants and onlooking gallery members, [but] not interviews or interactions with defendants beyond the public courtroom observations” (p. 338). She also conducted interviews with courtroom judges regarding the bailiff role. In the second part of the study, Scarduzio expanded her time witnessing, also coupling this with informal, field interviews. A way that focused participating may be represented is through shadowing.

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Often understood as a mobile participatory method (Czarniawska, 2007), shadowing may be used by organizational communication researchers who adopt any of the participant stances. One could argue that few, if any, participatory researchers “remain in the same place, immobile, during their study” (p. 56), and it is certainly the case that researchers may slip into shadowing at various moments or incorporate bouts of shadowing into their larger participatory research design (e.g., Jensen et  al., 2022). We include shadowing here, however, because the researcher is usually known to those in the research site (i.e., not attempting to be a complete witness) and has identified a focus that justifies the need to follow a person over a specific period of time or space(s). In her study of entrepreneurs, for instance, Gill (2011) adopted shadowing to witness and interpret the variety of activities and practices that make up an occupation that is ostensibly fluid and unbounded. Organizational communication researchers have also adopted shadowing to follow organizational and communicative objects and processes. Lindlof and Taylor (2019) remarked on this shift, encouraging researchers to “notice material culture” and “wrap our curiosity around a discrete space, place, object, or an assemblage of objects/artifacts—albeit in context. Always in context” (p. 287, emphasis in original). Here, the reminder about context is important because it recognizes material culture as a way to access the human use and interpretation of objects and spaces (e.g., Dean et al., 2016). Objects may, for instance, “facilitate multiple meanings across knowledge boundaries…or support unequivocal meanings for individuals within groups who share a similar type of expertise” (Barley et al., 2012, p. 281). Before moving on, we want to underscore that although one may assume that shadowing is a way to remain a somewhat detached witness (i.e., a focused participant), this is often not possible. Because of the need to coordinate with the person being

shadowed, or those involved with objects and processes, the researcher can paradoxically become more visible. Shadowing is “an active, explicit, reflexive and dynamic co-production … by the shadower and the organizational actor she follows” (McDonald, 2018, p. 207), and Gill (2011) wrote along these lines about her experience of being witnessed just as much as she, herself, witnessed others. Although not specific to shadowing, Matte and Bencherki (2019) further develop a “hauntological perspective” on ethnography, theorizing the researcher as engaged and “haunted” by an organization—“we, researchers, do not only follow an organization, but we are also followed by its ghostly effects of presence” (pagination n/a). This suggests that the researcher who shadows likely slides between focused and active participating, discussed next.

Active Participating The third representation, active participating, recognizes that organizational communication researchers may engage in organizing as though they are a member. Tracy (2020) used the term “play participant” to suggest “a stance in which fieldworkers play at becoming active members engaging in a range of cultural activities,” but where “their membership is improvizational and unbound by many formal norms of the scene” (pp. 132–133). Organizational communication researchers operating from this stance are more likely to view the field through an interpretive lens, recognizing the social construction of organizational reality, including how the researcher co-constructs that reality. Being an active participant means that one can explore the complex webs of communication and interaction (drawing from Geertz’ “web” metaphor, 1973) in organizing, attempting to understand what is happening from the participants’ point of view. For instance, in Wieland’s (2013) study of one branch of a Swedish multi­ national firm, she “engaged participants by

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asking questions and interacting socially” (p. 513). Wieland pointed out that because she did not initially speak fluent Swedish, she was able to explore participants’ sensemaking “frequently and unabashedly:” “I was able to ask participants to ‘tell me what happened there’ because they assumed I had not understood anything. Thus, my naivete was useful in that it gave me license to ask obvious questions” (p. 513). Organizational communication researchers taking a play participant approach have also woven critical and feminist commitments along with interpretive tenets, where their inquiry is oriented toward dynamics of power, oppression, privilege, and resistance. In her study of unemployed job seekers, GistMackey (2018) adopted participatory methods to reveal “hidden power-laden assumptions” (p. 1256) in the job search communication training provided by service organizations. Ashcraft (2000) noted that in playing various roles at SAFE, a domestic violence shelter operating from feminist principles, her participation “support[ed] a feminist view of all researchers as situated, implicated participants, not autonomous, objective observers” (p. 359).

Complete Participating Complete participating is a stance where organizational communication researchers study contexts in which they already are members or to which they become fully affiliated (Tracy, 2020). Active participant and complete participant are also often referred to as forms of ethnography, usually because of the time spent in the field and the depth of connection and familiarity the researcher generates with the research site. Murphy’s (1998) flight attendant research is illustrative of complete participant research. Having worked as a flight attendant and trainer for three and two years, respectively, Murphy went on to conduct research while “work[ing] as a flight attendant alongside the

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respondents” (p. 509). Murphy argued that, as a member of the organization, she held “a unique position to gain access to private, backstage interaction through participant observation” (p. 508). She added, “as a flight attendant, I shared the fate of those I was studying and therefore was totally immersed in the process” (p. 508). Because they require and rely on interaction with the research site and participants, complete participant researchers often hold interpretive and critical and/or feminist commitments. Complete participants share the work of organizing, gaining detailed insight and developing a tacit understanding of the dynamics of power and resistance that inform the research site. Murphy (1998), for instance, described her ability to access the “hidden transcripts” that comprised resistance on the part of flight attendants (e.g., wearing regulation high heels only in airports where supervisors were based). Simply being a member of a context does not make a researcher a complete participant; rather, the idea of complete participating means that the researcher has, or has cultivated, “access to a depth and breadth of the culture’s deep background that gives [the researcher] a unique standpoint from which they can make connections among a span of issues that might otherwise go unnoticed” (Tracy, 2020, p. 131). For this reason, we turn to a brief discussion of autoethnography (see also Chapter 12 in this volume). Although autoethnographic research can be inspired by any of the participatory stances, we mention it here because it benefits from the depth of reflection, interpretation, or experience often associated with complete participating. Autoethnography can offer insight into the research process itself, as we see in Frandsen’s (2015) articulation of a “paranoid organization” and Brummans’ (2008) insights into the construction of a Tibetan Buddhist monastery. Autoethnographic essays about the experience or performance of methods can also aid researchers in unpacking their methodologies and practices (e.g., Frandsen,

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2015; Gill, 2011). In these cases, the authors explore the sites of organizing and their research by centering their own experiences.

PHASES AND TECHNIQUES OF PARTICIPATORY RESEARCH At this point, we turn to a practical discussion of participatory methods used by organizational communication researchers, meant to help with the relevant logistics of data collection. We begin this discussion with the assumption that the researcher has designed a project that incorporates participatory methods aimed at answering an informed research question, and has obtained oversight from their university ethics board or committee to conduct their research (see Chapter 14 in this volume). From here, we organize our discussion around three general phases of participatory data collection: planning and arriving, participating, and leaving the site. These phases overlap in many moments, but they are useful for organizing the techniques reviewed. Throughout, we draw attention to issues of ethics and reflexivity and remind readers that participatory techniques need to be adjusted for different research questions, sites of organizing, relationships between researcher and participant, and other exigencies. We mean this review of techniques to inspire those thoughtful adjustments, not constrain them.

Planning and Arriving Negotiating access Regardless of the researcher’s participatory approach, negotiating and securing access to the site of organizing is paramount. Access is complicated by the fact that it “often requires a dual effort that involves gaining access to the organization through the gatekeepers and to the individuals in the organization” (Frandsen, 2015, p. 164). Participants at the

site may be unsure of what it means to participate in research in practical terms. They may feel vulnerable or threatened, and they may wonder if they will be burdened or unable to complete their tasks with a researcher present. The researcher may already have an “in” with the research site, perhaps because they have been a long-time volunteer or employee. Researchers may also hang around the site to get to know participants, complete interviews, and make concrete contributions (e.g., volunteering) before requesting permission to conduct research. Regardless of how purposeful the researchers’ efforts are to build relationships and comfort, researchers need to exercise care so that members of the potential research site have all of the information they require to make an informed decision and are not pressured to agree to the study simply because they know or like the researcher. In negotiating access, organizational communication researchers also often discuss ways that the research may provide value to the site, though a crucial reminder from Lindlof and Taylor (2019) is not to “misrepresent or overpromise” what the researcher can deliver (p. 126). It can be helpful to call on the support of a gatekeeper in the field, or one “with the authority to grant research access” (Lindlof & Taylor, 2019, p. 126). For his study of discipline and control in self-directed teams, for instance, Barker (1999) unexpectedly located a gatekeeper when attending a fraternity alumni reception. Specifically, in meeting the vice president of ISE, a local manufacturing company, Barker began to form the relationship that would provide him access to the company as a research site. In this way, access may sometimes rely on serendipity. Otherwise, researchers may need to identify and “cold call” the person or people who manage or organize the site. Large corporations and nonprofit organizations may be accustomed to being contacted for research purposes, but many sites of organizing are likely to find the request for research access

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novel, odd, or perhaps exploitative. Building rapport ahead of making a request to participate is especially important when it comes to smaller sites or shadowing individuals, particularly because the researcher will need to help participants know what the presence of the researcher will mean for them and their day-to-day experience. Likewise, the researcher should be aware of how existing frames for research in a given site may shape how participants understand the request. For example, U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Inspectors typically conduct surveillance of regulated sites as part of their own work, and so Barbour and Gill (2017) found that the idea of being studied seemed pretty orthodox to participants in their study. Similarly, organizational members and clients may be used to seeing interns rotate throughout, and the researcher may therefore be positioned this way, even if they are not technically so (e.g., Jensen, 2022). Other sites and participants, however, might see requests to collect data as a kind of oversight or surveillance (e.g., Cruz, 2017; Frandsen, 2015; Jensen & Meisenbach, 2015). In all cases, researchers need to be ready to provide a clear idea of what they are proposing, including the goals and likely outcomes of the research, even as they meet participants not yet familiar with the effort. Because of this, it is better to think of gaining access as an ongoing process of relationship building, rather than a stage of research with a discrete end. An important conversation to have at this point involves details related to when and how often the researcher will be on site (Lindlof & Taylor, 2019). At the most fundamental level, the details that the researcher should confirm are dates, times, and location(s); what activity(ies) or objects the researcher hopes to witness or collect (e.g., particular types of meetings, volunteer orientations, memos written by the CEO); and how the participant(s) can expect the researcher to act. The researcher should also solicit advice and direction from participants or informants about how to be in the site.

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Participants may ask for assurance that the presence of the researcher will not disrupt them or the setting. This concern does not mean that the researcher should only strive to be unobtrusive, but the researcher should make sure that any intentions to be an active or complete participant is part of the negotiation, to the extent possible. As an example, Barker (1999) spent time with the site gatekeeper, Jack, at the beginning of his study, getting to know him and his hopes for the research while walking around the plant. That first meeting concluded with an opening by Jack for Barker to do the research, which Barker marked as the start of the negotiation of access. During a follow-up meeting they “established several basic ground rules” (p. 15), such as respecting those who were trying to get work done and not identifying people by name. Negotiating access marks the beginning of projects but also persists in different forms as projects unfold.

Negotiating identity As researchers connect and work with gatekeepers and potential participants to negotiate site access, they must also reflect on how “culturally ascribed identities” infuse fieldwork (Lindlof & Taylor, 2019, p. 186). This aspect of participatory research methods has not been sufficiently acknowledged or explored in organizational communication research, but it is accepted that social and personal identities and identifications are entwined with choices about where to seek access, decisions to grant access, and interactions in the field. Yet, where White, able-bodied, cis-gender, and heteronormative researchers have not historically been called to account for identity when negotiating access to many mainstream sites of organizing, Black, brown, queer, and other underrepresented researchers highlight how identity plays a role in their conduct of participatory methods. McDonald (2013) noted, for instance, that the assumption of his homosexuality on the part of members of the homo-normative Sexual Health Organization nonprofit meant that he integrated well into the culture and felt that the

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participants trusted him as a fellow gay man. Gist-Mackey (2018) similarly argued that her ability to negotiate access and navigate the unemployment support organizations, Work Track and Executive Career Transitions, involved her intersecting social identities. GistMackey explained: My background growing up in a single-parent home, being a racial minority and academic scholar, and previously holding a corporate career, among other attributes, allowed me to carefully navigate the classed and racial differences between organizational environments. In essence, I was able to effectively and authentically code switch between organizational environments. (p. 1257)

Cruz (2017) draws attention to the contextual quality of identity and how it may be negotiated with and by participants in the field. Noting that she “strongly identifie[d] with her West African heritage,” the participants in Cruz’ study nevertheless “did not perceive [her] as Ivorian or West African, but as American” (p. 621). She further explained, “the women did not see me as ‘Black’ and commented on my ‘bright’ complexion. These exchanges echoed other experiences in the streets of Monrovia during which I was called ‘White woman’ or ‘Chinese woman’” (p. 621). These examples should not suggest that White, cis-gendered, able-bodied, and/or heteronormative researchers are not also entwined in performances of identity when they seek access to the field. Rather, they highlight that scholars who “fit the norm” can be advantaged by identity and thus, it may be easier for the role of identity in negotiating access to go uninterrogated. As an example, we can return to Barker’s (1999) negotiation with ISE. Barker met the site gatekeeper at “an alumni reception sponsored by the local chapter of my old social fraternity” (p. 14), and we recognize in this story a historical tradition that opens doors for some but not others and, most importantly, is not often grappled with by the researcher or considered for how it shapes data collection. Gill (2011)

aimed to surface this privilege in acknowledging that she was given access to shadow three White, cis-gendered, heteronormative entrepreneurs not only because she reflected a sense of themselves back to them, but also they reflected a sense of herself back to her. Sharing identity characteristics with these participants influenced Gill’s recruitment of these participants in the first place. We must also highlight that no one normative context exists. We are writing this chapter as scholars located in the United States, where much of the scholarship in organizational communication is situated, but social and organizational identities are contextually determined; what is normative in one research site or for one researcher may not be the same for another. Outsider and insider identities therefore have value for participatory methods, but they differ in how they are entwined with researcher and participant identity and context. Participant researchers should acknowledge and consider identity and embodiment in research and how they may inform and complicate design, collection, analysis, and representation.

Participating Showing up A fundamental question, especially for researchers new to participant methods or new to a site is, “How do I show up?” Showing up invokes questions about physical embodiment, attitude, and performance in interactions, and of course, the negotiation and contextualization of identity plays a role here as well. Organizational communication researchers may strive to maintain a kind of “professionalism,” though what this means or looks like will vary depending on the material site of organizing and shared norms therein, cultural and personal interpretations of “professional,” and the persona that the researcher wants (or needs) to adopt to “get along.” It might be helpful to think of

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negotiating access as applying for a job or proposing a consulting arrangement. We recommend that, above all, the researcher should “be themselves” while also aligning themselves with any reasonable, legal, and ethical norms of a site, and we appreciate Czarniawska’s point that, “the point is never to behave like a fly on the wall… but to behave like a responsible adult, showing respect and sympathy to others” (Czarniawska, 2007, p. 56). Organizational communication researchers have acknowledged that the researcher cannot always guarantee their positioning at the site, given that participatory methods require negotiating with others. Researchers may, for instance, enter the field thinking to act as a focused participant only to be called into an active participant role. In her research with students enrolled in massage therapy schools, Sullivan (2012) explained: Together, [the massage school directors and I] decided that my role would be that of an observer. By the second week of classes my role shifted to that of a participant observer. Often, there were an uneven number of students in class and I was asked to fill in as a body on the table or as a massage student. (p. 279)

Sullivan’s account underscores that participating means being responsive, and she discussed how this change affected her and her research. Moreover, her account shows how the role(s) the researcher is encouraged to play is itself a data point, highlighting how organizing works at that site and placing the researcher in a different position to witness. If for no other reason, researchers should strive to be sensitive to participants in the field because they may feel vulnerable and subject to surveillance. Participants might see the researcher as a spy for management (e.g., Frandsen, 2015), feel like an object of scrutiny (e.g., Cruz, 2017; Jensen & Meisenbach, 2015), see the researcher as disruptive or “disturbing” (Kunda, 2006), or have justifiable concerns about the implications of the research for themselves. We also recognize that the

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researcher may feel vulnerable, being in a new setting with all the questions and concerns that come with being “the newbie.”

Embodiment Ellingson (2017) pushed researchers to grapple with the embodied nature of research, which is especially acute in participatory research. Here, even if we strive for a complete witness stance, our bodies are engaged in affirming and/or challenging cultural norms, (re)producing or resisting discourses, and processes of identification and relationality (Ellingson, 2017). The body, qua identity, is a central element of the experience and ability of a participant researcher to access the site or spaces within the site, and influence how participants and researchers relate. While researchers may feel most self-aware at the beginning of their fieldwork, Ellingson argued that the entire research process is embodied, including design, collection, analysis, and representation. Calling out (largely Western) scholarship for failing to challenge the mind-body dualism that supports the notion of a disembodied researcher, Ellingson pronounces: Less powerful researcher bodies do not have the privilege of disowning their unruly physicality; scholars with queer, disabled, nonwhite, Third World/Global South, and otherwise marked bodies encounter resistance to claims of disembodied prose and the privilege of objectivity. (p. 6)

By discussing embodiedness, we also mean to signal the materiality of the researcher’s body, including presence and movement and the expectations to decorate, comport, and shape the body to the organizing. Gill et al. (2014) remarked on cramped hands from jotting notes, falling asleep in meetings, questioning what to wear, and concerns about when to eat, get coffee, and take bathroom breaks, but organizational communication researchers are also cleaning and cooking (e.g., Jensen & Meisenbach, 2015), working shifts (Ashcraft, 2000), selling and buying market goods (Cruz, 2017), and serving as an

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on-call contact (Jones & Tracy, 2022), mock interviewer (Gist-Mackey, 2018), or a “body on the table” (Sullivan, 2012). Importantly, explicit reflection on the experience of embodiment in participatory methods can lead researchers to develop significant insights. When Sullivan (2012) shifted from focused to active participant, she realized that she was able to become embedded “in the culture of massage to a greater extent than I would have by simply observing,” which helped her “reach new understandings of workplace practices and gendered relationships” (p. 280).

Deciding what to witness Depending on the research question and focus, researchers will have to make decisions about what to witness once on site. Researchers who enter the field as more complete or focused witnesses might have a specific plan for what and when they want to witness. For example, Barley (2015) described his strategy for conducting observations at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, specifying the length of each observation, the number of observations each week, their timing during the day and throughout the week, the persons observed stratified by occupational and team role, and additional criteria that would prompt him to observe (e.g., “any episode when my participants interacted with their cross-boundary partners,” p. 1616). He also specified how he would conduct each observation, including how he would interact with participants (e.g., asking them to “perform their work activities as normal,” p. 1616) and gather data, including the focus and practice of note-taking, making recordings, gathering documents, and asking participants to share screenshots of their work. Researchers who strive to be active or complete participants might choose to be open to all or any experiences, particularly if they seem or are important to participants, and they may cast a wide net when it comes to gathering materials. In his participatory

research with a Swedish police organization, Rennstam (2013) allowed himself to be guided by a key moment during data collection. He wrote: [I]t [soon] became apparent early in the study that [a particular] incident played an important role for the police employees as a means to make sense of the management of the organization. In addition, the media coverage as well as my general observations in the organization indicated that this was by far the most significant incident that took place in the police department from 2008 to 2009. This led me to delve deeper into the details. (p. 126)

Rennstam remained open while honing the focus to reflect what resonated. Like negotiating access, deciding what to witness is about adjusting the aperture and focus of the researcher’s lens, guided by an iterative consideration of existing research, the research questions, ideas, and insights emerging in data collection, and the resources available. That said, although it can be tempting to try to collect everything and anything, this impulse has to be checked. In his study of engineering work at Tech, Kunda (2006) shared that he was “swamped with information” because “despite the advice I frequently received, I did not consciously define what I was after” (p. 245). We would caution researchers to have ideas for how they will experience the site, including how they will keep track of and organize materials.

Making notes Researchers using participatory methods need to make decisions about how they are going to make notes, though this may differ based on the stance they adopt. A complete witness or focused participant may enter the field with a predetermined plan, whereas an active or complete participant may let a structure for note-making emerge. Although participatory research does not typically strive for replicability, researchers need to be confident that they are keeping a record that will help them manage data and develop a rich analysis.

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A key difficulty of publishing the results of participatory methods in journal articles is that traditions in the field as well as page limits mean that we do not always learn how organizational communication researchers make notes. Most organizational communication researchers, however, rely on a blend of jottings and headnotes that they then turn into field notes during down time or when they are away from the site. We discuss each of these in turn, as well as the growing use of photo and video methods. Jottings. Ideally, researchers will be able to jot notes while participating. Also called “raw notes” (Tracy, 2020, p. 138) or “scratch notes” (Lindlof & Taylor, 2019, p. 200), jottings allow for in-the-moment witnessing and reflecting that later forms the basis of more fully-rounded out field notes. These initial notes represent “the first, unprocessed notations of the field” (Tracy, 2020, p. 138) and may comprise a simple word that will spark one’s memory later, or are more detailed, perhaps “record[ing] an ongoing dialogue or a set of responses to questions” (p. 29). Wiederhold (2015) “kept a small notepad with [her] to jot notes about aspects of our interactions that could not be captured by audio recording or reconstructed in memos after the fact, such as nonverbal responses” (p. 610). As implied in this quotation, some researchers take advantage of technology to audio-record moments in the field (e.g., Barley, 2015; Barley et al., 2012) or will take photographs of key moments. These can serve as jotting-style mnemonic aides and can later become part of the field notes themselves (keep in mind that audio and video recording may require a different standard of review for the protection of human subjects and/or explicit conversations with participants). Although all researchers will collect jottings in their own style, Tracy (2020) showed how her raw notes provided an opportunity for her to make connections amongst what she was witnessing (p. 138). We recommend that even the most unstructured jottings should include meta-data such as time of day and location (see Gill et al., 2014).

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Headnotes. Researchers may not always be able to take jottings on-site, perhaps because participants would see it as disruptive or because they are engaged in other work. In her study of market women’s susu groups in Liberia, Cruz (2017) underscored the value of headnotes as a way to negotiate participation alongside note-taking. Cruz explained: I engaged in 100 hrs of active participant observation. Early on, some people in the market commented, “She’s just watching us,” and I realized they felt scrutinized. Because of this, I conducted 2 to 3 hrs of observation in the morning, memorizing as many details as I could, and wrote headnotes at a nearby restaurant during lunch hour. I resumed my observations for the same length of time in the afternoons and wrote headnotes in the evening. I then expanded my headnotes into fieldnotes on my computer. (pp. 620–621)

Others have also written about this balancing act. Because she was also working as a flight attendant at the time and wanted to “remain as unobtrusive as possible,” Murphy (1998) “listened carefully to conversations around me, took extensive fieldnotes, and immediately transcribed notes into journal entries after each trip” (p. 509). Field notes. Although the term field notes suggests that these are the notes that are captured in situ, it is usually the case that these are the notes that are crafted outside of active participation. Field notes “interpret the experience of participant-observation” and are “a permanent record verifying that field events did occur as the researcher has stated” (Lindlof & Taylor, 2019, p. 201, emphasis in original). That said, field notes do not function as incontrovertible evidence of an objective reality. Researchers can “write these notes at any point, and as many times as we please, but we cannot rewind an actual event, erase our original impressions, and directly reexperience it” (Lindlof & Taylor, 2019, p. 201, emphasis in original). Tracy (2020), therefore, recommends scheduling time to craft field notes from jottings and headnotes “within 36 hours of the field visit” given that

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the longer one waits, the easier it is for “the codes, snippets, and shorthand in raw records to fade and become confusing” (p. 141). Field notes vary a great deal among researchers and can differ for the same researcher from project-to-project. Commonly agreed upon guidelines, however, include that researchers should generate descriptive field notes, strive to capture conversations or comments verbatim when possible, and organize notes chronologically. Elaborating on experiences and what one is witnessing is especially important early on, as it can help to capture the field from a position of curiosity. This style of writing field notes aligns with Geertz’s (1973) thick description, a style recommended particularly for researchers who adopt interpretive commitments. Thick description avoids generalization and instead includes concrete, vivid descriptions of scenes, actions, and behavior while offering interpretations of what is happening. In their field notes, for instance, Murphy (1998) incorporated “stories, actions, or reflections by employees” (p. 508) and Rice (2021) “describ[ed] how everyday actions accomplish organization” (pp. 535–536). Practical recommendations emphasize structuring field notes with headers, including the time and date of the notes, and a chronological style. Notes may take the style of vignettes or sketches; real-time, action-by-action lists; or stories of vivid or meaningful moments of that day. Regardless of form, notes should let the researcher return to moments and trace the development of phenomena throughout one’s time in the field.

Informal and formal interviews Organizational communication researchers also frequently conduct informal or formal interviews to supplement participatory data collection. Informal—also called field or ethnographic—interviews take place as one is engaged at the site. Such interviews allow a researcher to gain insight into how participants interpret the field, including their emotions or sensemaking about what is going on,

and create or learn about opportunities for other events or activities that the researcher might want to witness. Field interviews are typically conducted more by active or complete participant researchers, where a significant amount of interaction may occur, and they vary in terms of length, depth, and interaction. Organizational communication researchers have also explicitly organized fieldwork around interviews. In an event ethnography of an Occupy Wellington protest in Aotearoa/ New Zealand, Ganesh participated in the event as an activist while also conducting short (minutes-long) interviews with over 76 other participants at the event (Ganesh & Stohl, 2013). Ganesh’s experience attests to the flexibility needed in participatory research: realizing that the questions he planned did not resonate with the participants, Ganesh changed them to focus on the protest signs they held. Ganesh and Stohl explained that this new focus worked better because, “engaging people by asking them about their signs was an inviting and personalizing interview process. Moreover, since signs themselves serve as protest frames, the interviews generated very specific insight into how individuals were constructing frames around issues” (p. 435). Another example is Wiederhold’s (2015) use of “peripatetic interviewing” to explore how residents in her hometown made sense of the departure of a major local employer and initiatives to spur economic development. Because Wiederhold was familiar with her hometown, but had also been away for some time, she wanted to create a way for the participants to show her “the places or events that they think ‘best illustrate what is happening in the area economically’” (p. 608). The interviews ranged from forty-five minutes to four hours and were simultaneously participatory: As we traveled through the fields and buildings and topographies of Wilmington, we toured the “landscape” of the community in every sense of that word… despite my familiarity with

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Wilmington, the framing of these mobile interviews allowed me to situate myself alongside participants in order to look at the city the way that they look at it and move through the spaces as they move through them. (p. 608)

By adopting peripatetic interviewing, Wiederhold became a “tourist” in her “own hometown,” which provided her the insight she was seeking from others and herself (p. 608). Other approaches supplement field interviews with “formal” interviews that occur before, after, or otherwise “outside” of participation. Such interviews tend to be semi-structured and scheduled rather than serendipitous. Formal interviews contribute to data that comprises researchers’ overall understanding of the site and can provide space for reflection about moments witnessed during fieldwork. Eger (2021), for instance, supplemented participation with the Transgender Resource Center (TGRC) nonprofit with semi-structured interviews, noting that they allowed her “to understand participants’ experiences and perspectives” (p. 261) on the identities co-constructed at TGRC. Branton and Compton (2021) conducted interviews with 25 owners, staff, and patrons of two gay bars after Branton spent 199 hours “fully immersing himself into the culture as a ‘regular’ who engaged with bar owners, staff and patrons” (p. 76). Organizational communication researchers have used insights from fieldwork to generate and guide interview questions and interviews to inform fieldwork (e.g., Jensen et al., 2022). Sometimes, the inability to collect interviews as supplementary data is itself instructive. Frandsen (2015) presented a compelling story of trying to recruit participants after she was already given permission to study a European national rail service under public scrutiny for poor decisions and financial incompetence. The company’s representatives assured Frandsen that she would be able to recruit interviewees, and yet when she posted the call for participants: “nothing happens. No response. Not a single one.

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Utter silence” (p. 167). Eventually, Frandsen was able to recruit one interviewee, though he was noticeably worried that what he said would get back to the company. Another employee responded to her recruitment email by accusing Frandsen of perpetuating company “propaganda” (p. 162). Frandsen used this and other instances to highlight the uncertain nature of fieldwork as well as how even the inability to collect data may be data.

Artifacts, photos, audio, and other materials Organizational communication researchers may also supplement their field notes with artifacts, photos, documents, and audio-recordings. GistMackey (2018), for instance, collected “e-mails, posters, memos, training, marketing materials, handouts, newsletters, board minutes, brochures, worksheets, reports, and policy documents, websites, social media pages, images, signage, and other objects,” arguing that these contributed to “the rigor and trustworthiness of the analysis” (p. 1259). For their study of automotive engineers, Barley et al. (2012) not only took notes on the interactions of the participants, but collected materials that helped them understand the work under study. They explained: When our informants worked at computers, we requested screen shots of software interfaces and digital copies of the models, code, e-mail, and documents with which they worked. We photocopied key documents that the engineers employed, including drawings, sketches, handwritten calculations, and scraps of paper on which they had scribbled notes. Collecting so many types of data enabled us to prepare fieldnotes that described actions, conversations, and artifacts simultaneously and, thus, to produce a record not only of what engineers did and said, but also of what they worked on and created. (p. 287)

The collection of artifacts can provide helpful insights into the research context, though it does require careful consideration about how to integrate them with other data.

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Organizational communication researchers have also adopted techniques that take advantage of video and photography to enable or enhance participatory methods. In these cases, fieldwork may entail training a camera on a particular setting to capture what occurs there. The video methods deployed by Cooren and colleagues stand out for their ability to capture interaction for detailed analyses (e.g., Cooren et  al., 2007). Cooren and colleagues have described video as allowing them to “better understand [participants’] daily activities, as well as the type of challenges and problems they tend to encounter (and how they go about resolving them)” (p. 159). They suggest that three advantages of video recording are: obtaining a more “faithful representation” of field activity; being able to revisit the video and audio representations of what occurred in the field; and providing for a kind of “falsifiability” in that the recordings may be made available to others to review and critique the analyses and findings (pp. 159–160). Another technique that organizational communication researchers have embraced is photovoice, or photo-visual methods (PVM). With these techniques, researchers invite participants to “communicate in different modalities” by taking photos or creating other ways to convey their experiences beyond more traditional methods. The data produced then become “a shared focus for researcher/ participant communication,” as participants explain what they created, including their process and interpretations (Wilhoit, 2017, p. 448). In their study of how unemployed individuals experience and discuss food security and insecurity, Dougherty et  al. (2018) argued that “[p]articipants became more active in the research process and their photos offered another source of data to triangulate that became a window into their lives” (p. 448). It is not that the photos or visuals “stand for themselves.” Rather, PVM guides the participatory researcher in “knowing which questions to ask, understanding what is important to participants, creating rapport,

and communicating with participants about taken-for-granted knowledge that participants might not otherwise see as important enough to discuss” (p. 450; see also Chapter 19 in this volume.)

Leaving the Site Leaving the site is typically understood as the end of time in the field, and yet we would caution that, in a sense, the researcher never leaves the site. That is, their presence has become a moment in the development of the site of organizing, even if a minor one or only for a few participants. Researchers may also remain in the field at the research site (e.g., continuing to be employed or as a volunteer). What it means to “leave the site” is an understudied phase in organizational communication, not just in terms of what the various parties feel or think about the research, but also in terms of the journey of the data. Researchers describe their data collection process in publications but must typically limit the discussion such that the time in the field and afterwards becomes flattened. Leaving the field also takes many forms. Tracy (2020) argued that exit depends on the “relationship with participants, immersion in the field, and resources (in terms of time, power or money) to travel, present wrap-up reports and conduct member reflections” (Tracy, 2020, p. 345). Tracy recommends that researchers think about leaving the research site in the ways that they might leave a job, community, or romantic relationship—provide adequate notice, engage in leave-taking rituals, leave good “guest reviews,” and clean up. Member reflections are often an important part of this phase, as they invite participants to provide feedback on the researchers’ preliminary interpretation of the findings and provide space for additional sensemaking. Jensen et al. (2022), for instance, facilitated meetings that served as a check of the findings and also involved additional opportunities for participants to elaborate how they could or would make

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choices about communication. We shared preliminary findings, invited participants to amplify, clarify, modify, and challenge findings with their own examples and stories…and prompted participants to discuss and share actions they planned to take having heard and talked about the findings. (p. 40)

These kinds of reflections can deepen researchers’ understandings and signal to those involved that the research is changing phase. As formal data collection concludes, researchers should also prepare to meet any commitments they made in terms of what they would deliver to the research site. This might mean providing raw or formatted data, proposing an intervention strategy, or developing training based on the findings. These obligations may take some time to plan and coordinate, which means that researchers might be involved in the field long after they have ceased “formal” data collection. Kunda (2006) reported that a year after concluding data collection, he was contacted by a manager at his research site who insisted that Kunda deliver the report he had originally promised. (He did.) Leaving might also require that researchers reveal their researcher role if previously concealed (e.g., Murphy, 1998). Sullivan (2012) expressed regret that the participants (massage therapists) in her study did not learn of her researcher status: Despite the institution’s support, and upon reflection, I regret not sharing my research purpose with students. This is not because I think that obscuring my role did harm, only that I do not believe that being open about my research purpose would have either. (pp. 279–280)

We can imagine, in fact, that Sullivan’s participants might have found it interesting and also legitimizing to learn that research was being conducted regarding their profession, given the marginal status of massage therapy that Sullivan explores. Finally, significant emotions can accompany leaving a site—for the researcher and the participants. Tracy (2020) reflected:

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When I left my cruise ship field research to return to graduate school, I experienced a huge sense of relief, but I also felt lost and discombobulated. As I took off in the airplane to go home, I remember peering out of the airplane window at the massive Radiant Spirit cruise ship docked just several miles away. With my nose pressed against the glass, I watched as my entire world for eight months grew smaller and smaller until, finally, it was just a little white dot and disappeared. Tears streamed down my face. Even though I had grown to detest certain parts of cruise ship life, I appreciated its safe routine, and I did not know where my next paycheck would come from. Even if I kept in touch with my cruise ship friends, I was leaving a vibrant and unique chapter of my life forever. (p. 346)

Tracy acknowledged that her experience may be “extreme,” given that she undertook research that required her to be highly enmeshed. Nonetheless, she encouraged researchers to “feel the feelings” about leaving the research site, writing, “[i]f you feel grief, elation, sadness, joy, or even selfrighteousness upon exit, you should know that you are not the only one to feel that way. Strong feelings are common when disengaging from the research” (p. 347).

OPEN QUESTIONS IN PARTICIPATORY RESEARCH METHODS We conclude the chapter by reflecting on how participatory methods might continue to be used, altered, and crystallized in organizational communication research. First, we want to return to the fact that doing fieldwork well often requires a significant amount of time and attention from individual researchers. Most organizational communication researchers teach and have service obligations to their departments and universities, and changes in the academy are eroding the availability of research leaves for even the privileged few with access to them. Moreover, article page length norms mean that much of the labor of participatory methods goes

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unacknowledged or unexplored. Working with a research team to collaborate on fieldwork can allow researchers to widen their focus, yet this too requires iterative, continuous conversations among researchers and participants and is thus also time and energy intensive. Related to issues of access and privilege, our discipline needs to continue to push the conversation around identity and embodiment in participatory research methods. As discussed, some organizational communication scholars are taking on this important work, which not only fosters conversations of representation, privilege, and inequality in the field and in organizations more broadly, but it also encourages researchers to explore how identities and status, themselves, enable and shape projects, data, and analyses. For this reason, consideration of identity moves beyond issues of equality and access to also speak to epistemological questions of how knowledge is produced. The field has begun this conversation, but there is certainly more to be had, particularly in disentangling participatory methods and characterizations of identity from the Western norms that underpin the field. Thus, organizational communication should build greater infrastructure and strengthen pathways to support fieldwork and the complex discussions that accompany it. Our professional associations could assist by providing online teaching resources and advocating for the validity of online teaching as a way to create more flexible research pathways. We appreciate that our disciplinary journals have dedicated forum space to some of these issues (e.g., Jensen et  al., 2020; Stephens et  al., 2020; Taylor et  al., 2021). Additionally, journal editors and reviewers in organizational communication and the allied fields need to be sensitive to the rigors of participatory methods and the consequences of length and format constraints. Journal article page lengths, for instance, could be overcome with dedicated space for online research supplements.

Organizational communication researchers engaged in participatory research also need to grapple with the larger call for open access data; notably, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) recommended over two decades ago that research that is publicly funded be made accessible to broader research communities. The OECD and other proponents of open access data argue that open access “enable[s] verification of analyses and challenge[s] research findings by the academic, research, and government communities” (Chauvette et al., 2019, p. 1). Correctly, qualitative and participatory researchers have concerns about the appropriateness of depositing and releasing data. Secondary analysis of primary data collected through participatory methods lacks the crucial spirit of this approach, which is in the researcher’s “having been there.” Relatedly, publishing data may detach them from the identities and bodies, settings and contexts that generated them, and “the nature and characteristics of the contextdependent knowledge may not be apparent when data are reused” (p. 3). Ethical considerations abound, as well, given that published data may violate the principles of informed consent or risk causing harm to participants. Yet, we recognize that calls for open access are only increasing, and that open access data can offer benefits to research communities and provide avenues of empowerment for participants and the wider public. Organizational communication researchers undertaking participatory methods will need to respond to requirements to make research designs, coding materials, and data available, and we should feel empowered to adopt open science principles and mandates to the requirements of participatory methods. Publishing even redacted or anonymized field notes may be unethical or impossible, but it may be possible to publish other data artifacts such as coding lists, intermediate analytical tools, and aggregated notes or data about those field notes. Participant researchers need new vocabularies for describing their research

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for audiences who expect open access to the research process and who are unfamiliar with why that access may be inappropriate in the context of participatory methods. As a field, we need to develop standards that protect the integrity of participatory research while also making data available to the degree possible. As a starting point for this conversation, we might look to the literature on organizational transparency and secrecy to understand the tensions and contradictions of openness (see Albu, 2022). Finally, we are acutely aware of how the surge of virtual organizing (e.g., remote work, Zoom meetings) may encourage online participatory research methods, perhaps most often taking the form of complete or focused witnessing (see Chapter 34 in this volume). To be sure, organizational communication researchers have begun discussing virtual participation during and now as the COVID-19 global pandemic becomes endemic (e.g., Taylor et  al., 2021). Virtual participatory research introduces complexity in questions about access, identity, and leaving the field, as well as how to relate to participants at the intersection of online and in-person organizing. Additionally, although virtual participation may seem to offer the promise of access and/or invisibility, neither is simple or guaranteed. A witness in a Zoom meeting, for instance, has still obtained permission from someone to be there, and is likely to be represented by an identity “tile,” even if blank.

CONCLUSION Call it witnessing, fieldwork, shadowing, or engaging—this chapter should make clear the rich variety of participatory research in organizational communication and insights produced. In reviewing the typical typology of participatory methods, we emphasized that such methods are rarely, if ever, static. Researchers must rely on others in and

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around the research site to undertake a successful study. This connectedness should not scare away the novice researcher but encourage them to deepen their understanding of participatory methods and engage in conversations with others who have undertaken this work. Participatory methods are strong in organizational communication research, as is the discipline’s wisdom about the possibilities and limits of participation.

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18 Collecting Digital Data in Qualitative Organizational Communication Research Jennifer L. Gibbs and Salla-Maaria Laaksonen

Since the interpretive turn in the 1980s (Putnam & Pacanowsky, 1983; Taylor et al., 2001; Weick, 1979), the field of organi­ zational communication has moved beyond simplistic conceptualizations of organi­ zations as physical containers to conceptualize processes of organizing as communicatively constituted (Boivin et  al., 2017; Fairhurst & Putnam, 2004). This has opened up new research opportunities including digital sites of organizing that transcend physical buildings and offices to include online communities, social movements, and other forms of digitally enabled collective action. Exploring these sites enriches our understanding and conceptualization of organizations, organizing, and organizational communication. The increasing use of digital archives and digital communication platforms for work and organizing practices provides organizational communication scholars with vast amounts of data available for research. Communication technologies such

as group chat and instant messaging, audio and videoconferencing, intranets, online forums, enterprise social media, artificial intelligence, and other work-related systems and applications enact and document organizational communication behavior through archived posts and messages. Much of this data is textual and lends itself to qualitative research. Along with renewed research promise, however, come a variety of new challenges in data collection. Digital sites of organizing often require adaptation of methods to capture and analyze new types and larger amounts of data produced by digital platforms. This chapter discusses digital data collection in qualitative organizational communication research. We start out by providing an overview of types and characteristics of digital data. We then proceed to discuss research exemplars that rely on digital data either alone or in combination with more classical qualitative methods including observation

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and interviews, as well as studies that combine qualitative and quantitative methods. Our goal is not to conduct a comprehensive review of the literature, but rather to illustrate a variety of approaches to data collection both in and on digital contexts. This includes both digital data (data collected from digital technologies and platforms) and data collected about digital contexts through qualitative methods. Organizational communication scholars have a long tradition of studying organizational phenomena as discursive constructions (Fairhurst & Putnam, 2004; Putnam & Pacanowsky, 1983), as examining how people communicate about organizational phenomena is an important way of learning about how they make sense of and socially construct them (Tracy, 2020). Qualitative organizational communication scholars are increasingly interested in materiality as well (Ashcraft et al., 2009; Boivin et  al., 2017), and digital data provides new ways of capturing the sociomaterial features and affordances of digital platforms and how they shape communicative processes. As such, we consider it important to address qualitative methods that capture both data from communication technologies as well as discursive data about technology and digital media—which can help to contextualize and construct meaning of digital data. The chapter is structured as follows: the first three sections review various types and characteristics of digital data, as well as outline several considerations for accessing and working with (or “wrangling”) digital data. The second half of the chapter provides an overview of various methodological approaches for collecting digital data, as well as discusses challenges and limitations of working with digital data in qualitative organizational communication research, followed by a conclusion. The goal of this chapter is to encourage researchers to think creatively about digital data sources and stimulate new innovative approaches to qualitative data collection in organizational communication research.

DIGITAL DATA IN ORGANIZATIONAL COMMUNICATION RESEARCH Our increasingly digital society provides organizational communication researchers with an abundance of various types of digital data, ranging from public to nonpublic data and from textual to audiovisual data. Public forms of data include different types of communication by the organization or its members: websites, press releases, statements, annual reports, speeches, presentations, and social media messages. Nonpublic forms of data include, for example, internal documents, memos, meeting minutes, intranet content, email, and chat logs from online communication systems. Such data objects have obviously existed before, perhaps in more physical forms, but in digital formats they can be stored and accessed in novel ways. These types of data can be used as traces of various organizing processes, but organizational communication scholars also study the communicative meanings of these data. Consequently, they have raised increasing interest as objects of study in organizational communication research: for instance, public data may reveal how organizations communicate their reputation and identity to external audiences (Albu & Etter, 2016) and regulate boundaries between life domains (Banghart et al., 2018), while nonpublic data may communicate status differences and knowledge disparities among groups of employees (Gibbs et al., 2021a; Kim, 2018). One profound change brought about by the digitalization of society and organizational life is that human interaction and social action, be it in a public (open membership) or private (closed or restricted membership) context (also referred to as open versus closed, see Gibbs et al., 2021b), also increasingly leave digital traces in various databases. The typical understanding of digital traces refers to quantifiable traces of action such as follower connections or retweets (e.g., Freelon, 2014; Howison et  al., 2011), but the patterns, contents, and meanings of those

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traces are also similarly of interest to qualitative organizational communication scholars who are interested in interaction and communication taking place inside and around organizations. Organizational communication, thus, can manifest as situated and ephemeral forms of communication such as conversations or interactions, or more stable and durable forms such as texts or documents (Kuhn, 2008; Taylor & Van Every, 2000). These modalities, documents and interaction, are combined with the public/nonpublic dimension in Figure 18.1, which depicts some examples of digital data relevant for qualitative organizational communication research. Digital data for qualitative organizational communication research, thus, come in various forms and from a variety of sources, which are typically different digital platforms and tools on which the data are accumulated. We will explain Figure 18.1 by starting at the top-left and then moving down-left to down-right, and then ending with top-right. First, document-type (Quadrants A and B) digital data in organizations originate from

Figure 18.1  Different Types of Digital Data

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databases that store documents. Not all documents are necessarily relevant for qualitative organizational communication research, but many could be considered either as petrified manifestations of past communication (Laaksonen & Lambotte, 2022; Taylor & Van Every, 2000) or objects that are used for communication in the organization or by the organization. Think of, for example, press releases and annual reports that communicate to stakeholders, or memos and internal reports that share information and decisions inside organizations. Document data thus come in both public and nonpublic forms, and are typically persistent (codified and archived) and in written text. Nonpublic document data (Quadrant B) can also originate from technical systems adopted by organizations. Organizational activities are perhaps more typically than not archived and reported in various information systems that aim to follow processes and performance and simultaneously build organizational knowledge and control (Ratner & Gad, 2019). Such systems might include numerical or algorithmic data (such as the

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ratings of Uber drivers), which lend themselves to qualitative analysis through observation of patterns of use and interpretation of their meaning, such as in growing studies on algorithmic control and surveillance (e.g., Chan & Humphreys, 2018; Newlands, 2021), but also textual data such as reports, or openended questions in survey data. Consider, for example, annual performance appraisals with employees and supervisors, typically supported by reporting forms used in the discussion. As mentioned, organizational interactions are also increasingly recorded in digital formats that take the form of nonpublic interactions, either as logs of textual interchanges or as recorded audiovisual content from conference calls to customer service recordings (Quadrant C in Figure 18.1). One increasingly popular data source of interest for organizational communication scholars is the digital platforms used for internal, i.e., nonpublic communication in organizations. These tools, with market names such as Yammer, Jive, Facebook Workplace, or Slack, are called by a variety of terms: enterprise social media (ESM), enterprise social platforms, enterprise social networks (ESN), or online collaboration software (OCS) (e.g., Leonardi et  al., 2013); we use ESM here as it is the most common term. They are online platforms where organizational members can communicate with other specific members or broadcast messages across the entire organization, build network connections with other members, and typically also share and edit documents to collaborate (Leonardi et al., 2013). ESM thus constitute new channels, contexts, and practices for organizational communication (e.g., Laaksonen, 2021), and facilitate social interaction and collaboration in the entire organization or in teams (e.g., Sinclaire & Vogus, 2011). ESM typically provide researchers with timestamped interaction data that can also be complemented with data about user affiliations, networks, and shared attachments. Accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic, video conferencing and virtual meetings have become another increasingly

common form of nonpublic interaction data in and across organizations. Consequently, scholars of organizational communication could also engage in data collection by recording or observing virtual and visual interaction. Such forms of data are often more ephemeral and allow for a multimodal and multi-sensorial understanding of organizational communication (see Chapter 19 in this volume). Finally, public interaction data may be extracted from public social media platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn, or professional online forums, such as Wikipedia or GitHub, (Quadrant D in Figure 18.1). Most organizations have adopted some social media channels for their external communication, thus producing digital data that represent the official corporate voice. Employees might also actively communicate about organizationrelated issues using their personal professional profiles on public social media (e.g., Albu & Etter, 2016; Miles & Mangold, 2014). The degree of publicness of such forms may vary but is nevertheless less restricted than intraorganizational communication; consider for example discussion groups by employees in public social media (e.g., Askay & Gossett, 2015) or counter-institutional websites (Gossett & Kilker, 2006). What is common to all these data types regardless of their ephemeral nature and level of publicness is that they are not only stored but also formed in a specific technological context. They are constructed in a sociomaterial process that imbues digital data types with unique characteristics that need to be considered when doing research. Next, we will discuss what makes digital data special.

CHARACTERISTICS OF DIGITAL DATA Most forms of digital data in organizational contexts are secondary data and they are investigated through document-based research, which means that the data have been originally

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compiled for non-research purposes (Prior, 2003). Therefore, they are often heterogeneous and do not directly answer the research question—compared to, for example, interviews or surveys that are designed by the researcher. For this reason, a researcher has to consider how to work with the data to fruitfully provide meaningful insights into the research problem. This requires, first, skills and careful consideration when interpreting phenomena identified in the data and making them speak to theoretical concepts. Second, an understanding of the context in which the data were created is crucial. Indeed, what makes digital data special is that they are always produced on and mediated by digital technology. The datasets are representations of organizational action (e.g., Stablein, 2006), but also socio-technical products of the systems, their users, and social processes related to their use (e.g., Bates et al., 2016; Ruppert et al., 2017). Thus, the platform on which digital data are produced and hosted on influences the way in which communication and other social processes unfold (e.g., Bates et al., 2016; Gitelman, 2013; Ruppert et  al., 2017). Therefore, any analysis of such material should consider the effects of the technology on which the text is produced and distributed. A lingering question in the broader field of social sciences using digital data is how to demarcate the social action and the mediating technology in research (e.g., Venturini et  al., 2018). Considering such issues becomes even more challenging when working with communication platforms such as ESM that utilize newsfeeds, the content of which is typically organized and curated algorithmically (Gillespie, 2014). Digital methods and critical platform studies offer some methods to recognize and study the effects of algorithmic technology (Venturini et al., 2018), but it can be an arduous task. At minimum, a researcher who works with digital data should aim to gain a basic understanding of the technological context

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on which their data have been produced by observing the system and its use.

Mediated Interactions The sociotechnical (or sociomaterial) nature of digital conversation data and the specificities of such text have been studied for decades by computer-mediated communication (CMC) and digital discourse scholars, with the main aim to explore and explain how communication is changed when it is mediated by technologies (e.g., Carr, 2020; Herring, 2003; Thurlow, 2018; Yao & Ling, 2020). The key argument in these studies is, indeed, that the transmitting medium affects both production and interpretation of text. The language used on digital communication platforms typically evolves to include specific textual and linguistic features that might be typical for a given platform and its culture. Overall, digital language has been characterized as a mixed register that combines features and styles of spoken and written language (Baron, 2008; Ferrara et  al., 2009). At the same time, digital texts are often a mixture of informal and formal language. In particular, users have been creative in inventing expressive mechanisms to compensate for missing gestures, emotions, sounds and even smell via digital text (Baym, 2015). Such mixing has helped to alleviate early concerns about digitally mediated communication as lacking nonverbal communication and social cues, which could lead to CMC being an impoverished, easily misunderstood form of communication (Baym, 2015; Herring, 2003). Yet, these new nonverbal cues such as emojis, memes, or animated gifs create new ­challenges for researchers as their meaning is subtle and may be platform- or culture-­ specific and requires in-depth understanding of the particular community’s norms around technology use. Another profound effect of the digital format relates to the editability as well as

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temporality and ephemerality of the data. Some forms of communication are more persistent than others; for example, texts and documents are generally considered to be objects that endure over time better than conversations (Fairhurst & Putnam, 2004; Taylor & Van Every, 2000). The digital format changes this setting: interactions also persist over time when stored in digital formats (e.g., boyd, 2010; Treem & Leonardi, 2013). This applies to asynchronous textual interactions on messaging platforms, but also increasingly to synchronous virtual interactions such as presentations and meetings that can be recorded for later use. However, digital material can be modified in nonlinear ways while it is being created, and particularly, textual forms can also be easily edited and altered later (e.g., boyd, 2010). This renders digital objects unfinished products, objects that change over time or even disappear if deleted. Therefore, while the digital format might add temporal persistence to communication, it also introduces instability and ephemerality. The growing emphasis on ephemeral data, particularly on public social media platforms (e.g., SnapChat, Facebook, and Instagram stories) presents challenges for researchers in terms of accessing and preserving such data for analysis. Persistent content presents its own challenges; while it may be easier to collect, it may also require additional insight into the time period when it was posted in order to put it into proper context. Questions related to the temporalities involved in the data creation are manifold: Was the collected material perhaps edited before it was collected for research? Did a post look different when people were commenting on it? Is the edit history available for the researcher?

Mixed and Developing Forms of Data Not all digital data are text-based: public social media platforms are turning increasingly multimodal, as the content types are

commonly images, video, or shared visual resources such as gifs and emojis (e.g., Highfield & Leaver, 2016; Thurlow, 2018). As ESM platforms are adopting features from public social media services, such visual practices might move from external corporate and strategic communication also to internal communication. Even emojis are slowly entering the workplace lexicon despite the warnings presented in netiquettes (e.g., Skovholt et al., 2014). The shifts in temporality and editability also apply to visual forms of data, as does the notion of the platformshaped data. The platform effect is, actually, particularly well demonstrated in the use of emojis; different platforms offer different sets of emojis and might display them in different ways. This, along with the varying solutions provided for communicating with gifs and stickers, introduce more devices for meaning-making in organizational communication, and consequently more issues to consider for qualitative organizational communication researchers. Storing and analyzing visual forms of data might create additional challenges and require different methodological approaches to understand the meanings they convey (see Chapter 19 in this volume). Furthermore, digital textual datasets often include some numerical data: timestamps, metrics of engagement such as views or likes, and access logs. These are variables that can be operationalized as cues of, for example, interest, popularity, or disagreement, and they can also be used to filter and organize large datasets. Blaschke and colleagues (2012), for example, used document revisions from a corporate database to identify communication networks. Using metrics, again, requires contextual knowledge: what do the numbers convey, and in which context they were curated? For instance, algorithms on social media platforms typically organize content in their feeds and tend to push popular content to the top (e.g., Gillespie, 2014). Therefore, popular items gain even more engagement because they are amplified by the platform

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architecture, not necessarily because they are genuinely popular (i.e., the Matthew Effect; see Merton, 1968). This further underscores the need for qualitative organizational communication researchers who use numerical data to filter or interpret their data to familiarize themselves with the social and technological context where the numbers were born. In the next section, we will address more practical issues related to accessing and working with various forms of digital data.

ACCESSING AND WRANGLING DIGITAL DATA Digital data are stored in databases and typically accessed through a user interface (Manovich, 2001). For research purposes, data can be accessed either using the same interface as regular users or using programmatic access through Application ­ Programming Interfaces (APIs, see Bruns, 2019). User interfaces provide access to qualitative data either through content views and feeds, search tools, or as data exports. Content views and feeds allow the researcher to access the content like a regular user, following the data structure of the platform, for example, by providing a list of documents in a folder or a feed of most recent posts. Search tools can be used to query the content with a specific keyword and typically filter the results with metadata variables, such as timestamps or authors. From online sources, the search results or required views can be stored as saved pages, screenshots, or printed as PDF documents. It is important to keep in mind that most feeds and searches are systems that provide algorithmically organized content. Therefore, the researcher is rarely provided with a naïve view of the data. However, on some occasions, qualitative organizational communication researchers may wish to access algorithmically organized data, for example, to understand what the communication looks like for

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actual users, or to explore the logics of the algorithmic platform (Rogers, 2013). Finally, some platforms, e.g., HR systems or ESM platforms, allow data to be exported in tabular format either via built-in platform features or through APIs, typically in a batch of several documents or database entries in answer to a query given by the user. Whether using the interface or exported formats, the data typically need to be accessed and filtered using queries. On nonpublic platforms searches could be targeted, for example, to specific teams of persons; on public platforms a common strategy is to use keywords or hashtags to filter the messages. Finding the correct query parameters requires exploration and careful checks of the query results. Some social movements or topics might be easily marked with a hashtag, but complex topics can be harder to locate with keywords, and on platforms that support threaded conversations a keyword search might leave out responses that do not mention the queried word. Therefore, organizational communication researchers should qualitatively explore their data before settling on a final search and consider multi-phased strategies to extract the data. For example, an initial keyword query could be used to identify main actors related to a theme and then the researcher could extract all messages from these users (e.g., Lorentzen & Nolin, 2017), taking into account the ethical and legal considerations (these will be discussed further in a later section of this chapter). Typically, some data wrangling is needed to transform the data into a suitable format for qualitative analysis. These procedures might include further filtering the data, perhaps ordering the messages or selecting a suitable file format for the qualitative analysis procedure. Methods such as qualitative content analysis that aim to categorize or label the data may benefit from using a tabular, structured format like spreadsheets that allows for sorting and filtering the data using the inputted

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categories or labels. Then again, qualitative textual analysis methods such as discourse or narrative analysis (see Chapters 21 and 26 in this volume) might be more easily conducted if the data are in digitally printed format like pdfs or screenshots, which also preserve the original visual layout and visual elements of the platform and thus provide a more ecologically valid feel for the original communication environment. Documents and pdfs, however, lose the advantage of using metadata variables to filter and organize the data. The research problem should guide the researcher in choosing what to include in their data. Next, we move on to illustrate various methods of digital data collection in qualitative organizational communication research.

METHODOLOGICAL APPROACHES FOR COLLECTING DIGITAL DATA In this section, we review empirical qualitative organizational communication research that has incorporated digital data. The goal of this section is not to provide a comprehensive review of all such literature, but rather to illustrate the range of methodological approaches that organizational communication scholars have taken to collect and work with digital data. We will discuss approaches that include using digital textual data directly, but also combinations of methods such as using ethnographic data to complement digital data, using interview data to complement digital data, and using interviews about digital data. The rationale for employing a mixed methods strategy (see also Chapter 1 in this volume) is to harness the strengths of each while offsetting their respective weaknesses (Arksey & Knight, 1999; Tashakkori & Teddlie, 1998). A typical disadvantage of digital data is its lack of contextualization. Traditional qualitative approaches such as interviews can be implemented to provide deeper understanding of the meanings and

perceptions behind decontextualized data from digital platforms.

Textual Analysis of Digital Data Given the voluminous amount of archived textual data available in digital contexts through messages and posts, textual analysis has become a primary source of digital data collection in qualitative organizational communication research. One genre of this approach is studies that analyze messages and posts in online forums and communities, thus with a focus on private or public interaction data (Quadrants C and D in Figure 18.1). For instance, in their study on a political brand activism campaign by a candy producer, Pöyry and Laaksonen (2022) engaged in qualitative content analysis of 1,615 social media messages by stakeholders who criticized the campaign. The messages were extracted using a proprietary social media database, from Twitter and online forums, by querying with the campaign hashtag and the account name. The authors used an inductive approach to identify various triggers and strategies stakeholders used to oppose the campaign, and correspondence analysis to explore the connections between the identified qualitative categories. Another good analysis strategy to deal with large datasets is to filter them with keywords and then select a suitable strategy to analyze the filtered data. Such a strategy was used by Laitinen et  al. (2021) who were interested in discussions with the Slackbot on an organizational Slack platform. They used a set of keywords to identify bot-related messages and communication episodes from the full dataset, thus making it possible to conduct an iterative classification of the data. Another common approach to textual analysis is interorganizational or public relations studies of corporate websites and social media interactions with customers and stakeholders around specific policies and campaigns (e.g., Dawson & Brunner,

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2020; Wong & Dhanesh, 2017). Such studies work with public document data (see Figure 18.1). One study relied on textual data from social media policies to examine the boundary logics they articulated in order to better understand the expansion of corporate control across multiple life domains (personal, professional, and public) in the digital age (Banghart et  al., 2018). These scholars conducted a content analysis of 112 social media policies from major corporations using a mixed inductive-deductive coding procedure. A team of four independent coders were trained using a detailed, 19–page coding manual and went through several rounds to establish adequate intercoder reliability. Coders initially coded each section of the social media policies for the presence or absence of boundary specifications, and then further coded boundary logics in terms of rigidity or permeability, accounting for material, spatial, temporal, and sociocontexual boundaries. Collecting public forms of textual data (policies, websites) has also been a common approach in research on communication of corporate social responsibility (CSR), which has examined discursive strategies and paradoxes in CSR communication through policies and reports posted on corporate websites as well as in social media interactions (e.g., Wong & Dhanesh, 2017). For instance, Dawson and Brunner (2020) examined how Patagonia discursively responded to wide-ranging and contradictory public input in order to communicate CSR to disparate stakeholders in what they called “wild public networks”. Their data collection included Patagonia’s communications on its website, blog, and traditional media, as well as social media comments and interactions on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. They used close textual analysis (CTA) to analyze the data, mapping discourses by coding for broader narratives and then charting how conversations moved across discourses and beyond social media. Overall, social media provides publicly available and versatile data

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to explore stakeholder interaction and their discourses regarding organizations.

Complementing Digital Data with Ethnographic Data Ethnographic approaches have been extended to study online contexts as well, through cyber ethnography or netnography. An example is Nissenbaum and Shifman’s (2017) investigation of the social dynamics in the 4Chan community, using an approach derived from netnography (Kozinets, 2002, 2010). Specifically, they studied memes in a specific 4Chan board through observation and textual analysis, looking for cases of social violations and condemnation to explain how memes act as cultural capital. The ephemeral nature of the site made sampling difficult, as it required sampling in real time by capturing web pages before they were removed as part of the site’s regular operations. As the authors were interested in meme-related “breaching” events, they targeted relevant posts through keyword searches for a specific term used by the community to derogatorily refer to outsiders and “meme.” Their keyword search identified 130 relevant threads. Threads with partial content or excessive length were excluded, and the final sample was reduced to 228 relevant meme-related comments. In another hybrid online/in-person ethnographic study, Albu and Etter (2016) analyzed publicly available Twitter hashtags to illuminate how organizing is constituted through hypertextuality across space and time through discursive-material interactions. The authors conducted a case study of two diverse organizations (an international cooperative and a multinational fast food chain) that engaged in strategic communication via Twitter with a variety of audiences. Their study relied on textual analysis of samples of 1,219 tweets from Alpha and 1,423 tweets from Beta, selected by purposive sampling and systematic random sampling of every 14th tweet over the first few days of

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campaigns. These electronic data were combined with an in-person field study of the two sites, which gathered additional qualitative data through semi-structured interviews with top and middle managers as well as 40 hours of observation and participation in meetings about social media strategies. The tweets were coded using the constant comparative method (Charmaz, 2001) and then compared and contrasted with the observation and interview data. As the two different ethnographic studies above show, digital data may be used on its own, or it may be complemented with other data sources. As an example of the former, Glozer and colleagues (2018) used digital nonparticipatory observation and made detailed field notes on the Facebook pages of two organizations to study discursive legitimation taking place through dialogue and competing knowledge claims by organi­ zations and their stakeholders. On the other hand, sometimes the only way to investigate the uses of and communication around digital systems is to follow people using them. A common approach to do this involves ethnographic observations and interviews. For instance, Barley (2015) conducted a yearlong ethnography of four research teams at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) that used applied weather modeling technologies (models and data representations) to forecast future weather conditions. During this time, the researcher spent 40 hours per week onsite conducting systematic work observations and taking detailed field notes (including audio transcripts, documents, and computer screenshots). In addition, Barley conducted 26 semi-structured interviews with organizational members from multiple occupational roles (e.g., atmospheric scientists and software engineers). Relying on ethnographic observation combined with in-depth interviews allowed for the findings that researchers performed anticipatory work that involved strategically manipulating data representations when communicating across knowledge boundaries, highlighting

the performative nature of knowledge construction in cross-functional teams. This is an example of a genre of study using traditional, in-person ethnographic approaches to study the impacts of new technologies in organi­ zations (for additional examples, see Barrett et  al., 2012; Beane, 2020; Leonardi, 2009; Mazmanian et al., 2013; Oborn et al., 2019; Stanko & Beckman, 2015). This approach often combines ethnographic observation with interviews and/or archival data, through longitudinal analysis.

Using Qualitative Methods to Complement Quantitative Data Qualitative data can also be fruitfully combined with quantitative data to produce mixed methods studies (see Chapter 1 in this volume) of digital contexts. Apart from textual data, digital platforms such as ESM provide vast amounts of digital trace data that can be accessed through quantitative, computational approaches such as server log analysis and network analysis and used to reveal patterns of communication behavior in terms of digital interactions through likes and other reactions, friending and following behavior, and comments. However, a disadvantage of this data is its lack of contextualization. Qualitative approaches ­ such as textual analysis of the content, or interviews of the users, can be combined with computational methods to provide deeper understanding of the meanings and perceptions behind decontextualized data from digital platforms. For instance, Gibbs et al. (2015) conducted a study of cross-boundary communication in ESM through a case study of a large Russian telecommunications company. They used server log data from a year’s worth of ESM interactions to analyze the degree of crosshierarchical and cross-regional communication and how it changed over time after the platform was introduced by management and was rolled out to lower-level employees.

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While the server log data revealed interaction patterns, they coupled this with in-depth interviews with a range of employees to shed light on how the technology was perceived and the meanings it held for geographically distributed employees, who expressed feeling isolated previously and appreciated the opportunity to have more direct communication with upper management through ESM interactions. They reported feeling a stronger sense of belonging to the company as a result of their ability to interact with employees across regions and time zones through the new ESM tool. Other studies have also combined digital data in the form of emails with in-depth interviews to examine how teams discursively construct subgroups as well as learning processes (Erhardt et  al., 2016; Gibbs et al., 2021a).

Interviews about Digital Data Finally, many qualitative studies of digital contexts in organizational communication draw on case studies using in-depth interviews about digital contexts—without directly using digital data—to explore organizational members’ perceptions and interpretations of digital tools and the ways in which they are constituting or changing organizing practices in particular organizations (e.g., Erhardt & Gibbs, 2010; Gibbs et  al., 2013; Newlands, 2021; Treem, 2015). For instance, Treem et al. (2015) interviewed 58 employees from a leadership program in a large financial service company to better understand their technological frames and how they affected their perceptions and use of a new ESM platform recently adopted by the company. They conducted two rounds of interviews, one before the ESM tool was adopted, and the other round on a subset of these employees in departments in which it had been implemented for several months. Their findings revealed that younger and more experienced social media users were less likely to use the ESM platform, as they

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regarded it as unsuitable for professional communication. In another recent study, Endacott and Leonardi (2022) interviewed employees from organizations using two different artificially intelligent scheduling assistants, including both principals who used these technologies and their communication partners, to understand inductively how the use of autonomous conversational agents to communicate on one’s behalf affected impression management practices among organizational members. While interview-based studies do not necessarily draw on digital data directly, they nevertheless can reveal important insights into the ways in which digital technologies are shaping organizational communication practices. In particular, when combined with analyses of digital trace data qualitative organizational communication researchers can produce versatile understanding of their use.

CHALLENGES AND LIMITATIONS While the prior sections have documented the benefits and promises of digital data collection in qualitative organizational communication research, it is not without challenges. In this section, we discuss several key challenges and limitations associated with digital data collection, including negotiating access, messy and/or incomplete data, and legal and ethical issues. Several of these issues are further discussed in Chapter 27 in this volume.

Negotiating Access While online platforms provide a wealth of new data sources that are archived and more easily accessible in some ways (e.g., publicly available data in websites, online forums, and social media platforms), negotiating access to organizational data—especially

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nonpublic data—remains one of the greatest challenges. Organizations are often reluctant to share digital textual data due to concerns about employee privacy and the proprietary nature of organizational knowledge. As a result, qualitative organizational communication researchers must often make creative use of limited or incomplete data; indeed, complete data may be a misnomer in digital data collection. For example, Gibbs et al. (2015) were able to get access to the entire first year’s worth of data from an enterprise social media tool adopted by a large Russian telecommunications company through a partnership with the designer of the tool. While the technology producer (a small Russian start-up) was eager to work with researchers from the US to lend legitimacy to its product, the client company had privacy concerns around sharing its employee data and was only willing to share the digital server log data without posts and comments. The authors were able to access a wealth of digital trace data (likes, patterns of interaction, and demographic information on posters such as job title and location) and about one third of the posts had tags (in Russian) which were translated to identify general topics and whether they were work-related or social in nature. From this, the authors were able to analyze changes in cross-boundary communication over time by analyzing interactive dyads and whether they were from the same or different hierarchical rank and geographical region. In another example, Kim (2018) conducted field research in a global high-tech organization including analysis of its ESM tool, Yammer. While she was given access to the company Yammer account and was able to monitor messages, the research site did not allow her to use any of the textual data in her analysis. While she could not analyze messages, she did an analysis of headquarters (HQ) versus subsidiary sites and their patterns of knowledge contributions to several different groups. This led to the uncovering of global status hierarchies: HQ employees

were more likely to contribute higher-level knowledge, whereas non-HQ employees were more likely to seek (rather than provide) knowledge or provide simple status updates. In this way, ESM gave dispersed workers increased access to knowledge, but it also revealed knowledge disparities and reinforced status hierarchies. Questions of access might be also connected to organizational policies. As an example, Laitinen and Sivunen (2020) conducted a study on the factors shaping employees’ decisions to share or not share information on an ESM platform. The company refused to allow them to collect the contents of the ESM posts due to concerns about privacy. As a workaround, the authors combined interviews with ESM reviews, in which the first author viewed ESM posts during the interview and was allowed to take pictures and notes related to them. In another example, one of the authors of this chapter (Laaksonen) and her colleagues (Hakala et  al., 2014) used data from a crisis communication exercise on a closed Yammer platform to simulate social media communication. The platform had been created specifically for the purposes of the exercise by the researchers, and all participating organizations and persons had given their consent for research. The Yammer platform technically allows for exporting the full data, but this option was disabled by the hosting university. Negotiations with the Chief of Data Security of the university were unsuccessful and finally, instead of exporting the data in a tabular format, the researcher had to manually click open all discussion threads on the platform and print pdf versions of the sites. As a benefit, this format allowed a better contextual view to the communication as all images and link previews were available. Qualitative analysis was thus perhaps even easier, but descriptive statistical analysis of activity over time was not possible. Finally, negotiating access also involves ethical dilemmas for participant observers, as in Gibbs et al. (2021b). The other author

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of this chapter (Gibbs) was a member of an especially close-knit online community whose members had been together for a decade before starting to study it through ethnographic observation. While IRB did not require her to disclose her status as researcher as the community initially had open membership, it evolved in such a way that membership became closed and members developed strict norms around accountability. She felt that ethically, she needed to disclose that she was studying them. She was initially afraid to tell them for fear that the members would think she was just using them and would ban her from the community. She crafted a sensitive message to the group letting them know that she was a member first, researcher second, and that she did not want to jeopardize her relationships with the members or do any harm to the community dynamics. Fortunately, the members were tickled to hear that she was writing a paper about their community and were happy to be featured in her research.

Messy and/or Incomplete Data One practical challenge constantly encountered by scholars working with digital data (especially public data) is the sheer amount of data available in databases or on social media platforms: tens of thousands of documents or messages, perhaps even millions. Such quantities of data are simply too vast for qualitative analysis, and as discussed above, the data might exist in unstructured formats that do not easily lend themselves to sorting or filtering. Some sampling or filtering strategies, however, are necessary in almost every setting when working with digital data. As in other research approaches, random or systematic sampling strategies or a combination of them can be adopted. For example, timestamps could be used to select a number of random messages per each day or week of data so that the resulting sample remains of reasonable size (for an example,

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see Albu & Etter, 2016). Keyword tags can also be used to filter posts for further qualitative content analysis (e.g., Gibbs et al., 2015). Other metrics, such as likes or view counts, can also be used to organize data according to the popularity of the documents, and then select an appropriate number of the most popular documents for qualitative analysis. For example, Poell et al. (2016) rely heavily on engagement metrics to select the most relevant content to study digital leadership. Naturally, the sampling strategy needs to be carefully chosen to match the research problem. Paradoxically, while digital datasets might be large, they are most likely not representative of the entire organization or its stakeholders. In most organizations, employees seldom use social communication platforms (Cardon et  al., 2019; Li, 2015) but instead consider traditional forms of communication more effective and satisfactory (Cardon & Marshall, 2015). Further, they might also carefully consider what to disclose on digital platforms, as they are aware of the publicness and surveillance possibilities afforded by the platforms (Denyer et al., 2011; Ellison et al., 2015; Laitinen & Sivunen, 2020). Data from internal digital platforms, thus, might represent only the loud minority and reproduce the dominant macro-level discourses in the organization (Alvesson & Deetz, 1999). Further, social media algorithms result in customized and curated individual news feeds such that different data are visible to different users, both based on their network connections and algorithmic nudges that prioritize certain data over others. This problematizes the notion of “complete” data. Typically, digital data streams tend to privilege current posts and obscure the visibility of prior posts (Treem et  al., 2020). Conversely, sometimes the logic or ordering might privilege older posts. An ironic example of such ordering is the story of Facebook content moderation subcontractor Cognizant, in which important changes to the internal guidelines were missed by

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employees because of the algorithmic newsfeed of the Facebook Workspace software, which promoted earlier posts instead of the just-published guidelines (Newton, 2019). This issue may also influence the interpretation of data: for instance, how are researchers to know if a post received less attention because it was not interesting for humans or for algorithms? What is the significance of a post published on ESM if we cannot be certain anyone saw it?

Legal and Ethical Issues Texts in digital social media, public or nonpublic, are typically produced by private individuals and the user’s name is usually visible. Other types of digital data in organizational systems are most likely also connected to persons. Therefore, they are always considered personal data and must be handled accordingly during the research process. Local legislation, for example the General Data Protection Regulation GDPR in the EU, sets limits and strict guidelines to the handling and storing of that data. International research teams may face dilemmas in sharing data files among researchers from countries with different requirements regarding privacy regulation, as well as different human subjects protocols. Indeed, the institutional review board (IRB) norms and requirements for protecting the rights of human subjects in digital contexts have been a moving target and have evolved over time along with the evolution of these digital contexts. Beyond policies and requirements at the national or institutional level, accessing and using digital data involves questions about research ethics and integrity. At a minimum, research subjects should always know when they are being studied (on informed consent and voluntary participation, see Chapter 27 in this volume). An additional element of caution is that material that is technically public is not necessarily considered as such by its authors

(Fiesler & Proferes, 2018). The privacy settings of the services might be complicated, and ordinary users are not necessarily always aware of the publicness of their content, and even anonymized datasets may inadvertently reveal the identities of participants (Zimmer, 2010). This being the case, the fact that the information is publicly available is not on its own sufficient as an ethical principle and the researcher also needs to consider the context in which the material was produced and the sensitivity of the material. An open dialogue with research participants would be the best way to ensure their perspectives are known and considered. Yet, often when working with large datasets, particularly from public sources, reaching all persons present in the data is not possible. Intra-organizational datasets might also include people who no longer work for the organization. In strict terms, researchers should aim to reach them to gain an explicit informed consent to participate in the research. Another option is to collaborate with the organization that provides the (nonpublic) data to pseudonymize it.

CONCLUSION This chapter has discussed digital data collection in qualitative organizational communication research, with a focus on describing types and characteristics of digital data, reviewing exemplars of studies using various types of qualitative designs and how they have incorporated digital data collection, as well as outlining challenges in negotiating access, messy and incomplete data, and legal and ethical issues. Our goal has been to provide researchers with better tools and understanding of data collection in digital contexts, and to encourage creative thinking about digital data sources in order to stimulate new research innovations. One of the frustrations with qualitative research is that every dataset and research site look different and thus there is no template or road map for how to design

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and conduct qualitative studies. On the flipside, this creates flexibility and freedom for qualitative researchers to creatively draw on data sources and combine them in order to tell the most compelling and meaningful stories. Digital contexts provide new sources of data to help us understand organizing processes in new ways. The use of digital data has important implications for organizational communication as a field and for qualitative organizational communication research in particular. As the recognition that organizations are communicatively constituted has become mainstream through institutionalization of the CCO perspective (Boivin et  al., 2017), the field is well poised to explore new digital forms of organizing as a way to further advance our theoretical understandings of the ways in which organizations are communicatively constituted through digital discourse and interactions—which have no physical instantiation. To this end, we encourage qualitative researchers in organizational communication to develop further innovations in accessing, collecting, filtering, and approaching digital data. Given the growing role of digital platforms in organizations (and in digital organizing), digital data collection has the potential to further enrich the field of organizational communication.

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19 Collecting Visual Data in Qualitative Organizational Communication Research Elizabeth Wilhoit Larson

This chapter considers how visual data can be and has been used within qualitative organizational communication research. Visuals are valuable for studying organizations both because much of organizational life is constituted through visual dimensions, but also because visuals can be used to gain new insights into other aspects of organizing (Davison et  al., 2012). Research involving visual data can take many different forms, but it will always include some kind of data that is seen but is not entirely textual. This might include photos, videos, artwork, cartoons, attention to aesthetics, and more. As this chapter will show, these visual data may be collected, engaged with, and analyzed in many ways that add additional layers of communicative meaning to qualitative organizational communication research. Although use of visual methods in organizational communication has grown (Grosjean & Matte, 2021), they are still underutilized, as the limited disciplinary examples in this chapter will demonstrate. Looking at organization

studies more broadly, Christianson (2016) found that only 0.6% of articles published in top organization studies journals since 1990 used video as a central element of the research design. Although there are certainly other visual methods beyond just video, this low frequency of use is also true for other methods (Ray & Smith, 2011). As this chapter will demonstrate, there are several reasons why visual research methods can be particularly useful for qualitative organizational communication research, as well as many established research methods that scholars can use as a starting point for incorporating the visual into their research. The chapter begins with a consideration of what visual data can bring to qualitative organizational communication: new kinds of communication to study, new ways for researchers and participants to communicate, and a more multi-sensory, embodied approach to research. It then discusses epistemology as it relates to visual data. Five existing visual methods (photo elicitation

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interviews, photovoice, video shadowing, visuals as texts, and visuals as part of ethnography) are described. The chapter continues with a discussion of technical, logistical, and ethical challenges for conducting visual research, before concluding with future areas for organizational communication visual research.

WHY VISUAL DATA IN ORGANIZATIONAL COMMUNICATION RESEARCH? First, it is important to consider the value of visual data in organizational communication research. Photos, videos, artwork, and other visuals are not utilized in research simply because they are a novelty, but because they bring new value to the research, specifically additional layers of communication. With visual data, the communicative data that researchers are collecting goes beyond words to consider additional types of communication like the framing of visuals, the content of visuals, and the affective and material layers of organizations. Specifically, visual data offers three potential enhancements to research: a new form of communication, rapport with participants, and a more multisensory understanding of organizations.

VISUAL DATA AS A NEW FORM OF COMMUNICATION First, visual data can become an additional form of communication in the research process (Wilhoit, 2017). In Stephens’s (2016) review of empirical research published in Management Communication Quarterly, she found that interviews and surveys were the most commonly used research methods. In the case of interviews (the dominant qualitative method), verbal (or sometimes written) communication is the primary source of data.

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Although communication through words is an important way of learning about organizational experiences, particularly how people make sense of and find meaning in their experiences (Tracy, 2020), words are not the only way that communication is achieved, a reality to which qualitative organizational communication scholars are particularly attuned to (e.g., Cooren, 2010). Although language is the primary human sign system, visuals are another way that humans construct social reality (Meyer et al., 2013) and visuals can be seen as their own language (Boxenbaum et  al., 2018). Visual data can be particularly powerful because it can communicate at several levels. For example, many organizations seek to intentionally embed messages in the visual aspects of organizing including physical spaces, branding, and social media (Creed et al., 2020). By looking at corporate imagery, organizational communication scholars might interpret what the organization’s values are or how it constructs an aspect of its identity, like legitimacy (e.g., Alexandersson & Kalonaityte, 2018; de Vaujany & Vaast, 2014). However, beyond the content of visual data, the production of visuals also offers meaning (Rose, 2001). For example, what is or is not included in an image, how an image is framed, and even what is captured with visuals have meaning (Wilhoit, 2017). The production and content of images offer two layers of meaning that can be understood simultaneously (Shortt & Warren, 2019). For example, imagine a study in which participants were instructed to take pictures of how they felt controlled by their workplace. The participants themselves would generate meaning through how they framed their images, what they found meaningful enough to take pictures of, and the presences and absences in their images. All of this would be valuable meaning that could be interrogated in an interview about the photos. Additionally, there might be things about the organization itself that could be understood through the images like its values as represented by office layout.

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Visual data then provides additional layers of communication to data collection and research. The content and production of images can both communicate more and differently than traditional research methods might. For qualitative organizational communication scholars, this means that scholars can collect data that goes beyond verbal communication, like an interview might offer, or textual data, like organizational documents would contain. Instead, organizational communication scholars can also examine how meaning emerges from the content (e.g., what is pictured) and the production (e.g.,  framing, what is or is not included) of visuals. Particularly with the increased acknowledgment of the role that materiality and nonhuman agents play in shaping organizations, it is essential for organizational communication scholars to consider other forms of communication beyond what humans say or write and visual data collection offers one means to study additional forms of communication. As the next section notes, additional layers of communication can also be created between the researcher and participants through the use of visual data.

Visual Data as Facilitating a Relationship with Participants Second, visual data can provide a new way for researchers and participants to form ­connections and relationships. The communicative constitution of organizations views communication as a relationship; communication takes place between two people or entities as facilitated by something in between the communicators (Cooren, 2018). Two rooms might communicate through a doorway and two people might communicate through text messages. In qualitative organizational communication research, the relationship between researcher and participant is often facilitated through interviews (Stephens, 2016). However, visual methods can also be used as a shared focus or anchor

(Harper, 2002) to help the researcher and participant co-orient around a common object (Taylor & Van Every, 2000). Specifically, there are many visual methods that involve using visuals as a starting point for an interview, focus group, or survey (Wilhoit, 2017). In these methods, the participant often produces photos or videos that serve as the basis for the interview, but in some cases images are provided by the researcher (Harper, 2002). Particularly when participants provide the visuals, they offer additional levels of meaning through their selection of topics and framing (as mentioned above) (Shortt, 2015). However, within the interview context specifically, participantgenerated visuals can help a researcher see more aspects of a participant’s experience and ask questions that they might not think to ask if they did not have the visual prompt. Visuals help participants and organizational communication researchers both to discuss the taken-for-granted aspects of organizational life (Wilhoit Larson, 2021b). Within interviews, visuals can also help make the participant aware of tacit aspects of experience that they were unaware of or could not articulate by helping to take them out of their experiences and view them from the outside (Slutskaya et  al., 2012; Wilhoit, 2017). The use of visuals in data collection can also help participants who may struggle to find the discursive resources to talk about their experiences or who engage in more embodied work that is difficult to convey only through talk (Slutskaya et  al., 2012). Finally, in the author’s experience, participants tend to enjoy the process of collecting visual data and it helps to build rapport in the interview. This asset can be especially useful when collecting data on mundane or taken-for-granted aspects of organizational life. There are many aspects of organizations that can easily fade into the background, for example, organizational space. Visual methods can be a useful intervention to help participants to see their organizational experiences in novel ways and to take a step back from the everyday and

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taken-for-granted. Through adding an additional point of connection between researcher and participant, visual methods can help to facilitate additional and more meaningful research communication.

Visual Data as a Means of Developing an Embodied ­ Multi-sensorial Understanding of Organizations Third, as organizational communication has taken an increasingly material turn (Ashcraft et al., 2009) and affect is now becoming an important research approach (Ashcraft, 2021), qualitative organizational communication scholars have become more interested in studying the embodied, material, sensorial, and experiential aspects of organizations, recognizing the role that bodies play in everyday and organizational practices (Ellingson, 2017). Although methods like interviews and surveys can be used to study these topics to a certain extent, an embodied, sensory understanding of organizations requires more embodied, multi-sensory research methods. Visuals can be one means for conducting this research (Pink, 2008). Visuals engage more senses and can invoke stories and emotions that other data might not, helping qualitative organizational communication researchers to better feel with participants (Pink, 2014; Rose, 2001). Visuals also offer a reminder that experience is positioned; visuals involve seeing and that sight (often involving a camera) is positioned somewhere, seeing the world from a particular vantage point (Bramming et al., 2012). For example, Dougherty et al. (2018) used photovoice to study food insecurity. Participant images of empty freezers and refrigerators added a more embodied and emotional way of understanding participant experiences as one reading the article can better enter into physical feelings of hunger or emotions of insecurity through viewing these images. Additionally, Cnossen and Bencherki (2019)

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studied the role of space in the emergence of organizations, in part through using photos during data collection. They noted the importance of going beyond discourse to study the material elements of organizations, noting that to study material and embodied matters, one must engage in studying materiality in ways that go beyond the discursive. Although qualitative organizational communication scholars are still exploring ways to utilize visual methods in order to better understand the material and embodied aspects of organizing, these methods offer new possibilities to better research organizations in ways that extend beyond the discursive by considering data that deal more directly with material, embodied, and multisensory aspects of organizations (Wilhoit, 2018). This section has described the value of visuals in qualitative organizational communication research, specifically how visual research methods can introduce new types of communication into data collection, create more rapport with participants, and incorporate more senses and embodiment into the research process. Before considering some specific visual methodologies that have been used in qualitative organizational communication research, it is important to consider the epistemological status of visuals.

EPISTEMOLOGY AND THE STATUS OF KNOWLEDGE DERIVED FROM VISUALS Considering the epistemological concerns around images entails asking questions about what knowledge can be gleaned from images. For instance, are images seen as representations of reality or as social constructions? The first consideration is how different research paradigms approach visuals. Although visual data can be used in research from any paradigm, they are most often used for critical and interpretive research, in large part because visuals often present multiple,

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ambiguous meanings and a level of subjectivity in their interpretation (Davison, Mclean, et al., 2012). Although an analytical method like content analysis (e.g., Stutts & Barker, 1999) or research from marketing that measures the efficacy of visuals (Meyer et  al., 2013) can be used to study visuals from a postpositivist perspective, this research is less common and this chapter will therefore focus on qualitative visual methods. A second important point to make about epistemology and visuals is that the content of photos, videos, and other visual data are not equivalent with reality (Davidson et al., 2012). Visual data frame the world in a specific way. They focus on some details and leave out others. They are data produced by humans that present the research scene in a specific way. Visual data always need to be understood as social constructions. Additionally, visual data that is either generated by researcher or participant is not an end-product in and of itself (Pauwels, 2015); visual data need to be interpreted. For organizational communication scholars, this means that visual data cannot be used as a proxy for reality; images do not show how an organization actually is in some objective way. Rather, they show a construction of the organization where one needs to consider the various layers of meaning described above (e.g., the framing of an image, the contents of an image, what is and is not included). A final issue regarding visual methods and epistemology is how the presence of a camera or other apparatus changes the nature of the research field (Ardéval, 2012). Whether researcher or participant is generating images, the possibility that the presence of a camera changes behavior cannot be ignored. Additionally, as both participants and researchers create images, they are tacitly guided by learned cultural aesthetic norms (Shortt & Warren, 2019). All cultures have unspoken visual practices and these practices are unthinkingly incorporated into the production of images, including those for research (Gylfe et  al., 2016). Considering,

or at least being aware of these social constructs around images is also important to keep in mind; images are produced within a visual culture and will likely reproduce the norms and values of that culture. It is therefore important for visual research projects to consider the visual culture in which images were produced as part of analysis. In addition to these general points on the epistemological status of the visual, there is still variation in the role that visuals take in research projects. Meyer et  al. (2013) have suggested that there are five different ways that visuals are used in organizational research. Each of these five approaches to using visuals suggests a different epistemological and ontological status of visuals. Understanding these five approaches can be useful for qualitative organizational communication scholars as they plan a visual research project to understand how different forms of data collection and analysis might pair with varying kinds of questions or forms of inquiry. First, the archaeological approach views images as encoding and transmitting social knowledge. In organizational communication research, one might take an archaeological approach by looking at sets of images taken by an organization to understand what the organization valued at a specific point in time. Even though archaeological studies see images as “storing” meaning or social realities that are then interpreted by researchers, they also reflect an understanding that visuals are produced in socio-historical contexts and are therefore not factual transmissions of historical truth. Second, research in the practice approach considers how visual artifacts are objects used in organizing processes. The practice approach is less interested in what visuals say than what they do in organizations. For example, research from the practice approach might look at what a set of charts might do as they circulate through an organization. In particular, significant practice approach research has considered the political effects of visuals

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in organizations (Meyer et al., 2013). Visual artifacts are then seen as actors that can make a difference in organizations, a perspective that fits well with organizational communication research on nonhuman agency (Cooren, 2018). Third, the strategic approach looks at visuals as rhetorical devices used to elicit specific responses from audiences. Much of the research in this approach has been marketing-oriented, and has used experiments to test the effects of specific images and other visual messages (Meyer et  al., 2013). Although this approach recognizes that images are interpreted within specific learned, cultural contexts, it also assumes that visuals can carry fairly stable messages that will have the desired effect. Fourth, in the dialogical approach, researchers use images more actively to engage with participants. Images can be created by participants or provided by the researchers and then serve as a way to collect data that might otherwise be difficult to access (Clark-Ibáñez, 2004). In dialogical research, meaning emerges from the relationship between the images and the communication about the images, rather than residing in the images themselves. Fifth, the documenting approach understands visuals both as a source of data and also a tool for research. In this approach, the researcher creates visual artifacts as a way of documenting their object of study. For instance, a researcher conducting an organizational ethnography might take photos or videos of important or unusual occurrences that might be better understood or remembered with a visual dimension in addition to field notes. However, just like written field notes which represent the researcher’s impressions of the field, rather than objective reality, visual field notes also incorporate the researcher’s subjective choices and understanding of the field. Meyer et  al.’s (2013) typology of approaches to the use of visuals demonstrates some of the broad ways that visuals are incorporated into research and the epistemological and ontological status of visuals

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in those projects. Some of these approaches have more obvious applications for qualitative organizational communication research (like the dialogical and practice approaches). Understanding these broad approaches can be useful for qualitative organizational communication scholars as they design visual research projects and need to consider the broad epistemological status of the visual data they will be using. The next section builds on these general approaches to detail some specific visual methods that have been used in qualitative organizational communication research.

PROMINENT VISUAL METHODOLOGIES IN QUALITATIVE ORGANIZATIONAL COMMUNICATION RESEARCH The following section considers five prominent methods that have been used in existing qualitative organizational communication scholarship: photo elicitation interviews, photovoice, video shadowing, visual rhetoric, and visuals as part of ethnography. Although visual methodologies have not seen widespread use in qualitative organizational communication research, there are several ­ main visual methods that have been used within organizational communication research. Visual research is certainly not limited to the methods detailed in this section— the use of photos and videos in research offer the potential for many creative innovations in research methods. However, these established methods offer a starting point for considering how one might use visuals in their research.

Photo Elicitation Interviews Photo elicitation interviewing (PEI) is an established method with a long history in many disciplines. In PEI, images are either

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taken by the participants or selected by the researcher and then serve as a shared “anchor” for an interview (Harper, 2002, p. 20). The photographs then “act as a medium of communication between researcher and participant” (Clark-Ibáñez, 2004, p. 1512). As mentioned previously, epistemologically, the photos are not seen as objective documentation of participant experiences, but as an additional layer of data and a means of improving the interview process through showing researchers what is important to talk about, emphasizing participant priorities, accessing taken-for-granted knowledge and creating rapport (Slutskaya et al., 2012; Wilhoit, 2017). PEI can also be used with focus groups in which participants discuss images together (e.g., Bramming et al., 2012; Davison, McLean, et al., 2012; Wilhoit Larson, 2021a). Although PEI often involves images generated by participants, the researcher can also provide the visuals for participants to respond to (Harper, 2002). For example, Wilhoit Larson and Bacevice (2020) chose images of three highly aestheticized organizations and created a qualitative survey in which participants responded to those images. Although there was not an additional level of meaning created as participants framed and chose images, the researchers were still able to use images as an anchor point and instead understand how many different participants understood the same imagery. PEI has also been expanded into a video elicitation method, participant viewpoint ethnography (PVE) (Wilhoit & Kisselburgh, 2016), in which participants record video by wearing a head-mounted video camera during their regular activities. The researcher and participant then watch the video together and the researcher interviews that participant about the video. One significant difference between PEI and PVE is that in participantdriven PEI projects, there is a layer of meaning and communication that is created in the selection and framing of images. In PVE, the video is still framed by the participant’s

experiences, rather than being an objective reflection of reality, but the participant is making fewer choices about what to record. Within qualitative organizational communication research, PEI has been used to study organizational spaces (Wilhoit Larson, 2020, 2021b) and social media communication during disasters (Stephens et al., 2020) and PVE has been used to study the organization of bicycle commuters (Wilhoit & Kisselburgh, 2015, 2019). Although these methods have been used to great effect in these studies, photo and video elicitation methods have only been rarely used within qualitative organizational communication research and there is much potential for their increased use in the discipline.

Photovoice Photovoice shares many similarities with photo elicitation interviews, but it is an explicitly critical method that has generally been used to study the experiences of marginalized people (Wang & Burris, 1997). Photovoice was developed by public health scholars as a more participatory, feminist way for members of communities to communicate about their needs (Wang & Burris, 1997; Wang et al., 1998). It is also a method that democratizes research as members of vulnerable groups who may not be given a voice in society or be literate can be trained to use a polaroid or disposable camera, affirming their perspectives (Novak, 2010; Wang & Burris, 1997). With participantdriven imagery, participants decide what is important and drive the focus of the research (Novak, 2010). In the context of public health research studying the health needs of women in rural China, Wang and Burris (1997) also argue that participants become advocates for their community. Like PEI, photovoice involves having participants take pictures. In the case of photovoice, the directive is usually fairly open-ended (e.g., take pictures that

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symbolize your experience of unemployment (Dougherty et al., 2018)) as researchers want to understand participants’ priorities and perspectives on a given topic. Following participants taking pictures, the researcher conducts an interview or focus group about the participant-generated images (Wang & Burris, 1997). Although there are many possible ways to conduct the interview, the SHOWeD method is often recommended (Wang et al., 1998, 2004). This interviewing technique involves asking the questions: (1) What do you see here? (2) What’s really happening here? (3) How does this relate to our lives? (4) Why does this problem or strength exist? (5) What can we do about this? (Novak, 2010). Photovoice can also be used in tandem with other research methods. For example, in Dougherty et  al.’s (2018) study of food insecurity among unemployed people in the US, the authors conducted two interviews with participants. First, they conducted a semi-structured interview and then at the end of that interview invited participants to take pictures. Following the generation of photos, a second interview was conducted focusing on the images. Dougherty et al. (2018) found that food insecurity was both a material and discursive problem, and a central part of the experience of unemployment. The use of photographs was essential in helping them to understand the dual material and discursive facets of food insecurity, as participants visually portrayed this material reality and talked about how the discourses of unemployment played a role in shaping their experiences. The main advantage of photovoice for qualitative organizational communication research is that participants are often able to bring up topics that the researcher might not have been aware of (Novak, 2010). As a critical method used to interview members of marginalized groups, photovoice recognizes that participants are often unheard, and the method is designed to give them a voice and to set the agenda for what scholars should care about. Photovoice research often has a goal of creating change and therefore some .

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scholars have concluded photovoice research projects by creating an art exhibit that displays participant images and inviting the public and policymakers to view the exhibit (Catalani & Minkler, 2010; Dutta et  al., 2013). This kind of action-oriented conclusion to research is once again in keeping with the critical orientation of photovoice. Within qualitative organizational communication research, photovoice has been used to study food insecurity among the unemployed in the United States (Dougherty et  al., 2018), and homeless newspaper vendors in Chicago (Novak, 2010). In these studies, photovoice has been used to gain an understanding of the voices of marginalized groups. However, once again, it is a method that has been underutilized in qualitative organizational communication research.

Video Shadowing Video shadowing has been a popular qualitative organizational communication research method, particularly within research using the communicative constitution of organizations (CCO) approach. Shadowing has been proposed as an ethnographic technique that allows scholars to study organizing processes that are increasingly mobile and fast (Czarniawska, 2007). Methodologically, shadowing involves following and recording organizational actors (human or nonhuman) as they go about their regular activities (Czarniawska, 2014; McDonald, 2005). The researcher can capture this work of shadowing through audio or video recording or field notes, although video shadowing has been the most used method in qualitative organizational communication research (Vásquez et  al., 2012). The goal of shadowing as a method can vary, but qualitative organizational communication research has tended to use video shadowing to understand organizing from the perspective of the researcher doing the shadowing (McDonald, 2005; Vásquez et al., 2012).

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Shadowing is different from simply documenting something that is taking place. Instead, shadowing research recognizes the intersubjective, co-constituted nature of meaning (Czarniawska, 2007) and is generally considered a postmodern research method (Gill et  al., 2014). Shadowing research sees the process as an oscillation between researcher and participant, insider and outsider (Sclavi, 2014). Collecting shadowing data frames a situation and the researcher must make many choices as they shadow their subject—e.g. what to follow, what to ask about, and how to explain one’s presence (Vásquez et al., 2012). Once again, video shadowing is not a method that captures an objective facsimile of reality, but that produces a specifically framed artifact. Given CCO’s emphasis on understanding organizations through the terra firma of micro communication interactions (Cooren et  al., 2011), video shadowing is an ideal method for studying how organizations are enacted through everyday interactions (Vásquez et  al., 2012). CCO scholars using video shadowing can see the conversations, interactions, and material actants that come together to achieve organizing. One thing to note with CCO research using shadowing is that the manuscripts produced using shadowing often rely primarily on transcripts of conversations and the visual is not always referenced in the data analysis. For example, Cooren et al. (2013) describe video shadowing as their primary research method, but there are no references to any of the videos recorded in the manuscript—only transcriptions of speech and field notes. However, shadowing is not limited to CCO research, and as noted below, it has also been used for research beyond CCO because of the intimate and detailed approach to ethnography that it offers (Gill, 2011). Examples of CCO research using video shadowing include Cooren et  al.’s (2005) study of a building manager in a skyscraper, Vasquez and Cooren’s (2013) research on the spacing of a science education organization,

and various studies on Médecins Sans Frontières’ organizing through everyday interactions (Bencherki et al., 2016; Cooren et  al., 2008), among many other studies. Beyond CCO, shadowing has been used to study entrepreneurs (Gill, 2011) and safety communication in nuclear power plants (Barbour & Gill, 2014). Shadowing has therefore been a more popular visual method within organizational communication research than the others detailed, but it remains a seldom-used method when compared with the predominant methods like interviewing and surveys.

Visuals as Organizational Rhetoric or Texts Research using visuals does not always entail creating new visuals for research but can also involve collecting and studying visuals that already exist. This type of research often involves studying images that have been created by an organization to communicate about themselves. For example, Clair and Anderson (2013) analyzed promotional materials produced by the organization Heifer International to understand the organization’s strategic communication and portrayal of the poor. They found that the organization portrayed poverty in a sanitized way that emphasized the entrepreneurial nature of the poor as workers on the “cusp of capitalism.” As the visuals rose in dominance in the public sphere, rhetoricians began considering rhetoric as multimodal (Kjeldsen, 2018). As organizations also increasingly adopted multimodal forms of internal and external communication (Bell & Davison, 2013), qualitative organizational communication scholars started to consider the rhetoric of visuals produced in and around organizations (Bruscella & Bisel, 2018; Clair & Anderson, 2013; Gill & Wells, 2014). The challenge of interpreting organizational visual rhetoric is looking at artifacts both as intentionally

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produced with rhetorical purpose by the organization, while also seeking to understand what meaning it might produce for its audience, keeping in mind the temporal and cultural situation in which artifacts were produced (Greenwood et al., 2019). Although a visual rhetorical approach has been used with some frequency in advertising and organization studies research (Kjeldsen, 2018), it is another seldom-used approach for qualitative organizational communication scholars. There are a few examples of organizational communication research that have examined the visual rhetoric of organizations. First, Clair and Anderson (2013) studied the holiday gift catalog distributed by Heifer International to see how the organization portrayed the poor and used them in rhetorical appeals for donations. Second, Bruscella and Bisel’s (2018) study examined ISIL propaganda magazines, looking at the textual and visual arguments used to position and legitimize the organization. Third, Gill and Wells (2014) examined the construction of nonprofit legitimacy by looking at images and texts used in marketing and fundraising by Mothers Without Borders. They found that the images used reflect donor values and identity. These three studies used a visual rhetoric approach to systematically study not only the words used by organizations, but also the images that they used to legitimize and promote themselves. Visual rhetoric presents qualitative organizational communication scholars with a way to study the many forms of communication that organizations use to communicate about themselves.

Photos and Videos as a Part of Ethnographic Research Finally, photos and videos are often collected as part of broader ethnographic work. In this case, photos and videos often serve as a form of visual notetaking. This usage of visual data aligns with Meyer et al.’s (2013) documentary approach. Taking photos or

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videos as part of ethnographic research helps the researcher remember certain events or details to guide them in later analysis (Pink, 2014). Research in this vein is likely the most common visual method in qualitative organizational communication but is also the least visually oriented since the images are often collected to aid the researcher, but not to be analyzed specifically as visual data. Beyond using visuals as a memory aid, ethnographic research might entail collecting visual documents or social media posts related to the organization (e.g., Branton & Compton, 2021). Many qualitative organizational communication scholars do capture visuals as part of ethnographic data collection. However, it was difficult to find examples of ethnographic projects where visual data collection was a documented part of the method, but the visuals were used specifically as a form of visual notetaking or documenting. This is likely because scholars either overlook the importance of the images they captured as part of their data collection process or because collection of photos or videos was not approved by IRB and therefore not an official part of the method. Although it is difficult to find exemplars of this approach, it is one that is certainly utilized. This section has considered five prominent existing visual research methods in organizational communication. The next section looks at some of the practical challenges to completing visual research projects.

PRACTICAL CONSIDERATIONS FOR COLLECTING VISUAL DATA Like any data collection, there are practical points to consider when collecting visual data for qualitative organizational communication research. Specifically, visual data has specific considerations in terms of technology and equipment, engaging participants, and storage and organization of data.

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Technology, Equipment, and Participants The first set of practical considerations specifically concern projects where participants will be generating photos or videos for data. First, there are some practical concerns regarding technology and equipment when conducting participant-driven visual data collection. Specifically, participants will need access to a camera to take photos or videos. Earlier studies gave participants disposable cameras for their low-cost and ease of use and training (e.g., Clark-Ibáñez, 2004). In more recent studies, participants have been offered a digital camera to use for taking pictures, but all participants have opted to take pictures on their personal cell phones (Dougherty et  al., 2018; Wilhoit Larson, 2021b). Given the near-ubiquity of cell phones with cameras in many cultures, it seems likely that most participants in photoelicitation studies going forward would be happy to use their own cell phone camera to take pictures. That said, organizational communication researchers do need to be prepared with an alternative (whether disposable film cameras or a digital camera that participants can borrow) for participants who do not have or do not want to use their cell phone for research participation. If researchers are giving equipment to participants, it is important that they are trained in how to use it. Wilhoit and Kisselburgh (2016) gave participants a GoPro camera to wear on their head or helmet while they biked to work. A researcher met with each participant before they collected their data to show them how to use the camera and also provided participants with a one-page guide on how to use the camera. It was also important that the researcher verified that the battery was charged and there was space on the memory card to record additional video. Researchers also need to consider the population they are studying and whether they may need additional training or instruction. For example, Novak (2010) noted that he needed to spend

time training participants (homeless street vendors) on how to use a camera. Novak (2010) also described logistical challenges in managing the cameras, replacing them if they fail, and if using film, developing it. A final consideration is that it may be more difficult to recruit participants for qualitative organizational communication research projects that involve taking photos or videos. The nature of the research is more involved and requires a higher time and energy commitment from participants. Although the author has experienced the opposite—that participants are interested in the novelty of taking pictures and recruitment has not been a problem—researchers should be prepared to spend more time and effort in recruitment and offer adequate compensation, if possible.

Storage and Organization of Visual Data The storage and organization of visual data can also create additional challenges. First, there is the very practical concern of having enough computer storage and backups to store these memory intensive files. Particularly for video projects, ensuring that one has enough hard drive and backup space (either on external hard drives or a secure cloud) is essential. Organizing visual data can also be challenging. The author has found the NVivo qualitative data analysis program useful for organizing photo data because photos can be coded in the same way as textual data and then sorted based on the assigned codes. Printing out digital images can also be useful for being able to see them all at once and sort them to see what patterns and themes are present (Shortt & Warren, 2019). Given the linear nature of video data, storing, organizing, and analyzing it can be more difficult. Depending on a researcher’s goal in analysis, they might prepare different kinds of notes on video, but they might transcribe video, take screenshots of key moments,

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make time-stamped lists of certain events in the video, or write out a full description of what takes place. Collecting, organizing, and storing visual data presents some additional challenges that other research projects may not have. However, by planning in advance for some of these additional considerations, visual data research projects should be able to proceed without many complications.

ETHICAL CONSIDERATIONS Visual methods also present new ethical considerations. This section will raise some of the issues that scholars must consider, but on many of these questions, there is not a clear consensus on ethical guidelines for visual research. There is also some conflict between what is ethically ideal and what is practically feasible in collecting visual data. This section considers institutional concerns, consent, and the publication and sharing of visual data.

Institutional Concerns First, using novel methods like visual methods can create concerns for institutional review boards (IRBs) and other equivalent institutional research ethics review groups. This is not often described in the published literature on visual methods, but in the author’s experience, IRBs often have more questions about visual research projects and what they require varies widely from institution to institution. However, especially after meeting with IRB staff members, the author has gained institutional approval for all proposed visual research projects. Novak (2010) also described his IRB approval process for a photo elicitation interview project and noted that his IRB considered participants who take pictures as co-researchers and they therefore needed to gain consent of others who are photographed.

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However, participants in his study often failed to have others photographed by participants sign informed consent forms. Novak therefore excluded some photos from his study because they seemed to violate IRB procedures. Demonstrating the different requirements between institutions, the author has never had this requirement, which is likely ethically sound, but difficult to execute. Additionally, beyond institutional ethical concerns, there also may be laws that regulate taking photos and videos, particularly outside of public spaces, and copyright of images produced by participants can also be a concern (Wiles et al., 2011). Being aware of one’s local relevant laws is therefore also an important consideration in conducting visual research.

Consent Consent can be another challenging issue for visual research, especially for projects where participants will be generating photos or videos and others may be included in the images without their consent. Although it is likely that people being photographed or filmed by research participants will know the person recording them, they may not be aware of the ends to which the images will be used (Wiles et al., 2011). Some visual sociologists have argued that including individuals who have not given consent, but are in public spaces doing everyday things, does not pose an ethical concern because harm is unlikely to occur and there is not much difference from photojournalism, for instance (Harper, 2005). It seems that most scholars agree that gaining consent from everyone pictured in research images, even in public spaces, is ideal (Wiles et al., 2011), yet there is very little written on how scholars can practically achieve this ideal. How to achieve ethical ideals for consent is an issue that qualitative organizational communication scholars can consider and innovate on in visual research projects.

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Publication and Sharing of Images When conducting projects that involve images of participants taken by the researcher or taken by participants, making decisions about how these images will be shared in research output as well as gaining clear consent for sharing is another important issue. When the author has conducted photo or video research projects, she has included two options on the informed consent form so that participants can opt to keep their images private (only the researcher will see them) or that they consent to allow their images to be used in presentations and publications. In the author’s experience, most participants have elected to share their images. She has also blurred any identifying details (e.g., faces, company name or logo) that appear in images before sharing them in presentations or publications. In general, the author has not had any challenges publishing visual research. However, she submitted an article using PEI to a journal that required her to have written permission from all participants whose photos were used for global, online publication of their images. At this point, the author had deleted all correspondence with participants and destroyed the key connecting pseudonyms and actual names so she could not contact participants. The journal eventually decided that her consent form was sufficient, but this has made her reword consent forms going forward to clarify that images may be published online. For scholars based in Europe, the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) presented new requirements for the anonymization of research data. True anonymization can be difficult for visual data and concerns about GDPR compliance may affect the publication of visual data going forward (Siegert et al., 2020). As Pink (2007) has noted, it is important that consent documents for visual research clearly explain how images will be used and shared. Researchers using visual methods should consider any possible ways they may wish to share images and clearly

articulate these in consent documents and scripts. A final ethical concern has to do with sharing images taken or shared by participants. In Dougherty et al.’s (2018) photovoice project, they note that the copyright of each image used in the publication remains with the participant who took the photo. Considering ownership of the images, particularly if they will then be used in an action project like a gallery display of photos is important and, as noted above, there may be legal ramifications for publishing photos taken by participants. There are several new ethical considerations that come into play when conducting and publishing visual research, although there is generally good precedent for how other researchers have resolved these issues. As visual methods become more common for qualitative organizational communication scholars, there will be more shared knowledge in our discipline about how to navigate these ethical concerns.

FUTURE DIRECTIONS FOR VISUAL METHODS IN ORGANIZATIONAL COMMUNICATION As this chapter has demonstrated, visual methods have been used to make important innovations in organizational communication theory and research. However, visual methods are still a little used research method within qualitative organizational communication research. This chapter concludes with some suggestions for how visual methods might be utilized for studying organizational communication in the future.

Offering Nuance and New Insights to Well-Studied Topics First, the review of the existing research in qualitative organizational communication using visual research methods showed that

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visual methods have had very little use within organizational communication. There are likely many reasons for this including lack of training in visual methods, institutional review boards unfamiliar with approving this kind of research, time constraints, and concerns about visual research being taken seriously in job searches and tenure and promotion processes. However, as this chapter has demonstrated, there are many advantages and opportunities that come from using visual research methods. One way to encourage qualitative organizational communication scholars to begin to use more visual methods is to emphasize that visual methods offer several potential advantages for generating new insights into wellstudied organizational communication topics. First, visual methods offer a new entry point into research topics. Whether a researcher is using visuals generated by participants or examining images created by an organization, looking at an organization or organizing processes by starting with the visual, can help researchers to literally see the organization in new ways. Second, visuals add additional layers of communication to research, facilitating new communication between researchers and participants while also inviting exploration of how organizations communicate through visual and material means (Wilhoit, 2017). For example, Wilhoit Larson (2021a) used visual methods to understand the material aspects of vocational anticipatory socialization, bringing a new dimension to a classic organizational communication topic. Visual methods offer a potential way to bring new insights and nuance into topics that have already received extensive research attention.

Methodological Innovation There are also many opportunities for qualitative organizational communication scholars to adapt existing visual methods and create new ones. With so many possible visual aspects of organizations to explore

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(social media and websites, internal and external organizational communication, participant-generated photos and videos, third-party visuals about organizations, organi­ zational design, and more), there is lots of room to continue to create and adapt visual research methods. For example, Wilhoit and Kisselburgh (2015, 2016, 2019) adapted photo-elicitation interviews into video-elicitation interviews and Wilhoit Larson (2021a) used Pinterest to facilitate participant collection of existing images before conducting photo-elicitation focus groups. In both these cases, an established visual research method was slightly modified to best fit the research topic at hand. With the rise of mass visual culture and the increasing ways that people use images in daily life (posting to social media, texting photos or videos to friends and family, showing digital images on phones), the visual dimension of language and communication is becoming increasingly salient for both individuals and organizations (Alexandersson & Kalonaityte, 2018; Strati, 2016). This proliferation of the visual requires both more scholarly attention and constantly new and adapting methods to best study it. Creating new visual methods can be a playful process for scholars as they explore different types of visual data and approaches to collecting and analyzing it. Creating more visual methods that are particularly attuned to qualitative organizational communication research will also be helpful for increasing the frequency with which scholars use visual research methods.

Visual Methods for Continued Insight into Materiality and Affect In addition to having potential for studying established topics, visual methods also offer particular advantages for researching several topics of current and emerging interest within organizational communication. First, visual research methods are an ideal method for

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studying materiality, a now established topic in qualitative organizational communication research, and affect, an emerging topic. Both materiality and affect consider communication and organizing beyond human communication and require novel methodological approaches to understand the roles they play in organizing beyond written and oral communication. First, qualitative organizational communication research on materiality has already incorporated visual methods to better understand how bodies, spaces, and objects communicate in organizing processes (e.g., Bruscella & Bisel, 2018; Cnossen & Bencherki, 2019; Wilhoit & Kisselburgh, 2015, 2019; Wilhoit Larson, 2020). However, it continues to be important to use methods that go beyond the discursive to study materiality (Wilhoit, 2016). Especially as qualitative organizational communication scholars continue to use a relational ontology approach to study materiality (Cooren, 2018), visual methods allow scholars to see and trace those communicative relationships that often do not involve humans to better understand how organizing processes work. The fact that qualitative organizational communication scholarship has also focused more on objects and spaces than bodies and visual methods presents a gap and an opportunity to better understand the embodied aspects of organizing. Visual methods also offer potential for the emerging study of affect in qualitative organizational communication research. As Ashcraft (2021) noted, affect is difficult to define, but she characterizes it “as fluctuating intensities that arise from encounter, as bodies of all kinds (not only humans) come into contact” (p. 573). Affect is felt more than something that can be verbalized, and is not always consciously realized. Affect is also pre-individual and a constitutive force. In describing affect, hopefully it is clear why it is a challenging topic to research and why visual research methods might be ideal for its exploration.

For example, Warren (2002) titled her photo elicitation study, “Show me how it feels to work here.” Affect is fundamentally about feeling (although this feeling is distinct from emotions that require an individual who knows themselves to be such) (Ashcraft, 2021) and visual methods can offer ways to explore affect by capturing these energies and experiences that go beyond individuals and cannot be verbalized. Research on affect would therefore be different from a typical photo-elicitation project in which participants are asked to consciously take pictures of some organizational phenomenon or experience. That kind of project assumes a knowing and awareness that is not present in affect research. However, a researcher might take pictures of or take videos of encounters or interactions in organizations, which the researcher can then analyze to see the affective exchanges that take place and their organizing properties. As research on affect continues, new methods will need to be developed and visual methods seem a fruitful direction to pursue.

Perspectives on Marginalized Voices in Organizations Visual methods, particularly participatory methods, also have potential to be used in studying the voices and experiences of people in and around organizations who are marginalized or whose voices and perspectives are often unheard. As qualitative organizational communication scholars increasingly call for a decolonization of the discipline (Pal et al., 2022; see also Chapter 9 in this volume) and ways to make our research methods more inclusive (Gist-Mackey & Kingsford, 2020), methodological innovations are needed to both challenge institutional norms and to better study groups who have been ignored in organizational communication research. Photovoice, in particular, with its critical foundations, has already been used to study groups often overlooked by organizational

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communication research (the unemployed (Dougherty et  al., 2018) and the homeless (Novak, 2010)). Photovoice has been an underutilized methodological tool for studying marginalized groups and with the possibility of using the photos to advocate for change in public and political venues, it also has transformative possibilities. Gist-Mackey and Kingsford (2020) have discussed how typical semi-structured interviewing is often a classed process with an expectation that participants will have long and thoughtful responses to interview questions. Visual methods may be another solution to help scholars overcome the challenges of collecting data from particular groups. For example, Slutskaya et  al. (2012) used photo elicitation interviews to understand the dirty work that butchers perform. They found that the butchers had a difficult time just talking about dirty work, masculinity, and other experiences, in part because their working-class masculinity did not encourage self-disclosure and talking about oneself and because a typical semi-structured research interview made the participants feel uncomfortable. However, once the researchers asked some participants to take photos, they found that the butchers were much more able to talk about their work, in part because they were now positioned as the experts and the images provided a tangible starting point for talking about their work. (Slutskaya et al., 2012). In this case, photos helped to overcome some of the classed elements of interviews described by Gist-Mackey and Kingsford (2020). Visual methods may be a useful tool for better understanding groups often overlooked by organizational communication research.

CONCLUSION This chapter has demonstrated that visual research methods have many possible applications in qualitative organizational communication research but have thus far been

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underutilized. Visual methods should not be used as a novelty in and of themselves, but through helping researchers see organizing processes through different entry points, visual research methods can help scholars gain new insights to create more innovative theory and practical suggestions for organizations.

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PART III

Data Analysis and Representation in Qualitative Organizational Communication Research: Methods and Issues

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20 Phronetic Iterative Qualitative Data Analysis in Organizational Communication Research S a r a h J . Tr a c y, A n g e l a N . G i s t - M a c k e y, a n d Marco Dehnert

Phronetic Iterative Qualitative Data Analysis (PIQDA) was developed by first author Sarah Tracy over 30 years of practicing and theorizing qualitative research. Ethnographer and critical communication scholar Bryan Taylor introduced Sarah to qualitative research methods. His approach at the time focused on ethnography, grounded analysis, and collecting field data through participant observation and interviewing (Lindlof & Taylor, 1995). Interestingly, little was made about the distinction between “methodology” and “method.” Areas of concern such as phenomenology, narrative, ethnomethodology, and participatory action research were cast as approaches that could sensitize the emerging qualitative research for various audiences— rather than as methodologies that structure data collection and analysis choices from beginning to end. Indeed, those first editions of Lindlof and Taylor (1995, 2002) did not even include the word “methodology” in the index.

As such, it is of little surprise that students learning from Lindlof and Taylor infrequently held tightly to a specific methodology for guiding qualitative analytic choices—but instead regarded case study, narrative, and grounded approaches to research as toolboxes that may loosely guide a study. In the 1990s, much qualitative organizational communication research employed coding and analysis techniques that borrowed from, but did not adhere strictly to, Glaser and Strauss’s (1967) grounded theory. Many of these studies were influenced by theoretical frameworks, such as identity and identification, sensemaking, and structuration. Likewise, rather than holding on to assumptions of methodologies in a purist fashion, Sarah typically began research projects by identifying a specific problem—something recommended by Stanley Deetz, her doctoral advisor and organizational communication critical scholar. Beginning with a problem created a built-in rationale, answered the “so what” question, and aligned with her

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mentorship in relation to grounded practical theory (Craig & Tracy, 1995, 2021)—an approach that centers normative analysis of the ways people manage and communicate about communicative problems, tensions, and dilemmas. Over time, Sarah was also influenced by Flyvbjerg’s (2001) Making Social Science Matter and seized on notions of phronesis and practical wisdom (Schwartz & Sharpe, 2010). Together, this brief history helps elucidate the path toward PIQDA—the guiding framework that is developed and elucidated in Tracy’s (2013, 2020) two editions of Qualitative Research Methods and multiple articles on qualitative research practice (e.g., Tracy, 2007, 2012, 2014, 2018; Tracy & Donovan, 2018; Tracy et al., 2015; Tracy & Geist-Martin, 2014; Tracy & Hinrichs, 2017; Tracy & Malvini Redden, 2016). In this chapter, we explain the grounding principles of PIQDA as an umbrella analysis approach that is particularly valuable for organizational communication studies. In doing so, we discuss PIQDA as a methodology and compare it to other analysis approaches, such as grounded theory, thematic analysis, the Gioia methodology (Gioia et  al., 2013), and Fairhurst and Putnam’s (2019) integrative methodology (see Chapter 28 in this volume). Second, we turn to critical issues and questions about enacting PIQDA in practice, including research design (see also Chapter 14 in this volume) and focus, coding, quality and ethical concerns, and techniques for focusing the analysis. Third, we provide an examination of three dominant ways that PIQDA has been adopted in organizational communication studies. We close the chapter with future directions for PIQDA in organizational communication research.

PIQDA AS METHODOLOGY Common examples of qualitative methodology include schools of thought like phenomenology,

ethnography, narrative, case study, or grounded theory (Creswell & Poth, 2018). Sarah did not set out to create a methodology when she first began practicing and writing about qualitative research and we have reservations about calling PIQDA a methodology, because doing so may inadvertently foreclose one of its most useful characteristics: being adaptable to the question and problem at hand without being sedimented to a specific lineage of literature, theory, or research approach. PIQDA grew (and will continue to grow) from considering a variety of qualitative approaches—in disciplines including communication, management, sociology, health sciences, humanities, and education— and then aiming to create an approach that works for people whether or not they have deep knowledge of a specific methodology or literature. As PIQDA has been written about, synthesized, and made more coherent, it has nonetheless begun to define philosophical underpinnings, assumptions, and justifications that influence a study’s overall foci— all of these being characteristics of what equates with a methodology (Schensul, 2012). PIQDA provides a process for ­qualitative data collection and analysis that will result in phronesis—an ancient Greek word that refers to “prudence” or “practical wisdom” (Aristotle, 2004). Phronesis is distinct from scientific (episteme) and technical (techne) reasoning. As a contextbound, localized, and particular (not universal) form of practical reasoning, phronesis is concerned with the possible consequences of probable actions in a scene of contingent constraints. This approach is distinct from scientific research aimed at creating rulelike theories and a singular “true” version of reality. In contrast, phronesis is concerned with “practical contextual knowledge and is carried out with an aim toward social commentary, action, and transformation” (Tracy, 2020, p. 24). Furthermore, phronesis requires experience of a given context,

PHRONETIC ITERATIVE QUALITATIVE DATA ANALYSIS

which then leads to prudential considerations regarding possible courses of action. Social science, especially qualitative social science, has the potential to result in phronesis (Flyvbjerg, 2001) due to its attention to contextual and experiential power issues. Social action is always in transformation; therefore, situated explanations are integral to ongoing sensemaking and practical wisdom. Qualitative research provides access to sensemaking in motion, illuminating how perception is intertwined with researcher subjectivity and examining how sedimented power relations and historical issues precede and influence individual behaviors and intentions (Cairns & Śliwa, 2008; Schwartz & Sharpe, 2010). A phronetic approach to qualitative research is especially valuable for examining how identities (of the researcher and researched) are discursively constructed and the ways that power and privilege shape values in context (e.g., see Flyvbjerg et al., 2012). PIQDA, then, aspires to leave the reader wiser and more prudent in terms of acting in relation to contextual value-laden issues. What does this mean, practically speaking? Slightly rewording Schwartz and Sharpe (2010, pp. 25–26), a wise person: 1 knows the proper aims of the activities they are involved in, and wants to serve those they are working with; 2 knows how to improvise: balancing conflicting aims and interpreting rules and principles in light of particularities; 3 is perceptive: knows how to read a social context and moves beyond thinking there is only one possible solution—identifies the range of possibilities in a situation; 4 knows how to adopt the perspective of another; strives to see the situation as another person does and feel what another person feels; empathically makes decisions to meet the needs of the other; 5 knows how to make emotion an ally of reason— to rely on emotion to signal what a situation calls for and to inform judgment without distorting it;

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can feel what is the right thing to do, being able to act quickly when required; 6 is an experienced person—practical wisdom is a craft and people become virtuosos in their craft through experience and by having the right experiences.

PIQDA incorporates these goals in a variety of ways; for example, by advocating for substantial engagement with a context or group of participants (e.g., Ban, 2017), or by emphasizing the importance of showing and not just telling (e.g., Kingsford et al., 2021), self-reflexively considering embodied research signals (e.g., Jones, 2020), and learning by doing (e.g., Dutta, 2018). In accordance with this PIQDA methodology, PIQDA methods logically include participant observation/participant witnessing (Tracy, 2020), considering participants’ viewpoint in identifying the research focus, and abductive reasoning that oscillates back and forth between the emergent data and the guiding theories, research questions, and sensitizing concepts. In a section below about enacting PIQDA, we review a number of these methods. Before we do so, let us consider how it compares to several other popular analysis approaches.

SITUATING PIQDA IN RELATION TO OTHER QUALITATIVE METHODOLOGIES In contrast to approaches like phenomenology (Vagle, 2014; see Chapter 5 in this volume), ethnography of communication (Carbaugh, 2015; see Chapter 11 in this volume), postcolonial qualitative inquiry (Bhattacharya, 2018; see Chapter 9 in this volume), and narrative inquiry (Lawler, 2002; see Chapter 21 in this volume), PIQDA does not require a specific corpus of theoretical knowledge before study design. In this regard, it is similar to thematic

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analysis (e.g., Braun & Clarke, 2006, 2021; Ryan & Bernard, 2003). Without being tied to a specific body of theory, PIQDA is appropriate not only for scholars, but also for beginners, professionals conducting industry research, and students across disciplines. PIQDA’s success is defined by workability: Has PIQDA’s process and outcome met the needs and concerns of the relevant parties (e.g., the readers, the participants, the person conducting the qualitative study)? Unfortunately, many people who benefit from qualitative research do not have the luxury to immerse themselves in a certain body of theory and a question that plagues many people who are unfamiliar with qualitative methods is: Am I doing it right? An obsession with this question constrains creativity and working through the messiness that inevitably marks qualitative research. If PIQDA sheds light on a problem and creates findings that provide practical wisdom and “workability,” for instance by providing use-inspired guidance on social action, then PIQDA is a success. Like any craft or practice, people will learn PIQDA less by reading about it and more by taking the metaphorical plunge (ideally with a mentor) and getting their hands and feet wet in the process (Tracy, 2007). Although adherence to a certain school of thought is not required for PIQDA, the approach encourages the use of extant academic literature to inform the study at hand. PIQDA is an umbrella approach, in that you could start with research design and data collection and learn a body of theory simultaneously. For example, perhaps a researcher jumps into fieldwork, is introduced to the phenomenology literature three months later, and then begins to examine the field notes by paying close attention to experience—­ perhaps even conducting an autoethnography to explore one’s own similar experience (see Chapter 12 in this volume). The researcher might also learn about and incorporate a specific literature (e.g., on the concept of organizational identification) and use those

concepts to help guide the study’s focus (see Endacott & Myers, 2019). This incorporation and welcoming of existing literature and theory differentiates PIQDA from purely inductive renditions of grounded theory that advocated that researchers enter the scene as a blank slate and avoid reading literature until most of the data were collected and analyzed (Glaser & Strauss, 1967). Instead, PIQDA adopts an iterative approach—a reflexive process that oscillates back and forth between these two areas: (1) guiding literature, research questions, theory, and sensitizing concepts, and (2) qualitative data’s emergent notions, concepts, themes, and surprises. The researcher visits and revisits the data, links emerging insights to established literature, and progressively refines the study’s area of focus. These are the basic questions guiding an iterative analysis: (1) What are the data telling me? (2) What is it I want to know? (3) What is the dialectical relationship between what the data are telling me and what I want to know? (see Srivastava & Hopwood, 2009, p. 78). This iterative approach resonates with thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2021) and more recent constructivist versions of grounded theory (Thornberg & Charmaz, 2014). Indeed, the funnel metaphor (Tracy, 2020) is emblematic of PIQDA: One enters the research design with a guiding research question or problem, casts a wide net with a child-like curiosity, asks how the emergent data speak to or suggest a modified research direction, revises the research approach, considers additional former literature or a priori research concerns, and re-enters data collection and analysis with a narrowed attention. This iterative process is depicted in Figure 20.1. Rather than telling a story of the entire range of events, activities, participants, or relationships evident in the data (expected in many grounded theory, ethnographic, and thematic analysis approaches), PIQDA is successful when it answers a specific research question (or two, or three, or five),

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Figure 20.1  A Phronetic Iterative Approach Alternates Between Considering Existing Theories/Research Questions and Emergent Qualitative Data. Source: Sarah J. Tracy, commissioned from artist Sally Campbell Pirie.

and does so in a way that creates practical wisdom for the focal audiences. A phronetic approach would suggest that good initial research questions include: (1) Where are we going? (2) Who gains, and who loses? (3) Is this development desirable? (4) What should be done? (Flyvbjerg, 2001). As they proceed with the study, researchers devise more specific research questions, such as: “How do administrators of color negotiate their co-cultural group and dominant group memberships within a predominately White institution of higher education?” (Razzante, 2018, p. 341). Readers may also wonder how PIQDA compares to other well-known qualitative methodologies in organizational studies, such as Fairhurst and Putnam’s (2019) integrative methodology (see Chapter 28 in this volume) or Gioia et  al.’s (2013, 2022) grounded methodology. Like Fairhurst and Putnam’s (2019) integrative methodology, PIQDA examines emergent data in relation to larger discourses. However, Fairhurst and Putnam’s (2019) methodology focuses primarily on combining little “d” and big “D” discourse orientations to analyze organizational oppositions. Moreover, like Gioia et al.’s (2013, 2022) grounded methodology, PIQDA assumes that organizing is a socially

constructed process and that researchers should pay attention to participant-generated meanings and researcher-generated analytic insights. What’s more, all these approaches are interested in generating plausible understandings of phenomena, rather than a single right answer. PIQDA differs from the Gioia methodology, though, in that it may or may not result in a grounded explanation. In addition, PIQDA is not focused on creating a conceptual model that differentiates participants’ “first-order” understandings from “second-order” researcher interpretations. Gioia’s approach has come under attack for being applied as a formulaic template (e.g., Mees-Buss et  al., 2022; Pratt et  al., 2022). In contrast, PIQDA aims to provide a map for conducting and analyzing qualitative research, while remaining open to a bricolage of research representations, which may take the form of rich exemplars, artistic representations, autoethnographic storytelling, conceptual models, and detailed textual analyses. Furthermore, given its original home in the field of communication, studies employing PIQDA typically include verbatim excerpts from a range of empirical materials, such as interviews, field notes, artifacts, art, online materials and more, whereas the Gioia methodology primarily focuses on interviews to

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synthesize first-order concepts (summaries of interview content) and second-order interpretive themes.

CRITICAL ISSUES AND QUESTIONS ABOUT ENACTING PIQDA RESEARCH We now turn PIQDA as an actionable practice. The information provided in this section is abbreviated, given space limitations. Interested readers are encouraged to consider more detailed discussions (see Tracy, 2018, 2020)—as mentioned, PIQDA is not a template or methodological “recipe.” In what follows, we discuss critical issues, ethical concerns, and questions about doing PIQDA research, particularly related to (1) research design and focus; (2) primary and secondary cycle coding with first-level and second-level codes; (3) practices for creating quality; and (4) interpretive ways to focus the analysis.

Research Design and Focus PIQDA’s research design typically begins by identifying a problem, curiosity, dilemma, issue of concern, or interest. This problem may emerge in (1) the context of study, such as asking whether the concept of compassion or burnout may better elucidate the emotional highs and lows of hospice workers (Way & Tracy, 2012); (2) a population, such as wildland firefighters who operate based on codified safety rules from earlier fatalities and need stronger safety rules and work team models (Jahn, 2016); or (3) an academic literature, such as Kingsford et al. (2021) who explored resilience theories and expanded them by analyzing the experiences of welfare recipients. Whether this problem is identified in a specific context, population, or literature, it is not merely a hypothetical problem; rather, it is grounded in space and time—you could write a documentary movie script that showed

the problem or issue in action, with a plot line, characters, script, artifacts, props, and a scene. For instance, researchers may observe circus performers in their front and backstage environments (Martinez, 2022). Depending on what they observe, they may then choose to focus on how these performers are socialized to manage pain to become successful in their performances. Other researchers— especially those who aim to extend a specific line of scholarship or are motivated by professional goals—will more likely begin with a specific problem that has been identified in past literature or that emerged within their organization. For example, researchers may find that the concept of compassion has primarily been theorized on a relational level, which does not fully capture the organizational experience of healthcare workers. This may lead them to theorize compassion on a structural level (Leach, 2022). Next, the researcher collects data through qualitative means of interviewing, observation, gathering textual or artistic materials, and so on. PIQDA’s data collection practices are very similar to many other qualitative approaches (see Ellingson, 2017; Tracy, 2020). Throughout, researchers should pay attention to procedural ethics as are required by institutional boards as well as situational ethics that are particular to the context, such as whether consent should be generated at the individual, group, or organizational level. Preparing and organizing the data is a cyclical, iterative, and analytic process. Related activities include repeatedly reviewing empirical materials through reading and listening, writing analytic asides, and organizing the data into larger categories. The data could be further organized in terms of chronology (all the data from 2021 here, all of it from 2022 there), source demographics (all materials from Millennials here, all from Gen X there), contexts (all data from workplace 1 here, from workplace 2 there), or type (all field notes here, all interview transcripts there). During this organization phase, it is useful for researchers to reflect

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on the ways they process information. Some people like notebooks while others prefer specialized qualitative data analysis software (for an overview, see Silver & Lewins, 2014). The organization of data is a key part of the analytic process. Chronological ordering has the benefit of displaying change over time, correlation, and influence. Dividing data based on demographics encourages comparisons across groups. Separating field notes from interviews may trigger an interesting crystallization (Ellingson, 2008) that illuminates how participants say one thing and do another thing. We encourage researchers to be mindful and intentional, in this regard, as organization choices that may seem trivial in the beginning can affect a study’s results in significant ways.

Primary and Secondary Cycle Coding with First-Level and Second-Level Codes PIQDA suggests that researchers analyze their data as they gather it, but then engage in a period of focused analysis when they have completed about two-thirds of their data collection. One way to envision the coding process is by using a cooking metaphor (see Tracy, 2020). Imagine that your data are a buffet with all kinds of food. Although all this food is mouthwatering, it is way too much for a person to digest in a single sitting. The PIQDA researcher’s job is to identify the key ingredients from this delicious spread— ingredients they will use to create a perfect new “dish” (a research article, report, book) that meets the needs and interests of the key audience. Coding is a tool that facilitates this process. PIQDA uses the term “code” to refer to the way researchers identify a word or phrase that “symbolically assigns a summative, salient, essence-capturing, and/or evocative attribute for a portion of language-based or visual data” (Saldaña, 2016, p. 4). Coding unfolds

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chronologically, first in primary cycles that focus on the emergent meanings in the data, and then in secondary cycles that focus on synthesizing the data and incorporating concepts that could only be known through theorizing based on the literature (Tracy, 2020). Primary cycle coding begins with what grounded theory scholars have called “open coding” or “line-by-line coding” (Charmaz, 2014; Glaser & Strauss, 1967). During this process, researchers consider specific questions or domains. For example, they may take note of behaviors, rituals, characters, contexts, rules, or time periods (Tracy, 2020). During primary cycle coding, it is important to be curious and remain open to multiple meanings. This is a time to delight in surprises and new discoveries in the data. For such detailed open coding, Tracy (2018) generally recommends that researchers choose about 20% of the data that illustrate a maximum variation of information available in the empirical materials. To code, researchers can highlight a portion of the data (e.g., transcripts, field notes, news articles, visual materials) and then write the code—a word or short phrase— in longhand in the margin or a comment in Microsoft Word. Alternatively, the code may be entered in data analysis software, such as NVivo. The more detailed researchers are in this process, the more fine-grained their understanding in terms of the data’s main ingredients. However, there is no set rule as to whether to first “lump” data into larger categories or to “fracture” data into smaller slices that may be reintegrated down the line (Bazeley & Jackson, 2013). No matter how detailed, codes in this primary cycle should be quite simple, obvious, and empirical—sticking primarily to what Tracy (2020) calls first-level codes, which are descriptive (they describe who, what, where, when) and are identifiable, even without specialized expertise. Moreover, it is valuable to use gerunds (words ending in “-ing”) to capture action (Charmaz et al., 2018). First-level codes may also be the exact words or phrases

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employed by participants (in vivo codes, see Strauss, 1987). Assigning first-level codes simplifies the data buffet, so to speak, which is crucial for assessing the empirical aspects of the study before moving toward theorizing and conceptualizing. One of the most common mistakes in qualitative analysis is trying to create complex conceptual coding labels too quickly. A sound analysis benefits from patiently lingering in the intelligibility of first-level coding. We encourage you to wait for secondary cycle coding to engage theory in earnest— something we describe next. After completing the primary cycle coding, researchers continue with secondary cycle coding (Tracy, 2020). During this part of the analysis, researchers begin to integrate theory and synthesize first-level codes. Rather than simply examining the data for key descriptive ingredients, they search for second-level codes (Tracy, 2020), which are sometimes referred to as “themes” (Braun & Clarke, 2006, 2021; Gioia et al., 2013; Ryan & Bernard, 2003). One heuristic for having found a second-level code is attempting to answer the question, “What is this expression an example of?” (Ryan & Bernard, 2003). For instance, Martinez (2022) began noticing a difference in the ways circus performers related to pain depending on their context and audience. Over time, and pulling from Goffman’s (1959) sociological theories, a code of “backstage behavior” encapsulated data (interview excerpts and photos) that captured a key theme in the data. During secondary cycle coding, it is especially useful to talk with other scholars and return to the literature. For example, when first author Sarah and her colleague Tim were analyzing an audio-recorded conversation of a would-be school shooter and front-office employee (Tracy & Huffman, 2017), they first coded a series of talk turns as “conversational mirroring.” This first-level descriptive code was simple—identifying instances when one speaker repeated verbatim the words and intonation of the other speaker. However, in

secondary cycle coding, the authors wanted to understand the impact of such a conversational move. While reading the literature, they came across concepts of communication accommodation (Soliz & Giles, 2014) and communication entrainment (McGrath & Kelly, 1986), which became second-level theoretical codes in their study. These codes helped elucidate why such a conversational move had a calming effect on the would-be school shooter. In secondary cycle coding, researchers also begin to lump together multiple fractured codes—often referred to as axial coding (Charmaz, 2014) or hierarchical coding (Tracy, 2020). For example, in a study of how travelers interact with U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers, third author Marco, grouped together the first-level codes of “hiding information” and “ignoring hostile behavior” under the second-level code of “survival strategies” (see Dehnert, 2021). During secondary cycle coding, researchers may also link behaviors that co-occur. For example, in an interview study, Tracy and Rivera (2010) found that male executives showed an uptick in verbal disfluencies when speaking about work–life balance solutions. After researching the causes of verbal disfluencies and considering how the interview questions prompted participants to articulate new ideas for the first time, the authors identified that structuration theory (Giddens, 1984) would help explain the scripts that govern work–life concerns for the executives. This turn was a direct result of the abductive and iterative analysis processes that define PIQDA. The next step in PIQDA is to develop a codebook, which at minimum includes the names of the codes and their definition (for examples, see Tracy, 2018, 2020). Unlike a traditional grounded analysis that aims to explain the entire data set using open coding, PIQDA uses research questions to decide whether a code should be included in the codebook. Interesting codes that relate to questions that are not the focus of the study

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may be discussed in terms of promising directions for future research. The codebook goes through multiple iterations and is eventually laid deductively on top of the rest of the data. Of course, if a new or unexpected code emerges that relates to the study focus, the researcher should incorporate it into the codebook and reexamine the data set to see how it connects. Revising the codebook in this way maintains the integrity of the codebook via iteration with emergent qualitative data.

Creating Quality in PIQDA Quality standards in PIQDA are flexible and expansive. Tracy’s (2010) “big tent” model distinguishes eight end goals that characterize high quality qualitative research and differentiates these from the various mean practices, or techniques, that researchers take up to achieve the end goal. These goals include: (1) worthy topic; (2) rich rigor; (3) sincerity; (4) credibility; (5) resonance; (6) significant contribution; (7) thoughtful ethical considerations; and (8) meaningful coherence. Several articles, chapters, and encyclopedia entries have described this model of quality in depth, and also provided extensions and critiques (e.g., see Leach et  al., 2023; López & Tracy, 2020). The model has also been misinterpreted when readers overlook the fundamental distinction that the practices for reaching these eight end goals of research quality depend on the study’s paradigmatic and axiological assumptions. For example, researchers who adopt a postpositivist approach often use intercoder agreement practices to provide an avenue for enhancing the end goal of credibility. Intercoder reliability—something that can be addressed in a number of ways (Tracy, 2020)—is a valuable practice when a research team is claiming to represent a reality that others would be able to recognize and replicate. Such was the case in a research

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study comparing the efficacy of one type of leadership course compared to another (Adame et al., 2021). Based upon qualitative coding of role-play scenarios, the researchers claimed that several specific leadership behaviors were more prevalent among students in one class than the other. Such a claim benefits from the fact that multiple researchers identified and agreed that a certain piece of data aligned with a specific code. In analyses engaging critical, interpretive, or postmodern/post-structural postqualitative questions, a practice for reaching the end goals of credibility, rich rigor, and ethics comes through sharing emerging findings with participants—something Tracy (2020) calls member reflections. In carrying out this practice, researchers share, listen, and learn from participants’ responses—and consider how their feedback may shape and guide the research. It is less about ensuring that the researcher has it “right” and more about considering how participants’ reactions (whether positive, negative, or indifferent) provide another viewpoint. For example, during Way and Malvini Redden’s (2020) member reflections in a study of working-class youths’ social media use, the teens challenged the researchers’ initial interpretations, which in turn triggered the researchers to refocus their analysis on social media impression and privacy management. Another common quality end goal is for research to resonate beyond the specific study to other contexts. People who are not familiar with qualitative methods often refer to generalization, but this term begets inappropriate positivist notions of statistical generalizability and prediction. Instead, Tracy (2010) uses the term resonance to refer to research that influences, affects, or moves the audience in a variety of ways. Said another way, does the research provide an avenue for readers to better make sense of a phenomenon in their own lives outside of the specific research context at hand? Two mean (in process) practices for creating the end goal of resonance are aesthetic writing and thick description

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(Geertz, 1973). Of course, researchers can also make their research more likely to resonate when they not only show, but also tell about the ways that their research is transferable to other contexts. Given PIQDA’s essence of practical wisdom that addresses problems people grapple with, specifying a study’s transferability is an ethical move as well (Lincoln & Guba, 1985). This is where several practices related to focusing the ana­ lysis can also help.

PIQDA Focusing Activities PIQDA benefits from a number of synthesizing and theorizing activities. For instance, claim-making is a key analytic art between coding and interpretation, and, unfortunately, is often glossed in research methods training. Huffman and Tracy (2018) elucidate a range of claim-making heuristics that help ensure that qualitative research resonates beyond the study at hand. Here, we review several important heuristics. Weick’s (2001) adage of “How can I know what I think until I see what I say” is a guiding tenet of qualitative inquiry in so much that writing is not just a method of representation, but also is a method of inquiry (p. 189; see also Richardson & St. Pierre, 2018). For example, writing analytic memos (Charmaz, 2014) prompts researchers to think carefully and develop codes by informally writing about their parameters, examples, consequences, and a code’s relationship to other codes. As Saldaña (2016) would say, analytic memos are places to metaphorically “dump your brain” (p. 44). Analytic memos also provide spaces to begin making claims or statements regarding phenomena that could be substantiated, extended, or critiqued in future research. For example, consider the difference in resonance between these two sentences: (1) “This study suggests the importance of future research on transgender identities in the workplace”; and (2) “Formally educating our workplaces on

queer histories is critical to ensure that trans* employees’ well-being is not a casualty of poor planning or backlash” (Jones, 2020, p. 271). The first statement is a good, yet very vague idea. The second statement is a claim. And, as a claim, the second one has a basis to be further studied in the future, amplifying the resonance of the study. Claims can be made even more impactful when the researchers place parameters or borders around them. Parameter setting (Keyton et al., 2009) uses the structure of a claim plus the addition of especially when, or except when. Using the above example (Jones, 2020), the claim could be made even more powerful with a parameter such as: Formally educating our workplaces on queer histories is critical to ensure trans*1 employees’ wellbeing especially when organizational leaders are unfamiliar with gender nonconforming concerns. Arriving at such a specific claim would first require the PIQDA researcher to creatively think through their data, consider how emergent codes work together, and put boundaries among the emergent claims. Parameters are also an ethical practice for ensuring that claims made do not overreach or exaggerate the impact of findings. Another activity to focus PIQDA is creating a loose analysis outline (Tracy, 2020) that briefly overviews the content of research findings. Writing from a loose analysis outline is less unwieldy than trying to write straight from a codebook or even from a series of analytic memos. Researchers should begin with a short statement of their research questions, choose codes and analytic memo claims, and then rewrite them in a sentence form that connects with and serves to answer the research questions. Not all codes will be included in this outline. And the researcher can valuably place material on actual or digital Post-it Notes so that they can play iteratively with their ordering. The goal is to provide an outline—based upon the analytic activities thus far—of the emerging findings section in a small space. Doing so will point out places where additional data could be

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valuably gathered, synthesized, and coded and will serve as a framework for the larger paper. Now that we have reviewed PIQDA, we next turn to key ways that PIQDA has emerged in contemporary organizational communication literature.

ORGANIZATIONAL COMMUNICATION STUDIES USING ITERATIVE ANALYSIS APPROACHES In order to explore how PIQDA approaches to qualitative data analysis are used in organizational communication scholarship, we conducted a systematic search of articles published in Management Communication Quarterly as well as International Communication Association (ICA) and (U.S.) National Communication Association (NCA) journals between 2010 and 2020. We searched for the word “iterative” in a database of these journals, which produced 331 articles. We searched using the word “iterative,” rather than PIQDA, because it cast a larger umbrella, and because the name of Tracy’s (2013, 2018, 2020) analysis approach has evolved over time across multiple publications (e.g., Tracy used “pragmatic” iterative analysis in her 2013 edition of the textbook, p. 184). Furthermore, we were interested to know how organizational communication scholars are using a key element of PIQDA (iteration), rather than how they are labeling it. As is evident in the preceding discussion, PIQDA incorporates, overlaps with, and extends techniques from a variety of abductive and iterative approaches. Articles that used the word “iterative” outside the context of qualitative research or focus of organizational communication were eliminated, given the scope of this chapter. The remaining 161 articles were imported into NVivo. Then a text query was deployed using NVivo qualitative software searching for the word “iterative” and all of its stem words (i.e., iterative, iteration, iterate, etc.).

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The broad context setting within NVivo was employed for the text query, which provides a full paragraph (rather than one phrase) each time a stem-word of the word “iterative” appeared. This provided a dataset that was analyzed to see how qualitative organizational communication scholars incorporate iterative approaches into their research. Our analysis reveals that qualitative organizational communication scholars use iterative approaches in three dominant ways: (1) iteration between data analysis and existing literature/synthesizing concepts/theories; (2) iteration as a form of coding that is executed abductively; and (3) iteration between data collection and data analysis. Each approach is reviewed below and examples are shared. The first approach is directly in alignment with the PIQDA tradition and often cites Tracy’s scholarship. The second approach, iterative forms of coding, draws from the PIQDA tradition, but it is often combined with other forms of iteration, typically from the grounded traditions referencing constant comparative coding. The coding processes in PIQDA and constant comparative approaches are compatible in that there are multiple rounds of coding and synthesis. Hence, it is unsurprising that we find manuscripts that reference both iterative coding from PIQDA proper and constant comparative coding in tandem with one another. The final approach, iterating between data collection and analysis, aligns with PIQDA’s assumptions, yet most scholars using this type of iteration cite grounded theory rather than PIQDA. Scholars use these approaches in a wide variety of articles published across the discipline of organizational communication. Please note that in many of the examples cited below, scholars reference Tracy (2013), which is the first edition of Tracy’s (2020) edition of Qualitative Research Methods. The second edition (Tracy, 2020), especially Chapter 9, differentiates PIQDA from other qualitative approaches. Please also note that many people cite these books as being published a year earlier (2012 for 2013 and 2019

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for 2020), ostensibly because they used a prepublication version.

Iteration Between Data Analysis and Existing Literature The first way scholars use an iterative approach is by moving between their data and a priori literature, theories, or sensitizing concepts. This form of iterative analysis is aligned with PIQDA. For instance, Anderson (2020) described her analytical approach as follows in her quasi-ethnographic study of aging in place: I completed a thematic approach to data analysis…This approach seeks to identify themes or recurring patterns in qualitative data, such as observations, interviews, and personal reflections. It is a flexible process that involved moving iteratively between the theory, context, and data (Tracy, 2019). (p. 365)

Anderson first calls her analysis “thematic,” but then cites Tracy’s iterative approach as moving between “theory, context, and data” (p. 365). Similarly, Ban’s (2017) study of tensions and identities in Chinese house churches “used an iterative approach (Tracy, 2012) which allowed me to travel between ‘emic, or emergent, readings of the data’ and an ‘etic use of existing models, explanations and theories’ (p. 384)” (pp. 239–240). Others incorporated computer-assisted analysis as part of their iterative analysis, such as Kim et al. (2019), who described the qualitative portion of their multi-study article on organizational awareness among a dispersed workforce as follows: All interviews were transcribed verbatim; in turn, transcripts were imported into Atlas.ti for analysis. The data were analyzed using a practical iterative approach (Tracy, 2013). An iterative analysis alternates between emic reading of the data (e.g., emerging themes that reveal new patterns of task awareness) and an etic use of existing models and theories (e.g. prior literatures on

task awareness and our own findings from Study 2). The practical iterative approach allows researchers to pay attention to both emergent findings and currently active interests, priorities, and salient frameworks and theories.…The practical iterative approach provides an ideal fit for this study because it enables us to emphasize our focus on task awareness throughout the analysis and identify new forms of task awareness triggered by emerging communicative practice among dispersed workers. (p. 57)

These are just a few of the many studies we found (e.g., see Bruscella & Bisel, 2018; Compton & Dougherty, 2017; Cooper & Mitra, 2018; Dutta, 2018) that use this approach to iteration in their analysis, alternating between existing knowledge and the study’s localized qualitative data.

Iteration Between Coding Strategies Our analysis suggests that a second popular way that iterative approaches are ­utilized in qualitative organizational communication research is for coding purposes. These studies described an abductive, back and forth process between different kinds of data during the initial analysis. Iteration in coding (i.e., moving back and forth between different types of data) is distinct from the first iterative approach discussed in the previous section. For instance, Canary and colleagues (2017) described their coding in a research study about a process improvement project at a public institution regarding their conflict of interest procedures as follows: We used qualitative thematic analysis to answer Research Questions 1 and 3, engaging in collaborative and iterative coding following principles of the constant comparative method (Tracy, 2013). NVivo qualitative analysis software was used to organize and code qualitative responses from the baseline and follow-up surveys, notes from the policy café meetings, and field notes from the website usability study. (p. 211)

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Note that this article cites Tracy’s earlier book and uses the language constant comparative method to describe “iterative coding.” Similarly, Jones (2020) combined Tracy’s iterative coding with Charmaz’s (2011) coding approach to describe their analysis of interview data with trans*1 employees from a community organization called Trans*Spectrum exploring gender identity, performativities, presentation, agency, and privilege: I approached the study as multilayered and iterative by embodying an etic use of sensitizing concepts and theoretical models with an emic relationship to study data. After transcribing and reviewing each interview through processes of data immersion, I utilized primary, secondary, and hierarchical coding processes, including attribute, process, in vivo, concept, and emotion coding (Saldaña, 2016). The first stage of analysis included open-coding 80% of each transcript to describe “what” was happening in the data. Guided by Charmaz (2011), I used gerunds to best capture the essence of action in the data and punctuated these first-level codes with analytic memos. The second stage of analysis included analytic and interpretive revisions that answered “why” data were significant. Finally, I employed hierarchical coding to create “conceptual bins for emergent claims” (S. J. Tracy, 2020, p. 268) and repeated this cycle multiple times to create a codebook with 17 total codes.…Using these external assessments of themes’ validity, I used the constant comparative method to ensure data were applicable to codes and emerging themes, typologies, and metaphors (Charmaz, 2011). Finally, I organized the data in a loose analysis outline to guide the writing process and evaluate the completeness of analysis.

This excerpt shows a common approach in  which scholars use an iterative approach to coding and cite Tracy’s scholarship along with additional approaches to qualitative analysis, such as the constant comparative method. Other recent organizational com­ munication studies that use a similar itera­ tive approach to coding are Koschmann’s (2016) analysis of collaboration failures and  Guntzviller et  al.’s (2020) research on advice-giving conversations. By specifically

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addressing iterative coding practices, these studies couple PIQDA with other compatible analytical techniques.

Iteration Between Data Collection and Data Analysis The third and least defined way organizational communication scholars use iterative analysis is by moving back and forth between data collection and data analysis. The articles in the corpus we analyzed rarely cited PIQDA or Tracy’s qualitative research more generally. Rather, they cited a range of grounded theory approaches (e.g., Charmaz, 2014; Corbin & Strauss, 2008; Denzin & Lincoln, 2003; Glaser & Strauss, 1967; Strauss & Corbin, 1998). We included this type of iterative analysis because it demonstrates the intellectual diversity regarding iteration in qualitative data analysis. Often, grounded theory is strictly inductive, iterating between data collection and analysis. Further, traditional grounded theory approaches typically do not reference literature or sensitizing concepts until after analysis (Glaser & Strauss, 1967). For example, in Basu’s (2011) analysis of marginalized sex workers in India, iteration is described as follows: Data collection was conducted in tandem with translating and simultaneously transcribing the audiorecorded conversations. The data was then analyzed for themes. This project’s focus on contextually grounded localized articulations on health meant that the grounded theory (Strauss & Corbin, 1998) would be a viable method of analyzing the narratives. Denzin and Lincoln (2003) write that grounded theory is an iterative process by which understandings of phenomena as experienced on the ground emerge through engagement with the data. (p. 396)

Basu (2011) cites grounded theory as the methodology and describes movement between conducting data collection and engaging with the data analytically.

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Similarly, Kroon (2019) described her iterative approach in terms of going back and forth between data collection and ana­ lysis in a study of supervisors’ communication with aging workers: “Data collection and analyses were alternated in iterative steps. The recruiting of supervisors continued until collecting additional new data no longer resulted in the emergence of new dimensions or explanations (Strauss & Corbin, 1990)” (p. 396). Moreover, Kroon situated her study in the tradition of grounded theory. In both examples, as well as many others, researchers use “iterative” as descriptive language and employ it methodologically. The oscillation between data collection and analysis mimics similar assumptions tied to iteration from PIQDA as a process, in that interpretation often occurs via abductive reasoning until sense is made between the data and an intellectual stopping point, or “anchor,” metaphorically speaking. However, the intellectual anchor in PIQDA differs from the one that is used in grounded theory. In PIQDA, the anchor is often theory, sensitizing concepts, or literature; in grounded theory, the anchor is saturation (Strauss & Corbin, 1990)—when no new insights emerge from data. Although it is impossible to know the exact reasons why scholars chose to cite approaches other than PIQDA when coupling data collection and analysis, one explanation could be that PIQDA is typically associated with data analysis (e.g., Tracy, 2018), rather than with data collection. Indeed, there is little that distinguishes data collection in PIQDA from more constructivist grounded theory approaches (e.g., Thornberg & Charmaz, 2014). What distinguishes PIQDA from original grounded theory approaches is that, along the way, the PIQDA researcher is encouraged to consider theory, sensitizing concepts, and literature, rather than trying to analyze data purely inductively as a metaphorical tabula rasa or blank slate (Kelle, 2014).

In sum, our analysis revealed three common ways organizational communication scholars are incorporating iteration into their qualitative research. The first way is directly connected to Tracy’s (2020) PIQDA: moving between data analysis and existing literature/theory/sensitizing concepts. In this first approach, scholars use iterative efforts to develop and advance their data analysis. In the second approach, scholars use iteration as part of their coding processes. Organizational communication scholars abductively move between data (often multiple types of data) and codes as a way to advance their analysis. Articles using these approaches refer to PIQDA and Tracy’s work in tandem with other iterative coding approaches. In the third approach, scholars iterate by moving back and forth between data collection and analysis. In this case, articles do not refer to Tracy’s work directly, yet do use “iterative” language and are situated in the tradition of grounded theory. Furthermore, according to our analysis, Management Communication Quarterly published the most qualitative organizational communication research that incorporated some type of iterative approach between 2010 and 2020 (n = 44), followed by Communication Monographs (n = 42) and Journal of Applied Communication Research (n = 42). Thus, our analysis shows that iterative approaches to qualitative organizational communication research are widely accepted, with PIQDA serving as a common resource for framing processes of qualitative data analysis.

FUTURE DIRECTIONS FOR PIQDA IN ORGANIZATIONAL COMMUNICATION RESEARCH In this chapter, we explained the grounding principles of PIQDA as an umbrella approach for qualitative data analysis in organizational

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communication research. After offering a brief history of the approach, we situated PIQDA as a translated methodology; that is, as an overarching approach toward qualitative research. As a methodology, PIQDA centers on generating context-driven, pragmatic, problem-based research that aims to answer specific questions with practical wisdom, rather than to create grounded theory from data. Next, we showed how to embody this phronetic spirit in our explanation of how to conduct PIQDA. To conclude, we presented an analysis of how iterative approaches to qualitative data analysis have been used in published organizational communication research. We are excited to see the breadth and variety of ways that researchers have applied PIQDA to their problem-driven studies that result in context-based answers. Our hope is that PIQDA will also be used increasingly in organizational communication practice. That is, we believe that due to its focus on generating localized, problem-driven solutions, PIQDA can provide generative, effective, and applied insights for organizational practitioners across a variety of contexts, be it counseling, professional ethnography, or activist organizations. One strength of PIQDA is that those looking for potential answers to a given problem need not be experts in academic theory before conducting a study. Rather, they can iteratively move between the context at hand and the literature/theory as they are conducting their research, always being driven by particular questions. Moreover, PIQDA’s openness toward the “outcome” of the research process is less constrained, compared to other, related approaches. For example, while thematic analysis focuses on generating themes, the Gioia methodology on developing a conceptual model, and grounded theory on inductive theorizing, the “outcome” of a PIQDA project is open to the needs of the communities and organizations that are studied. This makes PIQDA suitable for application beyond scholarly contexts in which

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practitioners are oftentimes constrained by tight deadlines, operate with limited funding, and/or are simply not interested in developing detailed theoretical insights. Finally, we urge readers—practitioners, scholars, and students alike—not to treat PIQDA as a metaphorical cookbook or recipe that needs to be followed step-by-step. As we have shown in this chapter, PIQDA should be regarded as an expansive and translated methodology, rather than a template (see also Mees-Buss et  al., 2022; Pratt et  al., 2022). Moreover, we urge those interested in exploring PIQDA to “take the plunge” (Tracy, 2007, p. 106) and just do it. As noted by Schwartz and Sharpe (2010), citing Aristotle’s study of practical wisdom, “People learn how to be brave…by doing brave things. So, too, with honesty, justice, loyalty, caring, listening, and counseling” (p. 26). Likewise, you can only learn PIQDA as a craft in the practice of doing PIQDA. In this regard, we hope that PIQDA will continue to provide anchoring guideposts for the practice of qualitative research in organizational communication.

Note 1  We use the word “trans*” with an asterisk in alignment with the article cited by Jones (2020) to refer to all who are not cisgender, including people who identify as transgender, nonbinary, gender fluid, gender queer, gender nonconforming, or agender. We also recognize that this way of writing is not uncontested, and that writing conventions change.

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21 Narrative Analysis in Qualitative Organizational Communication Research S t e p h a n i e L . D a i l e y, L a r r y D a v i s B r o w n i n g , a n d Jan-Oddvar Sørnes

Narrative analysis is a unique method in qualitative organizational communication research. Classic and contemporary examples of narrative analysis abound in the discipline (e.g., Mumby, 1987; Peterson & Garner, 2019) and related disciplines, like linguistics, rhetoric, psychology, management, and organization theory (Boje, 1991; Bruner, 1986; Czarniawska, 2004; Fisher, 2021; Gabriel, 2000; Weick, 1995). Narrative ana­ lysis has reached its maturity, and a stock knowledge of the method exists. However, few organizational communication scholars have summarized or clearly articulated the various ways of doing narrative analysis. Our purpose here is to build on the celebration of the “narrative turn” in communication scholarship (Krizek, 2017, p. 2) by addressing how narrative analyses of organizations and organizing processes are being performed and how we might improve upon them. We organize this chapter into four sections: (1) narrative and its premises; (2) telling (good) stories; (3) collecting narrative

data in organizations; and (4) analyzing narrative data in organizational communication. Throughout these four sections, we keep our focus as much as possible on the implications for qualitative organizational communication researchers, while still acknowledging the interdisciplinary nature of narrative research.

NARRATIVE AND ITS PREMISES What Is Narrative? We begin our chapter with a basic—yet fundamental—question: What do organi­ zational communication scholars mean when they use the word “narrative?” Although this query might seem easily answered or obvious, we agree with Bruner (2002) that we must go beyond implicitness and intuition. Moreover, many researchers who use narrative analysis as a method fail to define this term. But clarity is key, because organizational communication

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researchers frequently use “narrative” to refer to the theoretical foundation of their study, a description of their data collection process, and/or an explanation of their mode of analysis (Barbour, 2017). As such, in his review of narrative and storytelling in organizational communication, Krizek (2017) encourages us to “strive for more precision or at least consistency in [our] invocation and use of conceptual terms” as a subdiscipline, and that we be “more pious in regard to our application of terms” (p. 15). Heeding this call, we define “narrative in organizational communication” as a discursive assemblage of stories that allows organizational members to make sense of lived experiences and emplot their own story of self. Let us unpack this definition in three parts. First, we conceive of narrative as a discursive assemblage. When speaking of narrative, then, we are not referring to the linguistic structuring of the narrative discourse or text (i.e., is there a plot?), or even the single act of telling a story. Rather, narrative in organizational communication emerges when individual stories coalesce—when stories are assembled together—to form a knowledge system (Snowden, 2002). Regardless of whether the narrative formation occurs unconsciously or strategically, the communication irrevocably represents tacit or explicit knowledge that can be used for various functions. A discursive assemblage may represent narratives of individuals, like an inspirational leader (Boje, 1991), a devious employee (Van Maanen, 1973), or a singer in a men’s chorus (Browning et  al., 2022). Or, it may involve the organization: its current practices (Meyer, 1997), past practices (Clark, 1970), or future practices (Barry & Elmes, 1997). One reason narrative applies so widely is that it scales up and down so readily. Second, we define narrative as a sensemaking process—a way for organizational members and researchers to understand lived experiences. As several narrative scholars have noted, people comprehend the world

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by assembling strings of stories (Browning, 1992; Fisher, 1984; Weick, 1995). For their use in integration, narratives hold value. Consider one of the most expensive wines—Scarecrow—produced in Napa Valley, California. Why do bottles of Scarecrow Cabernet Sauvignon sell for over $800 a bottle? One might argue that their vines produce superior fruit, that the winemakers at Scarecrow are exceptionally gifted, or that the grapes are harvested by hand and only at night. But many of these factors apply to other Napa Valley wines that cost under $50 a bottle. People make sense of Scarecrow through the brand’s narrative—the stories and history behind the wine persuade buyers of its unique value (Murphy, 2006). Through narratives in organizational communication, people make sense of their own lived experiences and those of others. Sensemaking thus includes internal practices as well as external communication via reputation and marketing. Brands are a component of sensemaking when the reputation is the best explanation for valuation. The third element of our definition of narrative is that it allows individuals to emplot their own story of self. Emplotment, a term from Polkinghorne (1995), describes what happens when happenings or events are integrated together into a thematic thread that takes on narrative meaning. Emplotment, Emden (1998, p. 36) explains, “ascribes sense to a story—at potentially different levels of complexity and sophistication.” Importantly, this term helps distinguish narrative from storytelling: narratives are unique because “events and happenings are configured into a temporal unity by means of a plot” (Polkinghorne, 1995, p. 5). Emplotment produces meaning; without it, events (i.e., stories) would seem isolated and discontinuous. Because they contain a beginning, middle, and end, narratives imply causality, which also distinguish them from other communicative forms (Dailey & Browning, 2014). In our definition, we build on Polkinghorne’s (1995) idea of emplotment

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by suggesting that narrative enables individuals to emplot their own story of self. With this third element of our definition, we suggest a connection between narrative and identity, as well as narrative and action. Narratives serve as mirrors—allowing listeners or readers to insert themselves into the discursive assemblage and reflect on their individual or organizational narratives. For example, joint emplotment as a narrative practice demonstrates how different perspectives are made relevant in team talk (Fox & Brummans, 2019). People rarely take in narrative and do nothing with it; rather, they think self-reflexively: How do I fit into this narrative? What would/will I do? How does this affect me? Narrative, Bruner (2002, p. 28) suggests, “gives us a ready and supple means for dealing with the

outcomes of our plans and anticipations.” Stories are powerful because they guide beliefs and future behavior. Narratives are points of articulation (Cooren, 2001) that are embedded in a series of actions to constitute a coalition of events and experiences bound together to produce meaning. In sum, our definition of narrative hinges on these three elements: structure, sensemaking, and the emplotment of self. Importantly, these elements are reflected in the thinking of several key scholars— characters, if you will—whose work formed the foundation for narrative analysis in organizational communication studies and related disciplines. We feature this cast, in alphabetical order, in Table 21.1, along with the premise of narrative they propose.

Table 21.1  Key Characters and Premises of Narrative Key Character

Premise of Narrative

David Boje

suggests that stories are constantly evolving; we pitch in “ante up” into stories like pushing chips to the middle of the table claims that all organizational communication is composed of lists and stories; proposes an open architecture approach for the analysis of organizational narratives contends that narrative shapes the self and our sense of the social world in which we live suggests that stories take an analyzable form that can be interpreted as causal sequences places narrative communication at the center of understanding by acknowledging it as a persuasive device and a means of understanding; stories must have narrative probability and narrative fidelity views organizational life as surprising, revealing, dramatic, and consequential; incorporates complex stances by interpreting mythology from the original Greek and elaborating and unpacking Freudian theory as these classics inform narratives in organizations proposes that our arc of personal experience permits us to code our lives as a grand novel; there is no such thing as a boring or undeserving story, only the wrong, or limited presentation of it believes narratives are an interpretative device; we select events to make up who we are by masking some events and emphasizing others integrates discourse, organizing, power, self-reference, and action into theory asserting that the communication does not represent the organization, the communication is the organization suggests people comprehend by assembling, in the moment, past, local, context and discourse into strings of sensible units that comprise a story

Larry Browning

Jerome Bruner Barbara Czarniawska Walter Fisher

Yiannis Gabriel

Erving Polster

Paul Ricœur James Taylor (and the Montreal School) Karl Weick

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TELLING (GOOD) STORIES Narrative inquiry is a formalized process of investigating (and analyzing) narratives. We begin with explaining the process of investigating and collecting good narrative data, since narrative inquiry is built upon the assumption that we can use stories to understand human action and organizing.

Anyone Can Tell a Story Stories are the building blocks of narratives in organizational communication. Following an idea from narrative scholar Thierry Boudès, we assert that anyone can tell a story; that narrative can be produced by any organizational member (Browning & Boudès, 2005). Webster and Mertova (2007, p. 1) paraphrased the French philosopher JeanPaul Sartre (1964), stating: “People are always tellers of tales. They live surrounded by their stories and the stories of others; they see everything that happens to them through those stories and try living their lives as if they were recounting them.” This position is in keeping with Ricoeur’s (2004) view of narrative. We make stories up and “live them up” at the same time. When humans are children, they enumerate. Listeners hear bits of stories—crumbs of a tale—that might have some meaning, but the items, one by one, do not compose a coherent idea. Around the age of seven or eight, children develop the ability to tell stories. They find a way to put the crumbs together and share or emplot their experience through a narrative. From this point on, the telling of life—how we interpret our experiences—is how we live. Bruner (1994, p. 36) puts it very eloquently: “[L]ife as led is inseparable from a life as told… life is not ‘how it was’ but how it is interpreted and reinterpreted, told and retold.” This reflection and recounting are treated as an unending process, which allows researchers to collect narratives as data points for the reality of organizational life.

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Narratives, then, are a rendition of how life is perceived. Narratives are stories in a tuxedo. They are stories that are “put together,” dressed up, that make you attend with admiration (Gabriel, 2000). It appears humans have a basic need for telling stories and assembling (i.e., emplotting stories into) narratives. As reviews of narrative in organizational communication have already summarized (Clair et al., 2014; Krizek, 2017), beginnings can be seen in cave paintings and other storytelling traditions. Greek philosophers conceived of theories and standards by which to identify and analyze narratives (Fisher, 2021). Why do humans—from cavemen to social media posters—like to tell stories? Because they attract interest; they are scalable (from as small as two isolates on a desert island to as grand as the Russian revolution); and they are versatile, as stories can refer to a moment in time (e.g., microstories) or to eternity (e.g., myths). Furthermore, stories are an invitation to identity. To have a story is to have an identity. As suggested, people make sense of their lives according to the narratives available to them. We should all ask: “What is the story that I’m telling myself?” (Williams, 2022, para. 19). If anyone can tell a story, then how do organizational researchers identify good stories?

Components of a Good Story The primary fuel for stories is a problem (Taylor & Van Every, 2000). For each story there are two questions: Where is the tension? What is the resolution? In organizational life, this is no different. Stories abound in organizations, because they are inherently ironic. Their structures are not perfect; thus, organizational members can always tell a story about a problem. In his discussion of the narrative creation of self, Bruner (2002) distills the psychology literature on the self and reduces it to a succinct list of good storytelling. In a similar

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vein, we offer a list of 10 components of a good story, based on the narratives collected, analyzed, and told in organizational communication research: (1) clarity; (2) structure; (3) interest; (4) vitality; (5) fidelity; (6) originality; (7) appropriateness; (8) relevance; (9) seamlessness; and (10) spontaneity.

Clarity The first element of a good story is one that offers the right mix of detail and ambiguity in the story. A story requires enough detail for verisimilitude, but it avoids the stereotypical curse of engineers, who become so bogged down in details that their stories lose momentum. Unsaid arguments are powerful, as indirection is achieved with the enthymeme, and empty speaking space allows listeners to weave the narrative alongside the teller. What is the joint fabric they ultimately and eventually produce? In short, good stories offer enough information but are “strategically ambiguous” (Eisenberg, 1984, p. 235), incomplete arguments, open to continual interpretation (Feldman & Sköldberg, 2002; Weick & Browning, 1986). For example, in an organi­ zational briefing, most generally consider it an error to have PowerPoint slides so filled with detail that there is no need for the speaker delivering the presentation; the expertise and informality combined with details make up a better pitch.

Structure Second, good stories provide an engaging sequence to the events and characters being related in the story (Czarniawska, 2004). The structure becomes part of the causality. What is the pacing and momentum that leads to the plot and to plot resolution? Is the story plodding or dynamic? Furthermore, is the punchline on point? (If you have to repeat it, it’s too late.) The presentation of a story in an organization necessarily builds on the desire of listeners to retain interest until the point unfolds—at the moment there is an “ah-ha” for the listener.

Interest Third, good stories use phrases and words that listeners find fascinating. In line with reader response theory, which recognizes the role of the audience in constructing meaning, you can never tell what a listener might take away from a story. At the start of his book, The Social Psychology of Organizing, Weick (1979, p. 1) presented the following tale: The story goes that three umpires disagreed about the task of calling balls and strikes. The first one said, “I calls them as they is.” The second one said, “I calls them as I sees them.” The third and cleverest umpire said, “They ain’t nothing till I calls them.”

Put simply, interpretation processes shape organizational reality.

Vitality Fourth, a good story makes the story come to life. Yes, a story has to have a heart. But the teller must be engaging enough and deliver the story with enough dynamism to make the heartbeat. Geertz’s (1972) anthropological study of Balinese cockfighting is a prime example of such writing, as the anthropologist retells how he (and his wife!) run down the main street of a village to escape a truck full of police officers, who had “jumped out, and, springing into the center of the ring, began to swing their guns around like gangsters in a motion picture” (p. 3). As researchers, we are all adventurous characters, but we also treat reflexivity as a methodological attitude (Barros et  al., 2019). We are both surprised by what we see and reveal our understanding to gauge the amount of support there is for our observation for those in the setting we are taking into account.

Fidelity Fifth, a good story rings true: The people and events are shown in a way that is fitting. Good storytellers ensure that technical details are believable. Narratives must have verisimilitude—they must pass as truth. Why are staging details (e.g., clothing, accents, etc.)

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so important in movies and plays? Because if the director gets the details wrong, the audience has no reason to believe the big picture, their main point. Good stories hang together.

Originality The sixth criteria of a good story is originality: The story should be inventive and fresh, rather than worn and familiar. Our words for needless repetition are harsh: “tired, worn, trite.” They all add up to boring. A story is already limited by being relegated to anecdotal knowledge. If it is also boring and obvious, it has two strikes against it; the third strike is limited empiricism and specificity. By its very nature, narrative practice trades specific detail for listener involvement. In organizations, we often combine stories with lists to engage both interests and accuracy (Browning, 1992).

Appropriateness Seventh, a good story should be offered in a context that matches the socio-political circumstances. Just as movies follow ratings (e.g., G-rated for general audiences), so should storytellers follow guidelines for their audiences. How simple or complex should information be presented? It depends. Time and space also affect story appropriateness. Stories told in a pub at 9 p.m. differ greatly from the conversations that transpire at 2 a.m. And employees’ anecdotes around the office watercooler are often unlike those shared over drinks after work.

Relevance Eighth, a good story should ensure that the story is relevant to the application theme. In other words, does the story build on the discourse being uttered, or does it make a case for a shift in the topic being discussed? Listeners must be able to apply the story to their lives; to follow the context and place themselves in it. Irrelevance is an indicator of impatient storytelling. An audience will tune out of a story that is too “off-the-wall.” Interestingly, the Latin phrase “non

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sequitur,” which means “it does not follow,” was “borrowed into English in the 1500s by people who made a formal study of logic. For them, it meant a conclusion that does not follow from the statements that lead to it” (Merriam-Webster). If a narrative is too hard to follow, it appears to be illogical.

Seamlessness The ninth component of a good story is one that delivers the story with pace and momentum. This idea presumes that attention is a scarce resource in organizations; adept storytellers use it wisely. Telling a good story does not take much time, and it certainly does not waste it. Dead airtime kills narratives.

Spontaneity Finally, good stories are able to relate to their audiences and are told in a conversational tone. Good stories know how to communicate common experiences and package them for a particular audience. They might even have a repertoire of narratives—a stock of stories prepared and ready to deliver for certain occasions. But good stories are also offered spontaneously, in the sense that story­ tellers recognize an opportunity and capitalize on it when they have the audience’s attention.

COLLECTING NARRATIVE DATA IN ORGANIZATIONS If organizations are full of storytellers, how exactly can organizational communication researchers go about collecting narratives? Again, although this task might appear simple, Czarniawska (1998, p. 19) cautions: “The narrative device [i.e., narrative data] does not predetermine in any sense how the material is to be constructed or collected.” In the sections below, we highlight four of the most common ways scholars can collect narrative data (stories and narratives) in organizations: (1) conducting interviews; (2) observing lived

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experiences; (3) collecting published stories; and (4) collecting visual images.

Conducting Interviews In the organizational communication literature, interviews are by far the most common means of collecting narrative data. Interviews—typically described by authors as semi-structured and open-ended—allow researchers to gather narratives about organi­ zational members’ personal experiences or perspectives on a topic. For this reason, much of the narrative research in organizational communication uses interview data to investigate sensitive issues, seeking to gain insight into how different employees deal similarly with the difficult topic (McVey, 2023). For example, Gravely et al. (2015, p. 177) used “narrative inquiry” as a method and interviewed 11 individuals who blew the whistle against perceived corruption in various schools. Interviews revealed four narrative identities that people assumed prior to whistleblowing disclosures (citizen, crusader, mom, and popularity seeker), as well as how shifts in narrative identity occurred once participants became whistle-blowers. In her study of sexual harassment narratives, Clair (1993) conducted semi-structured interviews with 50 working women to understand their “personal narratives” (p. 123) with sexual harassment. Clair’s analysis revealed that women framed their experiences in ways that both contributed (e.g., a simple misunderstanding) and challenged (e.g., mutual negation) dominant ideologies. In addition, Hafen (2004) asked 31 employees from four different organizations to narrate their experiences with workplace gossip. Workers’ accounts illustrated how gossip serves to regulate (e.g., cautionary tales) and resist (e.g., nostalgia) organizational processes. Researchers can also use photovoice—a method in which participants represent

their experiences through photos they take—to help individuals tell their stories, particularly those that involve sensitive issues like unemployment (Dougherty et  al., 2018; see also Chapter 19 in this volume). Similarly, Eger (2021) created a new arts-based method: “a ‘creative focus group,’ where participants created collages or drawings about [the organization]… and we discussed their art in focus groups” (p. 261). The advantage of interviews for sensitive topics is the amount of control it gives the interviewee over their story and the risk associated with telling it. As opposed to researchers who cast a wide net for participants across multiple organizations, other scholars take a case study approach, focusing their ­interviews or focus groups on one (or sometimes two) organization(s) (Horstman et  al., 2017; Padavic et  al., 2020). For instance, in their “qualitative case study,” Näslund and Pemer (2012, p. 95) spoke with 42 employees at two large Scandinavian companies to reveal how dominant stories contribute to organizational inertia. By collecting data in two different organizations, these researchers were able to discern differences and similarities between these companies’ narratives, and how these stories restricted and enabled organizational change. Similarly, Browning (1992) showed how lists and stories were embedded in the case of a team of engineers. Although not as common in organizational communication research as semistructured interviews, a specific type of interview bears mentioning: the life-­ history interview. Life-history interviews involve more substantive conversations with participants and seek to record a person’s extended narrative account of their life. Maclean et  al. (2012) appropriately used this specific type of interview in their study of 16 business leaders to show how they legitimize their success through the stories they tell.

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Observing Lived Experiences The second most-common method of collecting narrative data involves directly observing the lived experiences of others. Here, researchers focus on individuals’ ­stories—what is said and what goes unsaid— in the context of their organizational environments. Put differently, this method entails that analysts (re)construct stories based on their observation of others’ experience. Collecting narratives by observing lived experiences can be accomplished by audiorecording organizational interactions, as Boje (1991) did in his study of story performance in an office-supply room, or as Fox and Brummans (2019) did in their study of joint emplotment— how teams narratively co-construct reality— in interprofessional team meetings. In some cases, scholars also use video-recording, as Cooren (2001) did in his study of the intersection of Native people’s rights, energy production, and ecology. Interactional research is particularly ripe for gleaning narrative data and extending organizational communication theory, such as Bormann et al.’s (1978) work, which involved, in part, recordings of group interactions about recurring topics to demonstrate how shared fantasies relate to culture and leadership. Another example is Robichaud and colleagues’ (2004) study of interactional data from public meetings, which shows how organizing occurs through the production of a metanarrative. In addition, researchers often take detailed field notes of what they observe in the field. For example, seeking to reveal how narratives play into building a company, O’Conner (2002) relied on field notes from her ethnographic study of a technology start-up. Field notes are also used to triangulate interview data. Geiger and Antonacopoulou (2009), for instance, supplemented semi-structured interviews with field notes of their participant observation in their study of how narratives influence organizational change processes.

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Finally, autoethnography, although not as common in narrative organizational communication scholarship as it is in ethnographic research, is also a “significant and necessary focus of narrative inquiry” (Chase, 2011, p. 423). In autoethnography, narrative researchers explore a research question or topic by writing, interpreting, or performing their own personal narratives (see Chapter 12 in this volume). For example, in a qualitative course that Solberg and his colleagues teach in Norway, students use autoethnography to critique what they are learning. Indeed, Polster (1987) suggests that every person’s life is worth a novel, offering credence to the researcher’s story as a worthwhile narrative to investigate.

Collecting Published Stories Other organizational communication researchers rely on published stories as data sources. For example, to build their theory of narrative repetition, the first and second author followed the methodology of Martin et  al. (1983) and searched for examples of stories in the academic organizational literature (Dailey & Browning, 2014). Yang (2013) also used previously published ethnographic accounts (from Orr, 1996 and Thomas, 2006) as data, and Boudens (2005) analyzed narratives from two published books, titled Working (Terkel, 1972) and Gig (Bowe et al., 2000). Other scholars have used public d­ iscourse as narrative data, such as newspapers (Leonardi & Jackson, 2003), plays (Boje, 1995), novels, musicals, and a “graphic comic storyboard,” an adult comic strip about serious topic (Michaelson & TostiKharas, 2020, p. 878). Moreover, several studies exploring narratives have collected stories published online, including blog posts (Hinderaker, 2017; Peterson & Garner, 2019) and social media (Brummans et al., 2020).

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Collecting Visual Images Other narrative projects involve collecting visual images. Here, researchers solely gather visual images as data. For instance, Dailey et  al. (2023) collected narrative infographics—images that visually depict ­ information through a condensed story—to understand how such story graphics are being used in the public sector. Dailey (2022) also collected public Instagram images (in addition to their captions) to show, in part, how social media users promulgate an organi­ zation’s identity through posts that “align with the existing narrative [of the organization]” (p. 14). Note that collecting visual images differs from the previously discussed photovoice method, which involves participants generating and interpreting their own photos.

Challenges with Collecting Narrative Data in Organizational Communication Research Although interview data are often appropriate for understanding organizational members’ lived experiences, organizational communication researchers need not rely so heavily on retrospective self-reports for narrative data. Indeed, the bulk of data in organizational communication narrative research involves participant interviews; however, not all interview data are suitable for narrative analysis. In order for interviews to be suit­ able for such analysis, the researcher “needs to have approached the interview with the intent of hearing stories” (Emden, 1998, p. 34) from the project’s inception. From our reading of organizational communication scholarship, single data source studies could benefit from triangulating interview data with the other data collection methods mentioned above. Several articles serve as exemplars in this respect. For example, Sonenshein (2010) conducted 42 interviews with retail clerks and store managers,

collected 115 documents and archival records, observed 8 hours of meetings, and distributed a paper survey to show the role of narrative during a Fortune 500 company’s change implementation. When researchers have collected such an array of data from multiple sources, the story told in their findings becomes richer, deeper, and more valid. In another example, Brown and Humphreys (2003) collected data that included 75 semistructured interviews, participant observation (e.g., meetings), and documents (e.g., magazines, newsletters) to examine how organizational members used narrative to make sense of a merger. Although multiple data sources require considerably more time and effort from researchers, the richness of such data proves to be worthwhile. Using more than one form of data allows for contrast, and researchers can “use the gap between… [data sources] as a source of knowledge” (Czarniawska, 1998, p. 30).

ANALYZING NARRATIVE DATA IN ORGANIZATIONS Just as we suggested that anyone can tell a story, we also propose that anyone can analyze a story (Browning & Boudès, 2005). Narrative analysis is a subset of qualitative research, which broadly aims to gain insight into people’s experience and stories (Strauss & Corbin, 1990). We differentiate narrative analysis from narrative critique, and view narrative analysis as a broader term that might involve, but does not necessarily involve, critical analysis. Although narrative analysis in organizational communication often aims to uncover power structures (Mumby, 1987), this focus is not a requisite goal of narrative analysis. Why should researchers analyze narratives in organizational communication? At a high level, narrative analysis involves creating links or connections between stories in organizations. To begin, one might argue

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that very few events or experiences happen outside of an organizational context. Some hierarchical context can be brought into view—even if it is the king who directs the hero to go on a journey (Campbell, 2008). The move to incorporate narrative research into organizational theory is possible because people (from pharaohs, to Lincoln, to country club members) tell and critique stories from a particular context. And that perspective, almost without exception, includes an organi­zation with all the rules and resources that constrict and enable—or are defied by— the person. Also, organizational researchers should be attuned to stories because narratives tend to be trip wires: indicators of outliers and exceptions, breaks in rationality, breaches that offset the way things are planned to be, or should be. Where there is a problem, there is a story; and where there is a story, there is a problem. But, as Czarniawska (1998, p. 65) warns, “This does not matter all that much; the task is to interpret the information and come up with a new text that will bear this interpretation.” In other words, “ruptures,” as Blithe and Wolfe (2018, p. 168) have called such occurrences in organizational interview data, can serve as a starting point for inquiry, not a dead end. So, how do organizational communication scholars systematically make sense of narrative data and organize their findings? Reviewing the organizational communication literature, we agree with Krizek (2017), who called on scholars to be “more thorough in [their] description of [their] data collection, data management, and data analysis techniques” (p. 15). Indeed, many of the texts we reviewed vaguely referred to having conducted a “narrative analysis,” without much explanation or description of their analytic process. Below, we describe five different methods that organizational communication researchers use when analyzing narrative data: (1) ­thematic narrative analysis; (2) critical narrative analysis; (3) fantasy theme analysis;

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(4) life story analysis; and (5) narrative content analysis.

Thematic Narrative Analysis Many organizational communication researchers analyze narrative data by using grounded theory (Glaser & Strauss, 1967) or a version of thematic analysis, which involves breaking data into pieces (e.g., a sentence, a phrase, a paragraph) and comparing those pieces to find larger patterns (themes) in the data (see also Chapter 20 in this volume). Most narrative analyses of this type are either inductive and not guided by previous research, seeking to build new theory (Treem & Browning, 2017), or abductive, covering a middle ground between inductive and deductive analysis (Taylor & Van Every, 2000). Scholars typically present their findings from a thematic analysis in two different ways. Polkinghorne (1995) describes these distinct forms as the “paradigmatic analysis of narratives” and “narrative analysis,” drawing from Bruner’s (1986) distinction between two modes of thought: paradigmatic and narrative. In a paradigmatic analysis, authors present findings in themes—categories that are constructed from common elements across the data. For example, Maclean et al.’s (2012, p. 34) analysis identified three sensemaking processes at work (locating, meaning-making, and becoming) and four modes of legitimizing (defying the odds, staying the course, succeeding through talent, and giving back to society) that business leaders use to account for their success. Furthermore, O’Connor’s (2002, p. 36) analysis identified “six basic narrative types (founding, visionary, marketing, strategy, historical, and conventional) in three main categories (personal, generic, and situational) that are essential in founding and governing a new company.” In contrast (and more infrequently), in the narrative analysis presentation of data, authors produce and present stories as the outcome of the research process. Brown

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(1998; see also Brown & Humphreys, 2003), for instance, organized his findings around three narratives from different organizational groups (the ward, laboratory, and implementation team). In their project on COVID-19 and organizational identification, Dye and Dailey (2022) organized their findings around five employee narratives (from Troy, Dani, Anthony, Oliver, and Doug). In addition, Geiger and Antonacopoulou (2009) organized the results from their case study on how dominant narratives inhibit organizational change processes around four main narratives (the customer intimacy, parental, crisis, and control narrative). Across these examples, researchers use narratives to showcase findings to highlight insights into larger organizational questions/phenomena.

Critical Narrative Analysis Another common analytical technique in narrative organizational communication research is critical narrative analysis. Mumby’s (1987) work on the political function of narrative in organizations, which many consider to be a “classic” in the organizational communication discipline, serves as an exemplar of this type of analysis. In this research, Mumby examines a story from Martin et al.’s (1983) study of organizational storytelling to show “the ways in which narrative functions to reproduce the deep structure aspects of organizational power and rationality” (1987, pp. 120–121). Other critical analysis examples can be found in Helmer’s (1993) study, which demonstrates how storytelling created tensions and political stratification at a horse racing track. Boje’s (2001) method of microstoria analysis may also be considered a form of critical analysis. This type of analysis, Boje (2001) explains, “has the potential to trace acts of resistance of ‘little people’ to the grand narratives that embed their lives” (p. 55). Although we see this type of analysis in organizational consulting models (e.g., see

Snowden, 2002), it is underutilized in organizational research journals. One exception, however, is Hinderacker’s (2017) analysis of microstory narratives, which uncovered individual resistance and dissent in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Fantasy Theme Analysis Bormann et  al.’s (1978) concept of fantasy themes explains how group members come to create a common story or interpretation of their experiences. This process occurs when group members “chain out” their story— dramatizing and elaborating on the group fantasy. Fantasy theme analysis enables researchers to look for fantasies in group interactions. Although the original aim of fantasy theme analysis was to advance rhetorical rather than organizational communication theory, scholars have used this type of analysis to study organizational groups, such as online hate groups (Duffy, 2003) and Alcoholics Anonymous (Ford, 1989). In fact, since groups/teams are part and parcel of organizational contexts, fantasy theme analysis should be a common technique for organi­ zational communication researchers (Dailey & Browning, 2014). However, as Olufowote (2006) explains, fantasy theme analysis has been overlooked in organizational communication scholarship.

Life Story Analysis Riessman’s (1993) life story method takes the “life story” itself as the object of study, analyzing first-hand accounts of experiences as they unfold over time. The researcher’s goal is to examine and retell individual stories. Because “plot-lines may be contrasted across interviews and particular attention paid to points where the expected story-lines are disrupted” (Burck, 2005, p. 252), life story analysis is especially useful for contrasting different points of view in the story.

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Although few organizational communication researchers have used this analytical method, scholars in management have used it to investigate such topics as organizational and occupational narratives (e.g., see Maitlis, 2022).

Narrative Content Analysis A handful of organizational communication studies aimed to make quantitative claims with narrative data. To accomplish this, the researcher first thematically analyzes the dataset, through inductive or abductive processes described above. This process generates a coding scheme that can be used for quantitative content analysis. The researcher then trains coders to use the coding scheme with a small set of the narrative data. Subsequently, assistants independently code the data, and a reliability coefficient is generated to show that there were few discrepancies. Once data are content analyzed, statistics can reveal relationships between categories (i.e., variables). Brown (1985), for example, used content analysis to show patterns between stories—specifically, their form (aggregate, specific, or specific with morals), subject matter (relational or task), and function (descriptive, energy controlling, or system maintenance), and socialization stages (entry, encounter, role-management, and stabilization). Brown (1985) conducted 75 open-ended interviews with nursing home employees, and independent coders decided each story’s form, subject matter, function, and socialization stage. Chi-square tests showed relationships between sets of categories to show that stories and organizational socialization were statistically related. More recently, Shah et  al. (2021) used content analysis to study intergroup conflict narratives. After collecting written narratives of team conflict and developing a coding scheme, two research assistants independently coded narratives for their origin (individual, dyad, or subgroup) and evolution

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(again: individual, dyad, or subgroup) to show the frequency and trajectory of intergroup conflict.

Challenges with Analyzing Narrative Data in Organizational Communication Research The main challenge with analyzing narrative data for organizational communication research on narratives is how to take advantage of the momentum the interest in stories has generated, while controlling, via critique and education, the quality of the research being published. One way of achieving this control is to mention the limits of the analysis from the point of view of the researcher as part of the research document. Analysts can mention, for a small sample of stories, other sources in the organization that suggest they may be an accurate reflection of organizational life. Another approach, if the story is an outlier, is to mark off the reflection that may only have a possibility of relevance, but to note that it is worth highlighting because of the implications the story might have. Even with attention to qualifying truth claims, it is also necessary to attend to Chase’s (2011) litany of issues on the emotion, ethics, and validity of the storytelling. The challenge of locating a publication source, whether journal or book publisher, remains part of the reputational and logistical challenge that narrative analysts face, too (Barbour, 2017). However, paralleling trends in qualitative research in organizational communication (Stephens, 2017), there is a growing acceptance of narrative research in the field’s top journals. Another way of controlling the quality of work using narrative analysis in organizational communication research is to attend to ethical questions regarding data analysis and representation. To do so, researchers must focus on the organization’s culture, ensuring that the stories and characters represented are presented in context. Although authors

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might be tempted to dramatize protagonists or enemies in the story for effect, writers should remember that no one is as pure as an angel or as dark as the devil. Member checks can help guard against this temptation, as in the case with a story told in one of our books (Sørnes et  al., 2015), the central figure of a chapter told the author, “I don’t like it; I sound like a character.” The writer had sensationalized the story too much, because it seemed sensational indeed from the author’s purview. There are multiple perspectives to every event, and narrative research—no matter how perfect—can never capture them all. Researchers should also consider what they want readers to remember from the story, and find a way to reinforce that takeaway; most likely, this will come in the first and last paragraph of the manuscript, which are the two most important pieces of the document.

OPPORTUNITIES FOR NARRATIVE ANALYSIS IN QUALITATIVE ORGANIZATIONAL COMMUNICATION RESEARCH AND PRACTICE In this chapter, we have defined narrative, grounding the term in three elements: structure, sensemaking, and the emplotment of self. Since the interpretive turn in the social sciences and humanities in the early 1980s, organizational communication research has been infused with stories, storytelling, and narrative theory. However, many scholars are guilty of using the term “narrative” without much conceptual or operational precision. Moving forward, we encourage organi­ zational communication researchers to be clearer about their conceptualization and operationalization of narrative. Second, we suggested that anyone can tell a story—that storytelling is a basic human need that constitutes organizational life. We encourage organizational communication scholars to apply and critique the 10 components of a good story we proposed in their

future work. These components (and others) may also be used for teaching storytelling. How might we help organizational leaders and members tell better stories? Organizational communication teacher-scholars are well positioned to lead such efforts. Third, this chapter reviewed how communication scholars collect stories in organizations by conducting interviews, observing lived experiences, collecting published stories, and collecting visual images. We encourage organizational communication scholars to triangulate data sources by supplementing interviews with other narrative data, and we urge scholars to consider connections between engaged scholarship and narrative data collection (Barbour, 2017). There are many practical uses of collecting stories in organizations. Certain professionals (project managers, human resources representatives, marketing strategists, etc.) could benefit from “mining” their workplaces for individual and organizational narratives. As Czarniawska (1998, p. 8) noted, “Almost certainly, the greater part of organizational learning happens through the circulation of stories.” Fourth, we described several ways in which stories can be analyzed. To date, organizational communication scholars have primarily relied on thematic and critical ana­lyses of narrative data. We encourage scholars to consider other opportunities for qualitative (and quantitative) analysis, including fantasy theme analysis, life story analysis, and narrative content. We also echo Krizek (2017), who suggested that “[a]s a group, narrative scholars are not very systematic or complete regarding what they do and how they do it” (p. 15). This became particularly evident in our review of data analysis techniques. Journal page limits often restrict qualitative researchers in elaborating the intricacies of data analysis, but greater details would bolster the rigor and credibility of their research. Finally, we endorse narrative analysis in applied settings, like consulting and training.

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Organizational recommendations, talent development programs, and change interventions can be strengthened when practitioners work with leaders to locate, analyze, and tell (good) stories together.

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22 Rhetorical Analysis in Qualitative Organizational Communication Research Chantal Benoit-Barné and Mathieu Chaput

The goal of this chapter is to explore how rhetorical methods can be conceived and mobilized to investigate organizational communication phenomena. To accomplish this, we describe four approaches to rhetorical methods, each with their own analytical objectives and takes on what counts as data, how the data can be collected, how they ought to be analyzed, the role of the researcher in the process of rhetorical analysis, and the overall implications of rhetorical analysis for our understanding of organizational communication. While rhetorical approaches to organizational communication have been discussed previously (see Cheney et  al., 2004; Conrad, 2011; Feldner, 2017; Ihlen & Heath, 2018; see also Chapter 3 in this volume), a critical review of rhetorical methods in the discipline that considers recent developments, particularly the growing interest in rhetorical field methods, remains to be developed. Thus, we hope this chapter will be useful to scholars and students of qualitative organizational communication research

who aspire to understand, discern, and mobilize rhetorical approaches to study various organizational phenomena. Methodologically, rhetoric is said to exist at the margin of the organizational communication discipline (Meisenbach & Mcmillan, 2006), yet the idea that rhetoric is central to organizations (in many different ways) is well accepted among organizational communication scholars. As a practical art whose development is inseparable from the civic institutions, such as courts and assemblies in Ancient Greece and Rome, rhetoric can be viewed as a prototype of organizational discourse. Its scope, techniques, and threats have been discussed in classic texts such as Plato’s Gorgias, Aristotle’s Rhetoric, and Quintilian’s De Institutione Oratoria. Fast forward to the rise of modern organizations in the early 20th century, the practice and study of rhetoric have waned considerably. In fact, since the Renaissance, rhetoric had been reduced to mere ornamentation. In parallel, it was assumed that “serious communication”

RHETORICAL ANALYSIS

in the industrial world had become arhetorical, that is, “grounded in language that empirically corresponded with reality” (Zachry, 2009, p. 73). Those views were challenged throughout the following decades, which witnessed a resurgence of rhetorical theory and criticism, both in the field of organizational communication and beyond. This development foreshadows the diversification of approaches and rhetorical methods that can be observed in the past 20 years—if not longer. In the New Handbook of Organizational Communication, Putnam and Fairhurst (2001) identified 11 approaches to organizational discourse analysis, among which literary and rhetorical analysis. They associated the rhetorical tradition with its classical roots and a strategic understanding of rhetoric. Thirteen years later, Fairhurst and Putnam (2014) observed the growing complexity of organizational discourse analysis and “the cross­over among approaches” (p. 274), which was leading to hybrid theorizing and methodologies. They noted that rhetorical approaches to organizational communication had diversified considerably to include an expanded conception of rhetoric as symbolic action. This, in turn, entailed a diversification and complexification of different ways of conceiving and investigating the relationships and dynamics between rhetors, audiences, and situations. With regard to rhetorical methods, this meant a shift “from critiques of persuasive strategies nested in particular texts (such as corporate apology) to focusing on active stakeholders, indeterminate texts, and variable contexts” (p. 278). Organizational rhetoric as a field of study, dated to the late 1980s (see Conrad & Cheney, 2018), has been a driving force in the shift that Fairhurst and Putnam observed, and this chapter aims to highlight its key contributions. However, we also decided to go beyond the field of organizational rhetoric to consider rhetorical scholarship conducted under different labels, notably the argumentative approach in Europe, which is

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mainly grounded in the writings of Chaïm Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca (1969), and the emergence of the rhetorical fieldwork approach in the United States. Thus, the classical, argumentative, dramatistic, and fieldwork approaches to rhetorical methods presented in this chapter reflect the diversity and complexity of rhetorical analysis in organizational communication and beyond. They draw on the rhetorical tradition’s key figures (in particular Aristotle, Burke, and Perelman) and main concepts (such as topoi, stasis, genre, identification, and master tropes). They develop methods and engage with present topics and theoretical issues in the study of organizations. They borrow from a diversity of disciplinary contexts, and scholarly literatures, be it management, public relations, crisis communication, marketing, institutional communication, corporate advocacy, or corporate social responsibility. Scholars associated with the classical approach aimed to revive classic conceptions of rhetoric, paying homage to Antiquity thinkers, and adapting their ideas to analyze modern rhetorical situations. This renewed interest in rhetoric gave rise to novel approaches, often self-labeled as “new rhetoric,” to emphasize contrasts with either the classical approach or the prevalent views of their times. Two prominent trends stand out in modern rhetorical theory: One is the argumentative approach, which views argumentation as a collaborative pursuit of reasonable human beings; the other is the dramatistic approach, rooted in Kenneth Burke’s writings, which expand the scope of rhetoric to every type of situation involving human beings as “symbol-using animals.” Finally, the beginning of the 21st century has seen the emergence of a fieldwork approach to rhetorical analysis. Scholars adopting this approach study rhetoric in situ, focusing on the corporal, embodied experiences of rhetors and audiences, often in unusual settings of rhetorical practice, such as rave parties and rural festivals.

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The four approaches to rhetorical methods are summarized in Table 22.1. Each is presented in terms of six key questions that cover the methodological process from design to data collection and writing: (1) What are the main analytical objectives of scholars adopting this approach? (2) How do they conceive rhetoric? (3) How do they view the researcher’s role? (4) What object(s) of analysis do they prefer? (5) How do they typically collect data? (6) How do they view the role of writing in the research process? We specifically address the question of how data are analyzed by presenting data analysis examples for each approach, because this allows us to highlight the particularities and contributions of each approach. While our discussion follows Table 22.1, it does not treat each cell equally, thus reflecting the fact that certain issues are particularly salient in the literature. Moreover, a caveat is in order regarding the relative importance of each of the rhetorical approaches presented in this chapter. Treating them equally in a table does not mean that each approach is equally important and represented in organizational communication. Our goal is to present an overview of the various ways in which rhetorical methods can be conceived and mobilized by organizational communication researchers. Some of these avenues are well-known; others less so. Put differently, each approach could be compared to a river or a stream: The first has often been bridged by organizational communication scholarship (the dramatistic approach); the second has been observed from afar (the argumentative approach); the third almost dried up upon its discovery (the classical approach); and the fourth has yet to be fully discovered (the fieldwork approach). Hence, in the following sections, we present each approach by discussing underlying principles and exemplary empirical studies, while emphasizing how they are present (or relatively absent) in qualitative organizational communication research.

THE CLASSICAL APPROACH The classical approach to rhetorical analysis is based on the idea that rhetoric is the practical art of speaking and writing persuasively to an audience. A specific method associated with this humanistic approach is criticism as conceived by Edwin Black (1978). The classical rhetorical critic engages in close reading of speeches and texts guided by classical rhetorical notions (mostly Aristotelian, but not strictly), to describe, explain, and evaluate the persuasive strategies employed by speakers in leadership situations and their implications for the audience to which they are tailored. Thus, this tradition conveys a strategic conception of communication and implies a vision of organizations as milieux that are conducive to persuasive activities. The epistemology of classical rhetorical criticism, as Black (1978) defines it, sets it apart from other methods of discourse analysis in organizational communication. It belongs to the tradition of the humanities, contributing to and borrowing from philosophy, literary criticism, and history, among others. The nuances of its epistemological posture deserve more attention than we can provide here, but we will review some of its key principles to highlight the distinctive value of its methods and contributions to organizational communication studies. First, classical criticism generally aims to describe the rhetorical strategies by which rhetors pursue their persuasive ends and, on the basis of this description, to evaluate the rhetorical effectiveness of their speeches or texts according to principles of persuasion derived from classical texts, such as Aristotle’s Rhetoric and Quintilian’s De Institutione Oratoria. Second, the object of analysis, often referred to as an artifact in rhetorical criticism texts (see Foss, 2018; Kuypers, 2021), is conceived as existing prior to and outside the critic’s methods. This artifact is public, both in the sense that it is publicly available and in the sense that it was designed for and presented

To describe and evaluate the persuasive strategies employed by rhetors (mostly in leadership positions) and their implications for the audience

Rhetoric is the practical art of finding and mobilizing available means of persuasion

Researchers are critics who acknowledge the subjectivity of their own posture

Main objectives

Conception of rhetoric

Researcher role

Classical Approach

Researchers are analysts who objectively study rhetorical discourse; they implicitly or explicitly value the rationality, reasonableness, and communicative competence of those studied; they have an acute awareness of manipulation, use of sophisms, tacit premises, etc.

Rhetoric and argumentation exist as a collaborative and competitive practice among reasonable human beings

To document how arguments enable power, legitimacy, and discursive limits in organizations

To observe and analyze arguments as the practical use of reason and their contribution to various organizational processes and outcomes

Argumentative Approach

No outside or neutral positioning is conceived for the critic as a symbol-using animal

Researchers are critics who engage in playful and imaginative ways with the artifact(s), or the object(s) of criticism, leaving room for the expression of subjectivity, values, etc.

Rhetoric is a strategic activity to win adherence or pursue other organizational objectives; it exists as an essential condition for cooperation and organizing

To document rhetorical strategies that rely on argumentation, identification, pentadic organization and tropes

To observe and analyze how rhetorical artifacts contribute to the constitution of organizational identities, cohesion, power relations, cooperation, and other phenomena

Dramatistic Approach

Table 22.1  Four Approaches to Rhetorical Methods in Qualitative Organizational Communication Research

(Continued)

When researchers adopt a critical orientation, they may also endorse the role of advocate

Researchers are bricoleurs; they are reflexive about their active role in selecting, piecing together, analyzing and writing about the fragments of discourse, practices, and performances they encounter in the field

Rhetoric is constitutive of the world; it consists of “discourses, events, objects and practices [whose] character [is] meaningful, legible, partisan, and consequential” (Blair, 2010, p. 2, cited in Endres et al., 2016, p. 515)

To understand “how material/ symbolic resources are practiced, performed, mobilized, and disseminated in ways that have influence and consequences for our understanding of the world” (Endres et al., 2016, pp. 511–512)

Fieldwork Approach

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Public speeches and texts, often linked to grand historical moments, conceived as strategic and existing independently from the rhetorical critic

Publicly available, especially through archives and databases

Writing as formulation of a fair, original, and sound judgment about the persuasiveness of a rhetorical artifact or rhetor

Preferred objects of analysis

How data are collected

Role of writing in the research process

Classical Approach

Limited participant observation with subjective involvement of the analyst

Limited participant observation with a detached positioning from the analyst

Writing as symbolic framing of reality, which invites the exploration of alternatives

Interview-generated discourses

Interview-generated discourses

Writing as representation of reality, with a faithful account of multiple voices

Official documents

Activities involving nonhumans or other-than-humans can also be analyzed through dramatism

Writing sustains the researchers’ reflexivity regarding their role(s) and relation(s) with and to the field

Writing as a way to account for “lived rhetoric,” vernacular rhetoric, or in situ rhetoric

Informed by qualitative methods, in particular participant observation, interviews, and ethnography

Field and researcher exist in a co-constitutive relation

No prior exclusion as to what counts as an object of study Rhetoric embraces all types and spheres of human activities that rely on the use of symbols

The “field” expands what counts as an object of rhetorical analysis

Fieldwork Approach

Anything deemed relevant or meaningful

Dramatistic Approach

Official documents

Argumentation usually involves multiple actors, and thus should account for the plurality of voices

Organizational situations, such as technological change, management reform, negotiation, etc.

Argumentative Approach

Table 22.1  Four Approaches to Rhetorical Methods in Qualitative Organizational Communication Research (Continued)

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to a public—referred to as an audience, a foundational concept in classical and modern rhetorical studies, as we will show in our discussion of the other approaches. The archetypal artifact of classical criticism is the public speech delivered to an audience for a specific occasion. Third, scholars who adopt this approach assume their role as critics and recognize the subjectivity of their standpoint(s). They strive to be original and creative regarding their analytic methods, write convincingly to explain and warrant their judgment, and aim to develop a strong authorial voice. As Black (2000) explains, There are no formulas, no prescriptions, for criticism. The methods of rhetorical criticism need to be objective to the extent that, in any given critique, they could be explicated and warranted. But it is important that critical techniques also be subjective to the extent that they are not mechanistic, not autonomous, not disengaged from the critics who use them…[T]he only instrument of good criticism is the critic. (para. 24)

In sum, good rhetorical criticism is rigorous, fair, and original (Kuypers, 2021). Formulaic and unimaginative criticism is a pitfall to be avoided and so is the quest for standards of objectivity. As Black (1978) notes, “It is neither possible nor desirable for criticism to be fixed into a system, for critical techniques to be objectified, for critics to be interchange­ able for purpose of replication, or for rhetorical criticism to serve as the handmaiden of quasi-scientific theory” (p. xi). An excellent example of rhetorical criticism conducted on the basis of these principles is Deirdre McCloskey’s (1985/1998) wellknown book, The Rhetoric of Economics. This analysis is relevant for researchers in organizational communication who are interested in the founding texts of economics, in particular the arguments and figures of speech that characterize them. McCloskey is an economic historian who discovered (her term, not ours) the rhetorical tradition in Iowa in the 1980s through interactions with rhetorical scholars such as Michael McGee, Bruce Gronbeck,

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and John Lyne (see the acknowledgements of the first edition). The aim of her book is to get economists to recognize the rhetorical nature of their discipline. Focusing on established economists and their main texts, The Rhetoric of Economics documents the figures of speech (metaphor, synecdoche, metonymy, and irony) and arguments by which economists make their talk and publications persuasive to an audience and through which they construct their scientific ethos. Thus, McCloskey’s writings reveal the intertwining of rhetoric and science in a way that can make economists better scientists; that is, “more modest, tolerant, and self-aware” of the rhetorical practices that sustain the scientific methods they blindly endorse (p. 186). McCloskey (1985/1998) specifically reflects on her rhetorical methods in the first chapter of the second edition, entitled “How to Do a Rhetorical Analysis of Economics and Why.” In the spirit of a classical posture, and contrary to what the title suggests, she does not offer an account of her methodological procedures or specific guidelines for conducting this kind of analysis. Instead, she provides the reader with a short example of rhetorical analysis, a list of good readings on rhetorical criticism, and an introduction to key classical concepts, in particular ethos and the five canons of rhetoric (invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery). This is consistent with her epistemological posture: From a classical approach, rhetoric is a practical art and so is rhetorical criticism. It is acquired and refined recursively by carefully reading good rhetorical texts and applying one’s rhetorical knowledge to the analysis of rhetorical artifacts. Another example of classical rhetorical criticism worth discussing is Gross and Walzer’s (1997) analysis of the rhetoric surrounding the aftermath of the Challenger crash in 1986. Their critique is both illustrative of this approach’s focus on the inner workings of a persuasive text, and its conception and emphasis of human agency. It is particularly relevant to organizational communication scholars for its critique of

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bureaucratism. Through classical rhetorical criticism, Gross and Walzer call into question the findings of the President Reagan’s Commission report as well as the analyses of the cause of the accident conducted by several communication scholars. These accounts, they argue, are flawed because they “emphasize the technical and procedural aspects of organizational life at the expense of the cognitive and ethical [aspects]” (p. 75). A rhetorical approach, they claim, brings attention to the quality and conditions of deliberation among the various individuals involved in the tragedy. Thus, Gross and Walzer’s analysis of the Presidential Commission’s report focuses on the word choices and main arguments that were employed to make the report’s conclusions persuasive to its audience. These rhetorical strategies, they argue, minimize human agency regarding technology and decision-making procedures. Hence, through classical rhetorical criticism of the President’s Commission report, Gross and Walzer present a strong critique of bureaucratism and its tendency to diffuse individual responsibility. Classical critiques of this type are rare in the organizational communication literature, one possible reason being that they do not offer the theoretical development that a disciplinary journal like Management Communication Quarterly expects. That is, viewing rhetoric as persuasion remains the basis of any rhetorical analysis, yet, as we will show in the following sections, the conception of what counts as persuasion has significantly evolved over the years, and the classical posture has largely given way to a broader set of rhetorical methods that draw on and contribute to the larger field of organizational discourse analysis.

THE ARGUMENTATIVE APPROACH The argumentative approach to rhetorical analysis can be traced back to the writings

of Belgian scholars Chaïm Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca (1969). Sharing a background in philosophy, law, and the social sciences, they developed a rhetorical theory that cut ties with the then-dominant formalistic and logocentric views of reason, knowledge, and truth. In their view, the study of argumentation should rather focus on “discursive techniques [that allow] us to induce or to increase the mind’s adherence to the theses presented for its assent” (ibid., p. 4, emphasis in original). This implies that the soundness and validity of argumentation must be studied in ordinary language use, and judged in light of the audience to whom it is addressed. In other words, the value of argumentation resides in the audience’s acceptance: “[S]ince argumentation aims at securing the adherence of those to whom it is addressed, it is, in its entirety, relative to the audience to be influenced” (ibid., p. 19). This relational dimension of argumentation leads the authors to refine the notion of the audience. They introduce an important distinction between the particular and universal audiences: While the former refers to addressees who share certain features, such as “social groups—political, occupational, religious, for example” (ibid., p. 22), the latter refers to “every rational being” (ibid., p. 28), making the term applicable to all of humanity. This distinction is useful, for it helps to elucidate why some argumentative discourses are very persuasive within specific communities (e.g., conspiracy theories, claims of deceit, and the deprivation of freedom, constituting anti-health measures rhetoric during the COVID-19 pandemic; see Chaput, 2021), yet not convincing to others (scientists, medical authorities, etc.). An emphasis on a universal audience of reasonable beings also enables the transition toward an epistemic conception of rhetoric, in which truth no longer is determined exclusively through formal processes of discovery, but through generally accepted social norms and experiences (Ritivoi, 2008).

RHETORICAL ANALYSIS

Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca (1969) also emphasize the crucial role that values play in inducing the adherence of an audience. Reviewing Aristotle’s division of rhetoric into three genres (forensic, deliberative, and epideictic), they observe that the latter, concerned with the ceremonial use of rhetoric, associated with praise or blame and exemplified by funeral oratory, was historically considered of limited importance in the realm of civic affairs, since it did not deal with facts, policies, or legal judgments—only values. In their view, however, the celebration of values in the epideictic genre must be given more attention, as it reflects the weight of values in community-building. As they note, “[E]pideictic oratory has significance and importance for argumentation, because it strengthens the disposition toward action by increasing adherence to the values it lauds” (p. 50). Interestingly, resorting to values applies across all rhetorical genres. For example, it affects political and legal decisions—as well as organizational ones. In every context, a speaker attempts to “establish a sense of communion centered around particular values recognized by the audience, and to this end he uses the whole range of means available to the rhetorician for purposes of amplification and enhancement” (p. 52). The use of rhetoric to establish a communion involving a speaker and audience closely parallels Burke’s (1969b) expansive view of rhetoric as “the use of language as a symbolic means of inducing cooperation in beings that by nature respond to symbols” (p. 43, emphasis in original). Retrospectively, Burke and Perelman foresaw the growth of a new domain of inquiry, organizational rhetoric, in which rhetoric is not seen as a type of organizational discourse (Putnam & Fairhurst, 2001), but as a building block of organizations (Cheney & McMillan, 1990; Meisenbach & Mcmillan, 2006). Indeed, organizations can be seen as rhetorical actors who produce persuasive discourses to various audiences. But they have also increasingly been conceived of as

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rhetorical constructions. Thus, organizations are pro-duced (brought forth) and maintained through the constitution of distinctive views of reality in language, anchored in shared beliefs and values (Conrad, 2011; Feldner, 2017). Through the use of rhetoric, communion, cooperation, and organization can be achieved. And as was foreshadowed by Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca (1969) in their book, a significant part of rhetoric’s constitutive force is accomplished by celebrating individual, collective, corporate or national selves. In other words, it is through the epideictic genre that organizational identities come into being, as is illustrated by corporate events, organizational and brand cultures, and the growth of fields like marketing, advertising, and public relations. A rhetorical analysis inspired by The New Rhetoric does not rely on a singular method that is to be applied to specific cases of organizational discourse. This may partly explain why few studies explicitly borrow from the framework that is presented in The New Rhetoric in order to study argumentation in organizational settings. Still, researchers in the field of organization studies often draw on this opus to study the role of persuasion in processes of organizing. For example, some of John Sillince and colleagues’ work draws on Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca’s writings. Concerns for diversified audiences and competing values in organizations led Sillince to develop his concept of argumentation repertoires, which captures the idea that different groups, departments, or organizations may share common sets of “institutionalized argument justifications” (Sillince, 1999, p. 804). These repertoires constrain what members can say, thus becoming a discursive resource appropriated and manipulated to increase power. This institutionalization of arguments becomes most apparent during organizational change, when competing rhetorical strategies abound (Mueller et al., 2004). Analyses of the role and effectiveness of arguments to promote and justify organizational courses of action must also

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take the influence of context into account (Sillince, 2002), as well as the multiple identities of audiences (Sillince, 2006). Similarly, a technological change project implemented in a UK public sector organization offers a glimpse of this argumentation-based rhetorical analysis. Based on interviews with the managers in charge of the project, Symon (2008) retraced the various arguments and counterarguments mobilized as components of managers’ rhetorical strategies. In Symon’s view, “rhetorical analysis can help us understand how constructions of technology, its effects, and its relationship to the organization are made persuasive” (p. 75). The analysis of arguments and counterarguments enabled her to explain how the relationship between the technology and the organization is negotiated. From an argumentative approach, rhetorical analysis centers on the “linguistic strategies of argumentation” (p. 78) made by individuals, but also aims to account for the exigence or the issue at hand, the context in which the issue arises, the counterarguments that the rhetoric addresses, and the various audiences involved. This again demonstrates the context-specific value of argumentation highlighted by The New Rhetoric’s concept of the audience. Consequently, a rhetorical analysis not only targets individual arguments, but also includes the definition of issues that may be deemed controversial, the influence of broader myths and narratives, the dialogic nature of rhetoric, and the plurality of audiences. Based on Symon’s (2008) analysis, three broad patterns of rhetorical strategies emerged: (1) those that attribute specific effects to technology; (2) those that target convergent or divergent interests of the different social groupings involved; and (3) those that aim to build identities for speakers, groups, and the technology itself. Finally, Symon proposed that the argumentative context can bridge individuals’ rhetorical discourse with the wider organizational context, suggesting that rhetorical analysis may combine “specific talk with a detailed analysis of

organizational artifacts, documentation, and structures” (p. 96). Argumentation analyses have also been reviewed by Weick and Browning (1986, pp. 246–248), Putnam and Fairhurst (2001, pp. 105–106), Zachry (2009, pp. 75–77), and Chaput (2013, pp. 178–179), underlining the central role of argumentation in organizations. However, its significance remains somewhat relative. Indeed, The New Rhetoric has been recognized as a staple of contemporary rhetorical theory (Foss et  al., 2002), a major influence on the development of argumentation theory (van Eemeren et  al., 2020), and a philosophical guide for humanity’s endless search for truthful explanations and enlightened practical activities through disrupted times (Maneli, 1994). Despite this impressive impact, this approach to rhetorical analysis remains relatively unknown in the field of organizational communication. Admittedly, it proves difficult to read, especially for American audiences, as most illustrations originate from non-English literature (Gross & Dearin, 2002). Unlike Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca’s work, Burke remains an enduring reference in organizational communication, starting with the birth of the field (Tompkins et  al., 1975) and the “interpretive turn” (Cheney, 1983a; Tompkins & Cheney, 1985) all the way to research on the communicative constitution of organizations (Chaput et  al., 2011). In fact, alongside Aristotle, Burke can be regarded as the primary theoretician of organizational rhetoric (Cheney & Conrad, 2018; Ihlen & Heath, 2018), as we will show in the next section.

THE DRAMATISTIC APPROACH Kenneth Burke, an American literary theorist and philosopher, proposed his own unique take on rhetoric, deploring how rhetoric had been demoted due to the rise of aesthetic criticism. Burke rehabilitated classical

RHETORICAL ANALYSIS

rhetoric and rejuvenated it by integrating contributions from “new sciences” like anthropology, sociology, social psychology, and even psychoanalysis, to analyze human relations through the prism of the symbolic use of language. In his view, the distinction between old and new rhetoric can be summed up as follows: “The key term for the old rhetoric was ‘persuasion’ and its stress was upon deliberate design. The key term for the ‘new’ rhetoric would be ‘identification,’ which can include a partially ‘unconscious’ factor in appeal” (Burke, 1951, p. 203). While a rhetoric of identification can be mobilized in a direct fashion, as a device by which a politician, manager, or other, purposefully and openly seeks to identify with an audience, it also extends to a broader sphere of less deliberate activities, such as the visceral attachment of fans to their favorite sports teams and shared hatred toward adversaries. Identification thus introduces a new analytical element: “a partially dreamlike idealistic motive, somewhat compensatory to real differences or divisions, which the rhetoric of identification would transcend” (ibid., p. 203). Significantly, the rhetoric of identification blurs and complexifies the classical separation of speaker and audience. Furthermore, it allows for a rhetorical theory in which the identities of audiences (and rhetors) come into existence by the discourses that address them (Charland, 1987). Hence, Burke’s conception prefigures the “constitutive turn” in the study of organizational rhetoric and communication (see also Chaput et al., 2011). In dramatistic rhetorical analyses of organizational communication phenomena, dramatism refers to a communication theory that depicts language as a mode of action. In organizational communication research, such analyses have mainly focused on the strategic uses of identification in organizational settings. Formalizing Burke’s (1972) typology of identification types, George Cheney (1983a) discussed three strategies by which rhetors create a

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sense of identification with their audiences in organizational settings. The common ground technique is used whenever rhetors associate themselves with others in an overt manner by evoking common values, goals, origins, identities, and so on. The identification by antithesis strategy relies on creating an “enemy” that is depicted as a unifying threat, such as business competitors, controlling government bodies, an increasingly unstable environment, and scapegoats (e.g., immigrants). Finally, the assumed or transcendent we strategy involves the articulation by a rhetor of disparate groups through a broader unifying identity, such as downplaying oppositions between managers and employees by speaking of an organization as a coherent corporate unit in which “we” share mutual interests, values, and objectives, despite prevalent hierarchies. Thematically, Cheney’s work centers on identification as an unobtrusive type of control mechanism that blends symbolism with power (Tompkins & Cheney, 1985). Methodologically, this early work includes the criticism of formal documents as well as the analysis of interview transcripts and questionnaires (Cheney, 1983a, 1983b), showing the struggle of this kind of rhetorical analysis amid research traditions of humanities and social sciences. Later work by DiSanza and Bullis (1999) built on the rhetoric of identification. This research analyzed the organizational identification strategies mobilized in U.S. Forest Service newsletters. It also examined interviews with employees to understand how they responded to identification inducements from those documents. DiSanza and Bullis’s findings refined the common ground strategy to include four types of tactics: [1] global recognition of a unit or subunit of the organization, and [2] recognition of individual contributions outside the organization, … [3] invitations [organizational requests that members become or remain involved in some organizational activity], and [4] bragging [boasts about the amount of time, money, or effort a group puts into a task]. (p. 386)

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This analysis of responses to identification inducements showed that employees responded through nonidentification, textual identification, contextual identification, or disidentification. While audience reactions were examined in this study—a progression with regard to previous research, the locus of identification remained confined to overtly strategic communication. More recently, Ewalt (2018) extended this research on rhetoric of identification beyond formal texts to consider place-making as a strategic practice of organizational rhetoric, offering a first taste of the fieldwork approach we will discuss in the next section. This focus on place-making led Ewalt to identify “the various processes through which objects, plants, animals, humans, buildings, and other phenomena become organized into a constellation of materials” (p. 2). This method is innovative in organizational communication research, for it combines the textual criticism of documents produced by the Land Institute (a nonprofit organization devoted to alternative agriculture) with field immersion in a festival organized by this institute. In contrast with more traditional rhetorical critics, Ewalt describes in detail how he is affected by events, noting “the way discursive and nondiscursive phenomena moved my body, what materials moved with me, and how my senses were activated through encounters” (p. 5). Two strategies of rhetorical identification relying on place-making emerge from this study: On the one hand, the festival materialized the places and times imagined in the organization’s textual rhetoric, connecting “a utopic future and nostalgic past as imagined in organizational texts” (p. 14) to plants, buildings, and people. On the other hand, the Land Institute’s efforts to reinforce identification with their audiences involved the positioning of experimental crops as potential targets, inducing various feelings/affects and senses of identification in the festival’s attendees. In terms of rhetorical analysis, Burke’s rhetoric of identification may have had the

most significant influence on the field of organizational communication. But this type of analysis has not exhausted its potential. The dissemination of social media and digital technologies offers new grounds for rhetorical research on questions of identification (Feldner, 2017; Hess, 2014). As outlined, most studies have focused on deliberate and strategic dimensions of rhetoric. This leaves many aspects of Burke’s view on identification unexplored, including “less strategic and less conscious aspects” (Meisenbach & McMillan, 2006, p. 104) and how to address the “multidimensionality of the concept” (Cheney & Conrad, 2018, p. 461). Furthermore, an overview of this dramatistic approach would not be complete without considering other conceptual tools mobilized by Burke for rhetorical analysis, namely the pentad and rhetorical tropes. Pentadic analysis reigns among the core methods of rhetorical criticism taught today (Foss, 2018; Hart et  al., 2017; Kuypers, 2021). Burke (1969a) opened his Grammar of Motives by proposing five terms (hence the pentad) that account for every kind of statement attributing meaning and justification in artifacts such as fictions, philosophies, poems, religious doctrines, political programs, or mission statements. According to Burke, “any complete statement about motives will offer some kind of answers to these five questions: what was done (act), when or where it was done (scene), who did it (agent), how he did it (agency), and why (purpose)” (p. xv). The naming of each term involves a specific way to frame reality, emphasizing certain aspects of reality while deflecting attention from other aspects of reality. Thus, the rhetorical value of pentadic analysis is to discover the meanings of action attributed in discourse. The terms of the pentad are paired in ratios, which are helpful for identifying a dominant motive in one or many artifacts, and, consequently, the broader perspective that guides a communicative act. An example of pentadic ratios is the scene-act ratio, where the physical environment (scene) is said to exert

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a decisive influence on the conduct (act) of individuals. Rhetorically, this ratio can operate by minimizing one’s responsibility (as agent) in situations like a deadly car crash (act), by blaming the weather conditions (scene). Moreover, the colloquialism “boys will be boys” illustrates the agent-act ratio, where (unacceptable) behaviors (act) from young men (agent) are deemed “normal or expected.” In organizational communication research, Rebecca Meisenbach and colleagues (2008) explored the “universe of discourse surrounding maternity leaves” (p. 6) by producing a pentadic analysis of the discourse of pinkcollar workers. This analysis showed that these workers recreated a scene dominatedpentad in their talk, in compliance with bureaucratic obligations, depicting a closed universe of discourse with little room for discussion. The relevance of this pentadic mapping (Anderson & Prelli, 2001) furthermore lies in its capacity to “show alternative paths within moments of discursive closure” (Meisenbach et al., 2008, p. 2). Accordingly, Meisenbach et  al. charted alternative pentadic arrangements of maternity leave in order to emphasize that women are agents who are responsible to determine their own needs. They also extended the scene from the organizational to legislative public sphere to explore possible change at the legal level. Despite a rather somber portrait of women’s discourse, the authors concluded that alternative pentadic elements and ratios “can allow the pursuit of more than financial motives, namely, the care and health of the mother and child” (p. 21). This study consequently shows how pentadic rhetorical analysis can serve as a critical tool of organizational and social change. While Burke (1969a) opens his Grammar of Motives with the pentad, he ends it with a discussion of four master tropes: metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony. While the classical approach to rhetoric assigns them a mostly figurative role, Burke is interested in their possibilities for transforming

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reality—thus anticipating future research on the metaphorical organization of everyday life (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980) and the constitutive role of metaphors in the everyday organizational life (Cornelissen, 2005, 2006; Smith & Eisenberg, 1987). For instance, Burke (1969a) treats metonymy as a substitute of reduction. This allows him to use this trope “to convey some incorporeal or intangible state in terms of the corporeal or tangible. E.g., to speak of ‘the heart’ rather than ‘the emotions’” (p. 506). Burke explains how reduction (metonymy) overlaps with metaphor, which offers a perspective on reality. Likewise, reduction relates to synecdoche, which he associates with representation, just like a map represents a country, or an elected body its people. Finally, in Burke’s view, irony implies dialectic; it “arises when one tries, by the interaction of terms upon one another, to produce a development which uses all the terms” (p. 512, emphasis in original). An example of organizational communication research that draws on this part of Burke’s work is Putnam’s (2004) study of metonymy and synecdoche in negotiation in public school districts. Putnam relied on mixed methods, including participant observation, interviews, analysis of documents, and survey questionnaires. She noticed the recurrent use of “money” and “language” in bargainers’ talk. Hence, by showing how these terms become synecdoche and metonymy, her study illustrates the flexibility of rhetorical tropes in use. And by tracing how tropes unfold in bargainers’ talk over time and across situations, Putnam achieved Burke’s objective of displaying their possibilities for transforming reality. Beyond individual talk, rhetorical tropes become embedded in organizational texts like contracts, or mediated by tacit norms of speech, iteratively constituting an organization’s discourse. This illustrates how, once again, a dramatistic approach to rhetorical analysis influences the “constitutive turn” in the study of organizational rhetoric and communication, while also favoring a discursive understanding of organizational

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inquiry (see also Green et al., 2010). Putnam’s reliance on participant observation further suggests that rhetorical analysis can benefit from integrating fieldwork. In fact, an entire approach has emerged in that vein, as we will discuss in the next section.

THE FIELDWORK APPROACH In the last twenty years, a growing number of rhetorical scholars have integrated qualitative methods into their work, thus giving rise to new methodological debates about the combination of rhetorical and qualitative methods. This research is commonly referred to as rhetorical fieldwork—“as a set of approaches that integrate rhetorical and qualitative inquiry toward the examination of in situ practices and performances in a rhetorical field” (Endres et al., 2016, p. 511, emphasis in original). The main objective of in situ analysis through rhetorical fieldwork, Endres and colleagues (2016) note, is to understand “how material/symbolic resources are practiced, performed, mobilized, and disseminated in ways that have influence and consequences for our understanding of the world” (pp. 511–512). For Middleton et  al. (2011), rhetorical fieldwork is linked to the critical rhetoric tradition (McGee, 1990; McKerrow, 1989). Hence, this strand of research is characterized by a critical orientation aimed at both understanding and change through advocacy or intervention. Field methods allow rhetorical critics to document marginalized voices and represent them in order to achieve emancipatory aims. For others, however, rhetorical fieldwork is “not necessarily limited to only critical scholarship” (Senda-Cook et al., 2019, p. 1). It is a growing and diverse approach that encompasses a wide range of methodological tools that “place the scholar within the scenes of rhetorical invention and practice” (p. 1). Studies conducted under this label share a loose commitment to empirical

methods that fundamentally call the role of the rhetorical critic into question, as well as what constitutes a worthy object of rhetorical analysis. In this type of rhetorical analysis, the role of the researcher shifts from critic or analyst, who describes and evaluates the means of persuasion, to bricoleur, who views rhetoric as fragmented. Thus, the researcher’s task is to use methods to record and collect rhetorical fragments. As Endres et  al. (2016) explain, Taking on the stance of a bricoleur, in situ rhetorical critics turn to the set of tools afforded by qualitative, ethnographic, and performance-based approaches that provide a window into the everyday lived experiences of rhetoric in a way that already documented texts (e.g., speeches, television shows, and newspapers) cannot. (p. 518, emphasis in original)

As bricoleurs, then, it becomes especially important for researchers to be reflexive about their active role in selecting the fragments of rhetoric they record and study, as well as how they write about them. The turn to rhetorical fieldwork also implies an expansion of the range of what counts as useful, insightful data for rhetorical analysis. Vernacular rhetoric, in situ rhetoric, live rhetoric, and everyday discourse replace instances of public address and published texts as the privileged data, in this respect. The analysis often entails focusing on rhetorical practices and performances, two key analytical concepts in this approach to rhetorical analysis. According to SendaCook (2012), analyzing rhetorical practices manifest in vernacular rhetoric entails identifying the “mundane, embodied, and repetitive actions…that compellingly convince us of who we are and how we ought to act” (p. 131). In other words, rhetorical practices refer to more or less scripted ways of speaking and behaving in situations. A rhetorical performance, in turn, refers to the particulars of situations and the manners in which the practices were enacted. It refers to “the

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contingent, inventional, spontaneous variations on rhetorical practices that are deployed in efforts to transgress, resist, or reify the implications of rhetorical practices” (Endres et al., 2016, p. 516). Aaron Hess’s (2011) article, “CriticalRhetorical Ethnography: Rethinking the Place and Process of Rhetoric,” illustrates some of the specific and distinctive methods of collecting and analyzing data that characterize rhetorical fieldwork research. His article makes a case for critical-rhetorical ethnography as a method capable of fostering both an understanding of in situ rhetoric and social change. Hess summarizes this dual contribution as follows: Critical-rhetorical ethnography supplies scholars of rhetoric with a locally situated and experiential approach to the process and production of rhetorical texts. The method is designed to give rhetoricians an insider perspective on the lived advocacy of individuals and organizations that struggle to persuade in public for changes in policy, social life, or other issues that affect them. The method is not mere observation of advocacy but rather an embodiment and enactment of advocacy through direct participation. (p. 128)

Hence, this method allows rhetorical scholars to move away from “after-the-fact criticism” of instances of advocacy (p. 129) to the investigation of advocacy as it is unfolding, thus “repositioning… the critic among the exigencies of public life” (p. 131, emphasis in original). Drawing on traditional rhetorical notions of invention, kairos, and phronesis, Hess proposes a method that focuses on the situatedness of lived argumentative practices and the researcher’s development of an advocacy know-how that stems from engagement with the field. To demonstrate the value of this method, Hess discusses his work with DanceSafe, a health advocacy organization aimed at educating youth about drugs during all-night dance parties (raves). Hess conducted participant advocacy, a form of participant observation adapted to the conditions and complexity of in situ advocacy. Specifically,

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for two years, Hess became a volunteer member of DanceSafe, participating in the organization’s planning and decision-making activities. He also took part in 20 raves as a DanceSafe volunteer and advocate. He relied on writing scratch notes in the field, which he developed into more extensive field notes upon his return. As Hess explains, at first, his field notes were particularly attuned to the “moment and space of speaking” (p. 140), which was a way for him to document the kairos of advocacy—a classical rhetorical notion that underlines the importance of timing and speaking at the opportune moment. As he became more experienced, Hess became more concerned with invention, or the ways in which advocacy is performed through arguments and argumentative practices. Hess therefore created an inventory of the different forms of arguments for drug safety that were put forward by the volunteers when they were interacting with ravers during the raves. Hess also conducted two sets of interviews, the first with other DanceSafe volunteers, the second with ravers he had gotten to know. The first set of interviews focused on the organization’s argumentative strategies and practices during raves, while the second set focused on the reception and rhetorical effects of these strategies. This research process allowed him to document how advocating for drug safety during raves is taking place and to learn as a participant advocate how to practice DanceSafe advocacy in “a culture that is quite tolerant of drug use” (p. 143). Studies such as Hess’s show a “move away from the podium toward the field,” so to speak, within rhetorical scholarship. This emerging area of research is interesting for scholars of organizational communication for several reasons. First, it tends to focus on the characteristics and implications of persuasion in actual situations, thus offering organizational scholars the opportunity to investigate how persuasion is unfolding through the daily activities of organizational members. What

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emerges from in situ rhetorical analysis is a conception of persuasion that emphasizes its spontaneous, interactional, and emergent character. Second, and aligning with this decentralized and distributed view of persuasion, many central themes in rhetorical studies, such as public advocacy, contestation of meaning through controversy, or coalition building through deliberation, take on new relevance for the study of organizational communication. Through field methods like participant observation and interviews, rhetorical scholars can investigate the suasive complexities of organizational communication phenomena, as they are taking place in the everyday activities of organizational members, whether in forms of strategic communication or vernacular, spontaneous ones. For instance, Hess’s (2011) study advances a decentered view of corporate advocacy as a vernacular activity in which all organizational members can potentially engage, whether or not they formally assume a leadership role involving public advocacy of the organization’s interests. This view is in keeping with the move in organizational rhetoric scholarship toward scholarships that is less centered on formal and managerial rhetoric, and more concerned with vernacular forms of expressions (Meisenbach, 2018). Finally, rhetorical fieldwork studies show how it is possible to integrate qualitative methods into rhetorical research without losing sight of the rhetorical studies’ singularity, namely a concern for persuasion in all its forms and for the publicness of communication. The rhetorical tradition has always been interested in the public dimensions and implications of discourse. However, this locus of interest has been translated differently in different periods in terms of theoretical postures. Rhetorical field studies call attention to the different ways in which an instance of in situ rhetoric can have implications beyond the local realm of its enunciation because it is addressed to publics.

CONCLUSION This chapter presents four approaches to rhetorical methods for studying organizational communication phenomena. As we explained in our introduction, Table 22.1 highlights the specificity of each approach by presenting their distinct responses to six key methodological questions ranging from research design to data collection and writing. Thus, this chapter provides a useful overview of the contrasts between the different ways of viewing and mobilizing rhetorical methods. By way of conclusion, we want to highlight four general observations that stand out from contrasting these four approaches. First, looking at the historical development from the classical approach to the fieldwork approach, we observe a growing commitment to studying the fundamentally rhetorical nature of organizations, which is made possible by new ways of theorizing rhetoric. Moving from a view of rhetoric as a type of strategic organizational discourse to a view of rhetoric as constitutive of organizations allows rhetorical studies to participate in the ontological debates on the nature of organizations and organizing processes that have gained ground in our field. Relying on rhetorical methods of various kinds, the studies we have reviewed in this chapter in turn show productive ways to gain insight into the constitutive effects of rhetoric. Second, we note that this commitment to the rhetorical nature of organizations allows for greater convergence between rhetorical research and other perspectives in organizational communication, particularly research on the communicative constitution of organizations (CCO; see Brummans et  al., 2014). Feldner (2017) and Meisenbach (2018) have drawn attention to the convergence between rhetorical and CCO research. As CCO scholars with rhetorical training and interests, we agree that this convergence deserves further exploration. A first step in this direction is to explicate the rhetorical influences that

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have shaped CCO theorizing and analyses. For our part, we have relied on rhetorical notions to account for the constitutive effects of communication, thus demonstrating their relevance to organizational communication researchers (e.g., see Benoit-Barné, 2007; Benoit-Barné & Robichaud, 2021; Chaput, 2012, 2013, 2021; Robichaud & BenoitBarné, 2010). For instance, Benoit-Barné and Cooren (2009) studied how presence, a key rhetorical concept according to Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca (1969), is interactionally accomplished, and the key role it plays in the establishment of authority as well as broader organizing. Moreover, through a year-long fieldwork study of a political party, Chaput (2012) revealed how identification and division are consistently performed through “common sensations, concepts, images, ideas, and attitudes, as well as norms, principles, rules, texts, and artifacts, in the co-creation of sameness…and difference” (Chaput et al., 2011, p. 257), hence adding new depth to Burke’s concept of consubstantiality as a rhetorical basis for cooperation and organization. Furthermore, rhetorical influences can be found in Christensen, Morsing, and Thyssen’s (2013, 2021) work on aspirational talk and corporate social responsibility, which highlights the dynamics between corporate rhetors and audiences in the constitutive effects of communication, as well as in Brummans, Hwang, and Cheong’s (2020) analysis of the persuasive force of a mantra in the communicative constitution of a Buddhist humanitarian organization. These studies, and several others, contribute to what might be called a “rhetorically-infused CCO approach,” which could one day become a fifth approach to rhetorical analysis on the study of organizational phenomena. Third, our overview indicates that public texts and textual analysis are no longer the indispensable cornerstones of rhetorical analysis. With the emergence of the fieldwork approach to rhetorical analysis, the in situ investigation of rhetorical practices and performances have become other valid

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options. We also note that rhetorical analysis conducted from this perspective can integrate the socio-material dimensions of rhetorical practices and performances (bodies, objects, spaces, etc.), a characteristic not shared by the other approaches. Hence, this chapter brings additional attention to the potential of rhetorical fieldwork to stimulate rhetorical analysis of organizational communication, an observation that was also made by Meisenbach (2018). Finally, this chapter shows how the conception of persuasion has substantially evolved over the years. This broader conception of what counts as “suasive” entails considering a broader range of voices or actors in the rhetorical constitution of organizations, moving beyond managers or government bodies toward peripheric, vernacular, more vulnerable rhetors like pink-collar workers (Meisenbach et  al., 2008), drug safety advocates (Hess, 2011), or farmers engaged in alternative agriculture (Ewalt, 2018). To move away “from the podium toward the field,” so to speak, calls for increasing attention to ethical issues in organizational life, notably regarding who or what speaks and is (or is not) represented in specific instances of rhetorical discourse. Because rhetoric and ethics have always been intertwined, our chapter thus offers numerous avenues for those who are interested in studying questions related to the rhetorical force of communication in organizational ethics, sustainability, and corporate social responsibility, among many others.

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23 Conversation Analysis in Qualitative Organizational Communication Research Jonathan Clifton and Jakob Rømer Barfod

This chapter sets out to review the contribution of conversation analysis (CA) to organizational communication research. It also suggests ways of building bridges to create synergies between research communities that may not be taking sufficient advantage of common ground. When embarking on such an enterprise, it soon becomes apparent that CA is not a monolithic approach to analyzing social life that has one widely accepted and agreed upon definition. The first section of this chapter therefore briefly describes the historical roots of CA and its ontological and epistemological assumptions. It points out some of the divergent trends within what might be said to be an analytical frame of mind and way of seeing rather “than a static and prescriptive set of instructions which analysts bring to bear on the data” (Hutchby & Wooffitt, 2021, p. 39). The second section draws attention to the similarities in the research interests of both CA researchers and organizational communication scholars. The third section reviews work that is situated at the intersection of CA and organizational

communication research. This section also provides a brief analysis of interaction between Danish troops in Afghanistan in 2018. Here, we speculate on how a CA analysis can provide empirical evidence of the communicative constitution of leadership and so complement existing leadership research. The fourth section considers how research that combines CA and areas of interest to organizational communication scholars may have payoff for practice, as such bridging the gap between academic rigor and practical relevance. The fifth and final section sets out avenues that could be explored to build bridges between CA researchers and organizational communication scholars.

CONVERSATION ANALYSIS It is beyond the scope of this chapter to provide a full review of CA. Numerous monographs (e.g., Hutchby & Wooffitt, 2021), edited volumes (e.g., Stivers & Sidnell, 2012),

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and chapters in handbooks (e.g., Drew, 2005) do this admirably. For the purposes of this chapter, suffice it to say that CA has its roots in ethnomethodology (Garfinkel, 1967), which sets out to make visible, and thus analyzable, social actors’ own methods (ethno-methods) through which they produce and maintain the social world. This world is often taken for granted in classic sociology and is said to operate behind the backs of social actors, thus treating them as judgmental dupes. CA, growing out from ethnomethodology, was developed by the likes of Gail Jefferson, Emanuel Schegloff, and Harvey Sacks in the 1960s. It focuses on the finegrained analyses of transcripts of naturally occurring talk (i.e., mundane interactions, not produced in experimental settings or research interviews). Of course, these transcripts are necessarily incomplete re-productions of events (e.g., see Psathas & Anderson, 1990, for more on CA and transcription). As Sacks (1984) argues, they nevertheless constitute a “good enough” representation of the events to work from, and in practice the level of transcription can vary depending on the granularity that the researcher requires. Moreover, the act of transcribing naturally occurring talk is used as an estrangement device to oblige the analyst to focus on the seen, but unnoticed, resources used by social actors to enact their social worlds. The ontological and epistemological assumptions behind the analysis of transcripts of naturally occurring talk are, as Schegloff (1996) puts it, derived from the belief that in many respects, the fundamental or primordial scene of social life is that of direct interaction between members of a social species, typically ones who are physically co-present. For humans, talking in interaction appears to be a distinctive form of this primary constituent of social life, and ordinary conversation is very likely the basic form of organization for talk-in-interaction. Conversational interaction may then be thought of as a form of social organization through which the work of the constitutive institutions of societies gets done—institutions such as the economy, the polity, the family, socialization, etc. It is so to speak, sociological bedrock. (p. 4)

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Conversation analysts are particularly interested in the sequential structure of talk whereby they are able to observe how participants orient to prior turns in talk and so jointly enact social phenomena. As a simple example: If a person is met with the utterance “Hello how are you?” and replies “I’m fine, thanks, and you?”, then the utterance will be understood as the first part of a greeting to which a second part—a response to a greeting—is required. If no reply is forthcoming, the greeter might seek to repair the situation and restore social order by repeating the turn at talk. The recipient of the initial greeting might render an account for such a breach of social order (something like: “Sorry, I didn’t hear you”). However, if on the other hand, one replies: “Ah, I’m not well actually, I have a pain in my stomach,” the interactants may be orienting to, and constructing, what is going on as a visit to the doctors. It is through displaying their understanding of prior turns that participants construct and display to each other a mutual understanding of what they consider to be going on (i.e., through the next turn proof procedure; see Sacks et  al., 1974, p. 728). This display is not only available to the participants who have a naïve mastery of what is going on, but it is also available to the researcher, as overhearer, who is able to formally describe, and therefore analyze, the unfolding social action. It is through strictly applying this procedure that conversation analysts are able to anchor their analyses in participants’ emic understanding of the situation and their concerns, rather than those of the analysts (for more on this point, see Schegloff, 1997). Anchoring the analysis in displayed orientations to social actions therefore brackets the intentionality of the actors. As Garfinkel (1963) says, “[T]here is no reason to look under the skull since nothing of interest is to be found there but brains” (p. 190). Consequently, rather than trying to infer what is going on “in there” and which is invisible, conversation analysts focus on what is going on “out there” and which is

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observable. Similarly, CA researchers also eschew interviewing as a method of inquiry. This is because they consider that (interview) talk is not just an asocial expression of phenomena that are either “out there” or “in there” somewhere. Rather, CA scholars argue that interview-talk is necessarily a situated accounting for action in which parts will be omitted, while other parts will be attributed with meaning that was not necessarily present at the time of action. Thus, from a CA perspective, interviews are treated as situated accounts of action, which may themselves perform social actions such as blaming or justifying. However, they do not provide a clear lens with which to study the accomplishment of social action as it unfolds in situ. The robustness and validity of any CA analysis is rooted in explicating (i.e., unfolding and revealing in greater depth) the phenomenon under investigation by relying on a strict analysis of, to use Sacks’ (1984, p. 21) metaphor, “the machinery of talk” in and through which social actions are achieved. The machinery of talk is thus seen as a generic organizing property of talk that is revealed in the minutiae of interaction that is used in a particular situation, and that is usable in others. Consequently, CA does not rely on seeking statistical confirmation/ quantification in order for the analysis to be considered valid or interesting (for more on this, see Schegloff, 1993); nor does CA rely on coding large quantities of data, which, at the expense of glossing over, or even ignoring, the uniqueness of the phenomenon, favors treating instances under study as similar and belonging to the same (researcherdriven) categories. Further, the reliability of the analyses is achieved through the transparency of transcription, which renders it open to analysis by fellow researchers. Therefore, not only do the analyses become replicable and repeatable, but the analyst’s claims can be challenged if needs be. Having briefly overviewed some essential elements of CA in a manner to which we anticipate most CA scholars would subscribe,

we would propose that, following Drew (2005), “it might be misleading to suggest that there is one methodology, when in reality there are certain differences and diversities in the ways in which conversation analysts work” (p. 99). This diversity is reflected by the use of, sometimes ill-defined and vague, terms such as “pure CA,” “orthodox CA,” “applied CA,” “feminist CA,” “canonical CA,” “Schegloffian CA,” “CA-inspired,” and even “CA-ish.” Yet, despite the numerous adjective-plus-CA labels that have been deployed, perhaps the main distinction (however fuzzy it may be at times) is that of “applied” and “pure CA” (for more on this distinction, see Antaki, 2011; Lester & O’Reilly, 2019; Richards & Seedhouse 2005; see also the 2019 special issue of Research on Language and Social Interaction on “The State of the Art in Key Areas of Applied Conversation Analysis”). In short, as ten Have (2007) observes, [I]n “pure CA,” the focus is on local practices of turn-taking, sequential organization, etc., in and for themselves, while in “applied CA” attention shifts to the tensions between these local practices and any “larger structure” in which these are embedded. (p. 199)

A further trend that muddies the water is that certain researchers do not shy away from using the technical vocabulary and tools of CA to carry out non-CA analyses. For example, De Fina and Georgakopoulou (2008) argue that analyzing narratives as social practice is being increasingly informed by CA. Moreover, Deppermann (2013) argues that CA-inspired analyses of narratives can be employed to make explicit the interplay between so-called big-D Discourse (i.e., socially and historically embedded ways of thinking, acting, doing, and being in the world) and so-called small-d discourse (i.e., talk in interaction) (see also Alvesson & Kärreman, 2000). Similarly, researchers such as Wetherell (1998) and other critical discursive psychologists take a critical perspective to the analysis of mundane talk by combining

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fine-grained CA analyses of talk with analyses of how talk affords opportunities for interlocutors to position themselves, and others, relative to wider social discourses of, for example, gender. And, of course, the Montreal School’s notion of ventriloquism (Cooren, 2010), which has had a significant impact on organizational communication research, is also based on the fine-grained analyses of transcripts of naturally occurring talk, often using the same technical language and detailed analysis of the minutiae of talk as CA (see Chapter 24 in this volume). Unlike CA, though, ventriloquial analyses move beyond the analysis of people interacting with each other to consider the agency of non-present humans and other-than-humanagents, such policies, missions, facts, rules, and regulations, that also make a difference in the interaction. However, other scholars have no qualms about combining CA with other disciplines. For example, Larsson and Lundholm (2013) and Samra-Fredericks (2005) both combine CA with ethnographic research to analyze leadership and top management teams respectively (for more on combining CA and ethnography, see Moerman, 1988); Wasson (2016) combines CA with frame analysis to investigate decision-making; and Graf (2019) combines CA with sociolinguistics and discourse analysis to study the mundane practice of executive coaching. Moreover, some researchers (e.g., Fitzgerald & Housley, 2015; Hester & Eglin, 1997) have developed Sacks’ interest in categories (Sacks, 1972, 1979) into membership categorization analysis (MCA). Despite being criticized by some CA scholars (e.g., Schegloff, 2007) for precociously linking sequences of talk to identity, MCA has grown into a burgeoning research field that uses the insights of CA to analyze the doing of identity in talk as in situ social practice. Moreover, as inexpensive and easy-to-use video-recording equipment has become available, CA researchers have been increasingly turning to multimodal analysis, which encompasses not only talk but also features

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of interaction such as eye gaze, body position, gesture, the use of artifacts, and so on (for more on this issue see, see Mondada, 2019). Similarly, CA has also extended beyond face-to-face interaction to consider sequences of written interaction, notably online talk (for a recent review of CA and online talk, see Paulus et al., 2016). Consequently, CA is well removed from the cliché of being a method that “just” analyzes sequences of talk. In sum, CA is far from being a single agreed upon analytical method. It exists in a myriad of forms that are variously closer to, or further from, the original works of Sacks, Schegloff, and colleagues—i.e., so-called “pure CA.” From this perspective, CA may be regarded as an analytical mentality toward observing and analyzing in situ social practice. It is precisely this (flexible) analytical mentality that we argue can be profitably adopted by organizational communication scholars.

CA AND ORGANIZATIONAL COMMUNICATION RESEARCH As mentioned above, when seeking to comment on the potential value of CA for organizational communication research, it is perhaps more profitable to consider CA to be an analytical mentality, rather than something that is confined to one particular (orthodox) approach. Admittedly, doing so runs the risk of promoting an “anything goes mentality,” and perhaps this interpretation of CA is not met by universal approval among researchers who regard themselves as CA scholars. Nevertheless, such a more flexible approach to CA has the advantage of allowing for the exploration of a wider application of CA to organizational communication research. As Ford (2012) notes, with regard to applying CA, combining it with other methods, or adapting it for non-CA research agendas, to me CA is simply too powerful an approach to be abandoned because one is not using it in service of its own primary end. (p. 508)

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Moreover, organizational communication, as  with CA, is also perhaps a slippery ­concept—“an eclectic and interdisciplinary field,” as Ashcraft, Kuhn, and Cooren (2009, p. 3) put it—with debates about what the field does, and does not, cover, and in which the boundaries between such fields as organizational discourse analysis (ODA), management studies (MS), and organizational studies (OS) are porous. However, despite the fact the boundaries of organizational communication may be fluid, most organizational communication scholars agree that communication is the “stuff” of organizing and organizations. In other words, organizations are not containers in which communication takes place; rather, they are communicatively constituted in and through the mundane communicative practices of organizational players (Cooren et al., 2011; Fairhurst & Putnam, 2004). It is this essentially constructionist approach to communication that is distinctive about organizational communication research and which distinguishes it from other allied disciplines, such as business communication, organizational discourse analysis, management studies, and so on (Deetz & Eger, 2014). Whilst CA is not constructionist, nevertheless, a number of scholars consider it be to be close to constructionism (e.g., Kitzinger, 2000; Richards & Seedhouse, 2005; SamraFredericks, 2003; Stokoe & Sikveland, 2017; ten Have, 1990). This observation, therefore, draws attention to the proximity of the constructionist idea that language is constitutive, rather than reflective, of social phenomena, as well as to the CA notion of talking phenomena, such as organizations, into being. It is exactly this adherence to the constitutive nature of the organization, and the idea that, to use the CA jargon, social order is “talked into being” that runs through Boden’s (1994) seminal work on the organization of talk, and the talk of organization. As she says, [W]hen people talk they are simultaneously and reflexively talking their relationships, organizations, and whole institutions into action, or into “being.” Structure is thus realized as action. In this

sense organizations and institutions exist through the actions, reactions, and inactions of their constitutive members, who embody and enact the history or spatio-temporally constituted set of relations we call structure. (p. 14, emphasis in original)

If this is the case, CA (however defined) surely has common ground with organizational communication scholarship. Hence, there is a potential for dialogue and a crossfertilization of ideas. Indeed, Taylor and Van Every (2000) acknowledge that their foundational work on the communicative constitution of organizations is indebted specifically to the work of Boden (1994), and to ethnomethodology and conversation analysis more generally. This common ground and the potential for CA to dialogue with organizational communication scholars has been noted by numerous scholars who have called for CA to be adopted more extensively (e.g., Cooren, 2006; Greatbatch & Clark, 2018; Llewellyn & Hindmarsh, 2011). However, these same scholars have also noted that there has been a relative lack of uptake of CA in organizational (communication) research. A  search for “conversation analysis” in the abstracts of top-ranked communication journals revealed that it failed to appear at all in Communication Theory, appeared only twice in Management Communication Quarterly, and three times in Communication Monographs. The relative lack of uptake of CA by organizational communication scholars is perhaps because CA has been associated with so-called “pure CA,” which has a reputation for being interested in nothing other than sequences of talk. Consequently, it is regarded as being too “micro” to reveal anything of interest to organizational communication scholars (on this point see, for example, McPhee, Myers, & Trethewey, 2006) whose interests are focused on wider themes, such as “culture; identity and identification; leadership; socialization; groups and teams; relations of power and difference (or  in management terms, ‘diversity’—e.g., gender, race, class, sexuality); knowledge formation and management; communication

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technology; decision-making; work and family; sustainability; globalization; and so on” (Ashcraft et al., 2009, p. 5). However, the sticking point is perhaps not so much that CA cannot deal with such issues; rather, it is that the analytical spirit of CA radically re-­ specifies the approach to such issues in a way that renders it unattractive to organizational (communication) scholars. More specifically, rather than treating issues of power, gender, class, and so on as analyst-concerns that are applied a priori to analyses, CA treats them as members’ concerns that “emerge from the data.” After all, as Llewellyn and Hindmarsh (2011) succinctly put it, “[W]ider social issues and problems find their expression in, and are reproduced through, the sequential organization of talk-in-interaction” (p. 28). It is this presence of “big issues” in mundane interaction that CA may be able to reveal, and it is this opportunity that may be of interest to organizational communication scholars.

AT THE INTERSECTION OF CA AND ORGANIZATIONAL COMMUNICATION Despite the fact that some scholars have claimed that CA is unable to access themes of interest to organizational communication scholars, such as power (e.g., Clegg, 1987; McPhee et  al., 2006), and that many CA studies focus on institutional interaction (i.e., interaction in which institutional/organizational tasks are achieved in and through the management of sequences of talk) without necessarily explicitly addressing issues of power, gender, culture, and so on, others have taken up the challenge. This, albeit relatively slender, body of research demonstrates, for example, how a CA mentality can be brought to bear on the issue of power in organizations. If organizations are communicatively constituted (see Brummans, Cooren, Robichaud, & Taylor, 2014), some argue, it is “by focusing on the oriented-to structures of talk-in-interaction and their consequences

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in terms of the structural distribution of discursive resources, [that] conversation analysts can succeed in making visible what for conventional sociologists is the awkwardly invisible concept of power” (Hutchby, 1999, p. 92). Such an interactional approach to the doing of power has been taken up by CA-minded researchers. For example, combining CA with ethnography and Foucauldian analyses, Samra-Fredericks’s (2005) study highlights the everyday constitution of power as organizational players discuss and decide upon strategy. Also combining CA with ethnography, Arminen et al. (2022), using data from a university executive board and public research organizations, argue that a CA approach to the analysis of the interactional negotiation of deontic rights (i.e., rights to control the actions of self and others) is a way into the analysis of power—provided the analyst goes beyond “just” identifying when the negotiation of deontic rights is at play to analyzing what organizational players achieve in and through the negotiation of their deontic rights. And Clifton et al. (2022), combining CA-inspired analyses of sequences of talk with Foucault’s notion of disciplinary power, use critical discursive psychology to analyze the enactment of power during career coaching sessions. Further, as noted previously, despite being a somewhat contentious development of CA, MCA can also feed into organizational communication scholars’ areas of concern— including those of identity and power. As Sacks (1979) noted in his seminal paper on categorization, categorizing the world one way rather than another is an act of social control (power). According to Sacks, classifying young drivers as “hotrodders,” rather than “teenage drivers,” is revolutionary because it challenges the “adult” worldview and seeks to impose alternative (revolutionary) categories for understanding the world, which are associated with alternative, and potentially revolutionary, behaviors. More recently, Clifton et al. (2020), using MCA to analyze a speech of a famous management guru, Jack

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Welch, showed how categorizing employees as businesses enacts, and normalizes, a neoliberal view of the organizational landscape in which leaders are justified in being “cruel to be kind” by letting underperforming employees go. Clifton and colleagues (2020) then juxtaposed such category-work with critical approaches to leadership in order to argue that positive-sounding stories of leadership may have a darker side to them. These stories, that is, can be used to justify and account for, inter alia, shoring up contentious employment practices, such as “rank and yank” (i.e., the systematic firing of employees who are ranked as poor performers). Feminist CA is another approach to CA that resonates with the interests of organizational communication scholars in gender (and power)—an interest that Ashcraft et al. (2009, p. 15) claim has exploded since the 1990s. In her foundational paper on feminist CA, Kitzinger (2000) claims that “CA is a useful technique for understanding how, in our ordinary, mundane interactions, we produce the social order we inhabit—in other words, how we ‘do’ power and powerlessness, oppression and resistance” (p. 174). Working from this premise and analyzing interaction in a beauty salon, Toerien and Kitzinger (2007), for example, address not only the conversation analytic interest in how participants manage multiple involvements in a socially meaningful way, but they also address the wider feminist concern for making visible the skills of emotional labor upon which many organizations, especially in the service industries, rely. However, despite this clear potential for synergy between organizational communication scholars interested in how gender is made relevant for organizations and organizing, and the critical angle of feminist CA, this particular development does not seem to have been taken up by organizational (communication) scholars. As the work of Kitzinger and colleagues illustrates, CA can be used for non-CA ends. And as Antaki (2011) points out, researchers from different fields may look to CA

and “import” it into their own discipline. A case in point is that of leadership research. Leadership is, of course, a theme of interest to organizational communication scholars. For example, some of these scholars approach leadership from a discursive perspective and examine how both leadership and leader/follower identities are constituted in and through communication (e.g., see Fairhurst, 2007). Whilst much of the research that takes a discursive approach to leadership uses methods of analysis other than CA, some of it does draw upon CA to make visible, and thus analyzable, the machinery of talk through which leadership and/or leader identity are achieved as part of mundane in situ organizational practice. For example, Van De Mieroop et  al. (2020), analyzing a business meeting, use multimodal CA to investigate how “doing” leadership is not limited to the formal leader. Moreover, Larsson and Lundholm (2013), combining ethnography and CA, analyze a single episode of naturally occurring workplace interaction to show how leadership, understood as an interpersonal influence process, enables and facilitates organizing processes. Yet, since it is unlikely that, within the interaction itself, the participants/interactants explicitly account for what they are doing in terms of leadership, linking sequences of talk to leadership may require that the researcher works from an a priori researcher-driven definition of leadership. If one takes a more purist approach to CA, such a move is, of course, open to criticism. More specifically, since the participants themselves do not visibly orient to “leadership” or leader and follower identities, it could be argued that the researcher’s own interests are imposed on the analysis, without warrant. Consequently, since the researcher fails to reconcile the formal analysis of sequences of talk with what is observably relevant for the participants, the analysis ends up being purely “ideological” (Schegloff, 1997, p. 183), in the sense that the analysis will be driven by the researcher’s extra-textual concerns, rather than the

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displayed and oriented-to concerns of the participants. Nevertheless, returning to the concept of CA being an analytical mentality, rather than a strict and uniform way of doing analysis, providing researchers are both reflective about how they are applying CA and acknowledge their role in framing the analysis, leverage is to be gained by using CA for non-CA ends. This would be especially so for research situated within a turn to practice in which researchers seek to understand organizational phenomena, including leadership, as they happen as part of everyday in situ social practice (e.g., see Kuhn, 2012, 2021). To illustrate further how CA—or rather a CA mentality towards analyzing transcripts of naturally occurring talk—can shed light on issues of interest to organizational communication scholars, we continue with the theme of leadership. As Fairhurst and Connaughton (2014) argue, communication is constitutive of leadership. However, after reviewing the literature that takes a communicative approach to leadership, these authors call for more research, including cross-disciplinary work, to consider the communicative constitution of leadership. In order to go some way to responding to this call, and to exemplify how bridges may be built between CA scholars and organizational communication researchers, we adopt a CA mentality to the analysis of naturally occurring talk, which we argue “does” leadership as part of mundane, in situ, social practice. As data we use a (translated) transcript of naturally occurring talk that was audiorecorded during a military briefing of Danish soldiers in Afghanistan prior to an operation. The data were recorded in 2018 by the second author who is also a major in the Danish army and who was embedded in the unit for research purposes (Barfod, 2021). Being an embedded participant observer is a great advantage, since it allows the researcher to be familiar with the context and to understand the interaction as the participants do. However, such proximity to action also

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presents ethical challenges in terms of managing relations with the many stakeholders and their different expectations of the second author as a researcher, officer, and colleague. For example, a senior officer in Denmark who had been helpful as a gatekeeper was curious to know how the unit had performed. He emailed the second author and asked: “By the way, have you seen anything I need to be aware of?” This request for information was not complied with. Regardless of whether the researcher’s assessment would have been good or bad, it would have compromised the confidentiality and trust between him, as a researcher, and the unit, and so would have been unethical. Thus, working close to practice as an insider presents a constant stream of ethical challenges that have to be dealt with and, as Silverman (2015) points out, “it is wise to think about ethical issues at all stages of a research study” (p. 152). In the Danish military, orders are always given in a specific way ending with: “End of orders. Any questions?” The brief excerpt below, in which Egon, a private soldier, asks Janus, the sergeant in charge of the section, a question, was recorded during this final part of the briefing. “Papa” is the call sign for the section leader. “Alpha” is the call sign for the second in command of the section. 1 E   question it is papa who walks at the front and alpha comes at the back 2 J   no alpha walks at the front 3     (.) 4 E   in that case may I suggest that we take Jakob in our team (.) at any rate on the way 5     in (.) and then when we enter Jakob will be positioned by the door (.) keeps the 6     door open (.) secures it until you enter (.) so we avoid two persons fiddling with 7     that door (.) because (.) and cannot open it 8 J   I find that a fine suggestion 9     (1.5) 10 J   we do 11     (1.0) 12 J   that if that is what makes sense now when it is you who have been there 13     and not me

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14     (1.5) 15 J   then we connect with Jakob there (.) and then you just join my packet1 when I 16     have entered Jakob as the last man

This excerpt shows that at the end of the orders, Egon self-selects to ask a question about the future deployment of the soldiers. The question makes an answer a conditionally relevant next action and, in this case, Janus confirms that soldier “alpha walks at the front.” In line 4, Egon self-selects to make a suggestion. This suggestion, hedged through the use of the modal “may” (“may I suggest”), has a very shallow deontic gradient. Following Landmark et al. (2015), deontic rights—the right to determine one’s own and others’ future actions—are expressed on a gradient ranging from hedged suggestions to direct commands. Egon’s turn thus displays orientation to limited deontic rights to determine the future actions of others. The suggestion is that “when we enter Jakob will be positioned by the door (.) keeps the door open (.) secures it until you enter (.).” In an increment to the turn, the suggestion is accounted for on the grounds that “we avoid two persons fiddling with that door (.) because (.) and cannot open it.” Having made a suggestion, the conditionally relevant next action is a response (see Asmuß & Oshima, 2012). In this case, Janus evaluates the suggestion (line 8: “I find that a fine suggestion”). Subsequently, there is a 1.5 second pause after which Janus confirms acceptance of the suggestion “we do,” and he then accounts for this decision on the grounds that you (i.e., Egon and the other soldiers) “have been there and not me” (lines 12–13). Thus, not having been to the location himself, Janus defers to Egon’s primary epistemic rights to know based on his personal experience (Sacks, 1992, vol. II, p. 242). After a 1.5 second pause, Janus revises his orders, taking into account Egon’s suggestion: “then we connect with Jakob there (.) and then you just join my packet when I have entered Jakob as the last man.” This order is unhedged and so

is delivered using a steep deontic gradient, which displays his rights to decide the future actions of the soldiers. From a purely sequential perspective, this extract reveals the machinery of talk in which a suggestion is made and accepted, and in which deontic and epistemic rights are negotiated. However, talk is social action: it does something. In this case, Egon makes a suggestion about the future deployment of soldiers and this suggestion is accepted, integrated into new orders, and accounted for because of Egon’s first-hand superior knowledge. There is nothing in the analysis which would suggest either that leadership is being achieved, or that the participants themselves orient to such a vague and slippery notion as leadership. However, whilst most leadership scholars agree that leadership is a matter of influence, exactly how influence is achieved as part of in situ social practice is often missing from leadership research. By using CA for non-CA purposes and combining an analysis of the doing of influence with leadership theory, organizational communication scholars can make the communicative constitution of leadership tangible. In this case, we argue that the mobilization of, and orientation to, superior epistemic rights allows Egon, a private soldier, to influence his hierarchic superior to take a particular course of action. However, we also note that the final decision (lines 15–16) on how the team is to be deployed is delivered by Janus with a steep deontic gradient, which displays his deontic rights to command. We thus show that leadership, as an interactive, communicative process of influence, is enacted in talk through the negotiation of epistemic and deontic rights. Counterintuitively, in a military situation in which command and control models are prevalent, the giving of orders is not a question of the sergeant ordering and the private following; rather, it is rather a process of mutual influence that is commensurate with Pearce and Conger’s (2003) notion of shared leadership, which they define as

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a dynamic, interactive influence process among individuals in groups for which the objective is to lead one another to the achievement of group or organizational goals or both. This influence process often involves peer, or lateral, influence and at other times involves upward or downward hierarchical influence. (p. 1)

In leadership research, as reflected in Pearce and Conger’s (2003) work, there has been a significant movement away from the leader as heroic individual to post-heroic notions of shared, distributed, and collective leadership. Yet, despite the practice-turn in leadership research (Raelin, 2016), how shared leadership is actually achieved as an interactional process is rarely the object of leadership research—a complaint echoed by Smith et  al. (2018) who argue that to date leadership research has been theoretical, rather than empirical, and that there is “a dearth of substantive real-world data” that underpins research findings (p. 1428). Also, within the move to a post-heroic understanding of leadership, some scholars (e.g., Collinson et al., 2017) argue that collective, shared, and distributed leadership has been romanticized, making it appear smooth and devoid of conflict, and overlooking the action of existing structures, potential power imbalances, and asymmetries. The case we analyzed above shows that superior rights to know based on personal experience allow a subordinate to participate in the leadership process and influence his hierarchic superior. It thus shows how the leadership process is shared amongst members of a team through the negotiation of epistemic rights. In doing so, shared leadership is “done.” We also note, though, that the private, using a shallow deontic gradient to make a suggestion, orients to his limited rights to direct the future actions of the soldiers, whereas Janus, the hierarchic superior, uses a steep deontic gradient to announce what the team will do. Consequently, our analysis demonstrates that sharing leadership does not equate with equal rights to lead: The sergeant orients to his right to command

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using a steep deontic gradient; the private uses a shallow deontic gradient to suggest. In this case, shared leadership, as a process of mutual influence, is thus revealed to be achieved through the interplay of orientation to the rank of the speakers (positional leadership), deontic rights associated with these identities, as well as epistemic rights based on access to first-hand knowledge. These rights are not only brought along to the briefing in terms of responsibilities and expectations conventionally associated with the identities of sergeant and private; they have to be brought about in the interaction and negotiated, in Garfinkel’s (1967, p. 9) terms, “for another next first time.” This insight therefore adds to leadership research by making visible the in situ practice of the doing of leadership, understood as a communicative process of mutual influence. Moreover, it also shows the participants’ orientation to constraints and resources for doing influence that enact deontic rights associated with organizational hierarchy. We thus show how hierarchy and positional leadership intersect with the process of doing shared leadership, which suggests that shared leadership is nevertheless, to some extent, asymmetrical and influenced by formal position. In sum, we argue that taking a CA approach to analysis may be used to challenge, confirm, or nuance existing leadership theories and can therefore provide synergy between two research communities that, with a few notable exceptions, are talking past, rather than to, each other. Beyond leadership, this short analysis also exemplifies, more generally, the advantages that bringing a CA mentality to bear on issues of interest to organizational communication scholars can have. First, a CA mentality provides a method for making the in situ accomplishment of the communicative constitution of organization and allied phenomena available for analysis. If these “big issues” that are of interest to scholars have relevance to, and influence on, both the in situ practice of organizational

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players and the ways in which organizations are constituted, then they should be observable in actual interaction. Second, applying a CA mentality to the analysis of organizational communication phenomena avoids relying on researcher-elicited second-order accounts of events that, as we noted before, are removed from the in situ practices they describe and that are inevitably contextualized re-presentations of events, rather than the events themselves. Third, adopting a CA mentality allows organizational communication researchers to obtain empirical evidence of organizational phenomena that may be used to support, challenge, or nuance existing theorization.

PRACTICAL PAYOFF The relevance of CA to organizational communication research also lies in its potential for practical payoff, thus providing rigorous research that is relevant to practitioners. As Richards and Seedhouse (2005) note, because CA is empirically grounded in the close observation of everyday (organizational) practices, it has the capacity to inform practice. This is amply demonstrated, for example, in a collection of articles that appeared in the 2014 special issue of Research on Language and Social Interaction on “Conversation Analysis and Intervention.” The ability to intervene by providing empirically-grounded advice is especially relevant, because, as many researchers have noted (e.g., see Cameron, 2000), communication advice given to practitioners is often prescriptive and ideologically driven by what the trainer believes should happen, not what actually happens. Consequently, advice is often not only reductive, but it is also often misguided (Cameron, 2000, p. 177). Conversely, CA’s ability to lift the lid of the black box that surrounds organizational communication offers a way of analyzing the actual workplace practice of organizational players. CA can therefore help locate best

practices by establishing which communication strategies work, and which don’t. And once best practices have been identified, they can be articulated as advice in a way that is accessible to practitioners. For example, in the field of executive coaching, Sator and Graf (2014) remark that advice for coaches is rarely based on the observation of actual coaching. Following their analyses of naturally occurring coaching sessions, they argue that sensitizing coaches to the professional dilemma of managing the coach’s professional knowledge and the client’s personal knowledge is a possible application of CA to practice. Stokoe and colleagues (e.g., Stokoe & Sikvland, 2017; Stokoe, 2014) go further than arguing that CA could be used to raise the awareness of practitioners. They have proposed a pedagogic strategy (the conversation analytical role-play model [CARM]) whereby naturally occurring workplace communication is video-recorded and used as a basis for evidence-based training in which trainees critically assess their own, and others’, real-life interaction. In turn, they develop and improve strategies for better communication based on these observations. Similarly, O’Reilly et al. (2020) have put forward a framework of intervention, reflective interventionist conversation analysis (RICA), which emphasizes the promotion of a reflective conversation between practitioners and analysts with the aim of translating CA-driven research knowledge into good practice. Such an interventionist spin to CA allows it to move beyond “ethnomethodological indifference” (Garfinkel & Sacks, 1970, p. 345), whereby the analyst abstains from any judgment as to the adequacy, importance, and effectiveness of any practical activity, to engage with the world beyond the ivory tower of academia. Moreover, such work can also be profoundly ethical, since it allows researchers to engage with socially responsible agencies and organizations. For example, applied-CA research has focused on interaction in the following fields: child helplines (Hepburn et al., 2014); suicide helplines (Kevoe-Feldman & Iversen, 2022);

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care provision for adults with learning disabilities (Antaki et al., 2009); and sexual harassment (Kitzinger, 2000). Further, not only can applied-CA research feed back into practice, but it may also be able to contribute positively to teaching and training. Arguing that there is a disconnect between the practice of management and management teaching/training in universities and business schools, Mintzberg (2004) convincingly makes the case for more training/teaching based on actual practice. In this respect, CA can lift the lid of the black box that surrounds actual workplace practices that constitute organizations and the identities of players within them. It can thus provide teaching based on the CA-inspired analysis transcripts of actual interaction as, for example, promoted by Darics and Koller (2018, pp. 178–186) in their textbook designed for undergraduate students.

CONCLUSION AND AVENUES FOR FUTURE RESEARCH As Deetz and Eger (2014) note, “[W]hilst communication as constitutive has become a routine way that constructionism has been addressed [within the field of organizational communication], its development has shown insufficient appreciation for the complexity of human interaction in the constitution of human experience and social institutions” (p. 29). It is precisely in relation to this lacuna that we close this chapter by arguing that CA, or rather a CA mentality—whether that be blending CA with other research methods, applying CA, or using CA for non-CA purposes—can be profitably applied to areas of interest to scholars of organizational communication. We take this opportunity to repeat calls made by other scholars (notably, Cooren, 2006) for bridges to be built between scholars who have a CA mentality and organizational communication scholars. Certainly, a more purist form of CA, which seeks to examine the minutiae

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of talk and which, as its critics may argue, fails to take account of context and wider social theorizing, may be of little direct interest to organizational communication researchers. However, we argue that adopting a CA mentality and applying it to organizational communication scholarship can provide a way of examining the complexity of human interaction in and through which organizations, and the identities of organizational players within them, are communicatively constituted. Moreover, the increasing use of video data within CA also allows CA(-inspired) researchers to move beyond sequences of talk in interaction to consider the use of space, artifacts, gesture, and thus also to respond to the material turn in organizational communication (see Ashcraft et al., 2009). As we have illustrated above, despite the relative lack of CA work in journals favored by organizational communication scholars (e.g., Communication Theory, Management Communication Quarterly, and Communication Monographs), to some extent bridges between organizational communication research and CA are already in place. Applying a CA mentality to the analysis of naturally occurring interaction, this CA-ish work demonstrates how bigger issues of interest to scholars of organizational communication, such as power, gender, and leadership, are enacted in the minutiae of talk. However, much of the work at the intersection of CA and organizational communication scholarship has been published in journals that are not often cited by organizational communication scholars. Unfortunately, this is a reflection of research silos whereby scholars from the different disciplines are often talking past each other, rather than to each other. We therefore call for more work that develops the dialogue between organizational communication scholars and CA scholars. On the one hand, researchers who perceive themselves to be CA scholars may wish to bring a CA mentality to wider issues and draw on the insights and findings of ­organizational communication research. On

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the other hand, more organizational communication scholars may wish to adopt a CA mentality to their research. After all, if phenomena that organizational communication scholars are interested in exist, arguably they should be observable and analyzable in the actual practices of organizational players—the terra firma of interaction (Cooren, 2006; see also Brummans et  al., 2014). If phenomena of interest to organizational scholars cannot be found in the details of actual practice, they perhaps run the risk of being revealed to be researcher constructs that have little bearing on organizing and the organization as communicatively constituted by organizational players in and through mundane interaction. Above all, it is important to avoid an “anything goes, free for all” mentality in which CA is combined willy-nilly with the interests of organizational communication scholars. As Ford (2012) reminds us, when drawing upon CA to answer non-CA questions, it is essential for the researcher to be clear about their ontological and epistemological assumptions. The success of building bridges between CA and other methods depends on a respect for CA’s core methods and assumptions. Without such integrity, it would not be coherent to attempt to use CA for non-CA ends and purposes. At the end of the day, the academic rigor, reliability, validity, and pertinence of any bridges that are built between organizational communication scholarship and CA is a question for reviewers and editors who need to gate-keep with care. They need to create space for synergy and exploration, yet at the same time they need to be vigilant not to accept an “anything goes” mentality. With this (significant) proviso in mind, we end this chapter by calling for organizational communication scholars to consider the benefits of adopting a CA mentality to their research and of making visible, and thus analyzable, the communicative constitution of “big issues” in the minutiae of interaction, and we call for CA scholars to apply

CA to non-CA ends in order to engage more explicitly with the agenda of organizational communication research.

Note 1  In this case, the section is divided into two teams, and the word “packet” is used here as a slang expression for one of the two teams.

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24 Ventriloquial Analysis in Qualitative Organizational Communication Research Ellen Nathues, François Cooren, and Mark van Vuuren

Ventriloquism is a popular art form that consists of throwing one’s voice to create the illusion that the sounds produced from one’s mouth are coming from a source other than this vocal organ (Connor, 2000). Popularized in the 1920s in the United States by Edgar Bergen and his famous puppet, Charlie McCarthy, this practice already existed in Ancient Greece, where ventriloquists were then called engastrimanteis or “belly prophets” (Goldblatt, 2006). However, the term can also be used metaphorically to speak about our more mundane communicational acts of making someone or something else say or do something (Cooren, 2010). This chapter will focus on these acts and their implications for how we analyze organizational communication and communication in general. Specifically, in this chapter, we present, operationalize, and play with what could be called the “ventriloquial thesis of (organizational) communication.” This thesis exists in two versions. In a mild version, ventriloquation occurs whenever people more or less

intentionally make other voices present in their talking, writing, or doing, such as when a hospital director explicitly calls upon a protocol to remind his interlocutors that he has to validate all hiring decisions (Cooren, 2010; see also Christensen & Christensen, 2022). Here, ventriloquation happens to the extent that it is not only the director who says that he must validate all hiring decisions but also the protocol that he (strategically) invokes and that enforces his claim’s authority and legitimacy. In the strong version of the ventriloquial thesis, ventriloquation is involved in any act of communication. In this version, communicational scenes are decentered, acknowledging there is never an absolute source to anything that is being said or done; no matter what a person communicates, we can always identify who or what else is talking or acting through this person, and we can thus retrace the reasons that led this person to express what they did (we call this upstream ventriloquation). Because communication involves the (voluntary or involuntary)

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production of signs, however, we can also identify what a person’s sayings and doings make them say and do in a subsequent turn (what we call downstream ventriloquation). Keeping this in mind, the strong version of the ventriloquial thesis invites us to reimagine communication as ever-unfolding relations that unravel as we interact and that can be analyzed up and down the stream of communication. This chapter is organized into three main sections. We start by describing the ventriloquial thesis, including its Bakhtinian heritage, its mild and strong versions, and its upstream and downstream forms. Subsequently, we look at how to conduct ventriloquial studies by mapping out the scope and craft of these types of analyses, focusing particularly on how ventriloquations can be identified. We conclude by providing avenues for the future of ventriloquial analysis in qualitative organizational communication research.

THE VENTRILOQUIAL THESIS The idea that speaking can be metaphorically conceived as ventriloquism is not completely new. Although Mikhail Bakhtin (1975/1981) never used the term explicitly1, several commentators on his work did mention it (e.g., Carroll, 1983; Goldblatt, 2006; Holquist, 1981; Tannen, 2004; Wertsch, 1991). Bakhtin’s work (including his concepts of heteroglossia, polyphony, and double-voiced­ ness) may be broadly interpreted as an attempt to show that a multiplicity of voices can be recognized in whatever someone is saying or doing: Each time people communicate, they are orchestrating multiple voices (see Bakhtin, 1975/1981, p. 275). Importantly, Bakhtin acknowledged that these different voices are not exclusively human; they are also other-than-human. For instance, the Russian author pointed out that social groups and genres have their own voices and that even nature can (be made to) say things

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(Bakhtin, 1996). As Cooren and Sandler (2014) note, “The world inhabited by us, human beings, is according to Bakhtin, a speaking and acting world” (p. 229). This move on Bakhtin’s part is key to understanding the idea of ventriloquism in (organizational) communication (Cooren, 2010). While mainstream linguistics and communication studies keep positioning human beings as the sole actors capable of expressing themselves in interactions (Sanders, 2021; Weigand, 2021), the idea that other-than-humans also communicate allows us to reconsider the relation between conversations and the contexts in which they take place. A ventriloquial conception of communication shows that situational elements actively partake in interactions and thus reconnects conversations to their contexts, rather than treating contexts as mere backgrounds. Usually, this reconnection is the signature of pragmaticians (Alwood, 2017; Levinson, 1983; Mey, 1998)—that is, linguists who study how interactants use language in concrete situations. However, these linguists tend to maintain an anthropocentric vision of the world: For pragmaticians, only humans do things with and through words (Austin, 1962), so to speak. So, what exactly does viewing communication as ventriloquism mean? First, it is important to note that the ventriloquial world is not devoid of human beings. While the ventriloquial thesis questions the anthropocentric position defended by most linguists and communication scholars, it does not erase humans from the scene. Evidently, the (organizational) world we live in is a world in which people speak to each other, tell jokes, make announcements, chat on the Internet, issue authorizations, get appointed, and so on. However, what the ventriloquial thesis highlights is that this world is not exclusively human, even if modernity has often been conceived as a world in which human beings are almighty and central to its becoming—with the terrible ecological consequences that we know of today (Latour, 1993, 2018). Instead, the ventriloquial thesis sketches an image

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of the world in which humans are part of a multitude of other beings, who are always already entangled in chains or networks of shared agency. As mentioned, in its most basic form, to ventriloquize consists of making someone or something else say or do things. For instance, Deborah Tannen (2004) shows how family members ventriloquize their pets to give praise or resolve conflicts. As Tannen notes, “[T]alking through pets allows speakers to distance themselves figuratively from their own utterances” (p. 417). Hence, the act of ventriloquation creates an intriguing effect: It decenters the origin or source of what is being expressed, embedding it in a broader network of relations among various beings. François Cooren (2010) proposes the term “figure” to denote who or what is made to speak and act through ventriloquation (ventriloquial artists also use this term to refer to their puppets). In keeping with Tannen’s (2004) examples and using Cooren’s (2010) terminology, we could therefore say that a mother ventriloquates the figure of the family’s pet to teach values to her kids. In so doing, she creates the impression that her teaching is also coming from the pet, and not exclusively from her, supposedly augmenting the legitimacy and authority of what she is trying to convey (see also BenoitBarné & Cooren, 2009; Nathues & van Vuuren, 2022): If even a dog tells you that you better be quiet, it simply must be true! Tannen’s (2004) conception of ventriloquism could be called a “mild version” of the ventriloquial thesis. For her, “ventriloquizing is a special case of constructed dialogue in that a ventriloquizing speaker animates another’s voice in the presence of that other” (p. 402, emphasis added). Her take is thus closer to the art form or strategic practice we described at the start of this chapter. Our version is stronger and closer to Bakhtin’s (1975/1981) idea of multivocality, to the extent that ventriloquation occurs in any act of communication (Cooren, 2010). What exactly do we mean by this? To unpack the claim that ventriloquation occurs

in any act of communication, we first need to unpack what Cooren (2010, 2020b) calls downstream and upstream ventriloquation. That is, Cooren asks us to compare the act of communicating to a stream, considering our and others’ sayings and doings as part of ever-unfolding relations. If we take ourselves (human beings) as an arbitrary point of reference, the signs of our actions—the words we pronounce, the texts we write, the gestures we make, etc.—can be seen as being positioned further down in the direction of the stream of our communication. Once expressed, they make present additional beings—figures, in ventriloquial terms—and make us say and do things that we did or did not intend. However, we can also look in the opposite direction—up the stream of our communication—in order to analyze who or what else is expressing itself through us. In other words, the strong ventriloquial thesis problematizes the existence of unique origins in communication, instead suggesting that what is being said or done can always be attributed to multiple sources, or figures.

Downstream Ventriloquation There is downstream ventriloquation because the words we pronounce, the texts we write, the gestures we produce, and so on make present voices or figures other than our own, which in turn can make us say and do things that we did or did not intend. One simple example can be observed in blushing: When a person blushes, we (as interlocutors or analysts) can say that this blushing makes the person appear embarrassed, self-conscious, or ashamed. Thus, this blushing—as a sign or figure emerging from the person’s face— ventriloquizes this person by making them (unwillingly) say that they are embarrassed, self-conscious, or ashamed. The idea of downstream ventriloquation reveals that delegation or translation are innate and inevitable facets of communication

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(Cooren, 2020). Often, this delegation or translation is invisible because the signs people produce make them say or do things they were intending or anticipating. This happens, for instance, when a manager utters a request to her assistant to fetch her a folder (“Could you bring me this folder, please?”), which subsequently leads the assistant to bring her the respective documents. For all practical purposes, the words the manager pronounced made her do something that she was anticipating: She succeeded in making her assistant bring her a folder. The delegation down the stream of communication took place as planned or expected. However, we all know of situations in which the signs we express and the figures we invoke make us say or do things we did not intend. For example, in another situation, the same manager could say: “I cannot believe this is happening again!,” leading her assistant to reply: “I’m so sorry. I’ll try to be more careful next time.” Here, the assistant’s reaction shows that she translates what the manager said as a reproach, meaning that this is what the manager’s statement makes her utter (at least according to her assistant). The manager could reply: “No, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it as a reproach. It’s not your fault!” In turn, this would show that what the manager initially said (“I cannot believe this is happening again!”) made her do something that she did not intend to do—accusing her assistant. The translation becomes a betrayal (“Traduttore, traditore,” as they say in Italy)—down the stream of communication, the delegation to the manager’s original words did not work as planned. Similarly, a conflict or debate often involves a situation in which person X discovers that person Y is misrepresenting what X has just said (see Bencherki et al., 2020c; Cooren et  al., 2022). This type of “hostile” ventriloquation (where people explicitly or implicitly put incorrect words in their interlocutors’ mouths) can be contrasted with more “friendly” forms, such as what happens during constructive dialogues. In other words, we constantly ventriloquate each other:

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Through our interpretations, we always make others say or do things by interpreting the signs they produce in a certain way. From a strong ventriloquial perspective, downstream ventriloquation thus takes place whenever we communicate. Any form of communication involves the production of signs and figures, but these signs and figures can successively ventriloquate us to the extent that they make us say or do things that we did or did not mean to say or do.

Upstream Ventriloquation When analyzing upstream forms of ventriloquation (Cooren, 2010, 2020), we look up the stream of communication and toward the origins or sources of what is being said and done. One could easily retort that these sources are obvious and well known: The persons who actually express something. However, the ventriloquial thesis invites us to question this assumption. It problematizes the existence of a unique origin, instead suggesting that what is being said or done can always be attributed to multiple figures. Broadly speaking, upstream ventriloquation can be observed in any form of communication in which a person is identified as speaking in the name of or on behalf of someone or something else (Nathues & van Vuuren, 2022). For instance, invoking a protocol to remind our interlocutors what should be done in a specific context is a form of upstream ventriloquation because it entails making the protocol (figure) say the same thing we are saying (Cooren, 2010), thus adding additional “weight” to our claim. Moreover, while we often say that “facts don’t speak for themselves,” we frequently make them do precisely that when we speak on their behalf. This happens, for instance, when we point to a warning or traffic sign and exclaim: “Look at what the sign says!” In this case, we are invoking a certain “factuality,” presenting the figure of the sign as an additional source to lend weight to what we are saying.2

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Hence, upstream ventriloquation exemplifies the decentering to which we referred earlier. The idea of upstream ventriloquation highlights the fact that we never talk and act exclusively on our own but always in relation with various other human and other-than-human actors. As Cooren (2015a) notes, we are not only actors but also passers, in the sense that voices other than our own pass through us, substantiating and/or animating our sayings and doings. To return to our earlier blushing example, blushing can be seen as a form of downstream ventriloquation (to the extent that blushing makes someone say that they are embarrassed). However, it can also be regarded as a form of upstream ventriloquation because, through this blushing, a form of discomfort about the situation expresses itself. Put differently, this feeling expresses itself through someone (upstream ventriloquation) and through this person’s blushing (downstream ventriloquation).3 This very oscillation (occurring in communication) is an essential aspect of the ventriloquial thesis. Analyzing communication upstream and identifying the figures that express themselves through interactants enables us to examine the reasons that lead people to speak and act as they do. This includes feelings and emotions, which, so to speak, always also have their reasons: Their expressions often convey the sources that supposedly triggered them. For example, if an employee keeps complaining to her superior about her department’s poor working conditions, at least two forms of upstream ventriloquation can be identified: Through the employee’s complaints, feelings of frustration express themselves, just like the poor working conditions of her department. Both figures (the feelings of frustration and the poor working conditions) participate in the employee’s complaint as additional voices that we can hear—if we pay sufficient attention. As we suggested, because the ventriloquial thesis presents a decentered, relational conception of communication that always

includes more than just the persons talking and acting, it enables analysts to reconnect conversations to the contexts in which they are taking place. From a ventriloquial perspective, what pragmaticians (Hughes & Tracy, 2015) and ethnomethodologists (Garfinkel, 1967) call the indexical dimension of our conversations can be viewed as what Charles Sanders Peirce (1994) initially meant when he introduced the notion of index in his semiotics: A sign that is affected by its object (Peirce, 1994, CP 2.248). In our example, the employee’s complaints about her department can be analyzed indexically and ventriloquially to the extent that the poor working conditions that affect the employee also partake in the interaction and participate in what leads her to say what she is saying. A contextual condition can thus express itself in various manifestations, whatever they may be (terrible, surprising, fortunate, etc.), but also through the comments people make about it. As long as only people are regarded as doing things with words, indexicality remains a mystery. However, when we acknowledge that people and their sayings and doings are affected by their environments (and whatever constitutes them), the mystery begins to unravel. In ventriloquial terms, communication’s indexical dimension can be reinterpreted as whatever expresses itself through the signs we produce. Whether it is through pronouns (I, you, she, we, they), demonstratives (this, that, these, those), adverbs (here, there, now, then), proper names, explicit or implicit references, gestures, and so on, signs enable us to express specific aspects—figures—of our environment in what we say, do, or, more generally, communicate. As all these examples show, the ventriloquial thesis offers a small analytical step “aside”—or, more precisely, up and down the stream of communication. This step is crucial, for it enables us to not only study what is said and done but also to reveal how other voices/ figures besides our own are made to say and do something (from faire and dire to faire faire and faire dire, as the French would say).

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This decentered, relational view enables organizational communication researchers, for example, to analyze effects of power and authority while remaining on the terra firma of interaction (Bencherki et al., 2020c) or to show how organizations, teams, professions, and so on talk when their representatives speak in their name (Nathues et al., 2023). More broadly, it enables organizational communication researchers to analyze how a multitude of figures express themselves whenever people communicate and thus affect the ways in which people organize or constitute organizations. In the next section, we explain in detail how such analyses can be conducted.

THE SCOPE AND CRAFT OF VENTRILOQUIAL ANALYSES Conducting a ventriloquial analysis (VA) entails acknowledging and interpreting communication’s innate multivocality and relationality. Those who use a ventriloquial lens decenter their analytical gaze to examine the figures that contribute to the enactment of situations and thus shape organizational phenomena. In recent years, VA has gained increasing prominence within the organizational communication discipline. Accordingly, studies leveraging a ventriloquial lens now cover a broad range of topics. In this section, we review these previous ventriloquial analyses while keeping two primary objectives in mind: (1) to map out VA’s scope and eclectic possibilities; (2) to dive deeper into the craft of this analytical approach, particularly in terms of how to identify ventriloquations.

The Scope of Ventriloquial Analyses Thus far, organizational communication researchers have leveraged VA to study organizational tensions (Cooren et al., 2013),

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authority and strategy-making (Nathues et al., 2023), the implementation of diversity initiatives (Caidor & Cooren, 2018), leadership practices and leader identities (Clifton, 2017; Clifton et al., 2021; Meier & Carroll, 2020), resistance (Wilhoit & Kisselburg, 2019), organizational presences (Baillargeon, 2018; Costantini & Wolfe, 2022), the performativity of numbers (Fauré et  al., 2019), sensemaking practices around graduate student parenthood and work in China (Long, 2016; Long et  al., 2018), mediation (Cooren et al., 2021, 2022), framing techniques in crisis communication (Bergeron & Cooren, 2012), and the accomplishment of power and authority in conflict situations (Bencherki et al., 2020c). Settings are as diverse as Médecins sans Frontières (Cooren et  al., 2013; Fauré et  al., 2019), intra-organizational initiatives (Caidor & Cooren, 2018; Clifton, 2017) and inter­ organizational collaborations (Clifton et  al., 2021; Nathues et al., 2023), bike commuting (Wilhoit & Kisselburg, 2019), crisis pregnancy centers (Costantini & Wolfe, 2022), the creative industry (Baillargeon, 2018), the higher education sector (Long et  al., 2018), Chinese society (Long, 2016), public disputes (Cooren et  al., 2022), crisis teams (Bergeron & Cooren, 2012), and public institutions (Bencherki et  al., 2020c). On the whole, the details and technicalities of many of these studies reveal important influences from conversation analysis (CA, see Fairhurst & Cooren, 2004; Sacks, 1992; Sacks et  al., 1974) and ethnomethodology (Garfinkel, 1967), just like research on the communicative constitution of organizations in more general (CCO, see Aggerholm et al., 2022; see also Chapter 6 in this volume). The lion’s share of ventriloquial research focuses on analyzing excerpts from meetings or other types of interactions using detailed transcriptions (often produced by following CA standards). Transcriptions are generally based on audio or video recordings, the latter providing rich visual data (including facial

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expressions, gestures, rooms, artifacts, etc.). Both types of recording are usually made by a researcher in the field, frequently as an overt, nonparticipant observer interested in understanding how organizational meanings, orders, realities, and so on emerge in and through situated communicative practices. For instance, Caidor observed, audiorecorded, and transcribed the meetings of a project team working on implementing a new diversity initiative in their organization. She then analyzed tensional incompatibilities between ventriloquial figures (Caidor & Cooren, 2018). Similarly, Cooren and colleagues (2013) examined excerpts of interactions captured on video and then transcribed as part of an ethnographic project with Médecins sans Frontières (MSF), analyzing the communicative emergence and maintenance of organizational tensions. Moreover, Nathues et al., 2023 observed, video-recorded, and transcribed 11 in-person meetings of an interorganizational team, exploring how professionals coauthored a collaborative strategy through the invocation of voices beyond their own. The abovementioned examples centered on singular settings over time. Alternatively, multiple cases can be combined. For instance, Baillargeon (2018) compared two Canadian creative agencies, and Bergeron and Cooren (2012) analyzed interactions in the context of three crisis management exercises. Nathues et  al. (2021) examined excerpts of employees’ visionary talk from five different focus groups conducted in four organizations. While the latter two examples combined or contrasted data cross-sectionally (at one moment in time), Baillargeon conducted a longitudinal study in both agencies. Irrespective of these design choices, interactional data appear to form an essential element of most ventriloquial studies. This is in line with the general CCO premise of not leaving the terra firma of interaction (see Cooren, 2004; Cooren et al., 2011). Yet, we find evidence that ventriloquial analysts have begun collecting and studying a broadening

range of empirical data. For example, as part of their presence and involvement in the field, researchers frequently collect artifacts and documents (beyond those part of the interactions observed), or they conduct (in)formal interviews with the organizational members they follow. For example, Baillargeon (2018) conducted 51 semi-structured interviews and collected 90 organizational artifacts, besides observing and recording meetings. In turn, Clifton and colleagues (2021) collected online forum discussions, documents, and company websites, besides observing and recording multiple team meetings. In their research on strategy-coauthoring in interorganizational collaboration, Nathues et al., 2023 conducted two formal interviews with each team member and included the team’s documents, just as Caidor and Cooren (2018) did in their work. Thus, in all this previous research, interactional data (observations, recordings, and transcripts of naturally-occurring conversations, plus the artifacts used in these interactions) are central, while additional materials (other artifacts, interviews, etc.) are used to gain contextual insight or corroborate results that emerged during the analysis of the interactions. Put differently, these materials were used as secondary data to complement the interactional data. However, some recent studies have begun to broaden Cooren’s initial idea of the terra firma of interaction by using different data types more synergistically. For instance, Costantini and Wolfe (2022) grounded their ventriloquial analysis of a crisis pregnancy center’s organizational presence equally in the first author’s visits and observations of the site and the center’s textual documents (e.g., its pamphlets and website). Moreover, Wilhoit and Kisselburg (2019) combined video recordings of practices (rather than naturally-occurring conversations) with formal interviews to explore what animates people to commute to work by bike. Our review of ventriloquial studies also shows a stream of work that focuses entirely

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on interviews, most prominently evidenced in the work by Long and colleagues (Long, 2016; Long et  al., 2018). This is generally acceptable in CCO—or CCO-inspired— research as long as the constitutive nature of the interview is acknowledged, meaning that the interview is treated as actively contributing to the constitution of an organizational phenomenon. Long et  al.’s studies accomplish this in an exemplary way, both when she analyzes how Chinese post-1980 women construct meaning around their work (Long, 2016) and when she reveals the work-life tensions between being a graduate student and a parent (Long et  al., 2018). Her work is also noteworthy for approaching VA from a feminist, intersectional perspective, paving a potential way for more emancipatory and transformative ventriloquial studies (see also Baron et al., 2021). Finally, an emerging stream of research has started to adopt a ventriloquial approach to analyze social media data to understand organizational phenomena. For example, Clifton and de la Broise (2020) explored YouTube video footage of the Gilets jaunes (a French protest movement) to examine how this social collective came into being through online communication. Moreover, Myles and colleagues (2020) analyzed Reddit threads of a collective of web sleuths called the Reddit Bureau of Investigation. Many conference papers and dissertation projects also reveal a strong interest in social media data. Hence, these kinds of VA studies are likely to grow in the following years. As our review indicates, a ventriloquial analytical lens is useful for investigating various subjects and analyzing different kinds of empirical data. The studies we have discussed resemble each other in their firm commitment to teasing out the many figures that participate in communication beyond the commonly-accepted human center of conversation and dialogue (Sanders, 2021; Weigand, 2021). In other words, crossing a variety of subjects and data collection methods, ventriloquial researchers aim to decenter the

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analytical attention away from human beings to present a more complex, more nuanced up-and-downstream view of communication. They aim to reveal the figures that substantiate and/or animate someone’s sayings and doings, as well as what these figures become as communication proceeds. Hence, in general, the studies we have reviewed align with our strong version of the ventriloquial thesis, meaning that these studies view all communication (at least partly) as a ventriloquial performance. Next, we dive deeper into the actual craft of identifying ventriloquations.

The Craft of Identifying Ventriloquations As mentioned, VA focuses on investigating the multivocal and relational nature of communication by identifying the figures that are expressed (or express themselves) through what human and other-than-human actors say and do. Thus far, two step-wise VA frameworks have been developed. Castor and Saludadez (in Vasilyeva et al., 2020) view VA as a three-step process: (1) recording interactions as they happen or collecting recorded interactions; (2) identifying markers through which ventriloquial figures express themselves in the interactions; and (3) interpreting what the figures (are made to) say (or do). In turn, Nathues et al. (2021) view VA as a fourstep process, focusing exclusively on analytical steps (not data collection): (1) identifying ventriloquations; (2) grouping ventriloquations; (3) relating ventriloquations; and (4) showing ventriloquations. Nathues et al.’s (2021) first step focuses on unpacking the ventriloquial figures that are present in a particular dataset. The two subsequent steps then seek to move from singular figures to more overarching groupings, connections, and insights, such as how figures interrelate, which figures appear most frequently, or the implications of these interrelations for the organizational object of study.

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In the fourth step (showing ventriloquations), findings are communicated to readers by presenting illustrative data excerpts and explaining the ventriloquial figures that can be identified in them. In this chapter, we will focus explicitly on the craft of identifying ventriloquations (step 1) because this analytical technique is key to any VA.4 In line with the notions of upstream and downstream ventriloquation described earlier, a helpful starting point for identifying ventriloquations is to explore a dataset in terms of what appears to be animating interactants up the stream of communication (i.e., the additional sources of their sayings and doings) and what is being animated by them and others as communication proceeds downstream (i.e., what they are made to say or do). Since many different figures can be identified as being expressed or as expressing themselves in communication, this analytical technique requires a broad view as well as an eye for detail. Detailed attention must be paid to the eventful, explicit, and implicit forms that ventriloquations can take (through talk, but also texts, gazes, gestures, postures, etc.) without losing sight of the broader contexts in which communication takes place. In our four-step VA framework, we offer three analytical questions to help identify ventriloquations. Explicit figures can be identified by asking: What is invoked in what is being said or done? Here, explicit figures refer to already un-folded forms, markers, or presences, meaning that analysts can point them out more or less straightforwardly. One example is Clifton’s (2017) account of how Liz explicitly ventriloquates “the budget” (extract 2, line 15, p. 307) or her organi­ zation (“Rijsel Langue,” extract 4, line 34, p. 310) in her elaborations on the school’s hiring and personnel strategies. In so doing, Liz makes these two figures relevant to the interaction; they participate in it as much as Liz and her interlocutors. Costantini and Wolfe (2022) offer another poignant example when they illustrate how a crisis pregnancy center explicitly invokes God as a religious

authority figure who speaks on behalf of the organization’s mission to end abortion (e.g., see p. 13, “How does God see your unborn child?”). Cooren and colleagues (2013), on their part, depict how a specific situation (“Oh, at first, it was hard in Ribunu,” line 11, p. 269) or reality itself (“In the end reality catches up with all of us,” line 16, p. 269) are explicitly ventriloquized and hence made to speak and matter in a conversation between two MSF representatives. In all these examples, figures are explicitly made present by people to make a point, but it could also be said that these figures act upon these people, animating what they express (the oscillation we mentioned earlier). Hence, explicit figures can be identified both up and down the stream of communication, with slightly different interpretations dependent upon where we situate them. In contrast, implicit figures are en-folded (folded within or indirectly implied in communication) and need to be unpacked analytically. These ventriloquations mediate their presence through other words or doings. Thus, in order to identify them, analysts need to be attuned to the context and content investigated (e.g., by shadowing professionals, spending time in the field, or repeatedly rereading empirical data). The following analytical questions can help identify these implicit figures: What appears to lead a person to say what they are saying and do what they are doing? Which additional voice(s) can be recognized in what is communicated? Both questions encourage analysts to think one step up or down the stream of communication, helping them grasp what might be animating the person who is communicating—or what their communication might be animating.5 For instance, Clifton (2017) explains how knowing about budgetary details is bound to higher hierarchical positions. Hence, by explicitly invoking “the budget,” Liz also implicitly makes her identity as the school’s director and leader present, if we move one step up the stream of communication

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(besides the budget, one source of Liz’s claim is also her professional role and identity, so to speak). Clifton’s analysis shows how Liz is not only making this budget and her organization present; she also positions herself as being animated by these figures because of the organization’s financial interests that she is supposed to defend in her professional role. Similarly, Bergeron and Cooren (2012) trace one interlocutor’s concerns about the security of citizens to his profession as a police officer, showing that this professional identity also leads him to be “the voice of” security concerns. Another way to identify implicit ventriloquations is to make sense of local, situated, and eventful markers within their broader, historical, or cultural meanings. For instance, Costantini and Wolfe (2022) illustrate how a simple reference to “the whole person” (p. 14) makes a larger concern for patients present—one that elevates mere physiological aspects to a more emotional, even spiritual realm. Similarly, Cooren and colleagues (2013) identify the broader voices of a folk belief and the virtue of patience in how MSF representatives talk about their work in Ribunu (“All good things come to those who wait,” p. 270). Cooren et al. explain how relying on their intimate familiarity with the field strengthened their ventriloquial analysis of these more implicit figures. The ventriloquial analyst can thus draw from their fieldwork experiences, as well as from their own impressions and feelings beyond the empirical materials data they have collected. Precisely this sensitivity is often needed to have both an eye for detail and a broader understanding of the larger context. Finally, implicit ventriloquations can also be identified through a detailed investigation of the ways in which nonverbal signs are expressed. Indeed, a simple gesture such as drawing a horizontal line in the air can make a salary scale present (Cooren & Sandler, 2014). Moreover, expressing nonverbal signs, such as excessive laughter and head-shaking, can signify a certain macho-posturing and

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thus ventriloquate an air of authority and confidence (Cooren et al., 2013), whereas a calm and steady smile can convey a form of lightness, flippancy, or even ignorance (Bencherki et al., 2020a). Recall also our blushing example and how this sign can convey a certain embarrassment or discomfort with a given situation. Thus far, few organizational communication researchers have paid attention to the nonverbal and multimodal aspects of communication in ventriloquial studies. And if they are discussed, they are often mentioned in passing. Most researchers focus on examining the spoken or written word rather than exploring nonverbal and extra-linguistic signs. As we will discuss in the next section, because communication comprises more than talk and text, it will be important to gain deeper insight into the role of these other signs in future ventriloquial studies of organizational processes and phenomena.

IN GUISE OF CONCLUSION: AVENUES FOR EXPLORING ORGANIZATIONAL COMMUNICATION THROUGH A VENTRILOQUIAL LENS In this chapter, we have shown that organizational communication scholars have made significant steps in the development of VA since its inception more than ten years ago (see Cooren, 2008; Cooren, 2010). Now, this type of analysis has become a clear and well-structured analytical method (see Nathues et al., 2021). As we have shown, this method provides a unique angle for understanding how organizing—and the constitution of an organization—is accomplished through situated communicative practices. Hence, we are excited to see how future studies will deepen our understanding of traditional and emerging organizational communication concepts by using this method. For example, leadership has been a vibrant area of research for decades. However, VA is shedding new light on this topic and is

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providing fresh insights (Clifton, 2014, 2017; Clifton & Mueni, 2021; Clifton et  al., 2021; Meier & Caroll, 2020, 2023). In the remainder of this section, we discuss how a ventriloquial lens can be applied to study other concepts, such as organizational culture, conflict, and multimodality.

Organizational Culture Organizational culture is constituted in communication when symbols and stories are repeatedly invoked to illustrate “how things are done around here.” Thus, in many ways, culture is a matter of cultivation (Bencherki et  al., 2020b), of repeatedly ventriloquizing specific figures. To their regular frustration, organizational members and researchers alike are often aware that cultural dynamics are at play, but they struggle to fully grasp these dynamics due to culture’s evasive nature—what we could also call the “fish can’t see water” syndrome (see Hammerich & Lewis, 2013). As an analytical method, a ventriloquial lens can provide deeper insight into the communicative constitution of organizational cultures by revealing how values, heroes, rituals, and so on operate as figures. In other words, identifying the figures that animate organizational members (and that members animate) in their everyday work life could allow organizational communication researchers “to show the fish in which water they’re swimming.”

Organizational Conflict Organizational conflicts appear in many forms; whenever two (or more) interdependent parties have incompatible interests, goals, ideas, behaviors, or emotions (see Putnam, 1989; see also Brummans et  al., 2022). A ventriloquial lens can be useful for showing how these incompatibilities are constituted by figures, such as in the form of a person’s background, their values, the

rules to which they are bound, and so forth. Moreover, a ventriloquial perspective provides a unique angle for exploring a part of conflict that has often been overlooked: How one interlocutor makes another interlocutor say something that they did not say, did not mean to say, or did not think they said. Cooren and colleagues (2022), for example, examined this phenomenon by analyzing how people “put words in the mouths” of other people. Relatedly, metaventriloquism refers to “a form of metacommunication where one communicates about the ventriloquial acts of another or even of one’s self” (Castor, 2020, p. 30). This is what happens, for instance, when during a heated debate, someone says, “You’re only driven by ambition!” in order to criticize the other person for not considering other important aspects. Any conversation is a platform for exchanging thoughts and ideas, which generally benefit from speakers’ virtuous characteristics—the more laudable these characteristics (e.g., experience, logic, or wisdom), the more convincing their contributions are likely to be. In conflict situations, however, people tend to stress their interlocutors’ more dubious characteristics. Saying that someone is “only driven by ambition” (rather than experience or wisdom) conveys the figures that are supposed to animate this person up the stream of communication. A ventriloquial lens can draw attention to precisely these forms of attribution that (de) legitimize, (in)validate, (dis)qualify, or (dis) empower what someone else is saying (see Nathues & van Vuuren, 2022). Especially when debates become more heated, interlocutors often make explicit references to alleged ventriloquial acts. Doing this can be demeaning, for example, when referring to someone’s ignorance (“You’re only saying that because you don’t understand new technology”), interests (the “corporate lackey,” in Kuhn, 2009), or identity (“Of course, only someone from the south of the Netherlands would say that, wouldn’t they?”). Hence, a ventriloquial lens could help analysts

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better understand the underlying reasons for a conflict.

corporeal movements call for particular verbal moves, and vice versa.

The Multimodal Nature of Organizational Communication

CODA: THE RESEARCHER AS VENTRILOQUIST, AND AS VENTRILOQUIAL FIGURE

Previously, we mentioned organizational communication researchers’ predominant focus on language in ventriloquial studies and the scarcity of ventriloquial research on multimodal aspects of communication. While a linguistic focus is not illogical in itself, we believe that ventriloquism can provide a rich analytical method for exploring a range of other modes of communication, too, because it allows researchers to examine “the always already entangled multiple agencies and their multimodalities in the relational becoming of a phenomenon” (Dille & Plotnikof, 2020, p. 488). For example, “the shifting volume of [someone]’s voice as he moves” (Jornet & Steier, 2015, p. 138) may indicate a role transition from (soft-speaking) colleague to (louder-speaking) boss, implicitly making the figures of hierarchical structures and authoritative positions present through subtle changes in talk. This very role transition could also be indicated by a change in tone: Hearing “a certain formality in [someone’s] voice” (Dille & Plotnikof, 2020, p. 496)— say, a person with whom you are having a friendly chat—hints at that a more formal type of interaction, characterized by hierarchy and authority, is about to start. Similarly, grabbing performance reviews from your briefcase, pointing to the documents spread across the table, or closing the meeting room door can make certain figures present and signal changes in how a situation or conversation is supposed to proceed. Considering multimodal aspects of communication opens up new sensitivities for ventriloquial analyses that can illuminate how particular ideas, opinions, feelings, and so on can become expressed through nonlinguistic modes of communication, as well as how gestures and

Clifford Geertz (1973) pointed out that ethnographers are not only observing cultures as bystanders while others are “suspended in webs of significance” (p. 5) spun by themselves; they are also, to some extent, part of them, participating in them, contributing to their ongoing constitution. The same applies to organizational communication researchers: We are also always already entangled, suspended in webs of figures of our own and others’ making. Would it not be enlightening, therefore, to reflect on ourselves as ventriloquists—and as ventriloquial figures who are invoked by others, such as our academic peers or the people we study, in order to achieve particular aims (see also Vézy & Brummans, 2021)? In other words, would it not be enlightening to reflect on the figures we produce as we engage in data collection, analysis, writing, theorizing, and so on, as well as the effects these figures have in the world? For example, our data collection methods—or even our “mere” presence— ­ may create feelings of discomfort or suspicion (figures) in an organization, leading organizational members to ask such questions as: “How do you want me to act [when you’re observing me]?” “Should I be careful about what I say to you [when you’re interviewing me]?” (see Mengis et al., 2018; Vásquez et al., 2012). Conversely, as researchers, we may be invoked and instrumentalized as figures by the people we study in organizations. For example, during their research on the Tzu Chi Foundation in Taiwan (see Brummans et  al., 2013, 2020), Brummans and Hwang were asked to appear as (academic) figures

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in a televised interview that the organization subsequently used for promotional ends. Moreover, as organizational communication researchers, we often produce and invoke highly abstract concepts (figures) to make sense of organizational phenomena, even though they might fail to help professionals understand their everyday realities (see van Vuuren & Knoers, 2022). When we move from the field to our desks and academic communities, we animate and are animated by a plethora of ventriloquial figures, too. We analyze our data in a certain way, not only based on the figures produced in and by the field (words, feelings, impressions, etc.), but also based on the figures produced in and by the academic texts we have read and which we use as references to substantiate our claims, the figures produced by our colleagues when we present our work to them, and so on. In turn, in our presentations, books, and articles, we ourselves turn snippets of data into figures that are supposed to say something through our interpretations. As researchers, we are not uninvolved bystanders, watching streams of our own and others’ work, data, thoughts, ideas, and so forth flow by. On the contrary, we stand right in the middle of these streams; upstream ventriloquation making us say and do certain things and, vice versa, downstream ventriloquation resulting from these very actions. As we have explained in this chapter, from a strong ventriloquial take, ventriloquation is involved in any act of communication. This holds true for the organizational communication phenomena and processes we study, but just as much for our own sayings and doings as organizational communication researchers, and it may be worth reflecting on this more thoroughly as we carry on with our work.

Notes 1  In one of his essays, titled “Discourse in the Novel,” Bakhtin (1975/1981) writes: “The author does not speak in a given language (from which he distances himself to a greater or lesser degree),

2 

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but he speaks as it were, through language, a language that has somehow more or less materialized, become objectivized, that he merely ventriloquates” (p. 299). Cooren and Sandler (2014) note, however, that the verb “to ventriloquate” was never used by Bakhtin; it was added by his English translator, Caryl Emerson. Of course, one could retort that something only speaks “for itself” if we understand what it means. The person we are talking to could indeed reply: “You’re asking me to look, but I still don’t understand.” We agree with this objection, and we do not mean to say that facts speak for themselves to anyone. If the interlocutor is capable of understanding what the facts are telling them, it is also because this interlocutor is capable of making these facts speak, that is, of ventriloquizing them. Space limitations prevent us from further developing this point here, but this ventriloquation is possible because the understanding of any sign requires what Peirce (1991) calls an interpretant, that is, a habit that allows people to interpret what a sign means or says (see Cooren, 2015b; Lorino, 2014, 2018). Hence, the distinction between upstream and downstream ventriloquation lies in identifying a more or less arbitrary benchmark. In our blushing example, the benchmark is the person who is blushing: upstream, we can locate the feeling of embarrassment; downstream, the blushing itself. For more on the steps of grouping, relating, and showing, see Nathues et al. (2021) and Nathues and van Vuuren (2022). Note that humans present an arbitrary point of reference in these analytical questions. While they can create the impression that human beings should be put at the center, they actually decenter attention away from them, showing that humans act, but are also acted upon—they are actors as much as passers of other figures with which they are always already entangled.

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25 Analysis of Sociomateriality and Affect in Qualitative Organizational Communication Research Jennifer J. Mease and Scott E. Branton

Writing a chapter on sociomateriality and affect as a method of data analysis presents a challenge. If for no other reason, sociomateriality and affect are not methods. However, many analyses of sociomateriality and affect have challenged traditional approaches to organizational communication and, in turn, demanded that organizational communication scholars adapt methods accordingly. Consequently, this chapter does not stand alone. We invite you to read this chapter (in true sociomaterial style) along-side other chapters in this book. Indeed, many other chapters of this volume, including the ones on conversation analysis (Chapter 23), ventriloquial analysis (Chapter 24), process ontological analysis (Chapter 29), and postqualitative thinking (Chapter 33), address methods that are central to the emergence of sociomateriality and affect as prominent analytical foci in organizational communication. As a result, we leave the details of each of those methods to their own method experts. Our aim in this chapter is to offer (1) ontological framings

to clarify the foundations of the analysis of sociomateriality and affect; (2) sociomaterial phenomena to help focus such analysis; and (3) principles for analysis to assist scholars with post-human and affect-focused analyses. These framings, phenomena, and principles can serve scholars regardless of the qualitative methods they embrace. It all begins with a question: What do we mean by sociomateriality and affect? The concepts of sociomateriality and affect emerged onto an organizational communication scene that previously centered on the human subject, language, and meaning. Consequently, organizational communication scholars who analyze sociomateriality and affect must navigate ever-evolving assumptions regarding the relationships among language, meaning, sociomateriality, and affect. Some scholars implicitly assume that materiality and affect are ontologically distinct from language and meaning; hence, they focus on words and sensemaking practices, and merely “add stuff” in ways that demonstrate how

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spaces, objects, and bodies might (or might not) intervene in symbolic communicative processes that establish shared meaning. More recently, analysis has moved through juxtaposition, imbrication, and so on to focus on the mutuality of materiality, affect, and meaning—suggesting that materiality and affect have always been embedded in—and fundamental to—the use of language and the establishment of shared realities (Ashcraft 2019; Mease, 2021). As ontological assumptions shift, so must analytical methods. Before tracing this development, some basic definitions of key terms (that we will nuance and build upon in the following pages) are helpful. Broadly speaking, materiality refers to aspects of existence accessed through the senses (felt, heard, seen, smelled, tasted, or otherwise sensed by human or other-than-human entities). Meaning refers to thoughts brought to mind. By using the term sociomateriality, we invoke the inevitable imbrication of meaning and materiality in shared social worlds. This includes the traditional semiotic assertion that material signifiers evoke meaningful signifieds, but the term “sociomateriality” also implies the mutually constitutive relationality of materiality and shared meaning. For the moment, we define affect as an aspect of materiality beyond commonly understood material features. In other words, whereas materiality is commonly understood as objects, bodies, and spaces that have defined material features (textures, smells, colors, flavors), affect captures the sense-able that exceeds those defined material properties. It is what we sense yet cannot quite put our finger on. Yet, affect is not a different category of materiality (not: textures, smells, colors, flavors, and affect). Affect is the aspect of materiality that precedes and is captured through categorical material properties (textures, smells, colors, flavors, are affect). Affect persists in, yet exceeds, categorical and material attempts at capture and definition. As such, when we refer to sociomateriality, affect is implied, although we sometimes mention affect specifically to reiterate that aspect of materiality.

These simplified definitions will help us trace the emergence of materiality and affect as important concepts in organizational communication analysis. We begin by showing three ways scholars have ontologically framed materiality and affect: (1) as entities, considering materialities as coherent stable wholes that send and receive affect (often conceived as emotion); (2) as mutual influence, considering materiality and affect as interdependent with meaning in the (de)stabilization of social realities; and (3) as post-human, decentering meaning-making and human sensemaking altogether while focusing on the constitutive nature of relationality. Subsequently, we address the question “What exactly should I be analyzing?” by extending these three ontological framings to address nine sociomaterial phenomena that might focus your analyses. This section centers on a table that offers the distinctive features of each phenomenon, guiding questions, and scholarly exemplars (see Table 25.1). In addition, we clarify how the table might inform analysis. Our final section turns to the practice of analyzing sociomateriality, particularly those ways that push to incorporate affect. Here, we offer three principles: (1) collapsing and expanding the field of analysis; (2) relating with, rather than analyzing, data; and (3) following, moving across the sociomaterial field. We hope that at the end of this chapter, you will have gained confidence in what it might mean for you to integrate sociomateriality into the various methods you use, and how embracing affect encourages us to rethink sociomaterial analysis.

THREE ONTOLOGICAL FRAMINGS OF MATERIALITY AND AFFECT In the past decade, sociomateriality and affect have emerged as significant areas of organizational communication research (Aakhus et  al., 2011). However, a longer historical view shows that organizational communication scholars analyzed sociomateriality and

ANALYSIS OF SOCIOMATERIALITY AND AFFECT

affect before these concepts came into popular use. This historical view shows three ontological framings of sociomateriality and affect—as entities, mutual influence, and posthuman—that differ in the extent to which they emphasize: (1) relatively defined bounded entities and/or relationally constituted accomplishments; (2) processes of creating shared meaning and/or flows and transfer; and (3) human experience and/or material and affective encounters writ large. While individual studies may not fall cleanly into one ontological framing or another, understanding these differences can help you be transparent about how your assumptions or bracketing choices shape the questions and ethical considerations of your work.

Entitative Framing While not using the term, early approaches to sociomateriality often addressed materiality and affect as bounded, stable entities that intervened in communication processes that establish shared meaning. Scholars align with this approach when their analyses emphasize coherent bounded bodies, texts, technologies, or other objects, or when they emphasize affect in the form of emotion. While framing sociomateriality as bounded material bodies/objects emphasizes their role as receptors of meaning, such framing expands narrow ontological framings of texts as the harbor of meaning to show that a variety of material objects anchor, interrupt, extend, or sustain shared meaning. For example, Trethewey’s (1999) analysis of interviews showed how overly sexualized meanings map onto women’s bodies, as well as how women’s bodies exceed—and consequently resist and disrupt—traditional conceptions of professionalism. Likewise, Leonardi (2003) analyzed interviews with 78 U.S. Latinx immigrants, showing how participants assigned and drew meaning from organizational technologies. Similarly, the study of emotion in organizational communication foreshadows the

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explicit study of affect. Across academic disciplines, the relationship between affect and emotion is complex and unsettled. Some scholars distinguish the two, depicting affect as a pre-individual intensity that flows in and through relations, while depicting emotion as a particular state of affect: an intersubjective (Katila et al., 2020) or momentary (Massumi, 2015) capture of affect that represents a limited expression of the depth of experience. Other scholars, like Ahmed (2014), refrain from distinguishing the two. She uses the example of pain to illustrate how past emotional experiences and histories mediate the pre-personal, subconscious flow of affect. Regardless of how scholars distinguish emotion and affect, they commonly cast emotions as bounded entities/events (captured states) of affect in the flow of human experience, paralleling ontological framings of materiality as bounded objects or entities. In organizational communication, Tracy (2000) used a self-reflexive ethnographic approach to examine her emotions as disciplined performances shaped by discourses of both family and workplace expectations. Her work demonstrates how communication shapes affective intensities into discrete emotional experiences and questions what discourses leverage the power to shape those emotions. Tracy et al. (2006), in turn, examined hard-to-describe emotional elements of workplace bullying by using focus groups, interviews, and creative drawing to identify metaphors that reflect the experience of those bullied. These studies show how early research on emotion demonstrates an entitative framing of affect, as well as methodological possibilities for studying it. When considering sociomateriality and affect as bounded entities, communication remains the province of human beings and is bound to sensemaking. Material objects, bodies, and so on do not communicate per se, but they disrupt or stabilize human communication attempts to establish shared meaning (as in the case of bodies that resist shared conceptions of a “professional”; see Trethewey, 1999), or extend a shared

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meaning over time and space (as in the case with texts and technology; see Leonardi, 2003). In other words, the subject/object divide remains intact, casting humans as subjects with the capacity to communicate, and materiality as objects that serve or disrupt that human process. Analytically, this means that organizational communication scholars may directly observe how materiality is evoked or involved in sensemaking processes through ethnography or participant observation. When using focus groups or interviews to collect participant accounts of their experience, scholars may analyze how participants depend on materiality to pursue shared meaning, or cope with material disruptions to shared meaning. Thus, one way to consider sociomateriality and affect in organizational communication studies is to regard objects, bodies, spaces, and emotions as bounded entities, with an emphasis on the extension or disruption of shared sensemaking. This ontological framing remains primarily focused on human experience and meaning. Scholars who embrace this ontological framing likely focus on what meaning is assigned to entities and how those meanings emerge (Leonardi, 2004; Trethewey, 1999). Questions of power emerge as scholars consider who shapes meanings associated with bodies, objects, spaces, and emotions, and how that might privilege or disrupt power relations and discipline human bodies and sensemaking (Tracy, 2000; Trethewey, 1999). In this approach, ethical commitments remain with human research participants, using data analysis methods that account for participants’ experiences with feelings and material entities ranging from their own bodies to objects and spaces. Entitative framing rarely accounts for how materiality “acts back” on human experience. However, while the research examples we have cited lean largely on concepts of sociomateriality and affect as bounded entities, they each begin to push scholarship toward a more nuanced analysis of the “acting-back” ability of materiality and affect.

Mutual Influence Framing Sociomateriality framed as mutual influence unfolds the relationship between meaning, materiality, and affect by delving more carefully into the reciprocal relationships of mutual influence. This framing shows how objects, other material entities, and affective experiences act on humans’ sensemaking processes. In contrast to sociomateriality as bounded entities, which focuses largely on human meanings as they are mapped onto materiality and affective experience, ontological framings of mutual influence show how objects and affective experiences “speak through” and “act back” on humans as well. Yet the focus on human sensemaking persists. For example, Cooren et  al. (2008) used organizational shadowing to follow the leader of Médécins sans Frontières (MSF). Their analysis showed how human and other-than-human actors bring an organization into being through ongoing processes of presentification—in which material objects evoke an organization and make it present, even in the absence of human action. Analyzing reciprocal influence also expands beyond analysis of a single object-human relationship to consider how networks of connected objects create a complex hybrid arrangement of communication and action that constitute organization. Reciprocal influence framings may also analyze possibilities and constraints proffered by materiality and affect. For example, in their discussion of technologies, Leonardi and Barley (2008) noted that “key constraints and affordances sometime[s] push practice in one direction rather than another, if for no other reason than an alternative practice is too difficult or costly” (p. 171). Thus, their work expanded a narrow focus on how people assign meaning to technologies, to consider the possibilities and constraints on action that emerges from technologies themselves. In similar ontological framings of possibility and constraint, Ashcraft et al. (2009) posited that “material place/space influences the resources

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available for interaction” (p. 31), drawing attention to space as an important aspect of sociomateriality (see also Chapter 29 in this volume). Each of these studies show how sociomateriality—in the form of technologies or space—both creates and constrains possibilities for organizational action. Moreover, ontological framings of mutual influence expand beyond the study of categorical experiences of emotion and attend to affective transmission—the processes by which sensations or intensities move from one body to another and shape bodily movement, often in the absence of language (Brennan, 2004). Desire offers one form of affective transmission, as demonstrated in Trethewey’s (2001) self-reflexive study of eros in the classroom. Trethewey complicated understandings of emotion by demonstrating how desire shapes relationships and classroom cultures, despite not being explicitly spoken or expressed. In their performative analysis of video-recorded school board meetings with restrictive public comment policies, Mease and Terry (2012) showed how individuals’ behaviors offered a sense of compliance to cloak rule breaking and evade punishment. Their work also showed how people expressed resistance through tone or audible exhales, demonstrating disapproval without violating conduct policies used to squelch resistance. Finally, Katila et al. (2020) observed how new participants in an accelerator workshop embodied the upbeat rhythm (e.g., high energy, positivity) of business accelerator practices (e.g., sales pitching, business idea development) by tuning into the bodily movement, intensity, and expression (e.g., feeling loose, high fives, positivity, and smiling) of other participants, while neglecting feelings of hunger, frustration, and bodily exhaustion. These analyses move beyond bounded individual emotions to address flows of feeling/intensity between humans and other-than-humans, highlighting how affect contributes to or disrupts organizational constitution. Still, people remain at the center of affective exchanges. In each of these

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studies, affective transmission—via attraction, style, tone, and energetic performance— communicates by reinforcing or disrupting relationships that constitute organization. In ontological framing as mutual influence, communication still centers meaning, but it is not just the province of humans. Material objects, bodies, and so forth are more than mere factors in human sensemaking (the entitative ontological framing); they are agents of meaning-making. Objects, bodies, and so on are thought to “speak for themselves” or even speak through humans and other objects (Cooren & Sandler, 2014; see also Chapter 24 in this volume). This chips away at the subject/object divide as both material objects and humans can be both subjects that communicate and objects that anchor or disrupt meaning. Analytically, this means that scholars might shift their attention away from a focus on human communication, to a focus on the communication of any significant actor that carries or transfers meaning in an organizational context. It is less important to capture and represent a human experience in full detail, and more important to analyze and describe in detail the human and other-thanhuman interactions at play in a particular sociomaterial field that sustains or is attributable to an organization (see also Chapter 23 in this volume). Thus, in addition to considering sociomateriality and affect in organizational communication studies as bounded entities or emotions, scholars can consider how sociomateriality also “communicates” or acts on humans—and one another—in relations of mutual influence. Such ontological framings remain invested in practices of human sensemaking, but the possibility and constraints of such sensemaking are not only subject to human influence; they are subject to the influence of sociomateriality as well. Additionally, ontological framings of mutual influence expand to consider relationships, yet bounded individual entities are often taken for granted leaving relationships as secondary to entities’ assumed existence.

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When framing affect as mutual influence scholars have analyzed how shared sensations construct organizational experiences, such as felt tension that may impact levels of performance (Trethewey, 2001), or how affective expressions of tone or nonverbal behaviors “speak for themselves” beyond the rules and norms that constrain verbal expression (Mease & Terry, 2012). Ethical expectations expand beyond representing the experiences of individual participants to accounting for the multitude of human and other-than-human actors who contribute to a particular event.

Post-human Framing We started this section by considering three ontological framings of sociomateriality and affect—as entity, as mutual influence, and as post-human—each differing in the extent to which they emphasize: (1) relatively defined bounded entities and/or relationally constituted accomplishments; (2) processes of creating shared meaning and/or flows and transfer; and (3) human experience and/or sociomaterial and affective encounters writ large. Post-human ontological framings lean toward the latter in all three areas. To address things (people, ideas, objects, spaces, organizations, etc.) as “relationally constituted accomplishments” post-humanist organizational communication scholars analyze each “thing” as constituted by virtue of relations. This claim has two implications: First, things are constituted by virtue of connections. For example, a compact disc may create music or rainbows. It becomes a recording device or prism, depending on whether it connects to a CD player or sunbeams on the wall in an elementary school classroom (Mease, 2021). Second, things are themselves a collection of connections— think of human bodies as a collection of connected organs, each of which is a collection of connected tissues, which are connected cells, which are connected molecules, and

connected atoms. Analysis of these connections is one form of post-human epistemology addressing sociomateriality and affect. For example, van Amsterdam et  al. (2022) examined how “self-identified fat women” (data collection section, para. 1) take up space and make constitutive connections that induce affective feelings of embarrassment, othering, and shame in organizational settings. In this case, the sociomaterial and affective relations of bodies, clothing, chairs, and airplanes simultaneously produce disruption (at the meso-level), identities (at the micro-level), and marginalization (at the macro-level). As Gherardi (2019a) points out, this post-human ontological framing “transcends the view of the body [or idea, or structure] as an object and instead emphasizes the temporality of embodiment” (p. 271; see also Gherardi’s afterword in this volume); a temporary embodiment composed of a constellation of communicative connections and relations. Accordingly, organizational communication scholars might analyze how these temporary and ever-changing communicative connections are achieved, ordered, and maintained in organizing. A question therefore emerges: If things are a product of connection, rather than existing prior to connecting, what (other than things) is connecting to become things? Herein lies the shift of analytical focus from shared meaning as the focus of organizational communication, to a focus on flows and transfer. We have already suggested that affect is “the sense-able that exceeds…defined material properties.” Taking affect seriously requires acknowledging that bodies connect (read: communicate) in more ways than cognition, language, and meaning. It means accounting for ways lively, feeling, bodily encounters communicate through pre-cognitive, pre-individual, and transpersonal sensing of energy, intensity, and excitation that organize people, places, ideas, and many other things—think of the ways a song’s rhythm communicates and organizes bodies on a dance floor. Affect provides a felt exigence to act; to connect,

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to move, or (as one option among many) to make sense of things. Along these lines, Ashcraft’s (2019) autoethnographic account of hoarding, which she defines “as a communicative practice that enacts and circulates the affective boundary between human and nonhuman bodies” (p. 112), questions how organizing “properly orders” such that some possibilities and relations of sensing atrophy while others are endorsed and strengthened. Put simply, organizations are not only constituted by shared practices of sensemaking (read: meaning-making); they are also constituted by a second form of sensemaking: the ability to “tune into” and connect with sociomateriality in particular ways (Ashcraft, 2019). Thus, flow of affect through bodily connection is not only a form of communication; conformity (and resistance) to sanctioned communicative flow is fundamental to organizing. This brings us to our third point: the shift away from an emphasis on human experience, to an emphasis on sociomaterial encounters writ large. Keeping in mind the notion that both human and other-than-human objects, bodies, ideas, and spaces are considered (1) relationally constituted accomplishments that (2) circulate affect in (un)sanctioned ways, analysis must broaden to consider sociomaterial encounters writ large. To focus solely or primarily on human experience would cause scholars to miss the multitude of communicative connections, flows, and transfers that contextually constitute a sociomaterial field (including, but not limited to, the human experience of it.) Consider how rivers and mountains have organized human civilizations for centuries, and how flows of electricity or information over the Internet have radically changed organization. Analyses of sociomaterial encounters, writ large, must account for this inevitable imbrication of meaning and materiality that constitutes organized and shared social realities. All materiality is imbued with affect—sense-able and subject to (though never completely) the realm of sensemaking and categorical capture (the river may

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overflow its banks). As such, meaning, materiality, affect, and organization are inevitably intertwined in constitutive relationships that can be traced in communicative connections, flows, and transfers. Harris’s (2016) strategy of feminist dilemmatic theorizing demonstrates the power of embracing this inevitable confluence. She shows how integrating analysis of material realities and malleable discursive construction accomplishes the dual aims of feminist scholarship to both describe the world and enact change in it. The point here is that the communicative constitution of organization is always already embedded in sociomateriality, and analysis should account for this embeddedness by attending to more than human experience. As we have hinted, connections, flows, and transfers (of ideas, of language, of intensities, of bodies or objects) are what post-human scholars might call communication. This focus decenters meaning and language as the only communication process, and thereby decenters humans. Communication occurs through language, but also when we sense the danger in a situation without verbal warning; when an open door directs the flow of people in space; or even when a key “tells” a lock to open (or fails to do so). Analytically, this means that organizational communication scholars may analyze arrangements of ideas, spaces, language, and objects as they direct and connect flows of materiality, affect, and meaning; communicating as they activate, alter, and suspend connection. Mease (2021) draws on Deleuze to analyze communication as such. Casting imbricated flows of materiality and meaning as force(s), that are arranged via particular techniques. The techniques and forces framework shows that communication analysis not only needs to account for what flows move and connect, but also the particular techniques by which those flows come together in relations of opposition, reinforcement, adjustment, deflection, and so on that ultimately foster communicative constitution. Thus, post-human ontological framings heavily emphasize the affective dimensions

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of sociomateriality. This emphasis emerges in attention to the relational constitution of bodies, objects, conversations, organizations, and texts by analyzing communication as senseable flows that move through, and thereby constitute, both humans and other-thanhumans. The emphasis on communication as connections and flows moves away from the notion of cleanly bounded entities, fading the boundaries between what is considered internal or external to any body, object, or organization. This allows scholars to question how a particular flow might simultaneously constitute an individual, an organization, an industry, and a culture (Mease, 2021). As such, materiality and meaning (both affectively imbued) are the mutually necessary warp and weft that constitute any given social reality. In other words, whereas entity and even mutual influence approaches take materiality for granted as an anchor for meaning, posthuman ontological framings address all materiality and meaning as imbricated affective flows that settle into temporary (though often enduring) relations that constitute our social realities. Ethically, post-human ontological framings take other-than-human (albeit communicatively constituted) entities seriously. Suggesting that flows of materiality such as water, animal migrations, or electricity are relevant to and capable of organizational communication. Thus, we have shown that organizational communication scholars have applied different ontological framings in their analysis of sociomateriality and affect. We acknowledge that while these distinctions help scholars grasp the nuanced differences that characterize analyses of sociomateriality and affect, studies may not fall cleanly into one framing or the other. The three framings are active modes of directing attention. For example, a scholar who attends to objects as anchoring meaning does not necessarily negate the fact that the object is constituted as part of a posthuman network of flows and connections. It is, however, important for a scholar to be mindful and transparent about the ontological

framings they use in their analyses. Having laid out the nuances of different ontological assumptions that surface in sociomaterial analyses, we now turn to the practice of analyzing sociomateriality, beginning with the question “How should I focus my analysis?”

FOCUSING YOUR ANALYSIS In addition to identifying the ontological framing that informs your research, you, the researcher, must also decide how to orient and focus your analysis. In the proceeding section, we explore how organizational communication scholars may attune to their sociomaterial field of study by offering nine different sociomaterial phenomena that may help focus your analysis. These are not discrete phenomena. Instead, think of them as entryways into one interconnected sociomaterial field, with the understanding that an initial focus on one phenomenon may lead you to address a different phenomenon more closely. We introduce the nine foci in a table that offers distinguishing features to help define each phenomenon, potential questions to guide analysis (varied by ontological framing), and exemplar studies (see Table 25.1). Our goal in this section is to guide you in how these nine phenomena may sensitize and orient your analysis of sociomateriality in organizational communication research. As you proceed, it may be helpful to print out or display the table separately from the text you are reading, so that you can easily move between the two. Please note that our post-human leanings strongly inform the remainder of this chapter. While these foci can be approached by using traditional coding, categorization, and thematization that treat phenomena as entities and emphasize consistent similarities, we primarily offer guidance for approaching these nine foci with post-human sensibilities that often integrate multiple phenomena into a single analysis. We do this for three reasons: First, we typically lean toward

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Table 25.1  Sociomaterial Phenomena to Focus Organizational Communication Analysis Phenomena

Entitative Potential Questions and Exemplars

1. Bodies (Objects, Things)

Physically coherent entities that exist with acknowledged physical boundaries Entitative question: How Mutual influence question: How Post-human question: How are do bodies or objects do bodies/objects speak bodies (including all objects) anchor, extend, or through one another? communicatively constituted interrupt meaning-making and organized as lively elements processes? in networks of relations?

2. Space(s) (Spatiality, Atmospheres)

3. Events (Encounters, Episodes)

Mutual Influence Potential Questions and Exemplars

Entitative exemplars: Mutual influence exemplars: Post-human exemplar: Dale Leonardi (2003); Bencherki (2018); van & Latham (2015); van Trethewey (1999) Amsterdam et al. (2022) Amsterdam et al. (2022) A realm and its occupants, as defined by proximity to a location or idea Entitative question: How Mutual influence question: How Post-human question: How do do human actors create do spaces constrain and/or feelings, energies, or bodies spaces that organize enable organization in (un) resonate or move through human action? intended or (un)expected a given space in ways that ways? constitute or compromise organization? Entitative exemplar: Mease & Mutual influence exemplars: Post-human exemplars: Hultin & Terry (2012) Branton & Compton (2021); Introna (2019); LeClaire (2023); Wilhoit Larson (2020), Skoglund & Holt (2021) Eger (2021) Sets of exchanges or connections occurring within a particular time and space (space-time) Entitative question: What Mutual influence questions: Who Post-human question: How does role does sociomateriality or what are the major human a specific (set of) encounter(s) play in significant and other-than-human actors “bring to life” and organize human encounters in an in encounters that constitute a series of human and otherorganization? an organization? What do than-human actors and they do? effects? Entitative exemplar: Mease & Mutual influence exemplar: Terry (2012) Wilhoit & Kissleburgh (2019)

4. Practices

Post-human Potential Questions and Exemplars

Identifiable situated (often repeated) activities Entitative questions: Mutual influence question: What human practices How are human and otherare significant to than-human actors mutually organization? What role engaged in practices that does sociomateriality play constitute and disrupt in those encounters? organization? Entitative exemplar: Meisenbach (2008)

Post-human exemplars: Harris et al. (2020); Janssens & Steyaert (2020) Post-human question: How does sociomateriality move through and sustain practices, linking them to one another and constituting organization?

Mutual influence exemplars: Gist-Mackey (2018); Wright (2016)

Post-human exemplars: Gherardi et al. (2019); Janssens & Steyaert (2020); Reckwitz (2017)

5. Collectives Multitudes of sociomaterial phenomena that express agency (Assemblages, Entitative question: How Mutual influence question: Configurations, do human actors use a How do a variety of human Plenums of multitude of material and other-than-human agencies, entities to convey their entities interact/organize to Entanglements) messages and organize collectively create affect? people?

Post-human question: How do flows and connections settle into organized constitutive relations and boundaries that constitute organizational actors and actions?

Entitative exemplar: Meisenbach (2008) 6. Relations

Mutual influence exemplar: Cooren (2006)

Post-human exemplar: Brummans & Vézy (2022)

Particular meetings of any of the sociomaterial phenomena in this table

(Continued)

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Table 25.1  Sociomaterial Phenomena to Focus Organizational Communication Analysis (Continued) Phenomena

Entitative Potential Questions and Exemplars

(Connections)

Entitative question: How do Mutual influence question: How Post-human question: How do material entities create, do meaningful and sensible entities and organizations extend, or disrupt human relations between human and come to exist via/through relationships among other-than-human constitute constitutive relations? organizations? organization? Entitative exemplar: Mutual influence exemplars: Gist- Post-human exemplars: Harris Bencherki (2018); Mease Mackey & Dougherty (2021); et al. (2020); Wilhoit & & Terry (2012) Hultin & Introna (2019) Kisselburgh (2019) Felt or sensed phenomena situated in a particular time and space (space-time) Entitative question: How Mutual influence question: Post-human question: How are emotions or feelings How does affect or emotion do feelings and intensities produced, controlled, or exceed, skirt, or disrupt organize bodies in ways commercialized through organizational processes? that supersede cognitive organizational processes? sensemaking?

7. Intensities (Feelings, Resonances)

8. Flows (Forces, Movements)

Post-human Potential Questions and Exemplars

Entitative exemplars: Mutual influence exemplars: Post-human exemplars: Dale & Meisenbach (2008); Mease & Terry (2012); Latham (2015); Katila et al. Tracy (2000) Pouthier & Sondak (2021) (2020) Movements of any form of sociomateriality across time and space (space-time) Entitative question: How do Mutual influence question: How Post-human questions: How do material entities flow or do encounters between flows constitute bodies and move in space? human and other-thanorganizations as they move? human actors move meaning How are these constitutive and materiality in ways flows organized? that constitute or disrupt organization? Entitative exemplar: Brennan (2004)

9. Pre-individual (Virtual, Potential, Pre-conscious)

Mutual Influence Potential Questions and Exemplars

Mutual influence exemplar: Skoglund & Holt (2021)

Post-human exemplars: Ashcraft (2019); Endrissat & Islam (2022); Mease (2021)

That which is sensed but not formed into any of the sociomaterial phenomena in this table Entitative question: How Mutual influence question: Post-human question: How do does the pre-individual How do precognitive or pre-individual sensations resist or escape attempts pre-individual sensations settle into or disrupt at capture into stable organize, motivate, or commonly understood shared/ entities? activate human and otherorganized realities? than-human actors? Entitative exemplar: N/A

Mutual influence exemplar: Brewis (2019)

post-human framing in our own work. Second, we advocate that even those who emphasize an entitative framing should have an awareness of other ontological framings that remain latent in their work. And third, while the entitative and mutual influence framings go well with more established qualitative methodologies and methods,

Post-human exemplars: Ashcraft, (2020); Mease (2021)

post-human framings resist such methods and methodologies, resulting in a much greater need for guidance among those who wish to incorporate these framings into their work. Accordingly, we offer two notes to consider as you review Table 25.1. Note that the table moves from more identifiable entities to less determined boundaries.

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This is true moving from the top of the table that begins with objects, spaces, and events, (which may be bracketed using time and space boundaries), to practices, collectives, and relations (in which bracketing requires more attention to enactment and cannot rely solely on time and space boundaries), to intensities, flows, and the pre-individual (which resist clearly defined time and space boundaries, such that bracketing an analysis often requires tracing, sensing, or following a particular phenomenon). At the same time, the ontological framings also move horizontally from identifiable entities on the left to less determined boundaries on the right. Thus, there are a variety of ways to conceptualize each analytical focus, and we have listed some of those in the first column under each focus. Note that these are not interchangeable terms, but nuanced conceptualizations that emphasize different ontological assumptions and intellectual histories when attending to a particular phenomenon. In each box, we have offered a sample “guiding question” (or questions) to help demonstrate how questions may shift with a change in ontological framing. These questions may also help you identify which foci resonate with your inquiry, and help you integrate considerations of sociomateriality and affect into your analysis. Given both the vertical and horizontal movement from identifiable entities to less determined boundaries, boxes in the upper right (post-human/bodies) or lower left (entitative/pre-individual) are contradictory in ways that resist our clean categorical structure. These boxes point toward a blurring of categories, as a post-human framing of bodies points toward the collectives, relations, or flows that constitute a body, and the pre-individual, by definition, resists entitative framing all together. This leads us to our second point. This table looks like a map, but it functions like a compass. By placing the different ontological framings, phenomena/foci, guiding questions, and exemplars in this table,

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we have assembled something that could be interpreted as a map: a map where you locate your own study in a fixed, structured territory and draw clear boundaries in terms of what you are (not) analyzing (in line with an entitative framing). As post-humanist scholars, we recognize the complexity and imperfection of our choices (see also Gherardi et al., 2019; Harris et al., 2020). Although we have made choices (often called “cuts” in posthuman scholarship; see Barad, 2007; see also Chapter 33 in this volume) for the sake of illustrating patterns and possibilities, we acknowledge there are no clear boundaries between the boxes. Hence, this table will inevitably fail to fully capture the “muscularity” of sociomateriality and affect, as well as any attempts at analysis. We therefore invite you to use it more like a compass—as a tool to help you navigate through the uncharted territory you seek to study. In turn, you will notice that many exemplars show up in more than one place in the table, and that guiding questions listed for one phenomenon/focus may refer to other phenomena. Just as a compass draws on forces of attraction to guide direction, your own framing and focus may point you in the direction of new framings and phenomena/foci as the data “speak back” to you. As a sociomaterial being yourself, engaged in analysis of sociomaterial phenomena, you will have to make decisions about what turns you will take, and what you will bracket out. Table 25.1 may help you clarify what directions are possible, and help you make those turns more mindfully and transparently. Every field of analysis encompasses all of the phenomena presented in the table, so they are all potentially part of your analysis. The phenomena that you emphasize is a matter of your ontological assumptions, research question, scale of analysis, access to data, and close attention to the directions in which your data lead you—we discuss the principle of “following your data” in greater detail below.

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Exemplars of Analyses When we first drafted this chapter, we attempted to address each of the nine foci individually to show how each one might emerge in analyses, but we quickly learned that trying to disentangle the sociomaterial phenomena for the sake of illustration created more confusion than clarity. Therefore, we changed our strategy and instead decided to reread two articles in light of our table, in order to show how the respective authors integrated multiple foci into their analyses. Our first exemplar is Wilhoit and Kisselburgh’s (2019) analysis of bike commuting as resistance. Wilhoit and Kisselburgh’s data consisted of interviews with bike commuters and recordings of commutes taken by commuters wearing cameras on their heads or helmets. Initially, “interview texts were analyzed using thematic analysis…[and] focused on understanding how bike commuting communicates through its materiality as well as how individuals experience bike commuting” (p. 879). Preliminary analysis led the authors to revisit their data by using a ventriloquial approach (see also Chapter 24 in this volume). This enabled them to address “how and when participants mobilized other figures” (p. 880) in ways that deviate “from or oppos(e) normal behavior” (p. 879). The videos were coded “to generate a list of categories (e.g., surfaces, interactions, bike tools)” (p. 881) and were then analyzed to consider “the relationship between dominant and alternative practices” (p. 881). The initial focus shows an ontological framing of mutual influence, focusing on human sensemaking and the communication performed by bounded practices and otherthan-human bodies. While the study focuses on the practice of bike commuting, writ large, the video analysis attends to bodies (surfaces and bike tools), encounters (interactions with curbs, leaf piles and colleagues), while following flows (the movement of the commuters and cars). The imbrication of materiality and meaning is particularly evident as the

authors review videos with the bikers to better understand their experience of the commutes recorded in the videos. Thus, Wilhoit and Kisselburgh approach the practice of bike commuting, with a focus on human experience, bodies, and encounters. Note that Wilhoit and Kisselburgh (2019) did not initially set out to examine bike commuting as resistance but followed what emerged in the data. Moreover, their work shows that none of the bikers intended to “challenge power or defy norms” (p. 881). With this observation, the authors signaled a shift away from a mutual influence toward post-human framing as they explored the occurrence of resistance despite it not being a key sensemaking feature. They used Ashcraft et  al.’s (2009) typology of bodies, sites, and objects to show how, despite a lack of intention, the bike commuters’ sweaty bodies upon arrival at work, movement through unsanctioned space(s) during the commute, and the “presence of cycling artifacts in the workplace” (p. 887) together demonstrated resistance by way of contrasting with mainstream practices. As such, attention turned to how this collective (of objects/ bodies, flows, and encounters) functioned to resist dominant practices, even in the absence of such resistance being expressed in human sensemaking or intention. Hence, Wilhoit and Kisselburgh’s analysis not only shows a movement from a mutual influence toward a post-human framing, but also the analytical movement between human and other-than-human bodies, space(s), flows, and collectives to unfold a relational ontology of resistance. Our second example explores Harris et al.’s (2020) analysis of how agency flows in and through organizational discourse about sexual violence. Drawing on feminist new materialism (FNM), a post-humanist, postqualitative approach, Harris et al. used the method of diffraction to “bring together high-profile events from two different U.S, organizational contexts, the military and higher education” (p. 664; see also Chapter 33 in this volume).

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In doing so, they analyzed publicly available military documents, interviews, field notes, and university documents while also including “the divergent modes of analysis and writing from (previously conducted) studies” (p. 666). More specifically, they used a post-human approach that collapsed the subject/object division of agency to explore “complex, contradictory, and fluid attributions of agency” (p. 666). To understand this agentic movement, the authors focused on two critical events of sexual violence: (1) a 2011 lawsuit filed against the Secretary of Defense for failing to confront military sexual violence; and (2) an early 2000s sexual violence case at a university that led to strict sexual violence policies. While zooming in on events, the authors illustrated how agency (which they conceptualize as the capacity to act) moves as it is verbally attributed to people (bodies), policies (practices), and offices (spaces) in the texts and interviews associated with these events. For Harris et al., events and flows remain the primary foci of their analysis. And yet, a closer reading suggests there is also a focus on practices, collectives, and relations. That is, they found that while the locus of agency flowed or moved in organizations’ responses to sexual violence, these flows also “appeared to stall responses to violence” (p. 669). In their analysis, Harris et al. drew upon Barad’s (2007) concept of agential cuts, which are boundary-making practices that separate relations into discrete individual entities (see also Chapter 33 in this volume). In both of the analyzed cases, agency sometimes moved and diffused across a collective of policies, bodies, and offices; at other times, agency “paused” on specific bodies, suggesting that “violence requires the action of a discrete agent” (p. 671). Put differently, the authors described how agency emerged as a sociomaterial duplicity. In the texts, flows of agency are configured as diffuse agencyin-motion within organizational discourse of sexual violence. Yet, agency is simultaneously separated from discourses of systemic

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violence where relations are cut and agency of sexual violence condenses on perpetrators’ bodies. Both configurations stymie organizational efforts to prevent sexual violence. In short, Harris et al.’s sociomaterial framing of “agency as motion” acknowledges partiality, complexity, and newness. It also shows how sociomaterial analysis can trace a seemingly coherent concept like agency in flows that move across bodies, practices and collectives, revealing how culpability is evaded in a complex, flexing, and problematic sociomaterial field of sexual violence. These two examples serve three purposes: First, they demonstrate how diverse sociomaterial phenomena fit together in a single study. Although our chapter is more focused on analysis than on data collection (an admittedly problematic division or agential cut), these studies offer examples of how interview transcripts, video analysis, public and organizational documents, and field notes may all be “sites” of sociomaterial analysis. Second, they illustrate how different sociomaterial phenomena may “show up” in the data: that is, as sweaty bodies; sidewalks and bike lanes; accessories; critical events; attributions and movements of agency across bodies; policies; offices; cuttings of relations; or configurations of sexual violence responsiveness. Third, these studies begin to show how the engaged act of analysis does not fit cleanly into codes and themes, but requires a different kind of movement between ontological framings, research questions, and foci. It is precisely this last point that we unpack in greater detail in the next section.

PRINCIPLES FOR POST-HUMAN AFFECTIVE ANALYSIS Thus far, we have explained how organizational communication scholars view sociomateriality by using entitative, mutual influence, and post-human ontological framings, and we have provided nine

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different sociomaterial phenomena to help you focus attention in your analyses of sociomateriality. For some, these two sections may suffice in terms of clarifying assumptions and understanding how to focus on sociomaterial phenomena when using existing analytical methods. For those who seek to analyze sociomaterial phenomena with an emphasis on affect, we offer additional guidance in the form of three analytical principles.

Principle 1: Collapsing and Expanding the Scope of Analysis Post-human sociomaterial analysis requires that you rethink, reimagine, and let go of the traditional qualitative “toolbox” (Brummans & Vezy, 2022) by challenging the subject/ object dualism where you, as “the researcher,” and “data” are framed as separate entities (Brummans, 2022; Jackson & Mazzei, 2012; MacLure, 2013). Rather than engaging as “the researcher” who is the “critical, intentional subject” (MacLure, 2013, p. 660) and who engages “the data” as a passive object to be gathered, analyzed, and represented, we invite you to think about analysis as an embodied relational becoming. This assumes that you (the researcher) and the “data” exist within unfolding relations in which you affect and are affected by the phenomena you “analyze” (Brummans & Vezy, 2022). A relational becoming approach resists the traditional separation between “data” and “analysis” (Gherardi, 2019b), allowing both data and analyst to fade into a single field of analysis; a field that is becoming. While this merging offers a deep sense of intimacy with a sociomaterial field of study, it also requires you to acknowledge the partiality and potentiality of sociomateriality as it becomes intelligible (Lenz-Taguchi, 2010). Despite efforts to capture meaning, coherence, and sensemaking, intelligible relations in an ever-changing field are always partial and evolving, moment to moment, which

affects the practice of research (Ashcraft, 2020; Stewart, 2007). What we tune into during a face-to-face interview (e.g., body language, facial expression, etc.) shifts as we later press play on a recording device to hear muffled speech, and then shifts again as we read and reread a transcript to correct textual inaccuracies. Moreover, in each of these analytical moments, we bring multiple theories and questions into the field that additionally influence what emerges as “data.” This example shows that “data” become intelligible in our active embodied engagement with a field of relations in which material attempts at capture (observations, recordings using devices, transcribed texts, etc.) variously activate parts of the infinite potential of that ever-evolving field. As such, you must do more than self-reflect on how positionality influences interpretation (see also Chapter 30 in this volume). You must acknowledge that embodied engagement is data, albeit partial and always unfolding (Revbæk & Simpson, 2022). Collapsing the data/analyst hierarchy and expanding the field of analysis to include your own body, flows, intensities, and so on (among other sociomaterial phenomena and beyond sensemaking) is a first step in a posthuman affective analysis of sociomateriality. Capturing such an engagement pushes the boundaries of traditional field notes and transcripts as data. For example, field notes might intentionally be captured in recorded speech, rather than written down, as recording captures affective tone, shakiness, intensity, or reverberation of the researcher, as well as the chaos, cool, or intensity of background noises that are often difficult to capture in written field notes (Ashcraft, 2021). Other possibilities include creative picturing (Tracy et  al., 2006) or mapping/tracing (Brummans & Vézy, 2022). Researchers might draw spaces and arrangements or use photography to capture arrangements of spaces, bodies, and objects. Strategies like photovoice (Dougherty et al., 2018; Wilhoit, 2017) might be tweaked to help participants describe and make sense of material and

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affective experiences prompted by photos that elicit bodily sensations (see also Chapter 19 in this volume). Regardless of your attempts to capture data, when you collapse the analyst/data hierarchy, the goal is to embrace your place in the relational becoming, and to attune to how the field of relations moves, challenges, and hails both self and other forms of sociomateriality. With the understanding that this is always a partial and evolving task, we offer two additional principles for data analysis.

Principle 2: Relating with, Rather than Analyzing, “Data” Once you embrace your place in a collapsed and expanded field of analysis, attunement (Ahmed, 2014; Reckwitz, 2017; Stewart, 2007) becomes possible. Attunement is the capacity for tuning into, sensing, and noticing what is capturing the attention or energy (including that of the researcher) in a sociomaterial field (see Massumi, 2015; see also Brummans, 2022; Brummans & Vézy, 2022). Whether engaged in ethnographic observation, reviewing recordings, or at a desk reading transcripts, attunement to sociomateriality and affect requires tuning into what is happening in and around you in a particular field by (1) opening to affect and (2) sensing your bodily capacity. First, attunement requires that you have to open to affect. This includes a multitude of sensations, and the “nudging along, budding promises that glimmer beyond articulation” (Kuhn et al., 2017, p. 64). Researchers engaged in a sociomaterial-affective analysis often describe parts of the “data” as “difficult to grasp” (Katila et al., 2020, p. 1316), as an “unexpected transition” (Pouthier & Sondak, 2021, p. 391), or a feeling of “heightened affectivity” (van Amsterdam et al., 2022, data analysis, para 2). Hence, you must attune to sensation, intensity, and energy emanating within the ordinary, and to the flows happening in between bodies, spaces, practices

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and other sociomaterial phenomena (Pullen et  al., 2017). MacLure (2013) is instructive in helping sense this hard-to-grasp potential, or how “data begins to glow” (p. 661). For MacLure (2013), the glow is first understood as the “pre-personal and pre-conscious” moments when synapses begin to charge, “conversations start to get faster,” and a feeling just won’t let go (p. 662). Simply put, you must open to experiencing resonance in the “body as well as the brain” (p. 661), noticing, for instance, breathing, a painful gasp, vocal tone, a shaky hand, or even a rhythm—not as discrete entities, but as relational phenomena of resonant felt energy. You should therefore be open to surprises and precarious unfoldings when felt observations point in the direction of something unknown or new. It follows that such an analysis should make space for “spooling out without a predetermined destination” (MacLure, 2013, p. 662). This means that while tuned in to theory or topics of interest (e.g., patriarchy or entrepreneurship), practicing a prescribed method of inquiry, or focusing on one of the nine phenomena presented above, you must also remain engulfed in the experience and resist the desire to step back, immediately assign significance, and “code” into neat categories. MacLure’s analytical reframing requires attuning to the complexity, energetic nuance, and the multitude of the sociomaterial in ways that disrupt narrowly focused theoretical or methodological perception. You maintain openness by attuning to how sociomaterial phenomena in a field attune to one another, noticing how energy and attention moves, resonates, infuses, and connects these phenomena, while also noticing the points that confound, baffle, surprise, and frustrate your attempts at clean interpretation and categorization. Second, openness to affect requires attunement as bodily capacity for sensing, treating your analysis as embodied knowing. Scholars who engage in sensing treat analysis as a communicative, constitutive practice that “enacts and circulates the affective boundary between human and non-human bodies”

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(Ashcraft, 2019, p. 100). This requires you to stay physically in the “middle of things” by feeling out the relations of a sociomaterial field (Ashcraft, 2020; Lenz-Taguchi, 2010). Such embedded sensing attends to both the becoming of the present in what is happening, as well as to the potential of current conditions that may encourage or prevent the field from evolving in one way or another. Thus, sensing via bodily capacity means connecting with the relational field in both mindful and sense-able ways, using embodied awareness of your place in the relational field in which organizational communication phenomena emerge (Brummans, 2022). Gherardi et  al. (2019) describe how data becomes embodied through a sensing of relations such as an “encounter with research participants…recorded by our own bodies, the traces kept in our memory, the annotations in the logbook” (p. 300). They also suggest that researchers may re-embody interviews by using “gestures to mimic the body and gestures of the interviewee” (p. 301). Accordingly, we invite you to tune into the sociomaterial phenomena that capture your senses and elicit feelings, such as practices or intensities of other bodies, or flows and connections that resonate (read: communicate) with your own bodily excitation from moment to moment. Such practice challenges efforts to detach your body from happenings and unfoldings in research. Instead, the entirety of your socio-material capacity to communicate becomes an integral part of your “method” of analysis. In many ways, we are calling you to engage in what we could call “meta-attunement.” Rather than observing flows in the field, follow the flow; rather than observing intensities in the field, feel with them; rather than capturing the data in categories, let the data capture you. As Ashcraft (2019) suggests, when something is sensed, a hailing, a correspondence, or a summoning takes place. For example, this means analysis may shift from attempts at understanding what professionalism is, and toward how one (scholar or not) senses professionalism and how that

sensing functions to constitute professionalism from moment to moment. By moving between practices of meta-attunement and theory, we engage in what Barad (2007) calls diffraction, a method that brings divergent theories, ideas, and sociomaterial phenomena into conversation with one another (see also Chapters 30 and 33).

Principle 3: Following, Moving Across the Sociomaterial Field In our section on collapsing and expanding the scope of analysis, we have sought to help you locate yourself as part of the data in the sociomaterial field of relations you are studying. In the section on relating with data, we have sought to help you develop your awareness and sense-ability to take note of your embodied senses. Our final principle on following data seeks to assist you in engaging data on their own terms, by following movements and connections across space and time (or space-time; see also Chapter 29 in this volume). Following contrasts with more traditional methods of coding, categorization, and thematization. Existing literature offers several different ways to follow data as a form of analysis. The first involves mapping or following bodily trajectories or affective movements in a particular encounter (Brummans & Vezy, 2022). For example, Brummans and Vezy (2022) suggest mapping or tracing organizational members’ movements to investigate how a social collective’s becoming is communicatively constituted in space-time. This form of following is characterized by the movement of a body or feeling in a locale bounded by time and space. A second type of following, tracing flows, is illustrated by Mease’s (2022) rereading of Albu’s (2019) analysis of a civil society organization (CSO) in Morocco. The CSO collects accounts of human rights violations in order to expose those violations to an international audience; that will, in turn, put diplomatic pressure on the Moroccan

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government. Mease shows how the flow of information regarding violations constitutes organizations and identities as it moves through verbal encounters, scribbled notes in a pocket, and digital messages sent through technologies. Her work highlights how tracing such flows is particularly useful for the ways analysis can span across time and space, treating the flow itself as more important than the bounded locale. A third type of following is contextualizing, which begins with a narrow focus, and follows the many connections (read: communications) that constitute a particular phenomenon. Branton (2022) put contextualizing into practice when he followed how a veterinary student’s request for an accessibility accommodation (that limited them to an 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. work schedule) was characterized as “difficult and extreme.” Branton traced how this felt characterization surfaced in conversations that affectively connected the request to online patient charts, the hospital operating system, emergency shifts, weekend work, case prep, owners, patients, discharging practices, and veterinary students. Branton’s tracing contextualized how these sociomaterial practices produced an “affective economy” of veterinary identity that collectively “evidenced” the request as “difficult and extreme,” and that limited accessibility accommodations for veterinary students. We refer to a fourth type of following as configuring, that is, following a multitude of connections in a particular field of relations. This is similar to contextualization, minus a clear central focus, shifting the primary question from “How did this happen?” to “What is happening here?” For example, Hultin and Introna (2019) traced how three different sociomaterial configurations of service desks, seating arrangements, presence of police officers, ticket machines, and noise at a Swedish migration service center for asylum seekers each hailed bodies differently. By tracing the connections of objects and humans and attuning to affective relations, they showed how the configuration of

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sociomaterial relations simultaneously produced subject positions and the potential for different forms of encounter. These four forms of tracing—following bodily trajectories, tracing flows, contextualizing, and configuring—allow for a zooming out of the relational field to understand “connection in action” and the conditions of possibility (see also Nicolini, 2009). Similarly, we invite you to resist choosing a single analytical focus. When tracing is synonymous with sensing, scholars can move between multiple sociomaterial phenomena to grasp the traces of affect that persist and resonate across them. In other words, tracing the affective through events, bodily excitation, and movement as flow, shows how practices are made durable through affective “stickiness.” In short, the principle of tracing urges you to follow the happenings of data from moment to moment. It also allows you to zoom out and make visible the complexity of constitutive relations and attend to organizational configurations and conditions of possibility within a sociomaterial field. Finally, we understand that given the messiness and complexity of data, you might find it difficult to find an endpoint. However, as we have noted, a post-human framing resists the notion that scholars can produce a single comprehensive representation of a scene, practice, or organizational life writ large. Hence, framed post-humanly, sociomaterial-affect analysis is always partial because the event is always made and remade anew in perpetual becoming, and, as researchers (and as human beings more generally), we find ourselves smack in the middle of its unfolding.

CONCLUSION Our goal in this chapter was to help you gain confidence regarding what it might mean to integrate sociomateriality into the analytical methods you use, and to provide specific tools to rethink sociomaterial analysis from a posthuman, affective perspective. We began by

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clarifying three different ontological framings of materiality and affect—entitative, mutual influence, and post-human—to help you clarify the assumptions you bring to sociomateriality, the implications of those assumptions for how you conceptualize communication, and the ethical obligations that accompany those assumptions. As we noted, these distinctions are not meant to trap organizational communication researchers in boxes. In fact, we have shown how some analyses might move between different ontological framings (e.g., see Wilhoit & Kisselburgh, 2019), demonstrating that distinct framings are just that: frames that enable you to focus your attention and ask different kinds of questions regarding the sociomaterial field you attempt to understand. We do suggest that movement between these ontological framings will prove most fruitful if you remain mindful of and transparent about the ontological assumptions you bring to each aspect of your analysis. Having clarified different ontological framings of sociomateriality and affect, we turned to the questions of what you might attend to in your analyses by offering nine different sociomaterial phenomena. While this list is imperfect, it provides ways to anchor the study of sociomateriality (including affect) by calling attention to specific foci, regardless of whether you analyze interview or interaction transcripts, ethnographic encounters, or any other type of data. While we have offered potential questions for each phenomenon to help anchor your analysis, we also acknowledge that your questions should emerge based on your own contextual encounter. These phenomena are not “units of analysis” in the traditional sense, but ways to draw out the sociomaterial, affective dynamics of organizational communication in a field of relations. In turn, we discussed two examples (Harris et  al., 2020; Wilhoit & Kisselburgh, 2019) to show how these phenomena may show up in an actual analysis, and how multiple phenomena might be examined in simultaneity in a single study.

Next, we offered three principles to help push the boundaries of post-human affect analysis. These principles encourage you to enter into a different kind of mutually constitutive relationship with the field of relations you investigate; to shift toward practicing an embodied sensing that attunes to data, rather being limited by conceptual blinders; and to follow data wherever they lead, rather than searching for patterns and themes. In this final section, we noted several lesser known concepts and analytical techniques, such as glowing data (MacLure, 2013), embodied analysis (Gherardi et al., 2019), agential cuts (Barad, 2007), attunement (Ahmed, 2014; Massumi, 2015), and diffractive analysis (Barad, 2007; Harris et  al., 2020; Ulmer, 2016; see also Chapters 30 and 33), because we believe that they are useful for further exploring analysis of sociomateriality that attunes to affect. To conclude, this chapter provides glimpses into the theoretical depths that undergird the varied studies of sociomateriality and affect, as well as their ontological framings. Still, we hope to have offered useful ideas for envisioning how analyses of sociomateriality and affect may be integrated into qualitative organizational communication research. Thus, we hope this chapter will encourage you to learn more about the theoretical nuances and use this knowledge to inform your own work. Indeed, sociomaterial-affective dynamics are part and parcel of communication. Hence, these dynamics need to be investigated in order to gain deeper insight into the ways organizations are enacted through and in communication.

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26 Critical Discourse Analysis in Qualitative Organizational Communication Research Debbie S. Dougherty and Blessing Ekene Okafor

Organizations are conceived as political sites where various organizational actors struggle to “fix” meaning in ways that will serve their particular interests. (Mumby, 2004, p. 235) The work-body relation is determined in discursive struggle. (Ashcraft, 2013, p. 21) The paper concludes with a discussion of the value of critical discourse analysis as a method in social scientific research, and as a resource for social struggle. (Fairclough, 1993, p. 133)

When we were first invited to write this chapter on critical discourse analysis (CDA) in qualitative organizational communication research, we thought it would be a fairly simple process of collecting organizational studies that claim to be CDA, analyzing those studies, and then writing about the approaches scholars use. However, it quickly became apparent that many studies that claim CDA status are not actually critical in their approach. Further, many studies that do not claim CDA status clearly utilize both a critical and discursive approach to theorizing and

analyzing organizational data, albeit with often wildly different methods. We have ­ultimately reached the conclusion that what constitutes CDA is more challenging to ascertain than we had expected. Hence, we decided to combine the research with a critical discourse sentiment to identify ­ both variations that push these studies apart, and commonalities that pull this research together. When taken as a whole, organizational communication CDA is focused on power, views discourse as complex, and approaches the social world with some level of suspicion. For these reasons, it is best to understand CDA as a methodology, rather than as a method. By “methodology,” we mean the logic of the research design (see also Chapter 14 in this volume). CDA provides the logic around which researchers design their data collection and analysis. As a result, the methods vary in a fascinating array of ways. Some scholars, such as Maier and Ravazzani (2021), use a specific CDA multimodal approach in their

CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS

research, which recognizes that discourses are embedded in texts with multiple semiotic modes beyond language. Other scholars utilize alternative conventions. For example, Mease (2016) used in-depth interviews in her study exploring the discursive paradoxes of diversity consultants. Gist-Mackey (2018) utilized methods associated with critical ethnography in her comparative study of unemployment support organizations, while Dougherty (2001) employed methods typically associated with phenomenology in her study of discourse around sexual harassment in a large health care organization. Gill (2013) conducted a textual analysis of entrepreneurial discourse in business periodicals. Although some scholars find this variation in methods to be problematic, arguing for a more consistent approach to CDA (Leitch & Palmer, 2010), Chouliaraki and Fairclough (2010) convincingly argue that one of the strengths of CDA is its diversity in theory and analytical approach. What distinguishes CDA from other organizational communication research methodologies? What are the common features that typically draw this body of work together? As hinted at in the opening quotes, there is a clear articulation over the years that CDA engages with important struggles. In particular, CDA scholarship focuses on struggle over power—how it is enacted, contested, and performed. Interestingly, despite the consistent orientation toward struggle, there is surprisingly little research that focuses on what struggle means and how it is engaged. Given this oversight, in this chapter we consider the dominant struggles that are engaged in CDA by organizational communication scholars. Aligned with critical scholars writ large, CDA scholars recognize power inequities as foundational for meaning and action (Mumby, 2004). As a result, CDA can best be understood as the analysis of struggle: (1)  struggle over power; (2) struggle over meaning and action; (3) struggle over discourse and materiality; (4) struggle over discursive openings/closings; and (5) struggle

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over difference. In this chapter, we explore CDA in organizational communication as a methodology by discussing each of these discursive struggles.

STRUGGLE OVER POWER In organizational communication studies, power is the most enduring and significant issue confronted by both critical scholars and by CDA scholars more specifically. The critical approach to organizational communication begins with the assumption that organizations are sites of domination with power, control, and resistance as central processes (Deetz & Mumby, 1990). In organi­ zational communication research, CDA also assumes that power is central to organizing, but further asserts that power is primarily reproduced through the ongoing discursive practices of its members. It is, in fact, in these discursive practices that power is exercised and enacted. Power as struggle has been viewed from different perspectives, such as domination (Aguinis, Simonsen, & Pierce, 1998), culture (Dougherty, 2023), and knowledge (Foucault, 1980). It is the orientation to power and struggle that creates a common bond between organizational communication CDA studies. Although there are a number of forms power, discourse, and struggle can take, we focus on a few that are particularly salient: struggle through power as complexity, struggle between power and resistance, struggle over power and knowledge, and the struggle to contextualize power and agency. The struggle through power as complexity is one focus of CDA research in the field of organizational communication. While some of the earlier critical organizational scholarship utilized a relatively stable and structural orientation to power and resistance (Mumby, 2004), CDA has helped usher in a shift toward understanding power as dynamic, complex, and interwoven (Fleming  & Spicer,  2008). As a

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result, one of the most interesting innovations that have come from CDA in organizational communication research is the recognition that power is complex, and that complexity both shapes and is shaped by discourse. This complexity orientation can be seen in concepts such as circuits of power (Clegg, 1989), systems of power (Hardy & Philips, 2004), and web-of-power (Dougherty, 2011). For example, Hardy and Philips (2004, p. 299) articulate this complexity when they note that “structured collections of texts and associated practices of textual production, transmission and consumptions…are what create systems of power that stay alive in a particular context.” As a result, how power is shared among actors, the types of power that actors utilize, and the types of actors that exercise power in specific situations, are constituted by discourse and made to appear fixed or stable based on the specific historical moment. Dougherty (2011) illustrates the struggle surrounding discourse and complex power relations. In her study of a Midwestern U.S. farming community, Dougherty illustrates the interweaving of power to trap people in social class positions. Her auto/ethnographic study of four farms, including her own sheep farm, included participant observations, indepth interviews, farm tours, and textual analysis. Her analysis shows the complexity around power and discourse, framing social class as a web in which different strands represent different types and processes of power. When taken alone, each form of power can be resisted. When woven together, social class becomes a part of the social fabric of society. (p. 82)

Mungaray and Curtin (2021) also illustrate the struggle through complexity. In their feminist phronesis analysis of a public accounting firm, these authors explored “what identities are constructed through language and catch phrases and how language and identities function to create and perpetuate a heteronormative leadership culture” (p. 198). Feminist phronesis is a methodology that is built around the complex thinking and

theorizing by feminists, and by Black feminists more specifically, which allows for a richer understanding of power and control. Using techniques commonly associated with conversation analysis (see Chapter 23 in this volume), they found that catch phrases and language create and perpetuate the heteronormative leadership paradigm. Taken as a whole, these findings lead to a different type of power struggle. Specifically, given the complexity of discourse and power, how should we understand resistance in organizations? The struggle between power and resistance represents a second form of discursive struggle over power. In organizational communication scholarship, CDA has moved away from a power or resistance orientation to discourse and toward a more nuanced interplay between power and resistance. Ashcraft and Mumby (2004) articulated this interplay as a dialectical tension with both being present and in relationship in all discursive encounters. Following this line of thought, Norton (2009) utilized a diachronic perspective in his analysis of a “decade-long multistakeholder conflict concerning the grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in the U.S. state of Utah” (p. 525). Diachronic analysis is the study of social dynamics across time. His analysis of hundreds of documents from a local paper, along with semistructured interviews, identified the ways in which power and resistance changed across time. Specifically, over time, those who were perceived as enacting power eventually lost discursive dominance and shifted to enacting resistance. In contrast, groups who initially enacted resistance, gained discursive dominance and shifted to enacting power. In this way, the struggle between power and resistance evolved over time. Fleming and Spicer (2008) went further to argue that power and resistance are insep­ arable in power struggles. Instead of distinguishing between power and resistance, they claimed, scholars should label this dynamic as struggle, a conceptualization that has generated robust theorizing in CDA research in the

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field of organizational communication (e.g., Benoit-Barné & Cooren, 2009; Dougherty & Goldstein Hode, 2016; Saldanha et al., 2023). The struggle over power and knowledge represents a third form of discursive struggle over power. Organizational communication scholars who utilize CDA tend to treat both power and discourse as constitutive of, and constituted by, struggles over knowledge. The roots of this struggle are apparent in some of the early critical discourse theorizing. For example, Michel Foucault (1980) claimed that power and knowledge are inextricably intertwined, and that power is constitutive of all relationships (Foucault, 1979). Although some people are granted authority to wield power, everyone engages in power practices, including those who seem to occupy lower positions in organizations. Foucault’s view of power has been an important source of inspiration for organizational CDA scholars. For example, Mäkinen (2022) utilized Foucault’s relational understanding of power and knowledge to identify the discursive struggle within a community of practice. Mäkinen analyzed a collaborative community designed to study biological markers of premature births that could then be used to improve treatment. This collective was composed of three groups: bioinformaticians, geneticists, and obstetricians. Unfortunately, due to discursive positioning and through coercive power, the bioinformaticians dominated the collective, dismissing the input from both geneticists and obstetricians. As a result, what was originally intended to be a collaborative, collective process ended up with the bioinformaticians acting as e­ ducators/speakers, while geneticists and obstetricians were relegated to the role of audience members. Ultimately, this discursive arrangement did not create a functioning community of practice, leading to the failure of the project. Other recent theorizing on power and knowledge as struggle has moved away from a Foucauldian perspective, centering instead on Fairhurst’s (2007) theorizing of discursive leadership. Specifically, in their

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award-winning article, Doshi et  al. (2021) explored how leaders in a multinational organization in India discursively manage not knowing in the face of the overarching discourse of leadership as knowing. The authors used three analytical phases usually associated with grounded theory: open/initial, selective/focused, and theoretical coding. The authors discovered discursive strategies, such as staying silent and saying, “I don’t know,” to manage the tensions that occur when leaders are expected to be omniscient, but do not know. A fourth type of discursive struggle is the struggle to contextualize power and agency. The literature on organizational communication and agency has seen rapid growth over the past 10 years (see Brummans, 2018). Who or what has agency, how it is enacted, and how it is communicatively constitutive are the primary focus of the discursive struggle. It seems that how this struggle is studied depends on how agency is defined. CDA scholars who utilize Giddens’s (1984) definition of agency as the ability to act otherwise, argue that humans are the primary agents in organizing (e.g., Dougherty, 2023). In contrast, those who define agency as the ability to make a difference (e.g., Cooren, 2015; Harris, 2019), tend to view human and nonhuman actors interchangeably. If an object makes a difference in organizing, then that object has agency. The CDA literature we reviewed for this chapter utilized the latter definition. For example, Benoit-Barné and Cooren (2009) analyzed a video of an interaction that occurred during their fieldwork of Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) in the Congo. The authors provided a transcript of the interaction, then proceeded to use the transcript to show the presentification of authority. They concluded that authority is a collective achievement by both superiors and subordinates when they make entities (such as policies) present through their discourse. Although the struggle over power is an overarching theme in CDA research in the organizational communication discipline,

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there are other struggles that are also prevalent, including the struggle over meaning and action.

STRUGGLE OVER MEANING AND ACTION One way in which CDA in the organizational communication field diverges from discourse analysis (DA) is in how communication is centered in discourse. DA scholars start from John Langshaw Austin’s (1962) premise that communication is action. It operates in important ways. For example, saying “I do,” in some cultures creates a binding marital contract. In organizational communication scholarship, DA tends to focus on how communication creates organization (Cooren, 2018). In contrast, CDA engages the interplay between discourse as action and discourse as meaningmaking (Mumby, 2011). Communication as meaning-making refers to the ways in which we come to understand our sociomaterial world. It is in the interplay between action and meaning that struggle is engaged. As Dennis Mumby noted in his response to Alvesson and Kärreman’s (2011) discussion of discourse analysis, “[M]eanings are not somehow separate from other aspects of human behavior, material or otherwise; rather, they permeate everything, and are therefore inseparable from the practices, objects, institutions, power relations, and so forth, that they define” (Mumby, 2011, p. 1156). Although organizational communication CDA scholars focus on the struggle between meaning and action, they do so in varying ways. Some

CDA scholars utilize traditional critical theory and textual analysis to identify larger meaning systems (e.g., Fairclough, 1993), while others are more focused on emergent contemporary theory and qualitative analysis techniques (Compton, 2016; Gist-Mackey & Dougherty, 2021). Yet all of these scholars engage in the analysis of the struggle between action and meaning. Alvesson and Kärreman’s (2000, 2011) review and conceptualization of organizational DA (including CDA) provides a framework for understanding how scholars engage with the struggle between discourse as action and meaning. Of particular interest is the first dimension of the two-dimensional model that Alvesson and Kärreman (2000) created to differentiate between different conceptualizations of discourse. This dimension focuses on the interplay between meaning and discourse. On one pole, meaning is fully separated from discourse, while the other side collapses meaning and discourse (see Figure 26.1). Alvesson and Kärreman (2000) contend that some scholars view discourse as action, separate from meaning, while others view discourse as meaning controlling action. However, we argue that most CDA studies in organizational communication research do not focus on either pole. Rather, for CDA scholars, the focus is on the struggle between meaning and action, understanding this relational process to be pivotal in the production and reproduction of unequal social practices (Mumby, 2011). As a result, it is constructive to present a CDA-specific model for exploring meaning and action as discursive struggle (see Figure 26.2).

Discourse Determination

Discourse Autonomy

MUSCULAR

TRANSIENT

(discourse/meaning collapsed)

(discourse/meaning unrelated)

Figure 26.1  Alvesson and Kärreman’s (2000) Discourse/Meaning Dimension Note. This figure represents only one dimension of a two-dimensional model.

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Discursive Struggle MEANING

ACTION

Figure 26.2  Organizational Communication CDA Scholars Study the Discursive Struggle Between Meaning and Action

A second contribution of Alvesson and Kärreman’s (2000, 2011) theorizing of organi­ zational discourse is their articulation of discourse as a multilevel phenomenon. Each level of discourse suggests different types of discursive struggle between communication as meaning and communication as action. Borrowing from Gee (2015), Alvesson and Kärreman distinguish between discourse, which is the language used in day-to-day conversations and texts, and Discourse, which provides an overarching meaning system that people can draw on when engaging in discourse (Alvesson & Kärreman, 2000, 2011; Fairhurst & Putnam, 2004). For organizational communication scholars, it is within the struggle between D/discourses that organizations are formed, maintained, and evolved. The iterative nature of D/discourses makes for a particularly interesting analytical space. Organizational members draw on Discourse in their everyday discursive practices. These discursive practices then either strengthen, maintain, or evolve Discourse. This D/d struggle is laden with power and complexity. Although Alvesson and Kärreman describe other levels of discourse (mega, etc.), most research has focused on this D/d dynamic. The notion that discourse structures, acts, and becomes meaningful through the interaction between discursive levels has provided an important point of analysis for CDA scholars. For example, in her powerful discussion of communication myths in consent education and anti-rape activism, Harris (2018) analyzed consent myths in feminist activist and educator discourse, arguing that these myths simplify and depoliticize sexual consent. By treating consent discourses as local

(discourse) rather than as historical and contextual (Discourse), Harris suggests that consent education removes the focus on the rapist and places it on the ­target’s consent behavior. In their CDA exploring how organizational members talk about their organization’s sexual harassment policy, Dougherty and Goldstein Hode (2016) utilized Alvesson and Kärreman’s (2000/2011) distinction between three levels of discourse: Discourse, mezzo discourse, and discourse. These organi­ zational communication scholars defined CDA as “the systematic analysis of discourse to explore how critical theories are operationalized in social practice and how local texts link to broader social discourses” (p. 1735). Using an iterative process of reduction, description, interpretation, and critique, the authors analyzed an organization’s sexual harassment policies, focus groups during which organizational members talked about the policies, and interviews in which organizational members discussed the focus group interactions. Dougherty and Goldstein Hode’s work highlights the multilevel discursive struggle that resulted in re-presenting policies as consistent with an organizational culture that supports predatory sexual harassment. “[S]exual harassment policy,” the authors conclude, “provides a mezzo-level discourse that is made unstable when organizational members draw upon macro-level binary logics that are applied at the local level through the use of binary language” (p. 1750). Besides Alvesson and Kärreman (2000, 2011), Norman Fairclough (1989, 1993) has shaped how discursive struggle over ­meaning/ action is studied. Fairclough’s work on CDA has been widely cited by organizational

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communication scholars. His conceptualization allows for a rich and nuanced understanding of CDA as meaning and action, first, by leaning on notions of i­deology and hegemony, concepts that emphasize social meanings that are tightly held and rarely examined. Second, Fairclough (1993) describes language as both a mode of action and as constitutive of society, articulating a deep relationship between discourse and action: Viewing language use as social practice implies, first, that it is a mode action (Austin, 1962; Levinson, 1983) and, secondly, that it is always a socially and historically situated mode of action, in a dialectical relationship with other facets of “the social” (its “social context”)—it is socially shaped, but it is also socially shaping, or constitutive. (1993; p. 134, emphasis in original)

It is in the complicated relationship between opaque meanings, historical context, and actions that Fairclough provides a rich space for envisioning the discursive struggle over meaning and action. For example, Fairclough (1993) conducted a textual analysis of ­discursive events to reveal the struggle for positioning in academic texts. In this study, each discursive event is conceptualized as having three dimensions or facets. First, a discursive event is primarily a spoken or written language text, although Fairclough does recognize that nonlanguage symbols, such as pictures and art can also be discursive. Second, a discursive event is an instance of discourse practice involving the production and interpretation of text. Finally, a discursive event is a form of social practice. These three dimensions served as the foundation for how Fairclough (1993) engaged in his CDA of academic texts, revealing how language has shifted in public institutions so that it aligns with the discourse of private marketization. Organizational communication scholars have leaned on Fairclough’s theorizing to identify struggles between meaning and action. Maier and Ravazzani (2021), for example, drew on Fairclough’s larger notion

of CDA, as well as van Leeuwen’s (2008) articulation of CDA as the social regulation of acting and doing, to conduct a multimodal analysis of diversity discourses in online settings. A multimodal discourse approach views multiple modes of communication (e.g., images, sounds, texts) as the means through which discourses are embedded in a particular context. Through their multimodal analysis of Google’s external communication regarding diversity, the authors identified four overlapping, yet distinct, perspectives that create the perception that Google views diversity as a value-added “opportunity that is not to be ignored” (p. 482). By combining representations of social actors and social actions across space and time, Maier and Ravazzani show how the multimodal intertwining of these perspectives is purposefully deployed to create an external perception of a commitment to diversity. More specifically, with regard to the analysis of the struggle over meaning and action, their study “­uncovers the meaning-making roles of the different semiotic modes that are inevitably embedded in today’s digital communicative contexts” (p. 483). Research on the struggle over meaning and action reveals that discourse not only constitutes organizations, but that it does so in meaningful ways. In doing so, an additional discursive struggle is revealed, specifically, the struggle over discourse and materiality.

STRUGGLE OVER DISCOURSE AND MATERIALITY Whereas sociological approaches to professionalism have prioritized material matters, communication scholars have overwhelmingly neglected the body, the material environment, and all things physical. (Cheney & Ashcraft, 2007, p.153)

With the discursive turn in organization communication studies came a tendency to highlight language, while relegating materiality to that which is constructed through language

CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS

(Cheney & Ashcraft, 2007; see also Chapter 25 in this volume). In other words, the ma­terial world, when considered at all, was treated as subordinate to discourse (see also Ashcraft et  al., 2009). Publishing work that treated materiality as interwoven with discourse was challenging, to say the least (see Dougherty, 2011). Yet, as time has passed, materiality has increasingly become a central question in discourse scholarship, marking a material turn within CDA work in the organizational communication discipline. The primary question guiding this body of work is: What is the relationship between discourse and materiality? This question represents the central struggle for CDA scholars in terms of how to represent and how to analyze materiality in discourse studies. Within this work, the relationship between materiality and discourse has been described as a dialectical tension (Ashcraft & Mumby, 2004), as a sociomaterial entanglement (Barad, 2003, 2007), and as a struggle (Ashcraft, 2013; Dougherty & Goldstein Hode, 2016; Gist-Mackey & Dougherty, 2021). Some of the earlier theorizing on the relationship between discourse and materiality by organizational communication scholars conceptualized discourse and materiality as a dialectical tension (Ashcraft & Mumby, 2004); that is, the relationship between ma­ terial and discursive conditions was viewed as “reciprocal, dialectical, and mutually ­ defining” (Ashcraft & Mumby, 2004, p. 123). According to Ashcraft and Mumby (2004), the discursive-material dialectic “recognizes both the materiality of discourse and communication processes, and the discursive character of the material world” (p. 25). In turn, these authors used this dialectic as an analytical lens in their study of how airline pilots’ gender discourse evolved over time. Moreover, sociomateriality has become an important concept for understanding the relationship between discourse and ­materiality. Karen Barad’s (2003, 2007, 2013) performative approach to sociomateriality is one of the key theories that organizational

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communication scholars reference frequently (see also Chapters 25 and 33 in this volume). According to Barad (2003, p. 802), “a performative understanding of discursive practices challenges the representationalist belief in the power of words to represent preexisting things.” Thus, combining physics research, critical theory, and post-structuralist thought, Barad claims that representationalism, the tendency to represent practices as things, produces the “thingification” or “entification” of materiality through discourse (see also Chapter 25 in this volume). Through words and language, humans make the material world appear to be stable and fixed, obscuring the complexity of material/ discursive relations. This thingification prevents us from understanding materiality and discourse as entangled performances, making them ontologically and analytically inseparable (Barad, 2007). In fact, in Barad’s (2007) view, materiality and discourse only take on the appearance of separability through agential cuts. Through these cuts, subject and object are separated at a particular point in time, providing an artificial appearance of autonomy. Barad’s theorizing has been a useful point of departure for CDA scholars in organizational communication. In contrast with Barad, however, the starting point of their theorizing is the positionality of marginalized people, particularly with regard to occupational identity (Ashcraft, 2013) and unemployment (Gist-Mackey & Dougherty, 2021). More specifically, these scholars challenge the field of organizational communication to conceptualize discourse and materiality as a struggle. Karen Ashcraft (2013) uses the glass slipper metaphor to characterize the struggle between discourse and materiality. She defines the glass slipper as the “alignment of occupational identity with embodied social identities as it yields systematic forms of advantage and disadvantage” (p. 16). Thus, it is possible to understand how occupations seem naturally aligned with certain types of

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bodies. In building the case for the glass slipper metaphor, Ashcraft identifies four stances that articulate the relationship between work and the body. It is in the fourth stance, the work-body relation is determined in discursive struggle, where the glass slipper metaphor becomes central in Ashcraft’s CDA of gender, occupational identity, and U.S. airline pilots. Through discursive struggle, she shows, it is possible to understand how the relationship between work, body, and discourse is always unstable, indeterminate, and contradictory. “Put simply,” Ashcraft notes, “the glass slipper is both solid and fragile; it can be shattered and refashioned, even as it resists new ‘magic’” (p. 22). Gist-Mackey and Dougherty (2021) also articulate discourse and materiality as a struggle, suggesting that, from a critical perspective, sociomateriality’s rigid treatment of discourse and materiality as the same is highly problematic. Specifically, by treating discourse and materiality as the same, entanglement obscures the very real, very material social class differences that shape discourse. Instead, they argue that by viewing the relationship as an interwoven struggle over power and control, it becomes possible to analyze how materiality and discourse are co-constitutive. In turn, these researchers conducted a critical ethnographic analysis of an unemployment support organization (Worktrack) to show how this struggle over discourse and materiality is performed. Using a four-step analytical process of description, analysis, interpretation, and critique, their work reveals that sociomaterial struggles are complex and entangled. For example, Worktrack attempted to help the unemployed adults form work-related habits through their training program by using elementary school discourse in an attempt to control their bodies. Worktrack students were, for instance, not allowed to use the restroom without a bathroom hall pass. This discourse infantilized Worktrack trainees, most of whom were Black, some of whom had been incarcerated, and all of whom were from the working class.

Thus, Worktrack trainees struggled against this primary school discourse by asserting their status as adults. While the school discourse threatened trainee dignity, the participants stayed with the training program because of the opportunity for both material (job skills) and discursive (high school equivalency) success. Based on this research, GistMackey and Dougherty conclude that [t]he material/discourse ontology and the power/ resistance as struggle, may be most usefully conceptualized when considered together in a construct we label: sociomaterial struggle. We understand social class relations as a sociomaterial struggle, one that accounts for power dynamics that manifest both socially through interactions or discourse, as well as materially through (lack of) physical resources, unmet needs, or autonomy, for instance. (pp. 324–325, emphasis in original)

Hence, these researchers have begun to lay the foundation for theorizing the struggle over discourse and materiality by focusing attention on the ways in which material/­ discourse relations are imbued with power. However, to understand the forces shaping the struggle over discourse and materiality, it is also necessary to consider the struggle over discursive openings and closings.

STRUGGLE OVER DISCURSIVE OPENINGS/CLOSINGS The idea of discursive opening/closure originates from Jürgen Habermas’s (1987) notion of systematically distorted communication. This notion has been carefully reviewed elsewhere (see Deetz, 1992; Meisenbach, 2006; Thackaberry, 2004). Systematic distortion occurs when a dominant ideological position prohibits other positions from being ­articulated (Deetz, 1990). It “usually characterizes an entire communication system” (Thackaberry, 2004, p. 322). Policies are one means by which organizations create and maintain systematic distortion (Deetz, 1992). For example, Dempsey’s (2007) study of a U.S.-based

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philanthropic nonprofit organization revealed that policy was used to strategically privilege certain voices. By tracing the discourse of accountability through her dataset, Dempsey showed that the privileging of a few people produced systematic distortion through bounded voices—voices that are provisionally limited based on legitimacy as determined by organizational policy and culture. Through this type of systematic distortion, organi­ zational policies uphold elite discourse and power by creating structures of meaning that provide limited discursive choices for organizational members (Markham, 2005). Discursive closure represents a subset of systematic distortion in which a particular conflict is suppressed (Thackaberry, 2004). Organizations are sites of discursive ­struggle, wherein discursive closure dissolves particular conflicts and is employed by system regulators such as organizational managers (Thackaberry, 2004). Through discursive closure, cultures impose boundaries on the interpretation of self and other (Nakagawa, 1990). In organizations, this process of closure can be complex, involving an interplay between structural and socio-ideological control processes that can produce a form of cultural closure (Kärreman & Alvesson, 2004). Thus, even when discourse arises within a system or organizational culture that is deemed “open,” there is considerable propensity for the discourse to reproduce the preferred doctrine in the system, eliminating true alternatives (Deetz, 1990). For example, in their CDA of a school board meeting, Mease and Terry (2012) show how the context of race and racism formed the backdrop for rule changes in a board of education meeting in Durham, North Carolina. The authors analyzed two school board meetings, with a particular focus on the distinction between performance and performativity. They discovered that by changing the rules on public comments at board meetings, the largely White board of education prevented community members from identifying problems that did not fit into the preset agenda for the meeting. In this way, the board

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created discursive closure by eliminating means for challenging the dominant meaning systems by opening up the discourse. To challenge dominant meaning systems, organizational members alter constraints on normative notions inherent in meaning structures through discursive openings. Discursive openings provide a forum for the articulation of new ideas. McNamee and Shotter (2004) address this in their discussion of communicative dialogue as a form of “first time creativity” (p. 97). Heath’s (2007) study of a multisector collaboration elaborated on the relationship between discursive openings and creativity. Heath used Deetz’s three-tier process of critical ethnographic analysis, where the initial phase focused on care; the critical phase focused on thought; and the final stage focused on good humor—such as identifying ironies. Using these analytical processes, Heath described the emergence of new d­ ialogic voices as a pathway that leads to “constitutive understandings that were not known or understood prior to the dialogic experience and ultimately led to something new (creativity)” (p. 157). Discursive openings therefore provide venues for expression that grant the opportunity for using a neverbefore-heard legitimized voice (Deetz, 1995). Deetz (1990) identifies three types of discursive opening processes. Meta­ communication allows individuals to locate and evaluate the inconsistencies within interpretive schema that often go unnoticed. Rhetoric also aids in opening discourse by authorizing adversarial organizational positions for discussion. Finally, as a last option, organizational members may need to use strategy to force open the discourse. Each of these approaches question discourse as static, allowing individuals the opportunity to investigate and possibly redefine themselves culturally and individually. For instance, Pal and Dutta (2013) demonstrate how to use a culture-centered approach to recenter a local cultural logic, which reopens the possibility for local meanings to compete with the neoliberal and colonial discourses in India.

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Not only have organizational communication researchers explored discursive closure and discursive openings separately, but they have also been intrigued with the struggle between opening and closing discourse. For example, Christensen et  al. (2015, 2017) identified possible discursive closures and discursive openings through what they call the license to critique. Specifically, these researchers showed that by keeping the meaning of sustainability open-ended, and by encouraging ongoing critique of sustainability processes, it is possible to continue to renew sustainability practices in organizations. Woo et al. (2022), in turn, used Glaser and Strauss’s grounded theory techniques to analyze a collaboration between generalists and specialists, finding that although discursive closure privileging specialists tended to happen in short-term planning, over the long term, processes were developed that kept the discourse open to input from both generalists and specialists. Finally, Thackaberry’s (2004) analysis of a wildland safety study is perhaps the most deliberate search for discursive openings. She analyzed the three phases of the safety report (phase 1: problems; phase 2: possible solutions; phase 3: recommendations), to identify places where new language allowed for discursive openings. By tracing discourse through these phases, Thackaberry identified discursive openings, and then ultimately discursive closure, through these texts. Taken as a whole, these studies illustrate the struggle over discursive openings and closures. However, these studies only begin to hint at an emerging struggle with which CDA researchers in organizational communication are faced, which is the struggle over difference.

STRUGGLE OVER DIFFERENCE The most intense struggle CDA scholars face, at least at the time of this writing, is the struggle over difference. This struggle can be

seen not just in the analytical tensions of difference, such as race, gender, sexuality, and social class, but also over placement and legitimacy of research. In the field of organizational communication, feminist research represented the first CDA work that investigated the struggle for recognition. As Ashcraft (2015) wrote very convincingly, feminism has its own history that is both separate from, and yet woven together with, critical theory. Feminist CDA work focuses on discursive struggle against patriarchy and paternalistic practices that limit women and minoritized men. In the organizational communication discipline, feminist research focused on discourse often has an intersectional sensibility (see also Chapter 30 in this volume). Often, this work utilizes Black Feminist Thought, a form of Feminist standpoint theory, for guidance (see also Chapters 7 and 8 in this volume). Work by Allen (1998, 2000), Davis (2018), and Collins (1986) shaped this small, but important, body of qualitative organizational communication research. Using feminist theory in her discourse analysis, Forbes (2002) interviewed five Black women managers who lived and worked in Jamaica to identify how women internalize masculine norms and values in the workplace through their discursive choices. Yet, although these women “chose” masculine discourses, these discourses were also the only ones available that were associated with organizational success. As a result, although these women internalized masculine discourses, they were not granted the privileges associated with those norms and values. Hence, the women in Forbes’ study reinforced masculine norms in organizations. The findings are reminiscent of Wood and Conrad’s (1983) theorizing on the paradox of the professional woman. Professionalism is tightly aligned with masculinity, Wood and Conrad noted. Women cannot be masculine and female at the same time. As a result, women are unlikely to be perceived as “professional.” Although there is now a robust body of  organizational communication research

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exploring gender and discourse, research on race, organizing, and discourse is much more anemic—although a recent body of work (e.g., Ballard et al., 2020; Cooper and Mitra, 2018; Kvam, 2017; see also Chapter 8 in this volume) is very promising for growth in this area. Brenda Allen has repeatedly called for the problematization of universalizing paradigms that obscure difference while simultaneously privileging a dominant group (Allen, 2011). In 2007, Allen once again reminded organizational communication scholars that “the discipline draws from and disseminates white universalistic paradigms without problematizing or even acknowledging their Eurocentric limits, thereby perpetuating ‘a pattern of Eurocentric intellectual domination’ (Shome, 1996, p. 49)” (p. 259). Whiteness as discourse has received some dedicated attention by organizational communication scholars who use CDA. Diane Grimes (2001, 2002), for example, analyzed whiteness in both organizational research (2001) and in magazines and journal articles written for practitioners (2002), providing the first CDA of how Eurocentric intellectual domination is sustained. She identified two interlinked meaning systems, White privilege and White dominance, that sustain Eurocentric domination. White privilege occurs regardless of White peoples’ beliefs in White supremacy. Grimes articulates White privilege as something that cannot be refused. These failures to refuse privilege are articulated in uncomfortable double negatives that reveal both racism and privilege in common interactions. For example, White male drivers cannot refuse to not be pulled over by the police, an experience common for Black men. Similarly, White women cannot refuse to not have store personnel follow them around a store, an experience common for Black women. White privilege, according to Grimes (2001), has led to White dominance, meaning that Whites—especially White, middle- and upper-class males—dominate business, government, and other powerful arenas, and that

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White ways of knowing and engaging with the world are assumed to be the right ways of knowing and engaging with the world. In this way, whiteness is both unmarked and distanced in language. Grimes (2002) uses these insights in her comparative analysis of popular press diversity texts. She discovered three underlying discourses about whiteness. Interrogating Whiteness occurs through “naming, unmasking, and de-centering whiteness” (p. 390). Re-centering Whiteness occurs when differences are acknowledged but linked to stereotypes. Advocated changes are surface level, offering a false inclusiveness that never fully engages with the concerns of other groups. Masking Whiteness depends on obscuring and naturalizing whiteness as a norm, while simultaneously insisting on its superiority. Only the articles that interrogate whiteness provide movement toward dismantling whiteness norms. In contrast, re-centering whiteness and masking whiteness uses the language of diversity to reinforce whiteness as the universal standard in organizational practice. More recently, Ferguson and Dougherty (2022) interviewed self-identified Black professionals to explore how assumptions of whiteness create an untenable work life for Black professionals. Specifically, in their thematic analysis of interview transcripts, they discovered that discourses ­surrounding professionalism were coded White. As a result, Black workers who identified as professionals were faced with the impossible situation of needing to be White while being (in) a Black body. This paradox was experienced as double binds linked to discourse, performance, and embodiment. The Black professionals in this study managed this paradox either by conforming to or resisting Discourses of Whiteness. Both forms reinforce vicious cycle process outcomes that reinforce overarching discursive assumptions aligning whiteness with professionalism. Ultimately, Ferguson and Dougherty’s analysis demonstrates “how professionalism

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discourses constrain, control, expand, and complicate the participants’ work lives, and provides us with a novel view of the White privilege embedded in discourses of professionalism” (p. 23). While in its nascent stages, organi­ zational communication researchers have also begun to turn their attention toward colonial and postcolonial theory (Cruz & Sodeke, 2021), as can be seen in the recent Management Communication Quarterly forum on “Decolonizing Organizational Communication” (Pal et  al., 2022; see also Chapter 9 in this volume). Although the forum itself is not grounded in CDA, it does provide CDA scholars with opportunities to explore the struggle over difference. For example, McDonald’s portion of the forum (Pal et al., 2022) articulated the relationship between the English language and knowledge in the academy. Because English is the standard in academic publishing, those whose native language is not English are at a distinct disadvantage in research and publishing, causing non-English ways of knowing to be erased and segregated from organizational communication studies. Discursive colonization can also be observed in corporate spaces in the Global South, as is exemplified by Karikari’s (2022) research. This research is distinctive from many of the other studies cited in this chapter because Karikari used CDA as a method (and not just as methodology). Specifically, the author used historical discourse analysis (HAD), as articulated by Reisigl and Wodak (2016). HDA uses five discursive strategies that connect talk to historical contexts: (1) nomination strategies; (2) prediction strategies; (3) argumentation strategies; (4) perspectivization strategies; and (5) mitigation and intensification strategies. Taken together, these strategies show how people select, articulate, promote, and link to larger meaning systems, as well as the emotional intensity with which the discourse is presented. Through this analysis, Karikari (2022) discovered that speaking English

was discursively linked with what it means to be a professional, demonstrating the ways in which neoliberal discourses, colonialism, and organizational culture can become intertwined in organizational discourse. For example, in the analysis, Karikari linked the history of colonialism in Ghana with the current use in everyday corporate discourse: Here, an important structural consequence of the use of English in Ghana is colonialism; unlike in other contexts, the legacy of colonialism instituted a policy in Ghana where official communication is conducted in English. Therefore, while this participant views the use of English as merely a matter of  convenience, Fanon (2008) argued that its adoption and use is the result of a condition forced on the colonized and later accepted for various reasons, including as a way of transcending ­ social  and economic status among the formerly ­colonized. (p. 161)

Through his analysis, Karikari provides an excellent example of the CDA project of understanding the struggle for meaning within an historical and contextual space. Other scholars who study colonial and postcolonial discourse provide direction for how CDA can center the subaltern—communities and cultures that have had their history, knowledge, and presence erased in mainstream society (Pal, 2014), and marginalized people from the Global South (Cruz & Sudeke, 2021)—so as to allow knowledge to emerge that decenters colonizer logic.

CONCLUSIONS We began this chapter by articulating CDA as a methodology, meaning it represents a type of research design logic, rather than a precise method or analytical technique. But what does this mean for qualitative organizational communication scholars who wish to engage in CDA? More importantly, how can these scholars retain the edginess that characterizes the best CDA work, while avoiding the mundanity that seems to

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permeate much of this work? We discuss these questions in this final section by arguing for a big tent CDA, a sustained focus on struggle, an unapologetic focus on power, analysis through suspicion and hope, and retaining a complexity orientation toward discourse.

Big Tent CDA First, we call for a big tent (Denzin, 2008; Tracy, 2010) style CDA. By this, we mean that qualitative organizational communication researchers who wish to engage in CDA should keep CDA open for a wide array of scholarship exploring the relationship between discourse and power. A big tent CDA is one way of retaining discursive openings, while those who push for a more standardized version of CDA seem to be comfortable with a more closed and routine array of positionalities and possibilities in their research findings (e.g., Leitch & Palmer, 2010). Given the renewed recognition that some discourse studies marginalize certain groups of people (Ashcraft & Allen, 2003; Chakravartty et  al., 2018), pushing for a more tightly controlled version of CDA limits the analytical imaginative of CDA to discursive processes we already understand. Yet, as we move toward understanding power and discourse through a more diverse set of perspectives, it is critical that we stay open to alternative ways of engaging with the world. Big tent CDA will allow for such a move (Chouliaraki & Fairclough, 2010).

Sustained Focus on Struggle As we have demonstrated throughout this chapter, one of the most common features of organizational CDA research is that it focuses on struggle. Yet, despite the frequent use of this language, most organizational communication researchers assume a common understanding of this term. As a result, we know surprisingly little about what struggle looks,

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sounds, and feels like. There has been limited theorizing on the nature of struggle (for exceptions, see Ashcraft, 2013; Dougherty & Goldstein Hode, 2016; Fleming & Spicer, 2008; Gist-Mackey & Dougherty, 2021). If  CDA scholars in the organizational communication discipline are to continue to focus on struggle, then we should do so with greater attention and thought in theorizing discursive struggles.

Unapologetic Focus on Power A focus on power is the key link between CDA and other critical organizational communication scholars. The focus on the relationship between discourse and power has fundamentally shifted what we know about power and how it operates in contemporary society (Harding, 2004). Power must retain its central space in CDA methodology, and that central space needs to start with theorizing and continue through the analysis and discussion of research findings. For this reason, we encourage critical organizational communication scholars to attend unapologetically to power as a central issue in discourse studies.

Analysis through Suspicion—but also Hope Critical organizational communication scholars generally tend to enter a research domain with a sense of suspicion. They are suspicious about organizational communication processes and outcomes that may seem benign, or even benevolent. Through this suspicion, they can pinpoint the power practices undergirding these processes and then critique those practices. This is important work. However, it is equally important for critical organizational communication scholars to balance their suspicion with hope. As Gist-Mackey and Dougherty (2021) argue, although particular discourses can be problematic, the goals and objectives of those

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discourses can provide a hopeful j­ umping-off place for critical organizational communication scholars who want to leave their research cites at least a little bit improved. It is important to not only critique what is, but to identify a potentially fruitful path forward toward a more just organizational space.

Retaining a Complexity Orientation toward Discourse Although some organizational discourse scholars have bemoaned the overly complex framing of organizational discourse studies (e.g., Alvesson & Kärreman, 2011; Leitch & Palmer, 2010), we suggest that, instead, CDA scholars—and critical organizational communication scholars more particularly— should continue to lean into that complexity. Multilevel, multiform, comparative, and material engagements are what make for, in our opinion, the most interesting and enduring CDA research in the field of organi­ zational communication. Let’s continue to defy expectations and conventions to retain the fuzzy boundaries that have always defined CDA methodology in qualitative organizational communication research.

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27 Past, Present, and Future Analysis of Digital Work in Qualitative Organizational Communication Research L u i s a R u g e - J o n e s , W i l l i a m C . B a r l e y, a n d J e f f r e y W. Tr e e m

This chapter examines the use of digital methods in qualitative organizational communication research—how we leverage digital methodological tools for qualitative inquiry, and how we use qualitative methods to study the relationship between the digital world and organizing processes. However, rather than merely reviewing research on digital work, we seek to start a conversation around three arguments. First, we interrogate the current dualism between “digital as virtual life” and “inperson as real life.” As we review studies of qualitative digital methods in organizational communication, we notice that many studies are transferring methods from in-person to digital when in-person is inaccessible or untenable for the researcher. We often talk, in our research, about the ideal qualitative space being in-person and the backup qualitative space being virtual. We argue that this distinction, though sometimes methodologically useful, is an artificial distinction that can easily paint digital qualitative methods as

a fallback option. Instead, we need to look at the value-added of inquiry into organizational communication when we study organizing in a digital (computerized), virtual (simulated), or online (interconnected) space. Second, given the need to turn away from this dualism, we consider the core tenets of qualitative inquiry: self-reflexivity, context, and thick description (Tracy, 2020). Selfreflexivity refers to “people’s careful consideration of the ways in which their past experiences, points of view, and roles impact their interactions with and interpretations of, any particular interaction or context” (Tracy, 2020, p. 2). Self-reflexivity calls on researchers to reflect on their own relationship to their research sites, to their participants, and to their interactions as they navigate a study. In organizational communication, scholars call on us to consider how our own implicit biases and positions will affect the research process (e.g., Gist-Mackey & Kingsford, 2020; Jensen et al., 2020). Context foregrounds a key distinction between qualitative and quantitative

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work: qualitative work seeks to be deeply situated in a specific time and place. Rather than creating generalizable results, qualitative research focuses on the particulars of a research site and communicative phenomenon within a given context. Researchers, then, engage in continual situated sensemaking to “build larger knowledge claims about the bigger picture” (Tracy, 2020, p. 3), and to create resonant and transferable findings (Tracy, 2010). Thick description is “the way researchers immerse themselves in a culture, investigate the particular circumstances present in that scene, and only then move toward grander statements and theories” (Tracy, 2020, p. 3). Closely tied to context, thick description helps the researcher capture and become embedded in a scene, moving beyond the surface observations (e.g., what we see or hear) to notice details such as cultural norms, communication patterns, or nonverbal and relational interactions. We argue that these three tenets should be a focus of qualitative studies, regardless of the nature of the space we are gathering and analyzing data within (e.g., online or in-person). Third, we encourage organizational communication scholars to engage in research that broadens our understanding of how organizing happens in digital life and spans across co-present and in-person spaces. In a world where organizing goes beyond a traditional in-person organization (e.g., new norms of working from home; hidden and distributed organizations; and fully virtual workplaces with no shared physical space), we need to consider the role of digital methodologies and digital work practices in our pursuit of knowledge around what it means to organize. Throughout this chapter, we use the term “digital work” to capture organizing that occurs through mediated communication. To support these arguments, we first review past research on digital work and highlight how different methodological choices have embodied the three core tenets of qualitative inquiry over the last four decades. We subsequently explore how this research informs

our current conceptualization and analysis of digital work. In turn, we draw on past and present studies to reflect on the praxis of analyzing digital work by employing digital methods. We conclude by offering best practices for the use of qualitative analysis methods in co-present and digital spaces. Hence, we give recommendations for continued conversations in this space, keeping in mind the core tenets of qualitative inquiry.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF QUALITATIVE RESEARCH ON DIGITAL WORK This section reviews major claims that qualitative analyses of digital work have introduced to organizational communication over the past decades. We organize this review between what we see as three epochs of qualitative scholarship on digital work, marked by a distinct set of analytic commitments, objectives, and outcomes. Doing so lets us build several claims about how qualitative analyses of digital work advanced theories of organizations and technology, and to present opportunities and challenges for future research. This review is not intended to be exhaustive.

The Rise of Digital Work: Contesting Deterministic Views of Technology’s “Effects” As personal digital computers proliferated in society in the 1980s, scholarship questioned whether and how these technologies might affect workplaces. At that moment, the predominant theoretical approaches to conceptualizing technology drew on deterministic arguments about how these tools would monolithically shape workers via processes such as deskilling or automating (e.g., Braverman, 1974; Chandler, 1977). Qualitative researchers challenged these deterministic assertions through thick descriptions of the social

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dynamics underlying new technology’s “effects” on communication processes (Barley, 1986; Leonard-Barton, 1988). Zuboff (1989), for example, drew upon in-depth interviews with workers in various organizational contexts to examine some of the early and largely unintended implications that the computerization of work had for individual jobs. Zuboff found that computers influenced white-collar work in dramatic ways; for example, by reducing natural opportunities for social interactions and creating feelings of isolation in the workplace. Moreover, Barley’s (1986) study of the adoption of Computational Tomography (CT) machines in hospitals showed that social dynamics within the workplace mediated the outcomes by which technologies would either challenge or reify existing organizational power structures. Through qualitative study of these new technology-embedded contexts, we uncovered new findings about organizing and interactions. Qualitative organizational communication scholarship also challenged early assumptions about how the features of new media would shape organizational communication dynamics. Early theories of computer-mediated communication proposed that new media would influence organizational communication in predictable ways. For example, media richness research claimed that workers would adopt technologies by rationally considering the information requirements of a situation, using richer media for ambiguous tasks and leaner media when tasks were straightforward (Daft et al., 1987). Qualitative researchers, again, turned to contextualized accounts of digital work to challenge these theories. Markus (1994) observed email use in a large professional service organization and showed that managers engaged in reflexivity as they chose communication media. Using thick descriptions of participants’ rationales for choosing when to email and when not, Markus offered compelling counter-evidence to media richness’ claims. For example, participants often adopted email when engaging

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in complex business negotiations because its properties afforded the creation of a record that could be used for later references. Other scholarship used qualitative methods to investigate how communication factors like social influence shaped which technologies workers adopted, as well as their perceptions of those technologies (Schmitz & Fulk, 1991). Organizations increasingly turned to the implementation of digital technologies (such as email and digital information repositories) to facilitate increased productivity and innovation. A recurring finding, however, was that these digital technologies produced varying and unpredictable outcomes (Poole & DeSanctis, 1992). Qualitative scholarship helped explain these dynamics by foregrounding the important role that communication plays in the adoption and implementation of technologies. Multiple field studies of technology implementation showed that the “success” or “failure” of a technology hinged upon how organization members negotiated the meanings and use of digital tools (Orlikowski et al., 1995; Tyre & Orlikowski, 1994). These contextualized accounts showed that communicative framing around meaning-making of a technology (Orlikowski & Gash, 1994) and prior history with already existing tools (Orlikowski et al., 1995; Yates et al., 1999) influenced its success, especially during the early phases of implementation when employees were open to negotiating how the tool fitted into their work lives (Tyre & Orlikowski, 1994). As digital technologies entered workplaces en masse, qualitative researchers repeatedly offered reflexive accounts challenging organizational scholars’ initial theorizing about technology. These contextualized descriptions of technologies under negotiation allowed researchers to advance predominantly rational and deterministic theories by demonstrating intricate communication dynamics surrounding negotiations of digital work. Their contributions continued as digital technologies shifted toward being mundane tools in workplaces.

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Normalizing Digital Work: Recognizing the Duality of Technology in Practice As digital technologies expanded in popularity in the 1990s, their use in daily work became commonplace, marking the second epoch of studies of digital work. Organizational scholarship began documenting how digital technologies had become integrated into everyday work practices. Qualitative analyses advanced theory by consistently reminding scholars to attend to the contextualized and contingent ways that digital technologies renegotiated organizing. Several ethnographic studies revealed the increasing role technical experts played in contemporary work, while also observing a growing tendency to delegitimize technical expertise (Barley & Bechky, 1994; Orr, 1996). Others examined the important role of organizational communication dynamics in moderating global patterns in technology adoption. One well-known qualitative case study of Sematech, for example, challenged functional approaches to technology by revealing the complex dynamics by which organizations cooperated in an increasingly digital world (Browning et al., 1995). Other field studies highlighted the increasingly central role digital technologies would play in innovation (Hargadon & Sutton, 1997), knowledge sharing (Ackerman, 1998), and distributed coordination and decision-making (Tracy & Tracy, 1998a, 1998b). Practice perspectives emerged as a dominant theoretical vantage point from which to understand digital work. Analysis of organizing practices showed that digital technologies only influenced organizations when people used them in a manner that meaningfully shifted their work practices (Orlikowski, 2000). Thus, organizational scholars turned to studies of how workers incorporated technologies in ways that either reinforced or transformed their work (Edmondson et  al., 2001; Leonardi, 2007; Leonardi & Jackson, 2004; Treem et al., 2015).

Qualitative analyses grounded in practice theory demonstrated how workers’ local identities influenced their use of tools. For example, Jian (2007) investigated the adoption of an enterprise software system, showing that workers interpreted new technologies through lenses of understanding relative to their local work practices. Since organizational identities are complex and variant, especially across departmental units, local interpretations of new technologies were often at odds with the perceptions of technology implementers. These differing interpretations highlighted tensions around the potential appropriation of new tools and helped explain why workers resisted a new technology. Other studies reinforced the observation that workers interpreted new technologies in the context of their preexisting practices, demonstrating that when analysts examined how workers adopted digital tools, they often found ways to use them to reinforce preexisting structural arrangements (Leonardi, 2009). These contextualized accounts extended theories of digital work by reminding scholars that the functional adoption of a technology was not synonymous with that technology affecting organizational dynamics. Recognizing the importance of practice in digital work revealed just how entwined technologies had become with important organizational communication dynamics. Qualitative scholars documented the myriad functions that new digital tools enabled in the workplace. Here, again, qualitative analysis complicated functional notions about technology’s intended and realized roles in the workplace. One function of technology was to manage the storage and exchange of knowledge throughout an organization (Wasko & Faraj, 2000). Qualitative scholarship challenged the prevalent “container metaphor” for knowledge management technologies as simple repositories of information that served as a communal resource for organizational behavior. Multiple field studies examining the use of knowledge management platforms

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demonstrated that workers increasingly viewed engagement with these tools as a stage for (re)negotiating their role in organizations, thus demonstrating the role that participation in digital spaces played in assigning expertise in organizations (Leonardi & Treem, 2012). Qualitative scholars offered early recognition that accessibility, visibility, and awareness afforded by digital tools would be key aspects of contemporary work environments (Vaast, 2004). Given the political entanglements between expertise and status, scholars also began observing how information systems could be regarded as spaces for strategically negotiating individual expertise, which required new skill sets (Leonardi, 2007; Levina & Vaast, 2005). Other researchers observed that online spaces offered opportunities to connect and empower employees’ collective actions of resistance in new ways (Gossett & Kilker, 2006). Qualitative scholarship also challenged functional accounts of technology by demonstrating how digital tools were enlisted strategically in cross-occupational power dynamics. Field studies emphasized how knowledge workers mobilized digital analyses as warrants to support their positions in ongoing conflicts with coworkers (Bechky, 2003; Carlile, 2002). Others examined how virtual tools allowed workers to produce new forms of knowledge that could inform decision-making practices in organizations (Dodgson et  al., 2007). Moreover, research emphasized how representations of knowledge enabled and constrained crossfunctional teams to integrate complex knowledge (Bailey et al., 2012; Barley et al., 2012; Bourgoin & Muniesa, 2016; Dossick et al., 2014; Groleau et al., 2011; Neff et al., 2010; Nicolini et al., 2012). Qualitative studies of digital work deepened organizational communication scholars’ understanding of the communication challenges that would emerge as organizations shifted toward an increasingly virtual work environment. Beyond functional challenges associated with different media, qualitative

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research revealed that distributed teams would face differing dynamics than in-person teams (Huysman et  al., 2003; Majchrzak et  al., 2000). Qualitative fieldwork revealed how virtual workers were less likely to perceive subtle differences in the norms, assumptions, and practices of their collaborators’ work contexts, which led to emergent social challenges on distributed teams (Cramton, 2001). Importantly, technological mediation influenced the visibility of collaborators’ work contexts, which led to emergent conflicts in distributed teams (Sole & Edmondson, 2002). In sum, the complications revealed by practice-based qualitative work coincided with growing arguments for the constitutive role of communication in the construction of technology and work (Cooren et  al., 2012; Heaton & Taylor, 2002; Taylor et al., 2001). Scholars challenged notions of technology as “capturing” knowledge and argued for characterizing knowledge as an accomplishment achieved through ongoing communicative practices of sensemaking within and around technologies (Kuhn & Jackson, 2008). Others called for more attention to the ways in which digital tools acted as material texts that played an active role in the ongoing constitution of organizational action (Ashcraft et al., 2009; Cooren, 2004).

The Virtualization of Work: Social Media, Sociomateriality, and Digital Organizing Around 2010, qualitative organizational communication scholars had begun to recognize that information and communication technologies had permeated our work lives, both formally and informally, and that technology use was occurring in complex multimodal, temporally-situated, cross-platform ways (Stephens et  al., 2008). The proliferation of these technologies has not always been positive—for example, leading workers to develop new practices to manage

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interruptions afforded by a complex ICT environment (Jensen et al., 2022). Qualitative organizational communication scholars began to build new conceptual tools to explain the complex embedding of technologies in every aspect of work. Drawing upon situated grounded inquiry, scholars began developing sociomaterial perspectives, which extended practice approaches to recognize the duality of agencies (human and nonhuman) associated with technologies and work practices (Martine et  al., 2015; Mazmanian et al., 2014; Orlikowski, 2007; Orlikowski & Scott, 2008). Social media platforms emerged as a dominant communication technology, for both internal and public-facing use. Qualitative organizational communication scholarship was present at the onset of this revolution (Erhardt & Gibbs, 2014; Gibbs et al., 2013). Most importantly, qualitative researchers started to re-examine how the new media environment held implications for classic concepts of interest in organizational communication. For example, they used qualitative methods to examine how job applicants’ personal online presence led to shifts in practices, expectations, and ethics of job selection (Berkelaar, 2014; Berkelaar & Buzzanell, 2015). Others examined how new organizational members appropriated social communication tools as a mechanism to enable socialization (Woo et al., 2023). One dominant thread in studies of social media has interrogated how performance and impression management practices are amplified in digital work contexts. At an individual level, researchers found that online workspaces are environments in which individuals can develop complex communicative practices to manage perceptions of expertise (Erhardt & Gibbs, 2014; Leonardi & Treem, 2012; Treem, 2012, 2016). These scholars recognized the importance of managing the visibility of information (Leonardi, 2014). Others have extended these arguments by interrogating the increasing value of hiddenness in digital spaces. In their case study

of milk banking, Jones and Tracy (2022) showed how workers engaged in complex tactics to make important resources available, in order to support their constituents while also attempting to hide from potential critics in online and offline spaces. Recent research has also examined the role digital technologies play in negotiations of power in contemporary organi­ zations. For example, some have explored how the affordances of new media are appropriated to enable resistance and labor organi­ zing (Salamon, 2022; Südkamp & Dempsey, 2021). Others have employed qualitative methods to challenge discourses of the democratizing influences of enterprise social media by uncovering the practices by which power dynamics play out in online spaces to (re)enforce established structures of hierarchy (Kim, 2018; Mazmanian & Beckman, 2018). It is particularly important to understand these dynamics alongside the growing prevalence of globally-distributed virtual work (Gibbs et al., 2015; Leonardi & Rodriguez-Lluesma, 2013), which is characterized by challenges of reproducing status hierarchies in online contexts (Kim, 2018) as well as unique communicative dynamics by which virtual teams negotiate their identities (Gibbs et al., 2021; Treem et al., 2021). Finally, qualitative organizational communication research has begun to explore how complex computational tools, such as automation (Barrett et  al., 2011; Beane & Orlikowski, 2015) and simulation technologies (Barley, 2015; Leonardi, 2012), play into communication processes. This research recognizes that these tools coincide with the need to develop new skills and strategies in the deployment and use of mediated communication technologies (Barley et al., 2020).

Section Summary This brief review has offered an overview of the important roles that qualitative organizational communication research has played

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in studies of digital work. This review shows four themes emerging between the 1980s and now, each of which has resulted from qualitative researchers’ continued commitment to the value of self-reflexivity, context, and thick description. First, qualitative organizational communication has served an important role in repeatedly challenging the lure of deterministic stances toward technology. By contextualizing workers’ experiences with digital work, qualitative scholars challenge assertions about anticipated “effects” of new technologies by showing how digital tools are embedded within the complex communicative negotiations. Second, qualitative organizational communication research has historically been among the vanguard of scholarship identifying how new technologies will produce complex, unintended influences. Again, we believe that the “grounded-in-action” nature of qualitative research helps explain this pattern. Commitments to thick description have allowed qualitative scholars to understand which technologies matter to contemporary workers while they are interpreting new tools. Third, qualitative interpretations have allowed us to gain insight into power and systems as a context for digital organizing. Finally, qualitative organizational communication researchers have been leaders in theory development, thus providing conceptual tools for (re)imagining how and when technologies affect workplaces in novel ways. Next, we discuss how our history of digital work studies in organizational communication informs our current conceptualization and analysis of digital work.

BLURRING THE DISTINCTION BETWEEN ONLINE AND OFFLINE Our review of past studies helps us to examine our current understanding of the complexities of studying digital work. A fundamental challenge to studying digital work, particularly from a qualitative standpoint, is that work is

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never solely digital. By that we mean that any form of digital communication merely operates as a representation of something—human action, an algorithmic output, a group interaction, and so on. Digital communication can be examined in and of itself, in similar ways to how we might analyze any text, transcript, or physical observation. Yet, if we confine our analysis to the communicative output, we are likely to miss many of the mechanisms that influence communicative processes. Methodologically, it can be easy to overlook these embodied, invisible, aspects of digital work, because one of the most attractive aspects of the growth of digital communication in organizing is the availability of visible forms of communication. Giving in to this attraction, however, may lead analysts to miss an opportunity for truly capturing the context of the digital space. Widespread access to emails, chats, message boards, intranets, social media platforms, and other communication technologies make it easier than ever for researchers to gather data for potential analysis. Indeed, scholars have used the availability of digital communication in creative ways, such as analyzing the emails of workers involved in corrupt activity over time to understand how they conceal activity in plain sight (Aven, 2015) or Twitter posts of workers that shared a specific hashtag to better understand the interplay between individual and organizational identification (Dailey, 2022). This scholarship reflects how digital communication broadens the scope, diversity, and scale of qualitative data available to researchers. However, for many qualitative organizational communication researchers, simply having access to digital communication data only tells part of the communicative story. The actual words, text, pictures, code, and so forth available online can inform what actions people have taken, and what topics have been examined, but they provide limited insight into how or why that communication occurred. Digital communication is always a product of, and exists within, a web of human

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and technological relations. Fundamentally, many of the questions we are interested in as organizational communication scholars center on those relations. Therefore, in studying these questions, it can be problematic to treat digital communication as distinct or abstracted from the processes allowing that communication to exist. For example, Leonardi and Treem (2012) examined the use of a new digital knowledge management (KM) tool among a team of IT service technicians, which involved the workers fielding service requests sent through the KM, and then entering in a summary of the work into the KM for others to view. Leonardi and Treem were interested in how workers on the team, who had not previously interacted in their roles, assessed the knowledge of their peers and determined who should be assigned what jobs. Conveniently, all the workers’ entries into the system and associated job assignments were visible and could be reviewed. So, in theory, analyzing the entries would replicate the process the workers themselves engaged in. However, an examination of the actual text entries into the shared KM system showed distinct qualitative differences in the technical knowledge, confidence, and richness of description communicated by individual workers after completing service jobs. Associating these differences with job assignments led to the finding that individuals were using the perceived rigor and quality of the communication in the KM system as an indicator of a worker’s knowledge in a particular domain or task. Yet demonstrating that workers used available, visible digital communication in the KM system to assess the knowledge of peers only reveals a small fraction of the work going on in relation to how the technology is used. Interviews with the workers revealed that many members of the team were aware that entries in the KM system were being used to evaluate individuals’ knowledge. Therefore, some workers strategically elaborated or restricted entries to position

themselves as more, or less, knowledgeable in areas. Observations of individual technicians engaged in daily work showed that they would sometimes search message boards about service issues to find language they could appropriate to make themselves appear more knowledgeable to others. The communication that eventually appeared in the KM system was not an objective reflection of an individual’s work on a particular job, but rather the product of purposive decisions and actions that resulted in some communication being made available on a digital platform. Thus, the methods and analytic frame a researcher adopts should always be aligned with the ontological and epistemological foundations of the inquiry. In this spirit, the argument that the study of digital data in contexts of organizing can never be solely confined to the digital is grounded (broadly) in the framework of sociomateriality, a metatheoretical stance that views the agency of humans interacting with technology and the possibilities for action afforded by technology as inextricably linked (Orlikowski & Scott, 2008). Though there are different camps of research on sociomateriality (for discussion see Cooren, 2020; Faulkner & Runde, 2012; Kautz & Jensen, 2013), each embraces the idea that an analysis of digital organizational communication ought to be informed by far more than an examination of digital outputs or inputs. A framework of sociomateriality recognizes that digital objects have different material aspects; for example, the features of technology that make some actions possible and prevent others or that digital objects do not come to exist fully formed, but rather are the product of other objects, such as computer code, broadband networks, and software interfaces. Additionally, digital objects matter in that they are encountered, appropriated, and deployed in contexts of organizing as individuals and groups pursue situated goals. Scholarship exploring the affordances, or possibilities for action, associated with the use of digital communication tools in

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organizational settings (e.g., Gibbs et  al., 2013; Leonardi, 2011) has embraced this framework. Because this work focuses on how individuals perceive how they can use digital tools, it is common for researchers to employ primarily qualitative methods in examining the relational enactment of technological affordances in digital contexts. Methodologically, there are some core common elements in studies concerned with the sociomaterial practices of digital communication. In particular, organizational communication researchers must carefully delineate the context of communication they seek to analyze. The clarity of context in analysis is important because, as Leonardi (2015) notes, practices are materially bound, recurrently enacted, temporally emergent, and historically influenced. There are a number of actions qualitative researchers can take when studying digital organizational communication to represent the context of analysis in effective ways: • Provide detailed examinations of digital tools, infrastructure, and training. If researchers take seriously the materiality of technology, then studies need to provide explicit discussions of the specific features of the digital tools used by organi­zational members. The reader needs to have a clear picture of what the digital technology being analyzed looks like in practice. Moreover, research should describe the surrounding infrastructure allowing organizational members to access digital tools and any education or guidance users are given regarding the technology. • Consider temporality. It is difficult to analyze practices or processes with single-time crosssectional data, as use of digital tools are commonly patterned, recurrent, and iterative. While there is no specific period of time that is ideal for qualitative observations and analysis of digital work, researchers should have a clear rationale for the selected time periods—and endpoints— of data analysis. • Focus on relational materiality. Researchers should consider what individuals can do when engaging in digital communication and what individuals (or units) hope to accomplish when using digital communication. This means considering the

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features of technology alongside the explicit goals of users and designers. Analytically, this means that understanding digital communication use in organizations requires examining both particular actions taken when using technologies and how that technology was developed, implemented, and promoted within a particular organizational context.

Individually and collectively, focusing on these aspects of data analysis highlights the strength of qualitative inquiry for the study of digital organizational communication. Specifically, it emphasizes that a thick description of digital communication necessitates an interrogation and understanding of communicative practices beyond visible digital outputs. Furthermore, it highlights that the context of digital communication is shaped by the nature of technology used as well as the organizational context surrounding use. We see this in the context of studies of social media use, where scholars have noted distinct differences across platforms and among users. Hence, these scholars caution against making broad claims about classes of technologies or users based on isolated contexts of digital communication (e.g., Hargittai, 2018). To date, studies explicitly adopting a sociomaterial framework have overwhelmingly relied on interviews as the primary source of data. Thus, in these studies, the analysis focuses largely on individuals’ perceptions, recollections, and interpretations of using digital technologies (Cecez-Kecmanovic et al., 2014). Prioritizing how people talk about technology use lends analytical attention to the actual use of digital technologies in practice. Yet, as the use of digital technologies becomes routine and ubiquitous in organizations, individuals’ reflections on their experiences and actions will likely become unreliable, because organizational members are often unreliable narrators. There is a need for data analyses that capture the experiences of situated uses of digital tools across organizing contexts. In some instances, this involves analyzing data that capture the behavior of individuals using digital tools. For example, Ellison et al.

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(2020) used eye-tracking devices along with interviews and surveys to analyze instances in which users of social media choose not to click on social media content. Behavioral observations showed that individuals often spent as much time viewing content they did not click on as they did material they did engage with. When coupled with the interview responses, these data enabled a robust analysis of the actions individuals take and the reasoning they provide for specific uses of digital communication. The advantage of analyzing behavioral data—through realtime observations, recordings, or archives— is that they allow for more valid and reliable examinations of how individuals use digital tools in embodied, situated ways. However, to take research in new directions, these data can also be combined with data that capture digital outputs or individuals’ discussions of goals associated with technology use. For instance, take a situation in which a researcher studying a context of digital communication and organizing can gather four different sources of qualitative data: (1) interviews with organizational members about how they view practices of using digital communication tools; (2) observations of workers engaging in daily work practices with digital tools; (3) the digital texts and online interactions that take place during work practices; and (4) discussions (digital or in-person) with co-workers about the work that has or will occur. Although it may seem burdensome to collect this kind of dataset, a researcher with reasonable access to an organizational context could easily gather these data. From a data analysis standpoint, the researcher could then explore—deductively, inductively, or abductively—different kinds of questions: Questions of communicative practices: Are the ways organizational members talk about their digital work consistent with the ways they conduct their digital work (e.g., see Treem, 2016)?

crystallization that support the validity and reliability of one’s analysis. • If the analysis indicates this is not the case, then it prompts questions about why organizational members use digital communication tools in ways that counter or contradict how members view their own work.

• If the analysis indicates this is the case, then it provides an opportunity for triangulation and

Each of these avenues of inquiry are explicitly focused on the analysis of digital data,

Questions of communicative representations: Are the processes by which workers represent their work in digital spaces strategically managed, or enacted without considerations of distinct audiences and goals (e.g., see Barley, 2015)? • If the analysis indicates individuals are strategic about how they attempt to represent their work to others (or choose not to communicate about work in distinct ways), this raises questions related to the mechanisms, motivations, and outcomes driving these processes. • If the analysis indicates workers’ representational practices are not reflexive, this raises questions as to how, and under what circumstances, individuals are unaware of consequences associated with digital communication.

Questions of communicative accomplishments: Do the interpretations of audiences who interact with the digital outputs of worker behavior differ from the goals and intentions of the workers who produced that digital work (e.g., see Leonardi, 2011)? • If the analysis indicates dissonance between a producer’s intended communication and its audiences’ interpreted meanings, this raises questions regarding how the sociomateriality of digital communication contributes to the (de) construction of meaning in organizations. • If the analysis indicates this is not the case, and workers are able to use digital communication to effectively communicate with audiences in desired ways, this raises questions regarding how the sociomateriality of digital communication affords individuals and organizations new opportunities to accomplish communicative goals in ways that may be difficult or impossible in other communicative contexts.

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but in service of answers relative to fundamental questions about processes of organizational communication. The fact that some of the qualitative data are collected, accessed, or produced digitally is not solely illustrative of a particular phenomenon. Rather, digital communication operates both as explanandum, prompting questions of why and how digital communication is utilized in contexts of organizing, and as explanans, helping us understand how digital communication constitutes organizing in different contexts. It is also important to differentiate between forms of qualitative data collection and analysis. Forms of qualitative data collection (i.e., interviews, observations, text corpus, pictures) provide unstructured data in the form of configurations of symbolic representations, such as language and images. These data present opportunities for interpretive analysis, yet they can also be transformed into more structured data that allow for different analytical approaches, including network analysis or various statistical tests. This quantitative analysis of qualitative data is commonly associated with positivist and postpositivist approaches that focus on verification or triangulation— this is explicitly not of concern for many interpretive or critical researchers. However, possibilities for transforming qualitative data are particularly relevant for the study of digital work in organizational communication, because the materiality of digital technologies creates opportunities for researchers to gather and interpret behavioral data traces and data sets of increasing scale (i.e., big data). In the penultimate section of this chapter, we draw on past and present studies to reflect on the praxis of analyzing digital work by employing digital methods.

EMPLOYING QUALITATIVE METHODS IN DIGITAL SPACES During a pandemic and in a culture that is increasingly defined by digital work, numerous scholars are engaging in discussions

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about bringing research methods into the digital world (see also Chapter 34 in this volume). Indeed, online resources, such as the Living with Data database, which includes resources for conducting qualitative research during a global crisis, have become key to understanding how we can move toward practical, ethical analysis across inperson and online spaces. In this section, we look at common ways of analyzing digital data in organizational communication. We discuss analytical methods that scholars have used in their research, what unique opportunities a digital space provides for analysis and interpretation, as well as practical and ethical issues tied to work in these spaces.

Method Transfer Many recent organizational communication studies engage in method transfer—that is, taking traditional in-person methods and moving them to an online space (see also Chapter 18 in this volume). Studies employ hybrid or online interviewing techniques that draw on best practices of semi-structured interviews. Exemplars are Long and Buzzanell’s study of women entrepreneurs’ resistance practices (2022); Ferguson and Dougherty’s (2022) study of Black professionalism and whitewashing; and Noyes’ (2022) study of power relationships in health care groups. Jones and Tracy’s (2022) study of concealment in organizing, similarly, includes observational and interview data, collected both online and in-person. These studies highlight this methods-transfer approach, whereby in-person techniques (e.g., semi-structured interviewing or observational techniques) are used through videoconferencing and other online platforms. Although many of these studies are hybrid in their data collection, they analyze both inperson and digital data as a unified corpus of data. In a time when organizational communication scholars are increasingly turning to hybrid data collection methods for the purpose of accessibility and convenience, it is

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useful to have analytical tools that enable the analysis of these unified, hybrid corpora of data. Thus, digital methods can serve as an alternative space when in-person methods are infeasible. However, it is also important to consider what it would mean to move beyond transferring analytical methods from in-person to digital or hybrid datasets.

Beyond Transfer The general mindset in the abovementioned studies follows the dualism presented in previous sections; that is, in these studies, in-person data are seen as the standard for qualitative inquiry and online data are deemed to be sufficient if in-person processes are unavailable. We would like to challenge this notion. Online and digital data and analysis offer advantages that go beyond what we can capture with inperson data, making digital qualitative research more than just a sufficient replacement for in-person methods. First, virtual interviews can provide insights into organizational communication phenomena that are meaningfully different from the insights that in-person interviews provide. Some scholars argue that it is easier for researchers and participants to build rapport and create comfort in a virtual environment (Ayling & Mewse, 2009; Deakin & Wakefield, 2014; Hanna, 2012). For example, virtual spaces allow participants to change their name, toggle their sound and cameras, and control their interactions with the click of a button. Virtual environments can also alleviate financial and logistical constraints of traveling for data collection (Lobe & Morgan, 2021; O’Connor et al., 2008). In turn, data collected through digital methods can reveal new insights into particular organizational communication questions. However, it is important to consider the environment in which these data were collected when analyzing the content that is shared in this virtual context. A second advantage, recognized in other fields, but still often overlooked by

organizational communication researchers, is how digital methods enable researchers to observe organizing practices that would be invisible when in-person methods are privileged. Hence, using digital spaces creatively in data collection and analysis can open up new areas of inquiry in our field. For example, in a recent forum on ethnography, scholars reflected on some of the opportunities of virtual ethnographic methods. In this forum, Rice argued that “virtual ethnography makes communication technologies visible and present in organizational interactions, even when our participants do not acknowledge their presence” (Taylor et al., 2021, p. 642). Some organizational scholars have started examining these invisible practices. For example, some have studied concealment and disclosure practices in organizations (Jones & Tracy, 2022; McDonald et al., 2020); the anticipatory work in which organizational actors engage outside of interactions (Barley, 2015); how organizational members draw on cultural resources in the creation of a technological artifact (Leonardi, 2011); and hidden, fluid, or distributed organizations (Dobusch & Schoeneborn, 2015; Scott, 2013; Stohl & Stohl, 2007). Analysis of virtual work can capture how technology and organizational practices are deeply intertwined. Through these methods, we can gain new insight into organizational practices, multimodal communication (e.g., private channels and public discussions in virtual meetings), and even asynchronous communication practices that remain concealed through in-person qualitative approaches. In other fields, researchers are using creative analytical methods that celebrate the utility of digital qualitative approaches. CallCummings and Hauber-Özer (2021), for instance, discuss the utility of virtual photovoice techniques and argue that “virtual spaces provide new and potentially more democratic means to [engage in meaningful, emancipatory dialogue with participants]” (p. 3230). In their study, participants were able to talk about their shared photos from the comfort of their own home. This, the authors noted,

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enhanced the quality of the conversations. Yet, organizational communication scholars are also increasingly interested in the use of photovoice to highlight participant voices (rather than impose observer interpretation only) in their analyses and to engage in critical, empowering dialogue in research (e.g., GistMackey & Kingsford, 2020; Wilhoit, 2017; see also Chapter 19 in this volume). Thus, combining creative qualitative scholarship and virtual spaces could provide opportunities for enhancing what we are able to make visible and understand when studying digital work. Organizational communication researchers can use studies conducted in other fields for inspiration, in this regard, such as studies that created virtual game environments (McIlvenny, 2020; Wirth et al., 2012) or that used virtual spaces to access hard-to-reach communities (Kaufmann & Tzanetakis, 2020).

CONCLUSION We close this chapter with a few remarks about key areas we believe should guide qualitative field studies of digital work as we move further into an era when the distinction between digital and non-digital becomes increasingly blurry and problematic. Organizational communication scholars have consistently drawn upon qualitative methods to engage, criticize, and extend theories, and we believe this practice has strong potential as we move into the future. Our conclusions center on two themes: (1) focusing on methods that strategically blur digital and in-person approaches, while (2) maintaining an ongoing awareness and commitment to the core strengths of qualitative work.

Blurring the Lines of Digital and In-Person Methodologies A key theme in recent scholarship has been the recognition that organizational communication

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dynamics are increasingly mediated by technological processes. These dynamics have been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, which has coincided with (and fueled) a massive (re)negotiation of digital, distributed, and virtual work (see also Chapter 34 in this volume). Thus, recent trends toward using digital methods will become even more important for understanding these dynamics. Yet, although studying work online is enticing, it will be important for organizational communication researchers to draw upon situated and embodied methods as well. As recent scholarship has shown (e.g., Jones & Tracy, 2022; Taylor et al., 2021), field methods are uniquely positioned to reveal otherwise invisible communicative labor. Real opportunities exist at the interface between digital and in-person methods to reveal what is hidden in digital work. However, although digital communication is often more accessible to researchers and third parties, we must remain vigilant regarding the complex ethical issues involved in the use of online qualitative methods in these new contexts. We encourage organizational communication researchers to remain especially mindful of issues regarding consent and potential for harm as they analyze digital traces. Increases in access and visibility of online information have made it easier to succumb to the potentials of digital harvesting, and they have made the dangers of participant identification more real than ever. As qualitative researchers, we are obligated to place our participants’ well-being above our capacity to produce research results (for more discussion on ethics in digital qualitative inquiry, see Chapters 18 and 19 in this volume).

Staying Committed to the Tenets of Qualitative Inquiry Throughout this chapter, we have encouraged organizational communication researchers to stay committed to the core tenets of

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qualitative inquiry (Tracy, 2020) as they navigate digital research spaces. First, it is important to consider the messy and invisible communication that occurs in a digital world. Context changes when we move into a digital space. We see examples of organizing that exist outside of physical office space when there is no office to go into. How we observe communicative practices and understand context looks different in these spaces. Creative digital methods can allow researchers to account for new modalities of organizational practices. Thus, we encourage researchers to think about context and consider the time, space, relationships, as well as the source of the artifacts and digital data they have collected, as they conduct their analyses. Second, it is important to consider how we may leverage thick description and how we may “thicken” our data through the use of digital methods. The combination of traditional and creative qualitative methods provides incredible opportunities. Supplementing virtual interviews with photographs, virtual tours, video data, or asynchronous communication archives can allow for deep immersion and understanding of the research context. We call for researchers to use traditional and new methods (e.g., capturing both visible and hidden work practices of digital life) in their analysis of many different work practices in order to produce holistic, rather than isolated, understanding of organizing. Finally, we encourage organizational communication researchers to be self-reflexive when using digital methods in data collection and analysis. Our analytical methods either reinforce or challenge the duality of “digital as virtual” and “in-person as real.” We analyze everything in a similar way, regardless of whether or not it is a digital or in-person space. It is therefore important to reflect on questions like the following when conducting data analysis: What is our own experience with the digital tools we use for data collection and analysis? How might our understanding of these tools differ from our participants? For example, while we may regularly interact

with a variety of technology, that might not be the case for our participants. How do our experiences affect our design and interpretation of our qualitative work? Hence, we encourage organizational communication researchers to stay committed to the tenets of qualitative inquiry as our understanding and use of qualitative data collection and analysis methods in digital spaces evolve. By understanding our past, interrogating our present, and creatively approaching our future, we can uncover new, deeper insights into what it means to organize through communication in a digital world.

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28 Analysis of Tensions and Paradoxes in Qualitative Organizational Communication Research G a i l T. F a i r h u r s t a n d L i n d a L . P u t n a m

As organizational life has grown more complex, paradox and related phenomena have become the new normal (Ashcraft & Trethewey, 2004). Specifically, tensions (in our view, stress-inducing oppositions), contradictions (interdependent oppositions that potentially negate each other), dialectics (negating oppositions with an ongoing dynamic interplay), and paradoxes (persistent oppositions that often result in an ironic or absurd outcome) impact organizational actors through a continuous stream of pushpull dynamics (Fairhurst & Putnam, 2019). A 2016 review of these terms uncovered over 850 publications, on approximately 30 different organizational topics, in 140 different organizational journals. These articles embrace a wide range of theories, including dynamic systems theory, institutional theory, structuration theory, postmodern studies, and critical management studies (Putnam, Fairhurst, & Banghart, 2016). As key contributors to this literature, communication scholars were among the first to

treat paradox as a metatheory (Ashcraft & Trethewey, 2004; Baxter, 2011; Baxter & Montgomery, 1996; Poole & Van de Ven, 1989; Putnam, 1986). Others in organizational communication have embraced paradox as a framework for examining tensions and contradictions on a wide array of topics, including: community organizing (Koschmann & Laster, 2011; Kramer, 2004; Norton & Sadler, 2006), conflict (Donohue, Pugh, & Sabrie, 2014; Putnam & Powers, 2016); control/resistance (Ashcraft, 2005; Cloud, 2005; Mumby, 2005; Murphy, 1998; Pal & Buzzanell, 2013; Papa et al., 1995; Real & Putnam, 2005), disorganizing (Cooren & Caïdor, 2019), healthcare organizing (Olufowote, 2008, 2011), humor (Lynch, 2009; Martin, 2004), identity (Apker et al., 2005; Meisenbach, 2008; Tracy, 2004), innovation (Sheep, Fairhurst, & Khazanchi, 2017), interorganizational relations (Lewis et  al., 2010), intersectionality and discrimination (Ferguson & Dougherty, 2021), legitimation (Zorn, Roper, & Richardson, 2014), organizational change (Barge et  al., 2008;

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Fairhurst et  al., 2002; Jian, 2007; Stoltzfus, Stohl, & Seibold, 2011), participation/collaboration (Medved et al., 2001; Stohl & Cheney, 2001; Wendt, 1998), team dynamics (Gibbs, 2009), technology (Leonardi et  al., 2009, 2010), volunteering (McNamee & Peterson, 2014), and workplace flexibility (Putnam et al., 2014). As noted in key literature reviews (Putnam et al., 2016; Schad et al., 2016), scholars have paid little attention to the selection of methods for paradox research (Andriopoulos & Gotsi, 2017). This may be because “paradox researchers are largely puzzled about how to open up space to unpack the socially constructed nature of paradoxes in their empirical settings” (Andriopoulos & Gotsi, 2017, p. 516). Part of the issue stems from the widespread popularity of grounded theory (GT) as the “go-to” method (Charmaz, 2014; Strauss & Corbin, 1998). Constant comparison, line-by-line coding, analytic memo writing, and theoretical sampling aid in identifying oppositions and responses (Charmaz, 2014). Yet, the vulnerabilities of grounded theory, especially regarding issues of language, have steered organizational communication researchers to other methods, such as merging GT with critical analysis, organizational discourse analysis (ODA), and feminist critiques (e.g., Fyke & Buzzanell, 2013; Mease, 2016; Meisenbach, 2008; Scott & Trethewey, 2008; Sheep et al., 2017). These practices, however, often produce inconsistencies across studies, misconceptions of ODA, and underutilized data (e.g., Fairhurst et al., 2002; Jarzabkowski & Sillince, 2007; Palmer & Dunford, 2002). Another issue that stems from relying too heavily on GT is generating a “laundry list” of tensions that are often devoid of contextual relationships. Too often these problems raise concerns about temporality, scale, materiality, and power, as well as misconceptions of language, communication, and discourse (Fairhurst & Putnam, 2019; Putnam et  al., 2016; Sheep et al., 2017). Communication scholars have taken the lead in developing more fine-grained

qualitative methods to address these concerns (Baxter, 2011; Fairhurst & Putnam, 2019; Mease, 2019). Relying on surveys and interviews to study paradoxes works well for research on cognition (Miron-Spektor et al., 2018), but not for work on communication. Tensional phenomena in organizations are inescapably communicative and marked by adaptively unstable responses (Kreiner et al., 2015); that is, they “stick” in the moment, yet remain malleable, elastic, and transferable to different organizational arenas. This chapter reviews six analytic methods used in studying organizational tensions and paradoxes. Notably, three of these approaches emerged recently; thus, suggesting a burgeoning interest in developing new methods to study tensions. We begin with grounded theory (Charmaz, 2006, 2014) as a benchmark, and move to discourse tracing (LeGreco & Tracy, 2009), contrapuntal analysis (Baxter, 2011), an integrative methodology that combines GT and ODA (Fairhurst & Putnam, 2019), a ventriloquial tensional approach (Cooren & Caïdor, 2019; Nathues et  al., 2021), and applied tensional analysis (Mease, 2019). The six share a number of features, and yet they diverge in other ways (see Table 28.1). All of them, however, confront two key problems: the definitional conundrum of paradox (and related concepts) and sensing paradox in first encounters. Addressing these issues brings a communicative lens to the study of organizational paradoxes, one that moves away from treating it as ancillary to the work on cognitions and perceptions (Fairhurst & Putnam, 2024).

DEFINITIONAL CONUNDRUM In developing and selecting methods to study organizational tensions, Andriopoulous and Gotsi (2017) call for scholars to follow strict protocols for defining and identifying paradox (also see, Smith & Lewis, 2011; Smith et al., 2017). They write:

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Table 28.1  Tensional Analysis Methods Type of Method

Definitional Conundrum

Grounded Theory

Has difficulty going beyond tensions due to line-by-line coding of themes; works well with tensions in struggles Focuses on macro/meso/micro and aids in identifying tensions, contradictions, and paradoxes; less sensitive to capturing dialectics Designed to center on competing discourses and identifies dialectical struggle over time

Discourse Tracing

Contrapuntal Analysis

Integrative Method

Ventriloquial Analysis

Applied Tensional Analysis

Sensing Paradox Phenomena

Senses themes that oppose one another or appear contrary; can aid in identifying dualisms, dualities, and contradictions Can be both inductive or deductive; has a general orientation to change, but does not focus on struggle or transformation Heavily oriented to individuals in social interaction, but less sensitive to organizational power dynamics, and paradox Emphasizes multiple levels of context Able to capture paradox through (little “d” discourse and big “D” competing Discourse repertoires, Discourse); works well in identifying categories that contain their tensions, contradictions, dialectics, opposites, and sequences that and paradox reflect back on past tensions Oriented to tensions and the clash Relies on indirect evidence to sense among figures paradox from the clash among two or more named figures Focuses on conceptual and practical Uses contexts to identify tensions; is tensions; does not center on sensitive to transformation and contradiction, dialectics, and change, but not to the dialectical paradox struggles that underlie tensions

What would greatly help, thus, is the development of reliable and flexible protocols for paradox identification. Such protocols would start with a definition of paradox and then highlight processes which researchers can use to go through transcribed text, archival material…etc. to identify words, expressions, emotions, gestures, images, [and] physical characteristics that signify paradoxical meanings. The development of [coding] units to be used to identify reliably paradoxical meanings in different modalities would greatly help. Researchers could then go through, for instance, a transcribed text and look for, in each sentence, words and expressions that signify paradoxical meanings. (p. 520)

Even though we concur that having operational definitions is important, paradoxes are complex and do not necessarily correspond with particular words, gestures, emotions, objects, or idioms. The definitional problems surrounding paradox do not indicate laxness, in our view, as much as they highlight three difficulties in taming paradox and researching it (Cunha & Putnam, 2017; Fairhurst, 2019;

Fairhurst & Putnam, 2019). First, paradox interfaces with elements of context and levels of meaning that undermine and reflect back on one another. Capturing layers of reflexive meanings amid changing conditions is difficult, even under the best of circumstances. Second, actors vary in their abilities to discern and articulate tensions, which shape analysts’ collection of data, in vivo coding, and selection of direct quotations. Third, paradoxical tensions are not easy to isolate. They become embedded in ongoing responses (Tracy, 2004), and they appear in multiples that knot and leverage each other differentially, even within the same sample (Sheep et al., 2017). Together, these conditions challenge the development of clear and unambiguous definitions. Organizational paradox research is an inexact science, whether informed by quantitative or qualitative methods (Andriopoulos & Gotsi, 2017; Fairhurst & Putnam, 2019; Mease, 2014). The very nature of the beast is

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to resist tendencies to oversimplify the complexities of doing paradox research (Cunha & Putnam, 2019; Fairhurst, 2019). For this reason, we suggest three guidelines for working through the definitional morass that plagues the paradox literature. First, aim for consistent definitions within the literature, as flawed as they might seem. This consistency can help readers benchmark the kind of language games that an analyst is playing with, in examining paradox phenomena. Second, articulate definitions and relationships among the terms that analysts use. For example, in Sheep et  al.’s (2017) study of tensional knots, they specify that this term embodies both tensions and contradictions. Tensions in this study referred to the lowest common denominator term, while contradictions stemmed from relationships among tensions. Thus, contradictions qualified as tensions, but tensions did not necessarily equate with contradictions. Third, analysts need to realize that the paradox literature often employs generic terms to refer to an array of similar constructs. For example, Fairhurst and Putnam (2019) use the term “opposition” to encompass and distinguish the concepts of tension, contradiction, dialectics, and paradox. Other scholars use the common umbrella terms, such as “paradox” and “tension,” ones that confoundingly stand for the category in which they are also members. In this chapter, we use both “paradox” and “tensional” methods interchangeably because they have become shorthand for an array of similar concepts in the literature (Lewis, 2000; Smith & Lewis, 2011). However, we urge analysts to specify concept usage, that is, tensions, contradiction, dialectics, and paradox, when they are appropriate.

SENSING PARADOX: FIRST ENCOUNTERS Most researchers do not set out to find organizational paradoxes. Whether examining

tensions, contradictions, dialectics, or paradoxes, they start with only a vague feeling or a sense of “something interesting is going on here.” An analyst might notice a sudden reversal, a surprise or felt sense of irony, a layered conflict, the pushing and pulling of emotions, clashes between divergent practices or philosophies, elements of a narrative that reflect back on one another, contradictions within or between actors’ accounts, or disconnects between words and deeds (Fairhurst & Putnam, 2024). These early indicators are the bellwethers of paradox. Epistemology plays a key role in how researchers respond to these initial instincts. For example, some scholars rely heavily on projecting their own insights onto the data analysis as opposed to eliciting tensions from organizational actors. Andriopoulos and Gotsi (2017) refer to the former as a deductive approach in which analysts embrace postpositivist assumptions and strive to remain detached, neutral, and objective. By contrast, they suggest that researchers who embrace a constitutive lens adopt an inductive approach to elicit paradoxes from actors’ language, communication, texts, and experiences. Researchers can also project their own sensemaking, either deductively or inductively, onto the analysis of paradox, irrespective of an organizational actor’s awareness. We also know that analysts can elicit actors’ paradoxical experiences and use coding schemes and typologies that ignore much of its import. We see deductive approaches as drawing categories from extant theory to target, operationalize, and manipulate data. For example, Miron-Spektor et al. (2018) employ a deductive approach to study paradoxical mindset, a general orientation in which actors accept, value, and feel energized by paradoxical tensions. They generate items deductively from the literature, develop a scale based on paradoxical thinking, and assess it across Eastern and Western cultures. Another deductive approach to research is the popular typology that classifies

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paradoxes into four categories: learning (old vs. new tensions); belonging (identity tensions between individuals vs. collectives); organizing (tensions in competing strategies and processes); and performing (internal vs. external demands between goals and performance) (Lewis, 2000; Smith & Lewis, 2011). The problem with using an a priori category system is that it can overlook other paradoxes that do not fit the classification system. As Cunha and Putnam (2017, p. 99) argue, Our concern is that researchers are using them [the four categories] as a typology or a full-scale road map for the paradox landscape rather than as building blocks for generating and classifying tensions. In particular, scholars often treat them as a fully developed a priori category system…or as explanatory interpretations for research findings…without questioning or problematizing the four types.

In practical terms, deductive approaches to paradox research need to be sensitive to context and nuances in the data to avoid treating categories as “variables” in which researchers give only a cursory nod to their interrelationships (Cunha & Putnam, 2017). Critical approaches to paradox, in contrast, examine power through splitting inductive and deductive analyses. For example, in structuration theory (Giddens, 1979, 1984), analysts might deductively explore an a priori contradiction—typically, a primary one between capital and labor—while inductively investigating secondary contradictions in the organizational context. To illustrate, Fairhurst et  al. (2002) employed Giddens’ primary contradiction to examine secondary ones unique to three successive organizational downsizings. In this way, analysts use deductive analysis to examine primary contradictions and inductive investigations to study secondary ones. Inductive approaches allow paradoxes to emerge naturally from the data. Issues of context are prominent, as are the individual and collective voices of organizational actors. Examples of inductive analyses show how conflict and difference aid in identifying

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tensions. Vásquez et  al. (2016) demonstrate this by showing how organizational members at different hierarchical levels conflicted regarding the use of ellipsis in PowerPoint texts for project teams. Similarly, Panayiotou et  al. (2019) illustrate how a start-up music company sowed the seeds of its own demise by shifting promoters’ roles, a move that reverberated across organizational and industry levels. To examine tensions, Jarzabkowski et  al. (2019) recommend locating conflict across organizational levels and boundaries by zooming in to identify problems in grounded situations and zooming out to focus on interrelationships, broad effects, and possible unintended consequences. With a slightly different focus, Ashcraft and Trethewey (2004) offer four recommendations for sensing paradoxes: (1) examine sociocultural history; (2) explore metacommunication as a strategy for negotiating organizational irrationality; (3) analyze micro-practices; and (4) investigate social identity. These four suggestions orient researchers to particular organizational phenomena as a way to locate paradoxes and tensions. By way of summary, we make three recommendations for examining tensions and paradoxes. First, analysts should attune to those vague feelings of “something interesting is going on here” as they sense the push-pull of tensions, contradictions, and/or irony in a research context. If these feelings persist after cycling through the data, analysts should return to possible markers to examine them; for example, the presence of conflict and difference, tensions that cross organizational levels or boundaries, inconsistencies in sociocultural histories, conflicting rationalities, and identity struggles. Second, although we appreciate Andrio­ poulos and Gotsi’s (2017) distinction between projected and elicited paradoxes, we urge scholars to embrace a more nuanced relationship between deductive and inductive methods. Namely, analysts can project their own sensemaking onto paradox studies, either

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deductively, inductively, or both. Moreover, eliciting actors’ paradoxical experiences is no guarantee that tensions will surface inductively. The role of organizational context and the nuances of the data play key roles in revealing paradoxes. Third, researchers should do a dive deep into the paradox literature to see how it aligns with the data. This literature review may help researchers define paradox (and related terms), flesh out specific features (e.g., category work, ironic appropriations, knotted tensions), and explore a range of responses to tensions. Identifying paradoxes and tensions, however, ties directly to the particular qualitative method that an analyst selects.

SIX QUALITATIVE METHODS FOR STUDYING TENSIONS AND PARADOX Researchers in organizational communication have employed six types of qualitative methods for collecting data and analyzing paradoxical tensions (hereafter, tensional analyses). They include grounded theory (Charmaz, 2006, 2014), discourse tracing (LeGreco & Tracy, 2009), contrapuntal ana­ lysis (Baxter, 2011), an integrative methodology of grounded theory and organizational discourse analysis (Fairhurst & Putnam, 2019), ventriloquist tensional analyses (Cooren et al., 2013), and applied tensional analysis (Mease, 2019). These methods concentrate on tensions per se and then move to paradox as the data warrant. We begin with grounded theory as a benchmark that the remaining five draw on. We then proceed to analyze each one, based on its development chronologically.

Grounded Theory (1998, 2006) Grounded theory (GT) is the most popular method for studying paradoxes and responses to them. The logic of this approach centers

on themes in the data and then scales up by synthesizing these themes across different types of qualitative data (interviews, observations, archival material). In this way, GT is an inductive approach that moves from the specific to the general through a series of increasingly abstract steps. During GT’s first phase, open coding (Strauss & Corbin, 1998), analysts examine actors’ language (words, phrases, texts) to identify oppositions through signs of friction, strain, conflict, or dilemmas (Engeström & Sannino, 2011). Following open coding, axial coding (Strauss & Corbin, 1998) transforms ordinary language into concepts linked to oppositional structures. Other GT techniques like constant comparison, line-by-line coding, analytic memo writing, theoretical sampling, and negative case analysis aid in identifying, clarifying, and elucidating oppositional structures and responses to them (Charmaz, 2006, 2014). For example, in her research on global virtual teams, Gibbs (2009) employed GT to analyze interviews, focus groups, participant observation notes, and various texts. She identified themes through line-by-line coding and applied the constant comparison technique to elicit three major tensions: (1) autonomyconnectedness, (2) inclusion-exclusion, and (3) empowerment-disempowerment, as well as families of sub-tensions under each one. In this way, she reconceptualized global team interaction through an inductive tensioncentered model, and she found that managers were more likely to transcend tensions than team members. Other communication scholars have also employed GT methods in their studies of organizational tensions (e.g., Fyke & Buzzanell, 2013; Fairhurst et al., 2002; Jian, 2007; Meisenbach, 2008; Scott & Trethewey, 2008; Tracy, 2004; Zorn et  al., 2014). Although GT was not specifically designed to study oppositional structures (Glaser & Strauss, 1967; Strauss & Corbin, 1998), the method requires that analysts stay close to the data in the early stages; iterate back and forth among data, analyses, and literature

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(Tracy, 2004); code data, inductively and abductively, into thematic categories; and scaffold or scale up from themes to (oppositional) concepts or constructs (Charmaz, 2006, 2014; Fairhurst & Putnam, 2019; see also Chapter 20 in this volume). While some GT scholars are sensitive to discourse (Charmaz, 2006, 2014; Gioia et  al., 2013), researchers who employ GT often treat language as representing reality (not constituting it), meaning as subjective (vs. intersubjective), and discourse as the content or topic of talk (not the “doing” of organizing). This overly reductive approach to language also tends to elide power and materiality in organizational life (Fairhurst & Putnam, 2019). Other more specialized methods, as discussed below, aim to capture a constitutive role for language in accomplishing organizing and organization.

Discourse Tracing (2009) Unlike GT, discourse tracing focuses directly on language per se, especially ways to scale up from the micro, localized interactions to the macro institutional and societal concerns. A cursory reading of how to use this approach (LeGreco & Tracy, 2009; Tracy, 2020) might conceal its applicability to organizational paradoxes and tensions. LeGreco and Tracy (2009, p. 1516) cast this method as useful “for studying social processes, including the facilitation of change and the institution of new routines.” However, the majority of questions that this method addresses are tensional in nature. Two key features characterize discourse tracing: its roots in case studies and its attention to multiple levels of analysis. Drawing from case study research, this approach relies on an extrapolative process called casing in which a theory that resonates with a case aligns with its temporal unfolding and context-dependent knowledge that, in turn, extends the theory (Flyvberg, 2006; Tracy, 2020). Influenced by Foucault’s (1975) concept of discursive

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formations and Fairclough’s (1995) critical discourse analysis, discourse tracing focuses on the interplay of language within and across micro, meso, and macro levels of analyses. Micro-level data include localized talk and interaction, both in terms of what is said and what is unsaid; meso-level topics focus on mid-level formal policies and other authoritative texts; while macro-level concerns consider societal laws, myths, ideologies, popular culture, and material artifacts. Tracers explore how various audiences use and respond to discourses based on these levels. Specifically, a first step in discourse tracing is to identify a rupture or turning point in the case. These breaches and temporal shifts reveal tensions among opposing phenomena (e.g., past-present). A second step is to sort and order the data temporally based on the micro, meso, and macro levels linked to the rupture. Chronological tracking reveals the presence and absence of events and the establishment of changes in routines that often point to new directions in the case (LeGreco & Tracy, 2009). For example, tensions such as presence-absence, stable-change, and conform-resist occur as meso-level policies (e.g., COVID-19 masking on airplanes) influence micro-practices (e.g., passengers refusing to wear masks); in turn, these practices shape macro-level structures (e.g., airplane safety and security practices) that can lead to unintended consequences and power effects (e.g., physical violence, the privileging of passengers who cause flight delays) (see also Malvini Redden, 2013). Finally, the third step in discourse tracing poses structured questions from the data to seek answers. Here, the method departs from grounded theory and thematic analyses (Tracy, 2020) to question the data in ways that reveal paradoxes. Drawing from the previous example, a question stemming from micro-level data might be: “How can someone who is not flying the airplane force it to land?” and “What are the localized tensions that surround airplane

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masking (e.g., authority-subversion, expertiseideology)?” At the meso level, a question might be: “What rationales do companies give for airplane policies (or the lack of them) that address these tensions?” And at the macro level: “How do these rationales and practices transform over time?” Discourse tracing draws case data and creates a massive text from fieldwork, interviews, management edicts, training sessions, company policy statements, and media messages that researchers systematically analyze. For example, LeGreco (2012) employed discourse tracing to study a stakeholder initiative for changing the eating practices of Arizona students. Public policy served as a “documented posture of the organization, revealing the essential tension, contradiction, and struggle between rights granted and privileges withheld” (Peterson & Albrecht, 1999, pp. 169–170, cited in LeGreco, 2012, p. 45). Micro data (policy committee meetings), meso data (written policy texts), and macro data (media reporting, popular texts) intersected with and fed into such structured questions as: “Whose stakeholder voices are represented in the policy?” and “How are foods labeled?” Answers to these questions treated policy making as a multistakeholder practice comprised of temporal processes. In addition, a number of paradoxes regarding policy participation emerged from the study. For instance, agencies developed policies and rules to control food practices, but they expected administrators to act autonomously in executing them. Policies also required participation from multiple stakeholders, yet they excluded students, who were those most affected by the mandates. Discourse tracing also revealed the creativity of state agencies in embracing paradoxes, exercising autonomy, reframing options, and strategically controlling ambiguity. Thus, one of the five processes from the multistakeholder practice was managing paradoxes. Although initially developed to study organizational change across levels, use of discourse tracing for tensional analyses is

well established (Abulof, 2015; LeGreco, 2012; LeGreco & Leonard, 2011; Malvini Redden, 2013). Even though this method does not focus directly on materiality or other-than-human agencies, discourse tracing aids in examining multiple tensions and power relations across multiple levels of analysis. The next method is equally concerned with multiple tensions and power.

Contrapuntal Analysis (2011) Discourse tracing clearly captures levels of analysis, but it was primarily developed to track micro-macro links in institutional change; hence, it attends less to the push-pull dynamic of tensions. Contrapuntal analysis, though, focuses on the dialectical interplay of competing discourses. Originating in Bakhtin’s (1984) textual analysis of literary works, Baxter (2011) expanded contrapuntal analysis into a theory of relational dialectics (for a review of organizational studies, see Putnam et al., 2016). Contrapuntal is a musical term that “refers to the playing of contrasting or counterpoint melodies in conjunction with one another” (Baxter, 2011, p. 152). As such, it captures the role of competing discourses in generating tensions in and through struggles over meaning. Relational dialectics theory stresses the dialectical interplay of tensions that create unity and those that become marginalized to form division.1 Power emanates from the discursive struggles that layer and interweave over time to construct meanings that challenge (and/or conform to) organi­ zational norms (see also Putnam et al., 2016). Baxter’s (2011) six-step process for contrapuntal analysis reveals residues of grounded theory, namely: (1) preparing the data; (2) identifying discourses through initial coding categories and emergent themes; (3) identifying competing discourses, if any; (4) exploring the dialectical interplay of competing discourses; (5) surfacing relational meanings from the interplay of competing discourses; and (6) locating exemplars

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(see also McBride & Bergen, 2014, p. 558). More specifically, Baxter (2011) urges sensitivity towards three tensional markers: (1) negating or rejecting a discourse (e.g., terms like “not,” “never”); countering or replacing an alternative discourse (e.g., linguistic conjunctives or connectives); and entertaining or indicating lexical signals of uncertainty (e.g., words like “maybe,” “might,” “possibly”) (pp. 167–168). Contrapuntal analysis appears sparingly in organization communication research (Ban, 2017; McBride & Bergen, 2014). However, Ban (2017) analyzed a Chinese church’s organizational identity that emerged from competing discourses of religion, management, and labor. Located in a South China industrial district, church leaders were high-level managers from local manufacturing industries, while assembly-line workers were the congregants. The tensions of religioussecular, profit-service, and labor-management emerged in shaping organizational priorities and policies through discourses that surfaced across journals, interviews, and participant observation field notes. Management discourse was privileged through negating, diminishing, and hiding labor discourse in the church’s identity, much like Baxter (2011) foresaw her tensional markers. Yet, service to the workers was a central part of the church’s values; hence, leaders sought to appear secular in public messages by transcending religious discourses (p. 252). Indicative of the relational meanings that a contrapuntal analysis uncovers, the irreconcilable struggles between management and labor resulted in selective denials of workers’ activism and positions (step 5 above). To resist top-down control of organizational identity, Ban (2017) concluded that disadvantaged workers kept tensions open and unresolved. Indeed, religiosity rather creatively disrupted management discourse and, in the process, complicated the management-labor struggle. While contrapuntal analysis reveals the identity struggles of individuals, its chief

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contribution is to focus on broad social discourses as a source of dialectical struggles, ambivalence, and power dynamics. Powerinfused dialectics are thus the sine qua non of this analysis; hence, these dialectics uncover the means by which broad-based discourses interpenetrate over time. Focusing on the micro dynamics of organizing, however, is discretionary. Such a dual emphasis is not an option for the next method.

Integrative Method: Grounded Theory and Organizational Discourse Analysis (2019) Drawing from the dialectical focus in contrapuntal analysis, Fairhurst and Putnam (2019) propose an integrative methodology to combine GT and ODA. GT’s chief advantage is its data synthesizing capabilities, while ODA asks more fine-tuned questions as to what the discourse is “doing” beyond representing content themes (Potter & Wetherell, 1987). For example, GT may easily identify oppositions and responses to them through thematic content analyses. Yet only ODA can show how organizational actors problematize oppositions and responses to them (Sheep et  al., 2017). This focus then captures the socially constructed nature of problems and alerts analysts to oppositional phenomena. To integrate these approaches, Fairhurst and Putnam (2019) draw on little “d” discourse (language, social interactions, materials in the tradition of ethnomethodology-informed conversation analysis; Boden, 1994) and big “D” Discourse (sociohistorical systems of thought; Alvesson & Kärreman, 2000; Foucault, 1975). Little “d” discourse employs temporal sequencing, category use, or material affordances (Gibson, 1979) to explore how opposites play out in action sequences; how they emerge through categories (category work); and how they spawn inertia/conflict or shift to new directions. In big “D” Discourse, analysts target the cultural assumptions and core ideas of

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systems that produce the push-pull of tensions. Discourses, though, are realized through speech and sociomaterial repertoires (e.g., terminology, habitual arguments, stories, embodied actions, objects, spaces, and other materialities) (Fairhurst & Putnam, 2019; Potter & Wetherell, 1987). Examples of clashing Discourses might be pro and con arguments, opposing terminology, positive and negative spin, diverging actions, or contrastive stories. The integrative methodology employs GT techniques (line-by-line coding, constant comparison, and abstracting) to identify opposing repertoires that coalesce into competing Discourses of sociomaterial actions (e.g., embodied actions). It incorporates big “D” Discourse analysis to understand the sociohistorical/cultural forces that underlie oppositional phenomena, and little “d” discourse analysis to examine the organizing dynamics of oppositions that (re)produce the organization. The methodology for doing the analysis consists of six steps that researchers can adapt to particular circumstances. Steps 1 and 2 focus on identifying oppositional repertoires in big “D” Discourse through analyzing terminology, arguments, stories, and sociomaterial actions in line-by-line coding and constant comparison. Then, by aligning similarities and differences in these repertoires, the analyst locates contrasts that cluster into higher-level oppositional categories. Step 3 bridges data and theory to differentiate types of opposition (e.g., contradiction, paradox). Step 4 centers on the conditions that produce the oppositions, namely, Discourse repertoires (habitual arguments, terminology, and embodied actions) that stem from training, extant practices, cultural background, and sociohistorical context—frequent bellwethers of power and agency. Step 5 looks for the effects of oppositions on organizing through moves in little “d” discourse (e.g., sequencing moves, category work, material affordances). Step 6 centers on responses to tensions through combining GT and d/D

techniques to track ongoing social interactions that change over time. Studies that employ the integrative method show how it captures the struggle of opposites in organizing processes (Gylfe et  al., 2019; Wenzel et al., 2019; Zanin, Shearer, & Martinez, 2020). For example, based on a study of journalists and producers, Gylfe et al. (2019) examined three forms of irony— inversive, subversive, and dramatic—that surfaced at different stages of coping with paradox. Deploying irony helped actors acknowledge contradictions in the moment, revealed how they used a quip to respond, and then moved on with their responsibilities. Not only did clashing Discourses generate contradictions, but the translation of them into Discourse repertoires unearthed how actors used ironic behaviors to cope with paradoxes. Little “d” discourse analysis showed how irony momentarily relieved stress while big “D” demonstrated the paradoxical nature of organizational practices, such as news gathering and hierarchical relations. Finally, this example illustrated how paradoxes persisted through accepting them ironically rather than resolving them. Unlike GT by itself, the focus on little “d” discourse (sequencing, category work, materiality) captures the “muscular” aspects of language and sociomaterial interactions in constituting reality (Alvesson & Kärreman, 2000). It centers on the intersubjective and sociocultural basis of meaning that goes beyond individual cognition or subjective meanings. The analysis also moves beyond content themes to capture what d/Discourse is doing (identity work and category work) as well as to explore multiple tensions, materiality, and power (Wenzel et al., 2019). That said, the integrative methodology is not well suited for interview data with simple, truncated answers that could be addressed with GT alone. Combining GT with ODA works best when the data fit thick description (Geertz, 1973) or rich explanations of the organizational context. Using thick description is also important for ventriloquism.

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Ventriloquial Tensional Approach (2019) Another communication approach that focuses on tensions is ventriloquial analysis. In ventriloquism, human beings are active ventriloquists and passive dummies made to speak on behalf of others (Cooren, 2010, 2012; Cooren & Caïdor, 2019; Cooren & Sandler, 2014; Nathues et al., 2021; see also Chapter 24 in this volume). In this approach, the ventriloquist mobilizes (and is mobilized by) a host of ideational, experiential, evaluative, and/or emotional actants, termed figures, that bring social interactions to life (Cooren et al., 2013, p. 256). In ventriloquial studies, conflicts and clashes among figures become the source of tensions that actors and researchers/analysts experience (see Cooren et al., 2013).2 Tensions and/or paradoxes emerge when two or more figures clash, contradict, or form ironic relationships within a context. The management of them interfaces with the ongoing flow of social interactions, especially when figures capture the dislocal or transferable character of previous interactions in which power relations surface (Cooren, 2010). Hence, some “thing” about the past or future is repetitively occasioned as scholars treat sociohistoric pasts (earlier, big “D” Discourse) and envisioned futures in a similar way (Nathues et al., 2021). In this way, figures are not easily tamed since they extend beyond what ventriloquists intended, limit their options, and can “seize” a situation (Cooren & Sandler, 2014). For example, Cooren et  al. (2013) examined tensions in a seven-year ethnographic study of Médecins sans Frontières/Doctors Without Borders (MSF). When the MSF contingent in Nairobi, Kenya located one of its clinics close to its patients, the United Nations (UN) raised concerns regarding the security of its compound. “Proximity” and “security” emerged as two figures in this ongoing clash of tensions. When threats to community members caused staff to focus

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on security concerns, MSF decided to strengthen the fence around the compound. This situation created the paradox of being close to the population while fortifying MSF barriers to separate and distance itself from them (Cooren et al., 2013, p. 268). In short, the incongruous clash of humans, meanings, sites, and objects engendered a paradox in this example. Steps in conducting ventriloquial analysis consists of four phases (Nathues et  al., 2021; see also Chapter 24 in this volume). In phase 1, the analyst identifies the figures that materialize in social interactions, including (1) that which is made to say or do, and (2) that which causes the saying or doing—much the way the MSF example above isolates proximity and security as tensional figures. In phase 2, the researcher sorts figures into thematic clusters through iteratively and constantly comparing the transcript data. The researcher can also employ higherlevel groupings to unpack how ventriloquial effects enter into interactions. In phase 3, the investigator traces chains of authority (e.g., managerial actions, technologies, principles, and directives vs. organizational members’ feelings, actions, technologies, and spaces) to examine how figures play out and coalesce into actions. In the MSF example, this step solidifies proximity and security as tensional figures that lead to paradoxical effects. Phase 4 entails isolating ventriloquial effects in data excerpts and selecting the most powerful ones to illustrate the findings. A number of organizational studies have employed ventriloquial tensional analyses (Cooren & Caïdor, 2019; Cooren et  al., 2013; Long et al., 2018; Nathues et al., 2021; Wilhoit & Kisselburgh, 2017). A major strength of this approach is its ability to capture grassroots tensional dynamics and to focus on hybrid configurations or assemblages of humans and other-than-humans as figures that speak for and are made to speak for others. Power is present, immediate, and sociomaterial in nature, but this method is less dialectical and sociohistorical than is the

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integrative method. Sociomateriality is also a key feature in applied tensional analysis, the next method we examine.

Applied Tensional Analysis (ATA) (2019) ATA is far more interventionist than the previous methods. It focuses on tensions in the possibilities for organizational change and transformation (Mease, 2019). ATA examines four foci: (1) tensions, (2) context, (3) enacted responses, and (4) repertoires, which are organized into analytical and change loops. First, the analysis loop examines the emergence of the organization’s current and past configurations in terms of conceptual topics (of primary interest to researchers) and practical tensions (as experienced by actors). The relationship between the two aids in discerning how organizations configure themselves in the midst of vulnerabilities susceptible to change. Context, the second focus, surfaces in three ways: (1) organizational (e.g., bodies, spaces, practices, knowledges, structures, artifacts, time constraints, ethical dilemmas), (2) social (e.g., economic downturns, financial upswings, identity constructs, global politics), and (3) historical (i.e., sociohistorical emphasis). The integration of these three aids in deciphering how tensions emerge as well as their latent potential for reconfiguration. It also assists actors in understanding the enabling and constraining effects of their tensional responses. Enacted responses, Mease’s third focus, centers on micro-practices, language, actions, interactional moments, and materialities that coalesce in responding to tensional phenomena. Actors may or may not be conscious of their response strategies, while analysts typically rely on the paradox literature to assess responses and their effects. The above three foci set the stage for the change loop that offers actors practical and

normative guidance, brings reflexivity in to reconfigure organization events, and develops the final foci, ethical repertoires of responses. A repertoire melds insights from the analytic loop’s configurational focus on the past/present to the newly configured futures in the change loop. Researchers navigate a path between making practitioners aware of (un)ethical strategies and preserving actors’ rights to choose ethical and efficacious repertoires. Work products might lead to academic publication, but the researchers’ ultimate goal is to help practitioners make contextually responsible choices. Recommended by Hurlow (2022) and Armstrong and Jiménez (2022), scholars Almjeld et  al. (2022) empirically embrace ATA. Cooper (2021) employed it to study tensions between the legitimacy of leadership (“grasstops”) versus community members (“grassroots”) in an interorganizational and community collaboration. This collaboration also engendered inclusion-exclusion tensions over the shifting status of community members and how they should be organized. Responses to these tensions entailed frequent meetings across widespread locales that overburdened community members. Consequently, the collaboration favored participating organizations, despite its goal and commitment to attract individual community members. Cooper’s use of ATA thus raised questions like: “Can community collaboration balance community and organi­ zational demands as it enacts social change?” (p. 413). Ironically, Cooper’s (2021) study did not execute Mease’s (2019) praxis mission, even though she drew these implications. ATA’s greatest strength is its ability to translate a paradox approach for a practitioner audience. However, it also captures the muscular aspects of language and sociomaterial interactions that constitute reality (Alvesson & Kärreman, 2000). Although ATA incorporates organizational, social, and historic contexts, Mease does little to theorize about the intersubjective, power-laced, sociocultural nature of meaning (Foucault, 1977).

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DISCUSSION Several conclusions stand out in reviewing these six methods for analyzing tensions and paradoxes, particularly for the five developed by communication scholars. First, all five, particularly contrapuntal analysis, discourse tracing, and the integrative methodology, rely on GT approaches to integrate qualitative data and to scale up from interaction to organizational or sociocultural levels. Consistent with GT’s goal of generating higher-level concepts from the data (Charmaz, 2006, 2014; Gioia et  al., 2013), these methods rely on emergent codes and themes to identify tension-generating Discourses and contrasting repertoires of speech, actions, and material actants. However, this reliance on big “D” Discourse does not mean that scholars necessarily embrace other theoretical entailments of Discourse, ones such as historicity (the sociocultural roots of competing Discourses), dialectics (the playing out of tensions over time), and disciplinary power (means of self-governance of one’s own behavior). Discourse can surface as a static concept when researchers rely too much on interview data and ignore the underlying dialectics and historical circumstances of language. The power of Discourse to discipline behavior (Foucault, 1975) also remains an underutilized explanation for why tensional dynamics play out as they do. Second, all five tensional methods embrace a constitutive view of paradox, likely because organizational communication scholars have an affinity for the muscularity of language, power processes, and interactional dynamics. These methods are oriented to communicative performances, struggles over meaning, and aspects of contexts that reflect back on themselves—all key to understanding paradox. However, only the integrative method, ventriloquial analysis, and applied tensional analysis incorporate the sociomaterial aspects of paradox. As such, materiality remains

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underexplored, despite the material turn that emphasizes the agential properties of bodies, objects, spaces, and places in organizational communication (Ashcraft et al., 2009). Only one method, applied tensional analysis, examines the translational aspects of tensions, including ethics and morality evident in power processes. This discovery is surprising given the field’s inclination toward engaged scholarship (Barge, 2017; Barge & ShockleyZalabak, 2008). Moreover, constitutive scholars tend to pursue creative, dialogic, and interventionist responses to paradox because these “more-than” approaches offer avenues for organizational transformation (Benson, 1977), as researchers have demonstrated (e.g., Barge et  al., 2008; Jian & Fairhurst, 2022; McNamee & Peterson, 2014). The five methods are sensitive to the interplay and (dis)organizing aspects of multiple levels of analysis, especially discourse tracing. However, mapping the (dis)organizing and (dis)equilibrating potential of paradox visually is not something these methods offer, with the exception of the integrative methodology. Such modeling is key to situating the constitutive approach in a broad interdisciplinary community of paradox scholars. Third, in terms of the future of these methods, one test of sustainability lies in assisting organizational communication scholars in studying society’s most difficult problems or grand challenges (Eisenhardt et al., 2017). In paradox terms, this entails investigating multiple and knotted tensions in complex social, cognitive, and material aspects of grand challenges. Organizational communication scholars have studied multiple tensions vis-à-vis hierarchies (Canary, 2010; Fairhurst et  al., 2002), nests (Panayiotou et  al., 2019), and families (Gibbs, 2009). Some studies, however, treat paradox as a single or primary tension and oversimplify the raft of interwoven contradictions that underlie it (Krautzberger et  al., 2020). Grand challenges exacerbate this problem because they are less amenable to paradoxical thinking, to “one size fits all”

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in reducing complexity, and to simple versus knotted tensions (Jarzabkowski et al., 2021). Relational dialectics theory, from which contrapuntal analysis emerges, introduces the concept of knotted tensions (Baxter, 2011; Baxter & Montgomery, 1996). The integrative methodology and applied tensional analysis are particularly suited to analyzing these knots. Yet, current approaches tend to treat knots as a conceptual heuristic rather than an empirical phenomenon (e.g., Biss et al., 2022; Jarzabkowski et al., 2021; Norton & Sadler, 2006; Sheep et al., 2017), even though actors readily voice and perceive knotted tensions in organizational life (Cunha & Putnam, 2019; Fairhurst, 2019; Sheep et al., 2017). Failing to capture this empirically ignores vital information as to how actors experience tensions (El-Sawad et al., 2004). Thus, one key future direction for all six methods is to focus on analyzing knots and the “compounded force” (Sheep et  al., 2017, p. 8, emphasis in original) of tensions that amplify and attenuate one another. Based on these observations, we make the following recommendations regarding selecting particular methods for qualitative tensional analysis in organizational communication research. First, researchers need to determine their goals for a particular study. Clearly, ATA is best suited for the goal of engaged scholarship, particularly given its dual emphasis on analytic and change loops. Researchers who seek to examine levels of analysis could select from any of the methods, although discourse tracing specifically focuses on interactions among macro, meso, and micro levels. Second, if researchers are seeking a high degree of definitional clarity between tensions, contradictions, dialectics, and paradox, the integrative method is the only one that offers specific criteria and analytical tools to distinguish among them (see Table 28.1). Similarly, if researchers need explicit directions for sensing tensions, contrapuntal ana­ lysis, the integrative methodology, and ATA seem more amenable since the other methods

require analysts to infer tensions from broad theoretical frameworks. Contrapuntal analysis and the integrative method even delineate steps for isolating data and locating tensions (see Table 28.1). Third, for analysts who are interested in issues of power, historicity, and materiality, any of the methods could be used, but we recommend selecting contrapuntal analysis, the integrative methodology, or ATA. They all embrace the operations of big “D” Discourse, which analysts can use to decipher these functionalities. Fourth, for scholars interested in dialectics and knotted tensions, we recommend contrapuntal analysis and the integrative methodology because they focus on multiple tensions. However, this is not to say that the other methods could not be used for this purpose with some further theoretical extension. Fifth, for those wanting to explore the micro aspects of sociomaterial interaction, ventriloquial analysis offers an extraordinary amount of detail. The other methods are little “d” discourse “friendly,” especially the integrative method and discourse tracing.

CONCLUSION This chapter focuses on alternative methods for qualitative research on tensions, contradictions, and paradoxes in organizational communication research. Taking into consideration the definitional conundrum surrounding paradox and related terms, we highlight important issues in sensing them in first encounters with data (see Table 28.1). We also urge scholars to embrace both deductive and inductive approaches in ways that fit complex data. Finally, we review six methods for analyzing paradox and related concepts. As take-aways from this chapter, we underscore our observation that organi­ zational communication scholars are taking the lead in developing methods for examining paradoxical tensions. The existence of viable alternative methods provides

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researchers with choices based on their data, the goals of their research, and diverse theoretical orientations. Hopefully, this chapter will advance research on the growing, perplexing, and important aspects of paradoxes in organizational life.

Notes 1  The former are considered centripetal forces and the latter centrifugal (see also Baxter & Montgomery, 1996). 2  We should note that a ventriloquial approach sometimes refers only to “figures” (Cooren et al., 2013) or “organs” (Cooren & Caïdor, 2019). “Figures” signify that which does something or is made to do or say something; “vents” make someone else do or say something. Both highlight ventriloquial effects as being active and/or passive (Nathues et al., 2021).

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29 A Process Ontology Perspective on Qualitative Analysis in Organizational Communication Research C o n s u e l o Vá s q u e z , V i v i a n e S e r g i , a n d Anthony Hussenot

Over the past two decades, process studies have grown in popularity in both organizational communication research and organization studies. Two main uses of the process concept can be distinguished in these fields. The first use is based on an entitative/essentialist view of phenomena. Research adopting this view aims to identify how entities, such as technologies and organizations, change in different stages over time (e.g., see Pye & Pettigrew, 2005; Van de Ven, 2021). The second use is based on an ontological view of process, hence positing that phenomena are in a constant state of becoming. Here, phenomena like organizations are not entities but only tangible manifestations of processes. Thus, they are constantly emerging and re-emerging from/within the indivisible and ongoing movement of life (e.g., see Helin et al., 2014; Tsoukas & Chia, 2002). Our chapter is situated within process philosophy, a tradition that favors the second use of process as this philosophy postulates that reality is ever-changing (Whitehead,

1929/1978). Beings, objects, and so on do not have any existence in and of themselves; they are only analytical “things” emerging from the ongoing flow of life. Change is therefore favored over stability (Rescher, 2000). Yet, it would be a mistake to understand this as a philosophy that merely focuses on change. Indeed, this philosophical perspective does not negate stability, but conceptualizes it as a process of stabilization—as collective and ongoing efforts to make something endure. Furthermore, a process perspective does not present a simplistic opposition to entitative/noun-based views: Building on the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, organizational scholars such as Bakken and Hernes (2006, p. 1604) have underlined that “[p]rocesses elude us precisely because they involve simultaneously impermanence and stability.” “Perhaps the most difficult task,” they note, “is to accurately describe that composite status of verb and noun” (p. 1604). In other words, by bringing attention to change, the accomplishment of things, and the

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relationships between effects and processes, this perspective highlights the dynamic and unfolding character of organizations as processes of becoming. In terms of analysis, Jarzabkowski and Spee (2017) identify three analytical approaches to the study of organization and organizing from a process perspective: (1) studying a scripted pattern; (2) uncovering an emerging pattern; and (3) researching patterns in the moment. In the first approach, researchers focus on scripted patterns, which “comprise a series of distinct tasks and activities that make the process identifiable and recognizable to the participants charged with performing the process” (p. 241). In the s­ econd approach, researchers examine emerging patterns “where the actors themselves are trying to delineate and construct a direction or order within their activities” (p. 244). The third approach, which is more directly related to the process philosophy perspective we adopt in this chapter, focuses on the patterns “through which things are constructed and stabilized within time and over time” (p. 246). Compared to the other two approaches that deal with how organizations change over time, this third approach highlights the becoming of assumed stabilities. While each approach comes with its own analytical challenges, the greatest and most common challenge remains “explain[ing] how moment-by-moment enactments shape the flow of experience over time (becoming) and [placing] those aspects that are enacted in the moment (the ‘doing’) into the foreground of the analysis” (p. 235). This requires treating each moment as an accomplishment in the present, and displaying actions as unfolding without fixing the movement that constitutes them (De Cock & Sharp, 2007). In this chapter, we argue that an ontological view of process offers a more complex and suitable approach to attend to the intricacies of everyday organizational communicative practices. As we will show, choosing this approach comes with great analytical challenges, such as keeping the processual nature of the

phenomenon under study at the forefront in the selection, representation, and theorization of data; restituting actors’ experiences and practices in the analysis; and integrating various processual dimensions. Hence, the goals of this chapter are to (1) review some of the analytical focal points of process ontological research in both organization studies and organizational communication scholarship; and (2) discuss the methodological challenges that such positioning entails. Our chapter is structured as follows: We first outline some particularities of the ways organizational communication scholarship has studied organizations as processes of becoming. Second, we discuss three key aspects that allow us to investigate organizational communication from a process ontology perspective; namely, the aspects of temporality, spatiality, and materiality. Third, we discuss how these aspects become analyzable by studying communicative events. Fourth, we address three main analytical challenges of process-oriented studies: restitution, categorization and separation, and writing. To conclude, we synthesize the key arguments discussed in this chapter.

ORGANIZATIONAL COMMUNICATION RESEARCH ON ORGANIZATIONS AS PROCESSES OF BECOMING The core tenets of process ontology have influenced the emergence of a processual stream of scholarship in the field of organizational communication1 (e.g., see Cooren et  al., 2016; Schoeneborn et al., 2016) known as the communicative constitution of organization (CCO; see also Chapter 6 in this volume). This scholarship suggests that organizations consist of imbricated processes of communication. In CCO research, communication is broadly defined, as it implies both the material and discursive practices through which collective meaning negotiation is accomplished (Ashcraft et  al., 2009). Consequently, CCO scholars

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claim that communication is not “simply one of the many factors involved in organizing, and it cannot be merely the vehicle for the expression of pre-existing ‘realities’; rather, it is the means by which organizations are established, composed, designed, and sustained” (Cooren et  al., 2011, p. 1150). According to Cooren (2018), communication should be seen as the “materialization of relations” (p. 279, emphasis in original). Hence, viewed through a CCO lens, organizational communication does not only involve language but heterogeneous agencies that affect each other in ongoing communicative processes. This, then, is one of the key specificities of CCO process scholarship: opening up the definition of (organizational) communication beyond human communication. Methodologically, CCO research typically involves “the in-depth study of communicational [events] to identify their organizing properties” (Cooren et al., 2016. p. 513). This approach is particularly well suited for studying organizations as processes of becoming, as ongoing communicative accomplishments. Furthermore, according to Schoeneborn and colleagues (2016), this approach can “illuminate the subtleties” of the process-entity paradox that is inherent in an ontological definition of process as “actions which form entities” (Bakken & Hernes, 2006, p. 1604, emphasis in original). CCO researchers aim to illuminate this process-entity paradox by accounting both for “the stability and evolution of organizational forms while showing how they have to be enacted on the terra firma of interaction” (Cooren et  al., 2016, p. 524). They do this by “analyz[ing] the communicative processes by which relatively stable societies get reproduced, evolve, and change” (Cooren et  al., 2016, p. 514). This explains why the main unit of analysis in CCO research is the communicative event: “a sequence of instances of communication (i.e., texts and conversations) that are performed in a distinct space-time” (Vásquez et al., 2016, p. 634). Various philosophers have suggested taking events as the ontological site

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where the world is made, most notably perhaps Bergson, Whitehead, James, and Mead. Hence, these philosophers have deeply influenced how CCO researchers pay attention to the enactment and embodiment of communicative events. But on what aspects should analyses of these communicative events focus? In the next section, we outline three key aspects and explore the challenges they pose for qualitative organizational communication researchers.

THREE ASPECTS FOR ANALYZING THE EVENTFUL NATURE OF ORGANIZATIONAL COMMUNICATION To explore the analytical challenges inherent in studying organizations from a process ontology perspective that highlights the constitutive force of communication, we discuss three aspects: (1) temporality, (2) spatiality, and (3) materiality. Treating these aspects separately is an analytical choice that in a way goes against the tenets of process ontology, which proposes to consider them together. We make this analytical choice for two reasons: First, these aspects correspond to common foci in process organization studies and organizational communication scholarship. Thus, they enable us to present a brief overview of this research in terms of these analytical foci. Second, and perhaps more importantly, this choice enables us to zoom in on one of the main challenges of conducting processual analyses: the dilemma of separating these aspects. We will return to this important key point after having presented each aspect.

Temporality A first analytical point of entry for analyzing the eventful nature of organizational communication is temporality. As concepts, time

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and temporality need to be clearly distinguished. Time is a social convention, partly based on natural cycles, but also on the Julian calendar, the Gregorian calendar, and the Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). Time aims to provide a common temporal scheme enabling actors to regulate social life (Sorokin & Merton, 1937). If time is a measurement system, temporality is a more subjective construct. It is about experiencing continuity by enacting a past, present, and future (Hussenot, 2019). Temporality refers to how we define and arrange past, present, and future in order to give meaning to current activities. Temporality emerges through organizational practices and informs these practices. Temporality brings continuity, coherence, and purpose to the organizational activity at hand. It explains why people do something and informs them about their activity—that is, its past, present, and future. Historical context, current issues, goals, objectives and so on are embedded in temporality as much as they participate in its definition. Consequently, time and temporality should not be confused. However, they should not be opposed either. As Johnsen and colleagues (2019, p. 5) note, “Human beings objectify time to form coherent subjective experience, creating a ‘life-support mechanism.’” Thus, any temporality can be shared by being articulated with time. For instance, this happens when the musicians of a band are working on a new album. This new album is related to their previous ones, but in some ways, it is also connected to current trends in the music industry, to styles of music they are experimenting with, and to what the musicians want to do and be in the future. These past, present, and future events provide the musicians with meaning, a sense of continuity, and a purpose in the creation of this new album. In a way, it gives a sense of intelligibility to the current moment, to the music that is currently being composed. Despite the subjectivity of this temporality, it has to be displayed on a timeline in order to be shared. In other words, these past, present, and future

events enacted to make sense of the current moment have to be positioned on the timeline to become a shared temporality, such as important historical dates for the band (first concert, first album, etc.) and key dates before the releasing of the new album (studio recording, mixing, etc.). It enables people to have a common understanding of the current activity. In this sense, time “helps” people define their temporalities. In process organization studies and organizational communication scholarship, the concept of event plays a key role in our understanding of temporality (Hernes, 2014). It can be understood as the happening of the world, when humans and otherthan-humans become “tangibles” (Hussenot, 2019). From a communicative perspective, events are communicative moments in which reality occurs and is defined by humans and other-than-humans: Communication is vital in this process, not so much because it enables the transmission of messages or the co-construction of shared meaning between human beings, but because it enables events to come into being through the expression of language and extralinguistic forces. (Brummans & Vezy, 2022, p. 265)

Past, present, and future events are thus narrated and configured by actors in communicative events in order to define a tangible and actionable reality (Hussenot, 2019). Temporality is (more or less) explicitly defined, configured, and negotiated by actors in order to create a (more or less) shared story. This view aligns with Cunliffe and colleagues’ (2004, p. 272) notion of narrative temporality to insist on the importance of stories in the definition of the past, present, and future: “[N]arratives are stories of our experiences in time, grounded in events or episodes which can be linked together in a temporal way.” However, as mentioned, communication is not limited to human beings. Otherthan-humans have a performative and transactional role too (see also Latour, 2005).

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Objects, technologies, and so forth therefore participate in the definition of the event. According to Cooren and Fairhust (2004), “organizations in their spatial and temporal dimensions can thus be considered to be literally generated and punctuated by the different human and nonhuman agents who contribute to these discursive processes” (p. 814). As a consequence, Time is not just an instrument to regulate social life; it is an other-than-human actor that plays a performative and transactional role in the definition of events and temporality. In other words, like any other-than-human actor (Latour, 2005), time plays an active role. Time influences the decisions we make, constrains how we organize our day and week, and so on. In the same way, temporality (as a narrative and agential enactment of events) participates in our experience of time. For example, an event related to our current activity can be narrated as long gone or as expected in a distant future. A “long gone” event and an “expected in a distant future” event can be about a matter of days, weeks, or years. It all depends on the activity at hand and, more precisely, on its temporality. Following this view, the experience of time is always subjective and depends on the enacted temporality.

Spatiality A second analytical focal point for analyzing the eventful nature of organizational communication is spatiality. As a concept, spatiality refers to our interpretations and experiences of space, and how these inform our actions. Organizational process scholars view spatiality by re-conceptualizing organizational space in terms of spacing. Moving from a Euclidean definition of space (as a fixed and stable physical environment in which organizational activities unfold), spacing emphasizes the performative actions and relations that constitute organizational environments. Space is thus viewed as space-time combined with becoming (Crang & Thrift,

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2000). Spacing entails rethinking space as “processual and performative, open-ended and multiple, practiced and of the everyday” (Beyes & Steyaert, 2012, p. 47). Hence, scholars adopting this view privilege a vocabulary of movement, flow, relation, and assemblage over one of stability and representation. This shift has enabled the treatment of space as both constituted by organizational practices and (in)forming these practices. From a communicative perspective, such reframing entails seeing space is being defined and constituted by interactions: “But what is even more important to understand,” as Vásquez (2013) notes, “is that these interactions do not occur in space; they create it” (p. 128, emphasis added). Put differently, it is through their daily interactions (or “spacing practices,” see Vásquez & Cooren, 2013) that human and other-thanhuman actors constitute organizational space and make their organization endure in space-time. This ontological shift has important methodological implications, particularly if we recognize that doing research is a situated and embodied (spatial) practice that also contributes to the constitution of space. McCormack (2008) distinguishes between two kinds of research models in research on space: thinking about space and thinkingspace. In the first model, research is seen as a distant activity through which the researcher collects, analyzes, and processes objects (or people) to be found in space. In the second model, which is more in line with process ontology, research is viewed as an encounter with and within different spaces. Therefore, thinking space—or thinking-with(in)—space invites mobilizing nonrepresentational methodologies, which are attuned to “the material, embodied, affective, and multiple sides and sites of organizing” (Beyes & Steyaert, 2012, p. 53). This requires developing a “spatial sensibility,” an “orientation towards spatial dimensions of the material world in which we act and through which we move” (Yanow, 2010, p. 415). Ethnographic approaches are

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privileged here, as they enable the study of organizational spaces “from within” (Tsoukas & Chia, 2002). In turn, such approaches make it possible to follow the course of action as it goes on (De Cock & Sharp, 2007). Stephenson and colleagues’ (2020) work is useful for discussing the analytical specificities of thinking-with(in) space. In their article, the authors propose a synthesis of the research on organizational space as process, both in management and organizational communication studies. They identify five process orientations: (1) developing, (2) transiting, (3) imbricating, (4) becoming, and (5) constituting. We focus on the last two, which are most clearly associated with process ontology. The becoming orientation is inspired by human geography, actor-network theory, and Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy, among others. It focuses on the emergence of spatial practices through the unfolding of situated interactions between humans and material artifacts. Research adopting this becoming orientation favors the ongoing activities that produce space and, as such, examines everyday practices and events, alternative spaces, connections, affect, speed and rhythm (Stephenson et al., 2020). De Molli and colleagues’ (2020) aesthetic study of organizational spaces illustrates the analytical strategies of this orientation. The authors followed the principles of inductive theory-building to investigate the creation of an urban film festival’s atmosphere. To accomplish this, they focused on the city’s urban space, combined with the physical interventions by the festival, and the experiences and feelings of the festival-goers. Considering these various dimensions, they analyzed their empirical data in multiple ways: coding pictures in NVivo; articulating aesthetic codes in the urban space and the materials adopted by the festival, such as symbols, colors, and font types; and coding interviews with the participants in relation with the researchers’ own observations. They also analyzed their data in time and through

space, for example by attending to the experience of walking from one cinema to the next as a key movement of the festival-goer’s experience. Atmosphere emerged as a central concept in their inductive analysis. As a metaphor, it helped explain the data and led the authors to review their initial interpretations of the interactions between the urban space, the measures taken by the festival organizers, and the festival-goers’ collective actions and interpretations. The constituting orientation, in turn, highlights the continuous construction and reconstruction of space that gives an organization/organizing its spatial form and stability (Stephenson et  al., 2020). Researchers adopting this orientation pay attention to how activities, events, and practices order and reorder the relations between human and material elements of space, and to how these spatial configurations participate in the emergence and enduring of organizations. Mostly inspired by CCO scholarship, this research focuses on modes of ordering, aggregated spatial movements, spatial images, spacetime rhythms, and the shifting of spatiotemporal configurations. To account for the processual and emergent features of space, researchers have developed different analytical strategies, such as incorporating reflexivity in narrative styles (e.g., Vásquez, 2016), proposing multiple interpretations, or capturing embodied experiences through affective language (e.g., Beyes & Steyaert, 2012). Cnossen and Bencherki’s (2019) ethnographic study of two creative hubs in Amsterdam illustrates the analytical work that is required in this kind of research. The authors paid attention to the reflexive, mutual constitution of space and organizational practices in order to explore how this assemblage makes an organization endure. Inductively, the authors searched for relevant breakdowns that challenged their interpretation of what was going on. They also played with their different roles and perspectives as insider (Cnossen) and outsider (Bencherki) to approach and analyze their empirical

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data. This collaboration helped the first author to reflect on how she moved across/ through the field and the academic world. In turn, together, they wrote vignettes that highlighted the challenges of organizational continuity. These vignettes were categorized and condensed using open coding in order to identify the actors’ most relevant practices. Here, the authors particularly focused on the practices through which space, as an assemblage, contributed to the endurance of the creative hubs. In sum, these becoming and constituting orientations to the study of organizational space share an interest in the emergence and ongoing construction of space, and they focus on the interconnection between material elements and organizational practices (Stephenson et  al., 2020). Hence, the focus of analysis is action, in all its human, textual, technological, and discursive forms (Vásquez & Cooren, 2013). The privileged unit of ana­ lysis, as for temporality, is the communicative event by both zooming in and out of the situated enactments of space, as well as the organizational and societal implications of its production (Stephenson et al., 2020).

Materiality Materiality is a popular concept in organizational and organizational communication research.2 As with temporality and spatiality, it is important to question the assumptions of what we already know about materiality. Hence, we encourage organizational communication researchers to pay attention to their conceptual definition of materiality, as well as to the theoretical perspective(s) in which this definition is grounded. Materiality tends to be equated with what is material, tangible, anything that has a physical presence, what can be touched, manipulated, and transformed. By extension, especially in organizational contexts, the word “materiality” is commonly used

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to designate objects, tools, instruments, and technologies. Generally speaking, referring to “the material” also evokes its opposite— the immaterial—suggesting a duality connected with other modernist dualities, such as the duality between the body and the mind. Similarly, the material is sometimes viewed in opposition to the discursive, or the social. Yet, paying attention to materiality requires that we go beyond such common and dualistic understandings. Overcoming these dualities has been at the heart of research on sociomateriality (e.g., Orlikowski, 2007). For its part, CCO scholarship has addressed these dualities by returning to the etymological root of the materiality concept. Playing on the idea that matter both points to the verb “to matter” and to the noun “materiality,” Cooren and colleagues (2012) proposed the gerund “mattering” to highlight that we do not have to “take sides” when it comes to discourse and materiality. It is therefore more fruitful, these authors argue, to “focus on the multiple ways by which various forms of reality (more or less material) come to do things and even express themselves in a given interaction” (p. 296, emphasis in original). Following this same line of thought, Cooren (2018; see also Cooren et  al., 2012) claims that communication is always material and immaterial to some degree. Hence, “what matters or does not matter has to do with what materializes (or does not materialize) in an interaction, whether through the form, for instance, of preoccupations, discussions, or activities” (Cooren et  al., 2012, p. 298). Pursuing this line of thought further, Cooren (2018) views materiality and sociality in relational manner. Thus, insisting on the sociality of anything amounts to focusing on the relations that sustain its existence and identity, while insisting on its materiality consists of highlighting what this thing is made of, which also leads us to acknowledge its relationality. (p. 279)

In turn, this relational definition implies that materiality is no longer understood as a

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stable entity, but as a process of materialization. Referring to materialization instead of materiality, then, not only avoids the trap of making arbitrary conceptual distinctions, but it also implies that any phenomenon has varying degrees of material dimensions (see also Cooren, 2020). The idea of materialization reorients and refocuses how empirical data need to be analyzed. It entails dropping the assumption that we already know what is material (e.g., what takes the form of objects) and rather paying attention to how anything materializes over time, through action or interaction. Conversely, this idea enables organizational and organizational communication researchers to study how things dematerialize and disappear from the scene. In other words, the process by which something dis/appears from the scene that is constituted by communicative events becomes the focus of analysis. Interested in the relation between strategy and materiality, Bencherki and colleagues (2021) built on this idea of materialization. They took a strategic planning exercise as their focal communicative event and analyzed the video-recorded discussions that took place between various participants. This analysis revealed four practices through which issues progressively moved—or did not move—from mere topics of discussion to strategic matters. Inspired by conversation analysis, their approach focuses on issues uttered by the participants, and on what happens as turns of conversation happen. Interestingly, this kind of analysis also reveals a sensitivity to temporality. Given that strategy involves a future-orientation, how “the future” was communicatively brought into the conversation was key to analyzing how concerns gained a strategic nature over time. Bencherki et al. demonstrate this through four vignettes, each focusing on a short conversational/interactional excerpt from the strategic planning exercise. Beyond contributing to the study of how strategy materializes in communicative events over time, this article also offers a methodological

contribution, as the authors show how each of the practices they have identified can be traced in the data (see Table 1 in Bencherki et al., 2021, p. 615).

HOW DO TEMPORALITY, SPATIALITY, AND MATERIALITY BECOME ANALYZABLE THROUGH COMMUNICATIVE EVENTS? As mentioned, temporality, spatiality, and materiality are analytical distinctions that researchers mobilize in order to study organizational communication as process. This means that these aspects are fundamentally entangled and co-defined, yet separated and distinguished by researchers, as they attempt to analyze them. This analytical choice is already visible in the studies discussed in the previous section: Despite efforts to define a single focal point, when adopting a process ontology perspective, it becomes nearly impossible not to evoke temporality when considering spatiality, or spatiality when considering materiality. The main challenge in this research, then, is that on the one hand, reality is a constant flux; it is an indivisible movement as Bergson (1907/2009) put it. On the other hand, reality needs to be made tangible and intelligible in order to study it; images need to be created from this indivisible movement (see Cooper, 1976). Here, “images” refer to anything that can make reality tangible: time, space, objects, technologies, as well as ideas, roles, and so forth. These images are things actors build from the constant flux in order to make the world tangible and to make action possible (Hussenot, 2022). Analytically speaking, the main challenge involves understanding the emergence of such images and their maintenance: What is the ontological moment in which these images are defined, maintained, or dissolved? And how can they be studied empirically? To address this challenge, organizational communication researchers and organizational scholars have

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argued that the world is happening in events. Focusing on events, as we suggested, enables a researcher to capture the processuality of life and to address how such images of reality are created, maintained and/or dissolved. Temporality, spatiality, and materiality, as we suggested, occur in events, and the nature of these events is communicative. It is in moments of the coming together of elements (which we might analytically label as “humans” and “other-than humans”) that the world becomes tangible, intelligible, and actionable. Temporality, spatiality, and materiality are thus not given, but are constantly re-defined in events in order to make sense of the current moment. More precisely, reality becomes tangible through discursive (especially narrative) practices that position the current moment in a story made of past, present, and anticipated events. Understanding how these aspects are re-defined in the communicative event is, in our view, key for analyzing organizational communication as process. Hence, data collection methods/techniques are required that enable the detailed capture of what happens in communicative events, as well as inductive or abductive reasoning to maintain the richness of the event in the data analysis process. As mentioned, temporality is often the primary focus of analysis in process philosophy (Rescher, 2000). Temporality is this “inbetween” between the indivisible movement of reality and its material and spatial becoming (Hussenot, 2019). Consider someone who is swimming. Swimming can be experienced as an indivisible movement when the swimmer is fully experiencing the progression of the body in the water; when the awareness of time, water, temperature, and body efforts disappear. At the same time, any swimmer has to consider the length of the swimming pool and the other swimmers, among other spatial and material constraints. In the end, swimmers are often in an in-between state: experiencing swimming as a progressive and indivisible movement and, at the same time, as an activity enabled and constrained by

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various humans and other-than-humans (the others swimmers, the timetable of the swimming pool, the size of the pool, etc.), as well as their physical surroundings. The temporality emerges in this in-betweenness. It enables swimmers to go back-and-forth between the sensible experience of swimming and the spatiality as well as materiality of this activity. This example illustrates that temporality is defined through spatiality and materiality: Past, present, and future events are partly constituted by materiality (Hussenot, 2021). Correspondingly, materiality is also defined through events. More precisely, materiality gains meaning in regard to the past, present, and future events enacted in the present moment, as is illustrated by Schultz and Hernes’s (2013) study of the LEGO company’s identity and development. LEGO has always been associated with their colorful plastic bricks. It has always been a core element of LEGO’s identity and the company’s success. However, facing fierce competition from other companies (video games, electronic toys, etc.) at the start of the 2000s, LEGO had to reinvent itself by relying on its past and projecting itself into the future. Their success depended on the ability of LEGO’s managers to keep the brick as a core element of their identity and products, while at the same time re-inventing it through new strategies and products. To accomplish this, they developed new products by mixing bricks and electronic components, or products based on movies or cartoons. Consequently, the meaning of materiality (the brick) depends on the story related to the current activity, yet previous meanings attributed to this materiality also participate in the definition of this story. What about spatiality? As mentioned, space is not given but always in a state of becoming, emerging from, and constituted by interactions (Vásquez, 2013). From a process ontology perspective, space is conceived as space-time, a coexistence of trajectories “as stories-so-far” (Massey, 2009). Space is thus an encounter in which distinct trajectories meet and collide. One way to

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address the coexistence of trajectories, as Cnossen and Bencherki (2019) suggest, is to focus on material assemblage. Here, materiality refers to any human and otherthan-human actor who contributes to making the world tangible. Physical elements, such as walls, buildings, furniture, and so on participate in the definition of space, as do nonphysical elements, such as ideas, hierarchy, and status. In other words, physical elements do not play a more “substantial” role than nonphysical ones. Consequently, space becomes an agency of materiality, but this agency is not just an assemblage of humans and other-than-humans; it is rather a configuration of ingredients of events (Whitehead, 1929/1978; see also Hussenot, 2021). In such a view, the agency of materiality co-emerges with temporality as much as this agency participates in the definition of temporality. Of course, this agency is never given or defined “once for all”; it is always situated in the current moment. Now that we have discussed the inherent connectedness of temporality, spatiality, and materiality, we turn to three key analytical challenges in studying organizational communication as process.

CHALLENGES IN ANALYZING AND REPRESENTING ORGANIZATIONAL COMMUNICATION AS PROCESS When adopting a process ontology perspective, the main challenge, as we mentioned, entails capturing and explaining how emerging communicative events shape the flow of movement without “fixing” it. Beyond the challenge of integrating temporality, spatiality, and materiality into a single analysis, researchers typically encounter three analytical challenges when aiming to study organizational communication from this perspective: (1) restituting actors’ experiences and practices in the analysis; (2) avoiding the creation of separations through

clear-cut categories; and (3) resisting the linearity of academic writing.

Restitution The semantic origins of the French word restitution are linked to the intention to repay a debt and give back. This “giving back” logic, we believe, is key in qualitative research as well: When restituting actors’ experiences and practices that were observed and inscribed during fieldwork, the researcher does not solely represent it but also, and more importantly, gives back to those who collaborated and participated in the research. When adopting a process ontology, this giving back comes with some specific challenges. For instance, it requires a particular sensibility and adaptability to movement, to multiple agencies, and to coexistent trajectories. Researchers must therefore try to make sense of and narrate a story about what they are observing and experiencing, while trying to preserve the complexities of this lived reality. To complicate this endeavor further, researchers need to reflect on their own participation in these processes of reproduction as actors and storytellers. As Couldry (2003, n.p.) notes, people “are not just taking input from the world in isolation from everyone else: they are engaged in making sense of other people’s meanings and interpretations.” This double hermeneutic adds another layer of complexity to the restitution of realities, for it highlights the (uneven) distribution of meaning and the mediated character of social life (Couldry, 2003). Representing “the world” from this point of view is thus not a simple task: Things are not “out there” waiting to be discovered; they are constantly being re-constructed, re-signified, re-stabilized. We are often tempted to simplify this process. Yet, as Latour and Hermant (2021) argue, [T]he access to the reference is never done by skipping steps, but by following the leaflet of light transformations, without missing a single one,

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without skipping a single step… Without this path, we lose the trace of the social since the words no longer refer to anything and they no longer make sense––that is to say, they no longer capture movement. (p. 50, our translation)

A process ontology perspective invites researchers to follow actors (or metaphors, plots, conflicts, etc.) as they make their way through ongoing winding paths (Latour, 2013). Analytically speaking, this calls for embracing the world’s messiness, and thus its processuality, recognizing its performative nature, and, more importantly, the part researchers play in its enactments (Law, 2004). Developing a keen awareness of being part of the changing world we are studying (and thus of its co-construction), and reflecting on our unfolding experience of the process, is central in qualitative research (Jarzabkowski & Spee, 2016). Reflexivity can thus be seen as an analytical practice for navigating the relational field that constitutes reality (Ingold, 2011). Following this line of thought, Vézy and Brummans (2022) propose to use field note writing to trace the relational dynamics through which an organization, the researcher, and their research materials (“data”) are co-constituted. Hence, they argue that it is important to pay attention to the researcher’s positioning in the act of field note taking and how they weave other trajectories in the act of writing. Here, the researcher becomes “the meeting and departure point of several paths that they discover at the same time as they trace them” (p. 150, our translation). A second analytical challenge related to restitution involves boundary-setting. Given the large amount of data required for process organization studies, it is important for researchers to set boundaries for their analysis. Selection is key, as it orients the analysis by zooming in on one or a few key areas of interest (Jarzabkowski & Spee, 2016). However, it can also restrict the analysis and reduce the processuality of the phenomena under study. In setting the boundaries for their analysis, process scholars are thus

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invited to both zoom in on the processuality of the current event and zoom out to connect it with other situations. What is particularly difficult in this process of selection is to maintain the longitudinal and temporal character of the data. Some choose to present a narrative overview of the case studied (Langley, 1999), while others focus on key events (Cooren et al., 2015) or conduct a thematic analysis to develop a processual model (Jian, 2007). Unfortunately, to some extent, these analytical strategies fail to capture both the thickness and the durée of phenomena. CCO scholars tend to privilege interaction analysis (Bencherki, 2014) to show how organizational practices unfold in the process of everyday communication. This analytical strategy has the advantage of capturing processuality at the micro level, one utterance at a time. The challenge, however, lies in capturing the whole duration of the organizing phenomenon (e.g., the life cycle of a project or an organizational change), as this type of analysis is characterized by the detailed interpretation of naturally occurring communicative practices. Hence, CCO research is often critiqued because researchers are unable to explain how a year of ethnographic research can be reduced to the analysis of a few interactional excerpts. Researchers are thus prompted to justify their selection of data excerpts or vignettes that explain the phenomenon under study (Nathues et al., 2021), and to explain why they favor interaction over other sources of empirical data, such as interviews or documents. In other words they have to address the following question: How can you capture the longitudinality of the fieldwork in a few minutes of interaction? We can only provide tentative responses to this thorny question here: combining different analytical approaches in the interpretation of the excerpt; explaining and justifying the choice of illustrative excerpts or vignettes (Nathues et al., 2021); and/or presenting the excerpts or vignettes as aspectualities (Searle, 1995) of the same phenomenon that do not present an exhaustive account, but rather

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in-depth insight into the aspects under study. A bolder and more affirmative strategy is to defend the processuality of interaction and argue for a flat ontology (Latour, 2015). As Seidl and Whittington note (2014, p. 1408), “Flatness here does not imply restriction of scope, but rather a willingness to radiate out horizontally from the single instance in order to trace the network of connections that make it possible.” Hence, from this perspective, we could argue that a 15-minute conversation can enfold a year-long ethnography.

Categorization and Separation The second challenge involved in studying organizational communication from a process ontology perspective does not stem from the researcher’s work itself, but from the positioning of this work in academic fields that are defined by norms, conventions, and institutionalized models. It pertains to how the dominant mode of theorizing, both in organizational and organizational communication scholarship, clashes with the underlying onto-epistemological principles of a process ontology perspective. This dominant mode of theorizing, heavily influenced by grounded theory, is based on the notion of categorization. It entails developing categories from the data, and using these categories to scale up in abstraction in order to develop theory. A notable example of this analytical approach is offered by the so-called “Gioia methodology” (Gioia et al., 2013; see also Chapter 20 in this volume) and its related concept of data structure (Langley & Abdallah, 2015). This approach asks researchers to identify categories in qualitative data (first-order analysis), to progressively group them into categories (second-order analysis), and then to aggregate these dimensions to build theory. This approach assumes that grouping data into neatly defined analytical categories allows us to explain phenomena: the categories are viewed as theoretical “building blocks” of such phenomena.

This way of analyzing empirical phenomena carries a specific understanding of theory: one that uses typification as a conceptual ordering mechanism (Sandberg & Alvesson, 2021). Furthermore, as Sandberg and Alvesson (2021) point out, this focus on categorization as a sole analytical tool for theorizing significantly limits what counts as “theory.” Finally, in this process of categorization, this approach establishes a clear separation between description and theorizing. Description tends to be viewed as a required intermediary step en route toward theorizing, where categories are presented and connected to propose theoretical contributions. Noting the dominance of this way of approaching data analysis and theorizing does not mean that it should be dismissed. Rather, it invites qualitative researchers to reflect on what theorizing and theoretical contributions are, which implies questioning how theorizing is done in the first place. This is especially important for process researchers. The issue we see with this dominant approach to theory development is ontological: Its main analytical act consists in “cutting” neat and discrete categories “out of” the data, whereas process studies and their relational ontology aim to “keep things together,” so to speak. The key aspects of process studies that we have highlighted in this chapter may lend themselves to categorization and the kind of theorizing that derives from it, but only at the cost of losing something––losing exactly what characterizes a process ontology perspective, that which we attempt to capture and restitute. What a process ontology perspective aims to grasp, among others, is movement; the composite nature of what comes together at a place and time and materializes; how phenomena emerge, unfold, have effects, morph into something else, or achieve a form of stability. All of these elements highlight the challenge of keeping things together, of escaping discrete and stable categories. Whatever the orientation and the focus of a process study, analyzing the data collected without resorting by default

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to discrete categorization requires researchers to break with the dominant approach described above. In rising up to the challenge of analyzing without making clear cuts between elements, other articulations between description and theorizing are possible. As we indicated in the previous sections, several process studies in organizational communication and organization studies build on a researcher’s “being there”—a presence that can materialize to various degrees and that can fluctuate–– during events and sometimes on prolonged engagement in a field. This presence, along with data collection techniques such as photography and audio or video-recording, are necessary to capture what is happening as it is happening. This general methodological principle of “being there” aligns with the onto-epistemological bases of process studies and shows a central methodological contribution of anthropological studies, namely ethnography. The latter does not only highlight the importance of writing descriptions (as implied in the etymology of the word ethnography), but also, and more importantly, a different understanding of developing a theoretical contribution. In the ethnographic tradition, description is neither viewed as a neutral act, nor as just an “obligatory passage point” before a study’s “zenith”—its theoretical contribution: it is the main contribution of such studies (see also Chapter 2 in this volume). Among others, Latour (2013) reminds us that description is a way of theorizing. In doing so, he argues that it is enough for a study to stop at description, because there is already so much that can be woven into a description, and that describing is already a form of analysis, of interpretation (which echoes the challenges of restitution and writing). After all, theorizing is about offering an understanding of a phenomenon, and descriptions achieve this goal while preserving a sense of what happened and materialized in events, over time and in space, and who/what participated in what unfolded. Hence, engaging

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in description (and experimenting with all the possibilities that description affords), rather than moving quickly away from it, may help with both restitution and carving a theoretical contribution that reflects the core ideas of process ontology. Thus, reflecting on the dominant approach to analysis and theorizing is helpful for defining and studying organizational communication from a processual perspective. We therefore encourage organizational communication researchers who adopt this perspective to change their view of description and to seize its many potentialities in order to face the challenge of keeping things together.

Writing The final challenge with which organizational communication researchers who adopt a process ontology perspective have to deal is the question of representation, which in most scholarly traditions entails writing. In qualitative research, writing takes a central role throughout the inquiry. As Brummans and Vásquez (2016) note, “[Writing] is one of the principal ways in which [researchers] dwell in or inhabit the world and contribute to its becoming” (p. 119). Debates about the trustworthiness of academic texts show that strong representational expectations often are still the norm (thick description, triangulation of methods, reflexivity, and theoretical contributions; see Schwartz-Shea & Yanow, 2009). As Schwartz-Shea and Yanow (2009, p. 72) put it, “Writers owe readers their best efforts, and that implies, importantly, truthfulness about what they have done so that readers can assess the strengths and weaknesses of the evidence, methodology, and arguments presented without worrying about authorial deception.” These concerns regarding the construction of credible, empirical, and theoretical accounts are shared by process organization and organizational communication researchers.

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Questions such as how to write a narrative that stays close to the empirical data while offering sufficient conceptual elements for the reader to follow the storyline, or how to organize multiple stories into a coherent narrative without losing the reader, are common in process organization studies and organizational communication. Abdallah and colleagues (2019) identify four approaches or “templates” for writing qualitative process organization research (evolutionary process stories, performative process stories, narrative process stories, and toolkit-driven process stories) and highlight a specific challenge for each. Abdallah and colleagues associate performative process stories with process ontology. The aim of these stories is “to enact a ‘becoming’ process ontology and to use this to reveal the emergent and constructed nature of the phenomena studied” (p. 104). To accomplish this, researchers produce these stories by zooming in on specific events through the analysis of small segments of activities, often presented in the form of vignettes. Performative process stories are more focused on patterns of practices than long-term evolution. The main writing challenges of this approach involves “focusing on micro-level details without losing sight of the broader context and maintaining processbased thinking, despite innate tendencies toward the language of things” (p. 104). As mentioned when discussing the challenge of restitution, making selections is difficult in process studies: Authors must focus on specific details to stay close to the micro-richness of everyday interaction (and to comply with word counts in publishable manuscripts), even though their work is oftentimes based on longitudinal fieldwork. The second challenge that Abdallah and colleagues (2019) point out involves the tendency in academic writing to use substantive language (the language of things), which makes it difficult to create a sense of continuous becoming. As Chia and King (2001, p. 312) note, language is “a representational

technology that actively organizes, constructs and sustains social reality by systematically insinuating its operating logic into the very textual core of discursive expressions.” Thus, language can be seen as a template to order the world through punctuating, separating, classifying, and sectioning. This ontological capacity of language is expressed in writing (Chia & King, 2001). Writing is indeed an act of stabilizing and fixing meaning (Vásquez et al., 2016) that corresponds with our need to locate and fix the flux of our present lives in order to control and predict our future. How to maintain the processuality of events through/in writing is not only a practical question, but also an ontological one. In this respect, Abdallah and colleagues (2019) suggest being explicit about one’s underlying onto-epistemological positioning, and to use processual wording, such as “work,” “dynamics,” “practices,” “accomplishments,” and “performances.” The use of gerunds in concept development––such as Weick’s (1979) celebrated proposal to shift from the study of organization to organizing––is also aligned with this onto-epistemological positioning.

CONCLUSION A process ontology perspective on qualitative research in organizational communication, as envisioned by CCO scholarship, aims to reveal how organizational phenomena are communicatively constituted.3 As we have shown in this chapter, its core potential is to expose, in ample detail, how this becoming happens and unfolds, and who/what participates in this becoming. Its potential depends on collecting data that capture events as they are unfolding in space-time. As we have shown, if the volume of data represents a challenge for any qualitative researcher, an analysis grounded in process ontology comes with additional challenges. We presented three key aspects for studying organizational communication from this perspective

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(temporality, spatiality, and materiality). Subsequently, we illustrated some of the analytical choices that researchers have to make when analyzing these aspects. We argued that adopting a process ontology perspective entails paying specific attention to how these three foci are conceptualized in order to go beyond taken-for-granted definitions that obscure the richness of what happens in the unfolding of communicative events. We also explained the challenge of studying each of these aspects in isolation. Finally, we presented three specific challenges involved in analyzing data from this perspective; namely, restitution, categorization and separation, and writing. All of these challenges may be akin to dilemmas. As we have suggested, addressing them always involves choices on the part of the researcher—choices that are not easy and may even be uncomfortable. These choices can be understood as imperfect solutions for problems that may well be irresolvable, given the numerous constraints qualitative organizational communication researchers face. We can neither capture everything, nor stay indefinitely in the field; we will always have to make cuts in our analyses, as well as in our writing. The best we can do, in the face of such challenges, is to acknowledge them explicitly in our work. Such acknowledgments are not simply a matter of recognizing the limitations of a study; they offer opportunities for refinement, extension, and methodological reflection. Analyzing organizational communication from a process ontology perspective may be demanding, but it is also rewarding, because this kind of analysis enables vivid explorations of the communicative dynamics through which the world is brought forth—of worlding(s) (Kuhn et  al., 2017, p. 61). For us, this immense potential provides strong motivation to face these challenges with creativity and imagination. We hope that reading this chapter has motivated those who are new to process research to join us in this endeavor, and that it has provided useful ideas for fellow process researchers in

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the fields of organizational communication and organization studies.

Notes 1  While this chapter focuses mainly on this stream of organizational communication scholarship, we note that already in 1984, Peter Monge and colleagues advocated for studying organizational communication from a processual perspective. More specifically, they proposed conducting longitudinal research and analyzing over-time data, particularly by favoring a form of statistical analysis called “time series analysis.” 2  It should be noted that in the associated fields of organizational communication and organization studies, researchers have become increasingly interested in the concept of materiality over the past two decades. This rising interest is partly due to the expansion of particular theoretical perspectives. Notably, the emergence of the practice perspective in these fields has generated an interest in the material dimensions of situated action, as materiality is integral to the definition of practice. Both the interest in materiality and practice reveal a growing attunement to what takes part in action, extending research beyond human actors. This growing sensitivity can itself be related to the influence of theories that emerged in the 1980s in other areas of the social sciences, such as actornetwork theory (ANT) and science and technology studies (STS). These theories have gradually made their way into organizational communication and organization studies. 3  As noted at the beginning of this chapter, CCO research is one stream of organizational scholarship that embraces processual perspectives to study questions of organization and organizing. We have chosen to focus on CCO scholarship in particular here, because it has a natural fit with processual perspectives, and it shares many of the premises of process ontology.

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30 Positionings: Toward a Relational Understanding of Representation and Writing in Organizational Communication Research Oana Brindusa Albu, Boukje Cnossen, and Chahrazad Abdallah

The concept of positionality, rooted in feminist standpoint epistemology (Harding, 1990, 2003), suggests that all knowledge is produced from a particular power position and is the result of the researcher’s lived experience. The concept has a dual meaning: It refers to the researcher’s position in relation to research participants as well as to their position in a larger system of power (Bourke, 2014). Today, positionality is a critical element of reflexivity. It aims to counter the invisibilization of the researcher’s place of enunciation (Jensen et  al., 2020). Unfortunately, positionality is often mobilized methodologically as one of the reflexive dimensions against which the quality of a study is judged. The risk here is that reflecting on positionality is turned into a legitimating exercise that foregrounds an instrumental form of reflexivity, rather than a critical reflection on how the researcher’s position might affect the conduct of research and the knowledge produced (D’Arcangelis, 2018; Schaefer & Alvesson, 2020).

As a result of this development, the need to acknowledge and reflect on the researcher’s positionality has become associated with questions related to identity, race, gender, class, sexuality, and so on. These categories are often “black boxed” and presented as “complicating” the researcher’s position by considering their various implications. The same categories also tend to be used when researchers make claims to intersectionality in their analysis (for an interesting take on this, see Cruz et  al., 2018). However, these categories are problematic on two levels: (1) they are considered as fixed standpoints from which the researcher’s work unfolds; and (2) they suggest that positionality is rooted in an epistemology of separateness. In other words, there are separate categories of race, gender, class, sexuality, and so on that are inter-secting in the field, producing effects that should be considered reflexively in the research. In practice, though, these embodied categories are dynamically enacted in

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the field, in the sense that they never matter the same at all points in time and with all participants. Since researchers’ interactions are manifold and produce numerous effects, they subsequently lead to multiple analytical variations. Identity statements, for instance, are contextually negotiated in relations to other bodies, feelings, cultural practices, or discourses (Putnam et  al., 2011). Put differently, rather than a fixed researcher position, there is a continuum of degrees of positionality (Abdelnour & Abu Moghli, 2021). Throughout time spent in the field, qualitative researchers can draw on multiple positions that become ­visible and invisible modes of sensemaking (Reyes, 2020). Positionality, consequently, is closer to a form of bricolage in the reflexive process (Vanner, 2015). In this chapter, we therefore suggest, alongside Jensen et  al. (2020), that it is important to move beyond positionality statements rooted in the separability of these categories. Qualitative organizational communication researchers have started to address the methodological implications of considering positionality intersectionally. They are increasingly aware that visible social markers of identity (gender, race, class, etc.) and less visible ones (social capital, researcher status, etc.) are indicators of researchers’ social and spatial positions (Broadfoot et  al., 2008; Cooks, 2003; Doerfel & Gibbs, 2020; Jensen et  al., 2020; McDonald, 2021; McDonald & Mitra, 2019; Mumby, 2011; Taylor et  al., 2021), and that the intersections of these positions act upon the nature of the knowledge researchers create and disseminate (McDonald, 2021; Putnam & Mumby, 2014; see also Chapters 7, 9, and 10 in this volume). Hence, it is important for researchers to address how their social positions shape their entrance into, interactions with, and conversations within sites of inquiry. However, methodological guidelines on how to identify and address the challenges that are specific to

positionally reflexive work are scarce. This chapter aims to address this issue by showing how crucial positionally reflexive work is for qualitative organizational communication research, because this work reveals how researchers’ positions and abilities to reflect on their shifting positions play into the production of academic knowledge. Our chapter is structured as follows: We start with an overview of existing qualitative organizational communication research that addresses questions of positionality and intersectionality. This review is organized in terms of two main themes: (1) the researcher’s dynamic identities and roles; and (2) the embeddedness of these identities and roles in webs of power, domination, and privilege. Next, we present two ethnographic vignettes to illustrate the importance of relational positionality for deepening and enriching the lifeworlds we study. This part brings attention to what we call “positionally reflexive work,” a deeply reflexive methodological practice through which researchers can develop a “sociological double-consciousness” (Rios et  al., 2017, p. 494). The vignettes show that positionally reflexive work has a twofold importance because it makes qualitative researchers aware of the dynamic intersections of their identities. In addition, it helps them develop an ability to (re/inter)act ethically based on a deeper understanding of the effects of their academic practices—in terms of power, domination, and privilege—on the people and settings they are studying. Thus, these vignettes reveal the significance of broadening the conversation about reflexivity and positionality in qualitative organizational communication research by attuning to the nexus of relations that inform the methodological unfolding of a qualitative study, rather than focusing solely on researchers themselves. To conclude, we discuss how future organizational communication research may move beyond the individual to the relational through a diffractive understanding of the researcher’s role (see also Chapters 25 and 33 in this volume).

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POSITIONS AND INTERSECTIONS OF IDENTITIES AND INSIDER-OUTSIDER ROLES Three aspects related to the dynamic intersection of identities complicate positionality claims (Jensen et  al., 2020). First, the concept of intersectionality highlights the idea that identities are forged of multiple components, and that researchers often only draw on certain parts of their identity during research. For instance, in her research on whiteness in educational settings, Cooks’ (2003) own whiteness allowed her to understand the context within which certain identities are signified as “normal” or “invisible.” A similar example of the ways in which parts of the researcher’s own identity can be an asset in conducting research is Ganesh’s (2011) research on bicultural politics in New Zealand. Ganesh’s position of a newcomer in New Zealand, and his intersecting identities of being Indian and secular, gave him a specific type of perspective on New Zealand’s approach to the indigenous Maori community and the role of Maori rituals in public space. Ganesh (2011) used his identities to position himself as an outsider and part of a nonindigenous minority, which facilitated classroom discussions and the conduct of interviews with social justice activists. Second, the intersecting social identities of organizational researchers play an important role in how they conduct research, not just in terms of what parts of organizations might become available to them (Jensen et  al., 2020), but also in terms of how their social backgrounds shape the way they see and construct their research objects. For example, Broadfoot et  al. (2008) point out that organizational communication research on meaningful work is often conducted based on implicit Eurocentric understandings of meaningfulness in professional contexts. When reporting their findings, Broadfoot et  al. (2008) suggest, researchers should therefore reflect not only on how

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their intersecting social identities enable, or prevent, certain kinds of access, but also on how the specific intersections of their identities constitute their research foci. Aiming to make the role of their own socialization more explicit, Mumby and Plotnikof (2019) arrive at similar conclusions. They do so by creating personal vignettes of how they came to be critical scholars, describing their challenges, interests, and fascinations. Third, important advances have been made in the field of organizational communication by drawing on intersectional approaches to understand how intersections matter in conducting as well as representing research. Whilst these advances have mostly encompassed the acknowledgement of the combined effects of gender and race, intersectional approaches can and should also consider other relevant identity markers, such as social class, sexual identity, or regional identities (Parker & McDonald, 2019). As an example of such an intersectional approach, Meisenbach and Hutchins (2020) show that individuals who often experience a stigmatized racial identity, are likely to face intersecting stigmas because their racial identity is always visible and cannot be concealed. Taken together, these three aspects that address the dynamic intersection of identities and the roles available to organizational communication researchers show that socially constructed categories should not be reified. For instance, scholars adopting an intersectional approach see communication itself as constitutive of difference (Parker & McDonald, 2019, p. 143). Likewise, dialectical approaches have emphasized that difference is constructed through language and power relations, and are brought forth by the dynamic interweaving of multiple systems (Putnam et al., 2011). Taking such a dynamic view even further, some have recently started to discuss the value of process philosophy for organizational communication research (see Brummans & Vézy, 2022; see also Chapter 29 in this volume). This philosophy challenges views of object-subject

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dualities in a radical manner and proposes to focus attention on relations, rather than individual entities. For example, Brummans and Vézy (2022) suggest that researchers interested in the communicative constitution of organizations should pay attention to the linguistic and extra-linguistic richness of micro-moments or events, which are difficult to observe and describe by using conventional methods. Brummans and Vézy (2022) offer several methodological techniques to attune to these moments, such as drawing wander lines, conducting in-depth interviews to relive micro-moments, and using thick cocomposition. Moreover, Brummans (2022) recently proposed eight ways to conduct qualitative organizational research in mindful ways by drawing inspiration from both process and Buddhist philosophy. Although the word “identity” does not appear in his text, several of the proposed ways point toward a letting go of at least some parts of individual identity. Perhaps the most striking recommendation, in this regard, is to “drop yourself as principal tool of inquiry” (Brummans, 2022, p. 176). Noting the hyphen, this seems to refer to a constructed self that might be understood somewhat differently from a more general sense of existing and moving through the world as an individual. This brief review reveals an important tension between, on the one hand, approaches that stress the need to account for one’s intersecting identities in relation to others in the field and, on the other, approaches that challenge ideas of individual identity altogether. In other words, there is a stark contrast between recommendations to emphasize the intersecting of social identities in fieldwork, and recommendations to view such identities as fleeting constructs to which you should not cling. One limitation of a processual ontology, however, is that in certain social situations and contexts, you may want to refrain from clinging to certain social markers as a researcher, but the people you are studying may not be able to do so themselves. In fact, it could be argued that being able to “let go”

of certain aspects of your identity in itself requires a position of privilege. A strong process ontology in the context of qualitative research thus runs the risk of eliminating or disregarding elements of dependency and power, since it contributes to obscuring particular relational dynamics. In sum, if identities are dynamic and socially constructed, it follows that researchers’ positionalities—the spaces researchers take up in the field because of their identities, as well as how these identities intersect and relate to those they encounter in the field—are also socially constructed. But when looking at the implications of processual and relational perspectives that are starting to emerge in organizational communication research, the question becomes how we can take the consequences of the differences and inequalities we encounter in the field seriously, whilst at the same time acknowledging that the specific intersection of those differences and inequalities are always context-specific, dynamic, and subject to change. This conclusion echoes Parker and McDonald’s (2019) observations that “[o]ne of the challenges of adopting intersectional frameworks in empirical studies continues to be foregrounding particular identities and shared experiences without essentializing them” (p. 142).

POSITIONS OF POWER, DOMINATION, AND PRIVILEGE, AND THEIR INTERSECTIONS It is increasingly important to acknowledge and explain how positional identity markers (social class, race, etc.) situate organizational communication researchers, and thus affect the power relations between them and research participants (Broadfoot et al., 2008). Nevertheless, recent qualitative organizational communication studies have shown that thinking solely in terms of positionality can neither capture the relational dynamics of power, domination, and privilege, nor

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researcher’s abilities to sense and respond to these experiences (Jensen et  al., 2020). The dynamics of power, domination, and privilege unfold in indeterminate ways, as we will show in this subsection; they are caused by the constant shifting of identities—as well as one’s capacity to respond to them. First, regarding power, recent studies have shown that organizational communication researchers navigate core ethical challenges in imperfect ways, especially because they are positioned in webs of power with research participants (Peterson et al., 2022). For instance, in their study on stigma communication, Meisenbach and Hutchins (2020) show that “strands of power are constantly being woven, destroyed, and rewoven by and around various organizational members and levels” (p. 32). The intersections of social identity markers (gender, race, occupation, class) weave this web of power that, in turn, inhibits individuals’ abilities to conceal and manage stigma (Meisenbach & Hutchins, 2020). Meisenbach and Hutchins propose that one “escape route” out of this web—possibly with its own entrapping limitations— could be the use of “allies” (p. 36). Such allies can leverage their power and privilege in situations where another person with less power and privilege is being stigmatized. These entrapping webs of power that result from the “ironic entanglement of complicity with rapport” (Marcus, 1997, p. 86; see also Brummans & Vézy, 2022) between researchers and participants are at the core of much qualitative organizational communication research. For instance, in their analysis of power systems, Putnam et al. (2011) propose a dialectical view of difference that highlights how difference is constructed through language and power relationships. In applying dialectics to the study of intersectionality, the authors show how systems of power are emphasized, accentuated, or treated as salient in discursive interactions. Putnam and colleagues’ dialectical approach is thus useful for researchers that aim to shift from binary understandings of difference to a relational

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view of identities as situated in ongoing micro interactions as well as in larger Discourses. Second, research on domination in organizational communication often draws on Foucault’s writings to examine everyday resistance practices (Mumby et  al., 2017). A Foucauldian approach enables researchers to show how questions of domination and resistance in micro-level interactions reflect neoliberal values that do not only permeate many contemporary organizations and alter employees’ behavior, but also shape the subjectivities and viewpoints of researchers themselves (Mumby & Plotnikof, 2019). Furthermore, organizational communication researchers use postcolonial and decolonial approaches to explore resistance and domination as well. This research reveals how colonizer-colonized positions and intersections may prompt new insights into domination and resistance within organizations (Ganesh, Zoller, & Cheney, 2005). For instance, Dempsey (2011) has shown that categories of difference function as interlocking systems of domination and emancipation. By showing how women experience these intertwined systems differently, at the level of their personal biography, at the group or community level, and at the institutional level, Dempsey demonstrates that it is important to understand the relationality of gender, class, and difference. If researchers acknowledge these intersections, she claims, they may foster new forms of solidarity among diverse women. Moreover, Ptacek and Connaughton (2022, p. 2) recently called for “practicing reflexivity about a relational orientation.” The aim here is to expand methodologies that reflect on researchers’ ethical responsibilities and that do not recreate and perpetuate systems of domination. In their study of peacebuilding, Ptacek and Connaughton note that being “epistemologically informed” (p. 2, i.e., understanding who has a voice and who doesn’t within a particular socio-cultural context) is essential for avoiding dynamics of domination when engaging with research participants. Hence, these authors encourage

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researchers to focus on doing no harm, asking critical questions, being mindful of power dynamics, avoiding systematically erasing the cultural voices of marginalized communities, and building dialogical spaces for engaging with these voices. Third, organizational communication research frequently examines privilege in relation to stigma, segregation, and oppression (Meisenbach & Hutchins, 2020). Privilege is the unrecognized advantage that positions certain people in a favored way and systematically grants power to groups of people in specific contexts (Crevani, 2019). The accumulation of privilege is usually explored as a process of configuring trajectories that shape the places in which privilege emerges (Crevani, 2019). For instance, Meisenbach and Hutchins (2020) examine how nonstigmatized individuals situated in places of privilege automatically hold a higher degree of social privilege. Crisscrossing such places of privilege is therefore a critical issue for organizational communication researchers who work with marginalized communities, because they do not want to exploit and harm informants further (Jensen et al., 2020). However, despite the numerous studies of engaged scholarship with marginalized communities (Tracy & Rivera, 2010; Tracy & Scott, 2006; Trethewey, 1997), there is still a gap regarding the ethics of qualitative research in relation to privilege and exploitation surrounding issues of race, gender class, and so on. For instance, Afifi and Cornejo’s (2020) review of organizational communication studies on race over a 30-year period (1973–2005) revealed that samples were “predominantly White” (p. 203) and that even the literature on race is “best described as White scholarship” (p. 205). These developments show how important it is for researchers to reflect on (and respond to) their own positionality and intersectionality in order to navigate these ethical conundrums. In sum, identity dynamics and the embeddedness of researchers in a web of power, domination, and privilege result from both

visible (gender, race, etc.) and invisible (class, education, network, methodological preferences, etc.) identity markers. Researchers’ positionalities and intersections complicate and transform the type of knowledge that is produced, and they have crucial impacts on the communities under study (Crenshaw, 1993). We argue, therefore, that positionally reflexive work has the potential to bring new insights to qualitative organizational communication research: On the one hand, it directs researchers to take into account and be aware of the overlap between their identity markers and roles; on the other hand, it pushes researchers to acknowledge their individual capacity of navigating across multiple identities and to respond adequately to others’ experiences in order to avoid oppressive dynamics of power, domination, and privilege. The aim of the two vignettes in the following section is to illustrate how organizational communication researchers’ positionalities intersectionally affect what they observe and represent. The vignettes show how important positionally reflexive work is, as it attunes the researcher to the fact that positionality is an ongoing process of negotiation that shifts within a nexus of relations and that continuously needs to be analyzed in relation to the participants, to the field, and to the specific situatedness of the researcher’s own knowledge production process. Embracing this processual view of positionality contributes to unscrambling the messiness and chaos of this continuous reflexive process (Adu-Ampong & Adams, 2020).

VIGNETTE 1: INSIDER-OUTSIDER DYNAMICS IN FIELDWORK Background The vignette presented below focuses on a research project, for which I (Boukje, the second author) conducted fieldwork in the

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South of the Netherlands. As I grew up in this region and could easily travel there, my immersion in the field usually lasted only several consecutive days. To a certain extent, my research approach showed similarities with at-home ethnography (Albu & Costas, 2018; Alvesson, 2009). However, the extent to which I really was “at home” in this setting, and how this mattered for the fieldwork, will be explored below (see also Cnossen, 2018; Gosovic, 2018). The research project originated from my interest in the potential of art and artistic practices to help create social change, and from my desire to follow a project for a prolonged period of time. Eventually, the fieldwork took place during 2017 and 2018. This artistic project was “brought to life” every time a new funding source or assignment presented itself, as is typical for the precarious organizing that can be found across the arts (Cnossen, 2022; Rowlands & Handy, 2012; Scott, 2012). The project was initiated by one artist, with several other artists and cultural workers supporting him. Their collective is called “Academy for Perception” (“Academie voor Beeldvorming” in Dutch), the original name being a play on the term for “Academy for Fine Art.” My struggle with this period of fieldwork emerged from the intersection and tension between different identities and social roles. On the one hand, my professional identity provided the foundation to gain access and build a relationship with the collective’s artists, yet it was also this professional identity that created an initial blind spot for me in the field. I was so convinced to be following an art project, given that this was the premise on which I could become involved as a researcher, that it took a while to notice that the participants had a different view.

Vignette For the purpose of conducting fieldwork, I find myself in the city of Eindhoven for the

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Dutch Design Week. I am here to attend a symposium on social design, a genre that uses the principles and guidelines of design in order to tackle socially complex issues. The specific project I am here to observe is one I have been following for a while. It is led by a group of artists who use design skills and artistic research methods in a project on living on campsites and recreational parks in the Netherlands, a polarizing issue in this country. Some see the increasing number of permanent campsite residents as legitimate, because of the shortage of social housing in the densely populated country; others believe that campsites are not made for permanent living, thus local governments and law enforcement should deal with the matter. Today, the artist Rob (all names are pseudonyms) is leading a workshop that is part of the programme of the symposium. I find him and his colleagues standing in their designated area in the large event hall, and I go to greet them. Diana, a middle-aged woman, is with them. I have seen her several times in the context of this project, and I know she lives in a small cottage on a campsite, about an hour away from here. Apart from the fact that Rob has asked her to play an active role in their workshop, I do not quite know what to expect and there is not much time to ask questions, as the first participants are approaching the area. I feel slightly uncomfortable when some introduce themselves to me, as I do not quite know how to explain my role or position to them. I look for a place to put my bag. I selfconsciously move my bag several times and realize I have more stuff with me than all other participants. Rob then starts off the workshop by standing in the middle of the floor speaking with much enthusiasm. His charismatic energy draws all eyes on him, and he very naturally introduces me as an academic scholar who studies their project. I feel grateful and decide to lean on one of the standing tables to make clear that I am observing from the side lines. I start to take notes.

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The participants introduce themselves. Most of them are civil servants and social workers who deal with campsite residents in their daily work. They seem keen to articulate their viewpoints and to get to know the other participants. I feel a vague discomfort that I am somehow less involved with the issue than the others. I am aware that this position is now also spatially indicated because I am standing farther away from everyone else. The physical distance increases the sense of not being involved enough—or not knowing how to get involved—and at the same time it feels comfortable to stay removed from the other participants. Rob’s approach is based on the constellation method—a well-known psychotherapeutic method. He asks Diana to sit down in the middle and introduces her as a campsite resident. He then asks the other participants, who are still standing, what people they think a typical campsite resident will interact with. People mention the owner of the campsite, neighbors, teachers, and parents at the school of her c­ hildren, the people she deals with to receive her unemployment benefits (as she is medically unable to work), a GP, and the bank (as she is living in a small bungalow so she can pay off a large debt). As the participants suggest these roles, Rob asks them to pick a position in relation to Diana, and to explain why they choose to stand near or far. At some point, we are running out of participants to give roles to, and Rob asks me to represent the police. I feel uncomfortable choosing a position in relation to Diana, since I was not the one suggesting the police might play a role in her life. I walk away from the standing table and position myself as far away from Diana as possible without leaving the workshop area. I hope this signals that I want to be a good sport and that I accept the role given to me, but also that I don’t believe she has much to do with the police. I notice my hands cling to my notebook out of nervousness. The workshop should end soon now, and Rob leads a final discussion in which Diana

explains whether the participants were right in their assumptions. The aim is to challenge prejudice and stigma, and Diana professionally explains that no, she has never had to deal with child protection services, and no, her children are not from multiple fathers. I know she has done this before, and I know she receives decent payment for doing this workshop. Still, I cringe at even the smallest hint of surprise on people’s faces when her story does not match their assumptions. Her medical condition makes her voice fragile, which increases my sympathy for her. With the workshop coming to an end, some participants come up to talk to Diana personally, thanking her and complimenting her on her courage. Rob is engaged in another conversation with participants, and I try to find something to do. I know some participants are going to the reception next door, a networking opportunity for all attendees of the social design symposium. For my research, it would be good to see if I could talk to some of the workshop participants there, but I also want to compliment Diana on her achievement. Diana is still seated, as her medical condition prevents her from standing for a long time, and I finally find a moment to approach her. We chat about the workshop, and she asks where everyone is going now. I mention the reception and ask if she would like to go there, thinking I might be able to assist her walking there. She resolutely declines, and I remember her telling me she can only manage social interaction for a short while. Thus, I realize a busy drink reception is probably the last place she enjoys spending time at. Diana leaves now, and I inquire how she will get home, afraid to insinuate she would not know how to get herself home. She mentions she drove here, and I offer to escort her to her car, which she politely but firmly declines. She knows her way and does not need anyone’s help, and I feel rather useless, once again. I decide to head to the reception.

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Analysis Positionally reflexive work helped me to recognize how my identities and roles, as well as their intersections, affected how I behaved in the field and the relations I developed with informants. I was born and raised in the same region as the one in which campsite residents were living, which meant it was easy to create some common ground based on towns and other places we knew or had been to. My identity as an academic researcher led to different types of “insiderness.” For example, I was sometimes considered a professional insider. I especially felt this in my interactions with the artists and the “professionals” involved, which ranged from policy makers to public health officials and social workers. The Academy for Perception’s practices can be understood as artistic or arts-based interventions (Berthoin Antal, 2015), which are closely related to the field of community art practices (van Erven, 2015, 2016). While organizational scholars have discussed the political and social potential of artistic interventions (Berthoin Antal 2015; Beyes & Steyaert, 2011), it is important to note that the artists in this field also use approaches that are very close to social scientific approaches (Rothenberg & Fine, 2008). In fact, Rob started to refer to their approach as “artistic action research.” At times, this created a proximity and sense of insiderness for me, while at other times, it caused a tension between him and myself, as he sometimes suggested that my task could be to offer scientific justification for their artistic work. Although I was, and am, somewhat familiar with, and sympathetic to, both action research and artistic research, I had to clarify several times that I preferred a more inductive approach, implying that I would follow their work and become immersed in both their ways of doing things, but also keep an open mind about how the participants (specifically the campsite residents) made sense of what they were doing. Throughout the fieldwork, Rob suggested that I was, or could become, part of

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the collective. This started with him calling me out during the public events as either part of their collective, or as a research expert, thereby sometimes drawing on my professional legitimacy as an academic researcher with a PhD to illustrate the importance and urgency of the project. I was certainly not the only one to whom this happened, as local politicians or professionals were also often publicly introduced and asked to make statements on the spot. I was specifically welcomed and asked for contributions when it came to the artistic character of the project. This was not only due to my academic background, but also because I had been working as an art critic and cultural journalist for several years, contributing to respectable newspapers and well-regarded art magazines—a role upon which I was able to draw for establishing trust with artists when doing fieldwork (see Cnossen, 2018). However, as I continued to follow the project, I became increasingly aware that some of the participants who were residents of the campsites and recreational parks, were not particularly interested in, or convinced by, the fact that they were part of a cultural or artistic project. If anything, some felt the artistic “flavor” took away from the severity of their case, although they used the cultural festivals and artistic venues to generate work or create political awareness. This is something I came to realize through conversations with the residents who were taking part in the project, such as Diana. These conversations were often based on a shared knowledge about the region, moving the focus away from art and artistic processes. As such, my insiderness as a researcher and art critic had given me access to this project but had also created a blind spot for the viewpoint of the campsite residents. Hence, by engaging in positionally reflexive work, I was able to recognize that in some situations, certain identity markers mattered more than others. In particular, the identity markers of scientific researcher, art critic, and someone from the same region,

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took center stage or backstage, depending on the situation I found myself in. This was a dynamic as well as a relational process. Rather than choosing or strategizing which identity marker or which level of insiderness should be mobilized, the degree of insiderness became a result of shifting in situ relations and interactions.

VIGNETTE 2: A BRICOLEUR ENMESHED IN A WEB OF POWER, DOMINATION, AND PRIVILEGE Background I (Oana, the first author) started a research project on the controversies surrounding human rights activist organizations in Morocco, their agendas, and the role of digital technologies in their work (campaigning, mobilizing protesters, etc.). Conducting this qualitative research in Morocco would be challenging, because at the time participants faced persecution from authorities due to the hybrid authoritarianism specific to that country (Kreitmeyr, 2019). At that time, Morocco’s monarchical governance was based on networks of wellestablished elites and hand-picked social entrepreneurs, as well as groups who were aligned with the Moroccan regime (lit. makhzen) since Morocco’s independence (Kreitmeyr, 2019). This led to a situation in which anyone who collided with the regime’s interests, such as activists who criticized the lack of freedom of speech, was persecuted. To gain in-depth insight into the organizational dynamics of activism in this highly charged context, I designed the research project based on participatory action research. Thus, I aimed to include participants in all phases of the research, from design to dissemination. From day one, I struggled, ethically and methodologically, with one question that rang inside in my ears all the time and prompted me to engage in positionally reflexive work: Who was I in relation to participants and the setting?

Without being able at first to clearly identify the issue at stake, I was aware of the challenges. I was a white, female, unmarried, non-Muslim, educated in Northern Europe trying to conduct a study in a postcolonial Sunni Muslim setting like Morocco. Morocco is a country in which the legacy of colonialism is combined with ongoing neocolonial relations (i.e., the continuation of the economic colonial system through other means; see Odijie, 2022). This situation made research subjects vulnerable. Consequently, I knew that “meddling” in their lives through a research project backed by Western funding would risk reproducing power inequalities. This was an especially strong risk for Western researchers, who represent a physical and historical embodiment of colonialism and may unintentionally perpetuate neocolonialism. Yet I also knew I could not neglect and ignore the postcolonial context of Morocco just because I was not a member of a community. Such ignorance would have similarly reproduced my privileged position without drawing attention to, or challenging, unequal and oppressive structures. My decision of not speaking on behalf of others could have resulted in “a retreat into a narcissistic yuppie lifestyle in which a privileged person takes no responsibility” (Alcoff, 1991, p. 17). Thus, my intention was to go forward with the research project and find a way to engage in positionally reflexive work in a way that would allow me to navigate the challenges of power, privilege, and domination imbalances, while creating an ethical research process for writing up research findings and representing phenomena in postcolonial contexts.

Vignette As I took the first step on the tarmac at the airport in Rabat, Morocco, a thought kept circling in my head: “It is too simple to see myself just like a white, European, woman.” While I made my way inside the terminal and cued in line for the security check, I kept

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texting back and forth on my smartphone with Omri (pseudonym), my activist contact, about where to meet later that evening at Place Pietri. There was no apparent stark contrast between me and the teenager behind me who wore a Justin Bieber T-shirt, kept scrolling on his iPhone, and was chewing gum, or the woman in front of me who looked a bit tired and blasé and was wearing what looked like an expensive business suit. Yet I was aware of the privilege and power resulting from my background: I was associated with a Northern European university, and I had had the opportunity to obtain a PhD degree. I had many activist contacts in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region because during my early academic career, I studied nonprofit organizations (NGOs) in Tunisia and Lebanon. Fortunately, I passed the security check easily without any lengthy questioning. While I made my way to a taxi, I wondered what I would talk about with Omri that evening. Omri became my key informant for a twoyear period during the project. In our fieldwork relationship, he held different roles including being a guide, translator, procurer, clarifier, and fixer or “go-between” (Burawoy, 2003). Omri helped me develop the participatory research design of my project, which meant that Omri embodied my entry into the activist community. With his help, I developed a research project that benefited both the research participants and their larger community. This benefit meant, on the one hand, building research participants’ skills by providing them with material support (IT knowledge, laptops, etc.). On the other hand, the benefit meant raising awareness within the community about the research topic and ultimately trying to influence structural and policy changes related to the community’s struggles. During the processes of data collection, iterative analysis, and writing, I had the privilege of living in different Airbnb rentals (which helped me maintain a low profile as an academic on sabbatical), while being close

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to the places where activists were doing their work. This gave me the flexibility to accompany Omri at over 150 hours of meetings with activists in different cities, and also to meet him daily for debriefings. Slowly, I felt that the power imbalance between Omri and me was changing because of the complexity and dynamics between our multiple identities and roles. My outsider role was reinforced by material artifacts (or lack thereof), since I did not wear a Hijab (head scarf), signaling that I was not Muslim. Moreover, I spoke little Darija (the Moroccan Arabic dialect) and relied on English and French. This meant that my presence at peaceful demonstrations, debriefings, and team building exercises, or while doing interviews, was often met with curiosity or initial reticence. I felt there were benefits of being an outsider as many were curious about my motives and intentions of doing research, which allowed me to adopt a “naïve researcher role” (Adams, 2021, p. 6) and question many taboos or taken for granted assumptions. Often, however, my outsider position led to whispered answers or silence from the participants.

Analysis Positionally reflexive work helped me recognize how my identities and roles, as well as their intersections, did not only affect my relationship with Omri and the research participants, but also the situations we found ourselves in. It also prompted me to discover the boundaries of, and the silence surrounding, activism in Morocco. I positioned myself as a bricoleur (Vanner, 2015) and followed two steps to identify my identity markers and their intersections, which allowed me to respond ethically to how they were negotiated, questioned, or challenged. In the first step, I defined the study’s objectives and its guiding theoretical framework to situate myself in relation to the participants and context. In the second step, I created a methodological design that minimized the negative

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effects of power, domination, and privilege on the research participants and maximized their empowerment. I intended to achieve catalytic validity (Lather, 1986), meaning that the aim of the research project was to empower participants to transform their community and overcome existing challenges. I mitigated potential security risks for participants through an encryption protocol that only allowed authorized parties to decrypt our communication. I never saw my relationship with Omri as a hierarchical researcher vs. key informant or a dichotomous outsider-insider relationship, because this would have been overly simplistic. Instead, I regarded my relationship with Omri as a “dynamic duo” (Middleton & Pradhan, 2014, p. 355), for at the end of every fieldwork day, we met to piece together field notes; explore similarities and differences in who/what we had observed in specific situations; and vent about the overwhelming challenges and stress created by the project. Then again, I always knew, of course, that I was still—and would continue to be—an outsider in terms of culture, religion, and language, even if apparently an “intimate one” (Ganong, 2011, p. 416). Thus, reflecting on my positionality helped me be aware of the intersections of my social identity markers and respond ethically to the shifting differentials of power, domination, and privilege. Practically, positionally reflexive work allowed me to avoid imposing a participatory research process on participants who did not want to be involved. On several occasions, when a new participant joined the project and would demonstrate significant interest and input, I would adapt the methods and writing process to enhance the project’s relevance. But this was always done on a case-by-case, relational basis and only when there was visible interest and enthusiasm. However, I felt that such a position of intimate outsidership was the most I could achieve in such a tumultuous setting characterized by ongoing “push and pull” dynamics of distance and proximity, observation and participation, insiderness and outsiderness.

Of course, I was critical of my privileged position and the power, domination, and privilege inequalities between Omri and me. I constantly grappled with questions (some of which I could not fully answer even long after the project had ended), such as: Whose voices remain unheard if Omri and myself form an alliance co-producing academic knowledge and acting under a common (hegemonic) aim of building capacity for certain human rights activists in Morocco? How could I even begin to speak on behalf of certain people who are subjected to abuse? Whose interests are strengthened by my research findings and whose are marginalized? Apart from the production of the category of “human rights activists,” what other categories am I not giving voice to? I realized that no one is a complete “insider” or “outsider,” but rather that we navigate across a continuum of insiderness-outsiderness, as “being there” is premised on researching the community, and researchers will never share all their invisible traits with each of their participants (Reyes, 2020). Due to limited resources, there will always be some communities that will be included in a study, while others are excluded (and by association their voices as well). I strived to empathize with participants. In doing so, I could see some of the visible and invisible similarities and differences with people across statuses, and I did my best to always represent them in accordance with their wishes.

CONCLUSION In qualitative organizational research, scholars typically view reflexivity as the cornerstone of trustworthiness in research (Schaefer & Alvesson, 2020). Recently, however, views of reflexivity have been expanded to include the broader position of the researcher as a racialized, gendered, and embodied critical player in the research process (BoladeOgunfodun et al., 2022; Jensen et al., 2020). Sharing this expanded perspective, we believe

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that if qualitative organizational communication research aims to deepen and enrich the lifeworlds of those who are studied (Rios et al., 2017), it is key that researchers engage with their own positionality and intersectionality. In this chapter, we have discussed the challenges of engaging in this kind of positionally reflexive work with regard to two dimensions: (1) the overlapping of identities and roles in the field; and (2) the embeddedness of the researcher within a situated system of power, domination, and privilege. In what follows, we provide some final reflections on the relational nature of positionally reflexive work, and the challenges that accompany it, especially in terms of addressing thorny questions of representation and writing. As we will suggest, the intersections of researchers’ identities and social roles are not geometrical, but relational, meaning that intersections are indeterminately shifting during the conduct of deskwork, fieldwork, and textwork (Yanow, 2000). As we have shown, it is useful to adopt a relational view of positionality; that is, a view that highlights the shifting intersections of identities in a dynamic relational field (Brummans, 2022; Brummans & Vézy, 2022; Vézy & Brummans, 2021). Reflecting on intersecting positionalities therefore entails rethinking the role of the researcher. The concept of diffractiveness (Gullion, 2018; Lather, 1986; Mellander & Wiszmeg, 2016; Schneider, 2002; see also Chapters 25 and 33 in this volume) was developed as a radical rethinking of the researcher’s role; a move from the researcher as “mirror” to the researcher as “diffractive glass” (Gullion, 2018), which triggers a shift in our understanding of representation and writing. Traditionally, the researcher was regarded as a neutral tool that would re-present (make present again) what they observed/experienced in the field through writing. A diffractive view decenters the researcher from the process and decenters the research narrative into a multiplicity of diffracted perspectives. This radical decentering is at the heart of our idea

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of doing positionally reflexive work: attuning to a multiplicity of dynamic positions that unfold and evolve depending on contexts, participants, and interactions. Hence, as we suggest in the title of this chapter, it would be more appropriate to call these entanglements “positionings,” rather than positions, as the former inherently implies a more active engagement, an ongoing indeterminacy. Methodologically, writing is critical in conveying these positionings. Here, researchers may consider fields such as—but not limited to—literary creation, long-form journalism, and new forms of qualitative research (such as postqualitative ones; see Bivens, 2021; see also Chapter 33 in this volume) to enrich their writing and develop new modes of describing their experiences with positionally reflexive work. Writing through a diffractive lens does not assume a central position for the writer, but acknowledges that through the writer, the observed/experienced phenomenon will take shape. Diffraction makes it impossible to focus on the text as the “product” of a neutral representation of reality; it reveals the writing itself, its texture, and its effects in (re) presenting what is studied. The “crisis in representation” in the social sciences and humanities has led to a complete rethinking of the role of writing and an interrogation of textual forms. These ongoing debates are clearly affecting qualitative organizational communication research, moving the field away from classic ways of representing the lifeworld of others, most notably through/in writing. Indeed, the writing process becomes a method in and of itself, a sensemaking and analytical process, one that diffracts and does not reflect or represent. In this case, writing is not transparent, but translucent (Abdallah, 2017). The researcher consequently does not act as a mirror, but as a kaleidoscope. To engage in such relational writing practice, we offer several suggestions. For example, adopting techniques of literary nonfiction writing, such as scene-by-scene constructions, or dense characterization, can enrich the relational aspects of texts and make them

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more vivid (Abdallah, 2017). Reading and writing texts intra-actively can also be useful, in this regard, for this practice “[enacts] new patterns of engagement, attending on how exclusions matter” (Barad, 2010, p. 243, cited in Mengis & Nicolini, 2021, p. 89). Moreover, several techniques and tools, such as the vignettes we created for this chapter, can help develop the writing process in a nonrepresentational and more relational way (Gullion, 2021). Art-based research methods can also function as potential avenues to explore the relational aspects of positionality (McNiff, 2008; Rumbold et al., 2012). In sum, this chapter has explored positionality in the plural, as a variety of entanglements in which the researcher is involved when conducting qualitative organizational communication research. In this respect, we suggest viewing positionality as a set of ongoing indeterminacies that produce different effects and that can only be addressed processually and relationally.

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Schaefer, S. M., & Alvesson, M. (2020). Epistemic attitudes and source critique in qualitative research. Journal of Management Inquiry, 29(1), 33–45. https://doi.org/10. 1177/1056492617739155 Schneider, J. (2002). Reflexive/diffractive ethnography. Cultural Studies Critical Methodologies, 2(4), 460–482. https://doi. org/10.1177/153270860200200402 Scott, M. (2012). Cultural entrepreneurs, cultural entrepreneurship: Music producers mobilising and converting Bourdieu’s alternative capitals. Poetics, 40(3), 237–255. https:// doi.org/10.1016/j.poetic.2012.03.002 Taylor, B. C., Barley, W. C., Brummans, B. H. J. M., Ellingson, L. L., Ganesh, S., Herrmann, A. F., Rice, R. M., & Tracy, S. J. (2021). Revisiting ethnography in organizational communication studies. Management Communication Quar­ terly, 35(4), 623–652. https://doi.org/10.1177/ 08933189211026700 Tracy, S. J., & Rivera K. D. (2010). Endorsing equity and applauding stay-at-home moms: How male voices on work-life reveal aversive sexism and flickers of transformation. Manage­ ment Communication Quarterly, 24(3) 3–43. https://doi.org/10.1177/0893318909352248 Tracy, S. J., & Scott, C. (2006). Sexuality, masculinity and taint management among firefighters and correctional officers: Getting down and dirty with “America’s heroes” and the “scum of law enforcement.” Management Communication Quarterly, 20(1), 6–38. https://doi.org/10.1177/0893318906287898 Trethewey, A. (1997). Resistance, identity, and empowerment: A postmodern feminist analysis of clients in a human service organization. Communication Monographs, 64(4), 281–299. https://doi.org/10.1080/036377 59709376425 Van Erven, E. A. P. B. (2016). Towards a new cutting edge: Where avant-garde meets community art. The Drama Review, 60(4), 97–102. https://doi.org/10.1162/DRAM_a_00597 Van Erven, E. A. P. B. (2015). The tension between community and art. RiDe, 20(3), 207–210. https://doi.org/10.1080/1356978 3.2015.1059748 Vanner, C. (2015). Positionality at the center: Constructing an epistemological and methodological approach for a Western Feminist doctoral candidate conducting research in

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the Postcolonial. International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 14(4), 1–12. https:// doi.org/10.1177/1609406915618094 Vézy, C., & Brummans, B. H. J. M. (2021). La recherche CCO comme pratique réflexive: Une approche relationnelle. Communication & Organisation, 59, 141–153. https://doi. org/10.4000/communicationorganisation. 10098

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PART IV

The Future of Qualitative Organizational Communication Research

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31 Digital Forensics: A Guide to Conducting Qualitative Research on Organizational Communication and Digital Technology Mikkel Flyverbom, Paul M. Leonardi, and Nitzan Navick*

Digital technologies play an increasingly important role in the process of organizing. Technically speaking, digital refers to data that is expressed as a series of 0s and 1s. Computer programs are executed using what are called “bit strings” that process binary data. But this definition is not really helpful. A more useful definition of digital recognizes the interplay of data, technology, and people. Data refer to any information that can be used for reference, analysis, or computation. Your grocery shopping list is data and so is the weather forecast you may consult for tomorrow’s temperature. Data come in a variety of formats—images, text, and numbers. Today, most people think of data as numbers. That is because activities, stories, pictures, and more are often quantified— turned into numbers—so that they can be processed, stored, and transformed through computing. Technologies are what create, capture, transform, transmit, or store data.

For most of human history, the technologies that processed data were simple—stone tablets, papyrus, and paper. Today, data are transformed at exponentially higher volumes and speed through myriad technological devices. In fact, it is through the use of multiple devices—sensors, computers, software programs, cloud-based storage, databases— that we experience most data. Take your phone as one example. It is a series of technologies that work together to mediate data. The combination of sensors, hardware, and software that make up the phone convert analog inputs like sounds and images into 1s and 0s that are processed, stored, and rendered for you as music, pictures, and ­ words. Your phone does not just store data, it produces and reproduces data in novel ways. But data and technology alone do not fully define the digital technologies that increasingly serve as the backbone for most organizing processes. Data are collected, categorized,

* Authors listed in alphabetical order. All authors contributed equally to this manuscript.

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stored, and used by people in organizations; people who make decisions about what data count in what ways and which do not, people who use institutional stocks of knowledge to make sense of and interpret data, people who decide what collected data mean, and people who decide what data are worth collecting in the first place. Of course, people also make decisions about how to use the various technologies that collect, store, and make those data available. Thus, the study of digital technologies is inherently the study of people making devices to do things with data. Digital technologies are, consequently, important organizing phenomena. In this chapter, we provide a novel approach for studying the role of digital technologies in qualitative organizational communication. We term this approach digital forensics. The term forensic is derived from the Latin word for¯ensis, which pertains to the forum. This term has its origin in ancient Roman society, wherein a criminal charge was presented before a public assembly in the forum. The accused and the accuser would present their respective perspectives through speeches, and the case would be decided based on the quality of arguments and the effectiveness of the delivery. Today, a typical forensic analysis usually entails a criminologist analyzing evidence left in different places and in different ways to piece together a story which will be evaluated later by an external audience. Each piece of evidence says something different, which is why multiple pieces of data are necessary for purposes of triangulation—to arrive at a coherent and reliable narrative. Digital forensics comprises the set of tools that researchers need to deploy to understand what role digital technologies play in the organizing process. Because organizing is a process that is constituted through communication, and because digital technologies become intertwined with communication processes in multiplex ways, the digital forensics approach requires multiple methodological tools. In this chapter, we argue that much like the work of a criminologist,

qualitative organizational communication researchers must attend to many different data sources to tell a rich, useful, accurate, and compelling story about the role that digital technology plays in the organizing process. In this chapter, we first preview the various ways in which digital technologies are reshaping work and organizing. We then outline the digital forensics approach and discuss what different methods are necessary to deploy in order to tell a story of how communication affects and is affected by digital technologies. Specifically, we identify five communicative objects of study—communication occurring on, with, through, about, and around digital technology—that comprise a digital forensics analysis. We discuss what can be learned from each of these objects of study and we briefly highlight the methods that are perhaps most useful for studying the various objects.

WHAT’S DIFFERENT IN THE DIGITAL ECONOMY? No matter where you go or what you do, you are connected to digital technologies. Even if you turn off your phone, there is a good chance that you will be captured by a security camera in the street, leave a digital trace because you buy something with a credit card, or get on the metro. Increasingly, our lives are interwoven with digital technologies of all sorts. The smartphones in our pockets have apps that access our contacts, pictures, and movements. Many times a day, people go on social media platforms where multiple parts of social life play out, including friendships and discussions about politics. On top of these, fitness trackers know how many steps we take, and surveillance cameras, cell phone networks and GPS devices follow our movements. If you work in a bigger organization, it is quite likely that your employer has digital systems that keep an eye on how you perform your duties. And whether you buy books

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online, listen to music, or watch a series via a streaming service, data-driven, algorithmic systems make choices about what you should consume next, or may be interested in. These developments not only have consequences for your interactions on social media, such as what ads you are served, which of your friends’ posts you see, or what political views you are exposed to (Albu & Etter, 2016); data, algorithms, and technologies also make their way into organizations and societies in profound but overlooked ways (Alaimo & Kallinikos, 2021). Organizations increasingly rely on datafied, algorithmic systems when they make decisions about products or seek to understand their customers or publics (Leonardi & Neeley, 2022). In years to come, we will have to grapple with questions about what happens when datafied, algorithmic systems travel from commercial, private platforms into all kinds of organizations and the rest of society. Also, the public sector increasingly relies on data-driven, automated forms of decision-making, and this has wide-reaching implications not only for employees and citizens, but also fundamental pillars of the public sector, including fairness, rights, and legal issues, as well as democracy itself (Zuboff, 2019). Digital ubiquity is the term we use to describe this situation, where digital technologies are everywhere and woven into most parts of social life. Soon enough, digital technologies will be much like ­electricity—built in everywhere and something we take for granted without questioning. Digital ubiquity both makes technology more important and more invisible because we tend to take it for granted or simply not think about it. Digital spaces can no longer be separated from the rest of social life, and we can hardly distinguish between online and offline activities. Even if some parts of life still may play out without digital technologies, it is increasingly difficult to be off the grid. Digital spaces are a complex mix of data, algorithms, and technologies. These

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components can be separated in technical and conceptual terms, but not when it comes to their actual operations. This is so because algorithms are constantly shaped by and inseparable from the data they sort and thrive on. Similarly, technologies both produce data and are informed by data. The components of digital spaces are obviously a range of digital technologies, systems, and applications, such as hardware, software, and platforms. Such devices turn analog phenomena like books or music into digital forms, or they produce digital phenomena, such as social media feeds or cloudbased file servers. Digital technologies and systems are connected and networked, for instance through protocols, interfaces, and link systems such as the World Wide Web that underpins what we term the internet. Also, digital spaces consist of data. All activities described above produce digital traces, such as logs of how products have been assembled, or who you have connected with or liked on a social media platform. As Zuboff (1988) suggested, when work processes start to rely on digital technologies, they are opened to a range of possibilities that she termed automate and informate. When work is automated, digital technologies replace human labor, and production processes can be optimized and controlled in new ways. This is often the first step when organizational processes become digital. As Zuboff noticed many years before we started talking about datafication, some organizations do more than automating their operations. These organizations, she suggested, see the data produced by digital systems as a source of insight and a way to reorganize and optimize work through novel insights. This is so, she suggested, because when you automate a process, you need to break it down to its parts and the concrete activities involved in that process. Used in the right manner, the insights that surface when we decompose processes can be a source of inspiration, a way to reflect on what work entails, and an

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invitation to consider how it could be transformed. Today, the realization that data can be a source of insight is well established, and one of the main reasons that digital platforms like Google, Amazon, and Netflix thrive is that they have data about their users as their main asset and generator of competitive insights. Data has emerged as the main resource and driver of digital infrastructures. Digital spaces also consist of algorithms. You can think of algorithms as mechanisms for sorting something out, and a simple example would be a set of principles for sorting a deck of cards (Sørensen & Bentholm, 2013). You could do this sorting either by way of color, putting red and black cards in two separate stacks. Or you could sort them by numbers, starting with the lowest ranked card, and organizing them progressively, leaving you with four stacks. These kinds of instructions are what make up algorithms— some predefined steps that process input and create particular outputs. Clearly, organizing the social media feeds of billions of individual Facebook users is wildly more complex than sorting out a deck of cards, but the operations are similar. They are about defining differences between objects, criteria for what is relevant, and how information and other phenomena should be presented. They are the kinds of instructions that a computer can understand and rely on. Increasingly, such algorithmic operations are not only pre-defined, but also able to learn from the data they engage with and the training they receive, which is why discussions about data reuse in machine learning take center stage (Thylstrup et al., 2022). Taken together, these digital components constitute the entangled phenomenon that we have come to know as the digital spaces that we inhabit and rely on in our daily lives. Cast in more theoretical terms, they are what Alaimo and Kallinikos (2021, p. 1386) call an “apparatus of data-technologies-algorithms.” This conceptualization covers the intermingling of data, the technologies that support the production and diffusion of data and the

artificial intelligence (AI)-related methods by which data are made to matter and underpins our description of digital spaces. The shift in default to digital spaces and data abundance is also the result of socio-political forces consisting of production systems, global supply chains, and organizational developments, such as the “triumph of transparency” as institutional norm (Braithwaite & Drahos, 2000, p. 507) and public demands for openness, accountability, and insight. At the same time, these technological developments also lead to the emergence of what can be thought of as a new “economy of traces” (Power, 2022, p. 1) and novel types of “data capitalism” (West, 2019, p. 20). As a result of these developments, our social lives are marked by an abundance of information, in sharp contrast to a past with widespread information scarcity. This means that social life becomes seeable and knowable in radically new ways, and that exposure, surveillance, reuse, and leaks become conditions in many contexts. Also, most social domains are “refracted in digital prisms” (Flyverbom, 2019, p. 18) and through processes of “categorization” (Alaimo & Kallinikos, 2021, p. 1385). Such forms of mediation make social phenomena change shape, and they make managing visibilities a central concern for individuals and organizations (Leonardi & Treem, 2020).

RESEARCH ABOUT COMMUNICATION AND TECHNOLOGY IN A DIGITAL, DATAFIED ERA As organizations of all types move, increasingly, toward digital infrastructures, such moves will have consequences for research strategies, data collection and methodological toolkits. If we accept the idea that the world is crowded with digital information and data, we need to consider the consequences for research. As a result, all sorts of human activities become informational ­phenomena— we become our data, as the title of Koopman’s

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(2019) book suggests. Data is the key issue here, because datafication means that we no longer exist only as humans in flesh and blood, but also as digital traces that add up to a depiction of where we have traveled, what we like, who we know, and what we have done. We can think of these shadows as our “data doubles” (Haggerty & Ericson, 2000, p.  605). With these developments, several complex and important questions arise: How accurate are our digital doubles, and do they correspond to who we are otherwise? In whose hands do these digital traces end up, and what will they use them for? And how can we control them and protect ourselves and our private spheres? Living in times of digital ubiquity has wide-reaching consequences for how we conduct our lives and the kinds of skills and competencies we need to develop as employees, parents, citizen—and researchers. These developments create new conditions for researchers, and this is what we explore in this chapter: What new ways of doing research are made possible by digital transformations, what skills do researchers need to hone to make use of these possibilities, and how do they require us to reflect on the craft and logics of research? As a novel condition for research, digital ubiquity implies what we can think of as a shift in default (Flyverbom et  al., 2016). In the past, information was scarce, and research was about uncovering, collecting, and securing enough information to be able to document a phenomenon or develop a theoretical conceptualization of it. Today, we live in digital spaces that make information abundant, and therefore we need to develop other kinds of research skills. These are what we develop in this chapter, using the concept of digital forensics to highlight the consequences of the shift in default to information abundance for researchers in organizational communication, as well as in related disciplines such as management and information systems. When we talk about digital forensics in this chapter, we seek to highlight forms of

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research that focus on the insides of digital spaces, both in the situations or production end where people work with data and technology, and in the digital spaces, platforms, and devices where traces end up. This interest in researching both in situ and traces is in line with our theoretical starting point, namely that the apparatus of data, algorithms and technologies can be understood as digital prisms that refract and re-categorize social phenomena (Alaimo & Kallinikos, 2020; Flyverbom, 2019). What we set out to develop is an analytical and methodological approach that starts from the shift in default that we argue for above, and that involves a more fundamental reorientation. One way to put this is that digital forensics involves fundamentally different forms of observation, knowledge production, and intervention. If social phenomena are refracted and re-­categorized through digital technologies, algorithms, and data, it also has consequences for how researchers can see, know, and govern social phenomena (Flyverbom & Schade, 2022). Digital forensics may sound like what happens in police work, and our approach also takes inspiration from how criminal investigations tap into human activities, compile traces, build possible scenarios and seek to establish causes or relations. Still, we distinguish our conception of digital forensics as different from crime investigations. First, digital forensics are a way to study broader social phenomena, and not only crime. But by using the term forensics, we point to the interest in material and other traces left by people and machines. And by using the term digital, we highlight that these traces are increasingly left in digital spaces. Digital spaces differ from other kinds of spaces by having technological affordances that allow for visibility, persistence, editability and association (Treem & Leonardi, 2012)  and  these create new possibilities for action and research. Also, we consider digital forensics to be an invitation to treat technology and human practices as inseparable and

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as objects of ethnographic and other forms of situated inquiry.

DIGITAL TECHNOLOGY’S ROLE IN PROCESSES OF ORGANIZATIONAL COMMUNICATION Digital technologies become intertwined with organizational communication p­ rocesses in a variety of ways. Here, we distinguish what we refer to as five communicative objects of study that are important to differentiate when attending to the role ­ played by digital technology in organizational c­ommunication. Communication can occur (1) on, (2) with, (3) through, (4) about, and (5) around digital technologies and each of these modes of interaction constitutes a unique and specific object of study. For example, communicating on a digital technology like a platform has different characteristics than communication that occurs with a digital technology like an AI-based chatbot or than communication that occurs through a digital technology like Zoom. Further, to understand each of these objects of study, researchers must collect and analyze different kinds of data.

Figure 31.1 summarizes our key argument about the digital forensics approach. As you move from objects of study at the center of the figure out to each of the sides, progressively more different types of data are needed to piece together the story about how digital technologies shape the communication process that is the analysts’ object of inquiry. The types of data collected as one moves to the left of the figure help to provide more macro-level accounts of organizational behavior (e.g., broad patterns of action that together constitute organizing), while the types of data collected as one moves to the right of the figure serve to generate insights about more micro-level accounts of i­ndividual-level communication practices afforded and constrained by interaction on, with, through, about, and around digital technologies. Although our identification and specification of these five objects of study might be new, the study of them by organizational communication researchers is not. Table 31.1 provides several examples, beyond those covered in the text below, of the study of qualitative organizational communication on, with, through, about, and around digital technologies that have been published in leading journals in the field and in adjacent fields. The important point here is that

Figure 31.1  Digital Forensics Approach: Types of Data Useful for Various Objects of Study at Different Levels of Analysis

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Table 31.1  Examples of Various Objects of Study in the Literature Object of Study

Description

Reference

On

A study examining the constitution and maintenance of supporting communication in an online-only cancer support community/forum A study evaluating the role of social media as organizing mechanisms in instances of collective action A study assessing the potential of social media as a channel to foster democratic deliberation A study exploring the extent to which human-like cues and the framing used to introduce a chatbot to a consumer can influence perceptions about social presence as well as mindful and mindless anthropomorphism A study examining how Uber drivers contribute to the normalization of the social production of space through their interpretative practices of digital data in an online forum A study explicating how workers make sense of different automated features of the Upwork platform, developing a literacy for understanding and working with algorithms A study investigating how the affordances of enterprise social networking systems can help reduce challenges in sharing organizational knowledge A study exploring the potential for enterprise social network sites to support knowledge-sharing practices within an organization A study outlining the potential of enterprise social media platforms in both enabling and hindering sharing from the perspective of affordances A study exploring what impacts of ICT-enabled brokerage are evident in the GSJM in Aotearoa New Zealand, how activists’ attitudes are embedded in the metaphors they use, and what concerns activists express about ICTs A study examining the expectations that workers have regarding enterprise social media and the different technological frames they assign to them A study investigating the dynamics behind group-based technology adoption by examining the underlying mechanisms of change in collective adoption decisions over time A study of how firms can create word-of-mouth peer influence and social contagion by designing viral features into their products and marketing campaigns A study focusing on how employee social network ties at work affect deep structure use and job performance in the context of enterprise system implementation A study exploring whether employees with access to social media are more likely to develop shared cognition and shift their attention within organizational networks

Aakhus & Rumsey (2010)

With

Through

About

Around

all of these communicative objects of study are necessary to provide a comprehensive picture of the role that digital technologies play in the organizing process. And, likewise, as one moves from the center of the figure out

Segerberg & Bennett (2011) Halpern & Gibbs (2013) Araujo (2018)

Chan & Humphreys (2018)

Jarrahi & Sutherland (2019)

Fulk & Yuan (2013)

Ellison et al. (2015) Sun et al. (2019)

Ganesh & Stohl (2010)

Treem et al. (2015)

Bayerl et al. (2016)

Aral & Walker (2011)

Sykes & Venkatesh (2017)

Leonardi (2018)

to the sides, an increasing variety of data are necessary for piecing together a rich empirical account. Consequently, communication researchers will need to deploy different data collection methods and collect data at

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differing levels of analysis as they explore the role of digital technology in organizational communication. In what follows, we explain each of these communicative objects of study, provide examples of them from existing research, and offer brief methodological notes on which data collection techniques are necessary to study that specific interaction between organizational communication and digital technology. We spend the most time considering the methodological implications of collecting and analyzing digital exhaust for two reasons. First, as Figure 31.1 illustrates, the use of digital exhaust data is important for research on all communicative objects of study, not just for studying communication on digital technologies. Second, there are no other chapters in this handbook that describe the process of engaging in qualitative organizational communication with digital exhaust, but there are chapters that explore other methods including interviews (Chapter 16), observations (Chapter 17), and archival data (Chapter 18). Rather than repeat much of what appears in those chapters, we focus simply on describing how and why each method is important for studying particular objects of study in the context of digital technology use as part of the digital forensics toolkit.

Digital Exhaust as a Data Source for Qualitative Organizational Communication Research Digital platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and Google contain a wealth of data, and some of these can be accessed through Application Program Interfaces (API) or by scraping sites for posts, comments, and other contents (see also Chapter 18 in this volume). Such data make it possible to investigate how topics, groups, and sentiments develop and gain traction in digital spaces, to carry out analyses using both text classification, content analysis, social network analysis, and machine learning methods, and to visualize

findings in the form of maps, clouds, or networks. These approaches differ in their interest in either what is being said, how it is said, and how actors interact (Lundgaard, 2021; Vatrapu et al., 2016). While such approaches may seem very technical and automated (Grimmer & Stewart, 2013) they also entail a wealth of analytical work and a need for reflections that we know from existing qualitative and quantitative approaches. In this way, datafied, algorithmic knowledge production raises fundamental—old and new— questions about epistemology, ontology, and the craft of research that scholars must grapple with (Thylstrup et al., 2020). We also need to consider the limitations of these approaches. First and foremost, digital platforms and technology companies remain largely inaccessible for independent researchers, and this raises questions such as what data do you get access to? Is it a narrow selection or a funnel of data (boyd & Crawford, 2012)? And what kinds of “epistemic inequality” (Zuboff, 2020, p. 174) are produced by this situation? In a sense, these developments where the most open and public forms of communication take place in closed and commercial spaces are a pressing concern and a major digital divide with farreaching consequences for research and possibilities for intervention into the potentially negative effects of digital transformations. We simply do not know what happens inside digital platforms. Another kind of investigation of digital exhaust focuses on the activities and traces of individuals by monitoring them through devices, self-tracking, digital infrastructures, and other uses of technology. By gaining access to some or all the digital traces people leave via their smartphones or sensors, such research can offer granular insights into communicative interactions, personal and professional lives, movements, environmental factors, and so on. By tracing the datafication of everyday life, we get a sense of how people engage with technology and how technology shapes our lives, as well as harvests data in

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ways and degrees that may surprise researchers and participants (Mejias & Couldry, 2019; West, 2019). Such studies may resemble traditional ethnographic or situated qualitative research, but their empirical focus on traces rather than situated practices sets them apart. Also, because of their orientation to digital infrastructures and platforms, they allow for research that goes beyond studies of individuals to look for patterns, networks, and other ways in which data get circulated, aggregated, and reused (Ribes, 2019). Such approaches have been used to study Twitter, with a focus on users (Mislove et al., 2011) or a focus on how topics such as climate change are discussed (Lundgaard, 2021). Also, studies have used trackers and reporting tools to do research on air pollution (Public Data Lab) and to show how apps track and involve third parties (Helles et al., 2020). Future research will likely seek to capture the crafting and uses of digital doubles (Haggerty & Ericson, 2000), and to understand how our understanding of both objects and humans change because of such developments. However, research on datafied living also requires many of the skills that we normally associate with qualitative research, in particular because those studying digital traces, such as ecologists, also need to have contextual knowledge about the data they study (Zimmerman, 2008). This is why also research on datafication can be seen as extending and relying on insights from existing research approaches, even if looking at new empirical resources and much wider circulations. In a world marked by digital ubiquity, many industries and professions rely on advanced tools for the production and distribution of their services, and such tools can be a valuable entry point for studies seeking to make sense of how digital spaces are developed and may be steered. One example of a study that seeks to both develop digital tools and test them against alternative ones is a research project that one of the authors is currently involved in. In the project Platform

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Intelligence in News, we set out to develop recommender systems for newspapers, with a focus on helping them regain control over contents and news feeds. Much news production has come to rely on tools developed by Google, Facebook, and other technology companies outside the news industry, and with time, these solutions have become both pervasive and parasitic. They harvest data, they drive advertising and they set the conditions for news production in ways that undermine business models and relations between newspapers and readers (Lindskow, 2016). To remedy these problems, the project develops its own technical solutions with strategic advantages for news producers, starting from a focus on how to balance commercial, journalistic, and democratic concerns in the creation of relevant, informative, and engaging news feeds. As we develop these tools seeking to give control back to news producers, we also study the technical development of recommender systems and gain insights from live tests of changes in news feeds, including comparisons between solutions. Such forms of analysis speak to the novel possibilities that digital ubiquity creates. We can study both the research and development that goes into digital solutions and the consequences of them by following both people, technologies, and traces as they are created and used. In many ways, such research extends existing ways of doing qualitative organizational communication research, but adds a focus on the more extensive workings and consequences of technologies as they get entangled with broader digital infrastructures and business operations.

Object of Study 1: Communication On Digital Technologies Communication on digital tools, or rather, communication which takes place entirely in a digital space is one potential object of study for those interested in qualitative o­ rganizational communication. Because communication is

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bound to the platform, every interaction on the platform is captured and stored in the frontend of the platform as text and image, and on the back-end as log files. These data can serve as the raw data for a qualitative analysis. In the area of organizational communication there are several examples of using data generated on a platform to study communication that occurs on digital technologies. For example, Nissenbaum and Shifman’s (2017) work exemplifies research of communication on organizing conducted on a digital platform. The study takes a grounded analysis approach to examining the formation of cultural capital using memes on a web-based community called 4Chan’s /b/ board. Their methods rely entirely on observation and careful analysis of existing digital traces produced and stored on the platform by 4Chan users’ communicative interactions, in order to explain a communicative process taking place exclusively through this medium. In the context of organizing, Gibbs et  al. (2022) more recently theorized that communication on singular digital platforms, such as bona fide online communities, provide novel sites in which communicative phenomena, such as concertive control processes, can be successfully captured and observed in both work and nonwork contexts through the exclusive analysis of platforms on which organizing occurs. Studying communication on a digital platform, such as an enterprise social media platform, a digital collaboration tool, or a messaging app, can have several benefits for qualitative organizational communication researchers. It allows scholars to focus on a specific type of communication, such as public-facing communication on social media or internal communication via email. This allows researchers to get a detailed understanding of the communication practices and patterns specific to that platform. Additionally, many platforms, such as enterprise social media and messaging apps, generate large amounts of data, which can be easily collected and analyzed by researchers. This allows for the study of communication at a large scale and with high granularity.

By studying communication on a digital platform, researchers can also access a specific population of users. For example, enterprise social media that has channel functionality might segment different organizational functions and allow researchers to focus on only engineers, or only managers. Furthermore, by studying communication on a singular platform, researchers can compare communication practices across different organizations or groups that use the same platform. This can provide insights into the similarities and differences in communication practices across different contexts. Increases in the use of digital technologies produce a corresponding increase in the amount of work that is recorded and stored. Every time employees like someone’s post on Jive, form a team in Microsoft Teams, or assign someone to project milestones in Trello, these digital technologies record that action as meta-data. These meta-data are digital exhaust. Logs of employee behavior are called digital exhaust because they are by-products of other activities, like setting up a meeting or running calculations. Although the term exhaust may signal the inadvertent nature of such digital records and connote worthlessness, nothing could be further from the truth.

Object of Study 2: Communication With Digital Technologies Communication with digital tools refers to interactions with autonomous digital technologies powered by AI and other machine learning algorithms. Digital communication technologies powered by artificial ­intelligence—what Endacott and Leonardi (2022) call AICTs— have computational capabilities enabling them to recognize patterns and make decisions towards pre-programmed or adaptive goals. People do not communicate on them; instead, AICTs communicate their own decisions and recommendations to their primary users through a variety of interface options and can be configured to communicate directly to and

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autonomously with other people on behalf of the principal user. AICTs can be developed and deployed with varying levels of computational ability and intelligence. The most basic AICT is a chatbot. Chatbots are computer programs designed to simulate conversations with human users. They use AI to mimic the unstructured stream of human conversation, typically first attempting to understand the intent of their communication partner and then responding by utilizing a predefined set of specific replies. Endacott and Leonardi (2022) center communication with artificially intelligent communication technologies as their object of study in their exploration of how the involvement of these tools in communication activities might shape engagement in impression management. They inductively uncover processes through which communication partners form impressions of the other when engaging with the artificially intelligent communication technologies employed by their partner. While not all parts of the communicative process occur directly with the digital tool, this object of study provides insight into an important part of the communication process that takes place between organizational members at a dyadic level. A study of organizational communication with a chatbot on the popular Slack platform by Laitinen et al. (2021) showed that when communicating with the “Slackbot,” there was great variation in how the team members responded to the bot’s greetings, acclamations, work-related messages, and relational messages. That data showed peoples’ communication with the AI were significantly shaped by how it responded to their personal and socioemotional communications. The findings suggest that AICTs can manifest and facilitate relational team communication in potentially new ways. Studying human communication with a digital tool such as an AI assistant can provide many benefits for researchers. First, by studying how people interact with digital tools, researchers can gain insights into user

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behavior, such as how organizational members and stakeholders navigate through software interfaces, how they process information, and how they make decisions. Studying communication with a digital tool helps researchers gain insights into how technology is adopted and used within the organization in addition to what factors influence technology adoption and use, and how technology can be integrated into organizational communication practices. Researchers can also examine the impact of technology on organizational performance, such as how it affects productivity, decision-making, and collaboration through this lens. At the macro level, this object of study can also help researchers to understand how technology is integrated into organizational communication practices, and researchers can understand how technology is shaping the organizational culture, such as how it is affecting values, norms, and beliefs. Because, at least today and for the near future, communication with an AICT must occur via text or speech and communications are processed (on the AICT’s side, at least) in the cloud, interaction with AICTs also produces digital exhaust that can be effectively mined for specific interactional sequences. Thus, in addition to interviews, observations, logs, or diaries for studying interaction with digital technologies, digital exhaust can also be useful for capturing a more complete picture of what organizational communication involving AI looks like. However, this object of study can be limiting in several ways. Studying communication with a digital tool can be challenging because of the complexity of the organizational context, the limited generalizability of the research, the ethical concerns such as data security and privacy, the lack of control over the digital tool, and the limited access to data and the researcher’s limited understanding of the technology. Nevertheless, by being aware of these limitations, researchers can take steps to minimize their impact and conduct rigorous and valid research examining communication with a digital tool.

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Object of Study 3: Communication Through Digital Technologies Communication through digital tools is a highly typical object of study in qualitative organizational communication research. This research focuses on organizational communication processes which take place through, but not exclusively on, certain media. For example, research which focuses on communication processes taking place through enterprise social media has been highly popularized among academics interested in virtual work (e.g., Chen et al., 2019; Ellison et al., 2015; Fulk et al., 2013; Gibbs et al., 2013; Leonardi et al., 2012; Van Osch & Steinfeld, 2016). Studying organizational communication through one particular digital tool, such as an email system, a messaging app, or a social media platform is beneficial in several ways. This approach allows researchers to focus on a specific type of communication, such as internal communication via email or public-facing communication on social media. Researchers can, therefore, gain a detailed understanding of the communication practices and patterns specific to that tool. Furthermore, just as is the case with studying communication on or with a digital tool, platforms such as email and messaging apps generate large amounts of data which can be collected allowing for granular analysis of communication through a tool. For example, in a study of social media use among workers in a multinational high-tech company, Kim (2018) found that the increased communication visibility afforded by use of an enterprise social networking site allowed dispersed workers to obtain previously unshared knowledge. Yet, visibility also led to negative consequences because it revealed knowledge disparities between different status groups, which ultimately sustained status hierarchies. Through interviews with organizational actors and analysis of posts made by the users themselves (which were available via the platform’s digital exhaust), Kim showed that communication visibility, which

is often linked to positive knowledge sharing benefits, can also highlight inequitable distribution of knowledge and status. By focusing on the communication occurring through the digital platform, Kim was able to show how affordances of the technology—the way it enabled and constrained certain kinds of communication—shaped how communication could come to constitute and re-­constitute status hierarchies in the organization. As another example of studying organizational communication, qualitatively, through digital technologies, Oostervink et  al. (2016) explored how professionals in a large globally distributed consulting firm used a new enterprise social media platform to communicate with each other in the pursuit of more effective knowledge sharing. This macro-organizational analysis used observation data on the platform to explore how professionals navigated the tension between the organization’s desire for them to share knowledge, and their own desire to keep knowledge close so as to burnish their own reputations and status. The authors found that to temporarily manage these ambiguities, the professionals used the technology’s affordances to develop a variety of coping messages, which affected how they engaged with others through the platform. Although this study made use of observations to explore macroorganizational patterns, it did not utilize digital exhaust to triangulate their findings. Doing so would have likely led to the development of even more specific mechanisms as the communicative practices that enabled the on-going maintenance of ambiguities could have been more concretely demonstrated. Naturally, studying organizational communication through one particular digital tool can provide valuable insights into communication practices and patterns within the organization, but it also has its own limitations such as limited generalizability, ­limited understanding of the technology, limited access to data, potential for bias and ethical concerns. To overcome these limitations, it is recommended that researchers triangulate

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data from multiple sources and methods whenever possible. For example, enterprise social media is often only one medium utilized for a given organizational communication process. So, while some of these processes can be partially observed through the digital exhaust of this medium, the communication through a particular digital tool only provides a partial picture of the process. In order to capture a broader understanding of the communication process in question, interviews and/or focus groups and the digital exhaust/interactions through other digital tools at either the micro or meso level must be considered in the analysis whenever possible. Supplementary data sources such as these make communication through an object of study moderately resource-intensive when compared to studies of communication on or with a digital tool.

Object of Study 4: Communication About Digital Technologies Communication about digital tools typically relies on the user attitudes, assigned symbolism, and overall discourse about a particular medium. For example, Barley et  al. (2010) build theory to disentangle the contradiction between the flexibility vs. control afforded by email by exploring the way in which users communicate about and assign symbols of stress to the technology. While many studies of communication on or through email suggest that tenure of use mediates email involved overload, users’ communication about their usage was contrary, providing a broader story of email use. Other accounts of communication about new technologies similarly show that how we talk about digital tools can shape subsequent action around them. For example, in a study about planned organizational change in a large Midwestern University’s IT department, Jian (2007) showed how the adoption, implementation, and use of an enterprise-wide digital tracking system occurred amidst strong rhetoric about the role that the new technology

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would play in the restructuring of the organization. Through interviews with key organizational actors, Jian showed how resistance to the digital technology was constituted by a dynamic, reflexive interplay between the ongoing discursive construction of the technology and existing organizational tensions. Talk about the technology enacted various organizational tensions, which then shaped how users interpreted the ICTs. Jian’s study did not focus on how people used the technology to communicate (on, with, or through), but instead how communication about the digital technology shaped organizing practices. Other studies have shown how communication about new digital technologies can affect broader patterns of organizing and organizational discourse. Heracleous and Barrett’s (2001) qualitative study of the London insurance market showed how the way financial traders talked about a new electronic trading system not only shaped how people interpreted the system (similar to Jian’s (2007) findings), but also showed how talk about the technology changed the deep structures that constituted occupational culture. Through interviews and studying of documents in which discourse about practices and the profession were codified, the authors were able to demonstrate how communication practices that constituted professional norms changed in the wake of discussions about the new technology. But just like the Jian study, the author did not have tools available to extract digital exhaust data about use of the electronic trading platform. Had they been able to do so, they could have complimented their macro analysis with insights about how the functionality of the platform intersected with emerging discursive constructions about both the technology and the profession. However, primarily at the macro level, the exploration of communication about digital technology as object of study benefits greatly from supplemental data sources beyond the digital exhaust of the digital tool in question such as interviews or focus groups, digital exhaust/interactions through other media,

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and organizational-level documents in order to capture a thorough understanding of why individuals within an organization communicate about a digital tool they way that they do. Organizations are complex systems and studying how technology is adopted, discussed, and used within these systems can be challenging. Researchers may have difficulty controlling for all the variables that may influence communication about technology, and may struggle to fully understand the impact of communication on technology adoption and use. Much like the limitations of other objects of study, the limitations of studying communication about a digital tool include limited generalizability, the researcher’s limited understanding of the technology, limited access to data, potential for bias, ethical concerns, complexity, and limited control over the digital tool. In order to overcome these limitations, researchers should be aware of the limitations and triangulate data from multiple sources and methods.

Object of Study 5: Communication Around Digital Technologies Communication around digital tools refers to the way in which digital tool use influence communicative processes occurring outside of the tool itself. Barley’s (1986) seminal study about the introduction of computed tomography (CT) scanners into two hospitals provides a clear, early example demonstrating the utility of focusing on communication around digital tools. His observation-based analysis showed how use of the technology shaped the way that technicians and radiologists interacted. He charted the differences in imperative phrases and in consultation patterns, showing how the technology changed who did what tasks and who had what status in the interaction. Communication in this study was not occurring on, through, with, or about the technology; it was occurring around it.

As another example, Leonardi’s (2007) study on activating the information capabilities of technology also drew on observational data to show how use of an information-based service management tool in an IT department gave technicians new information about each other than they had before—information which was subsequently used to seed new interactions and precipitate new communication patterns among the technicians. Like in Barley’s (1986) study, Leonardi did not focus on communication occurring on, with, through, or about the technology. Instead, the digital technology provided information that shaped communication patterns occurring around it. Leonardi’s (2013) study of a simulation tool used in automotive engineering showed complementary findings. In this study, the new technology provided engineers with capabilities enabling them to decrease communication about topics that interfered with coordination and increase the frequency with which they sought advice about new topics. Consequently, use of the technology enabled engineers to structure their advice networks differently. Although the Barley (1986) and Leonardi (2007) studies both relied on observations for a macro focus on the changing interaction of work patterns, neither study drew on digital exhaust to complement or enrich the analysis. Leonardi’s (2013) study of automotive engineers did use such digital exhaust. By examining the logs of which features of the technology different engineers used at various times, Leonardi was able to show how similar appropriates of the technology’s features—what he called the enactment of a “collective affordance”—enabled the engineers to standardize their work in ways that led to shifts in their communication with each other. In this way, using digital exhaust was an essential method to complement an understanding of why, how, and most importantly, when communication changes around a new digital technology occurred. Organizational communication researchers may have difficulty controlling for all the

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variables that may influence communication around technology and may struggle to fully understand the impact of communication on technology adoption and use. Similar to the limitations of other objects of study, the limitations of studying communication around a digital tool include limited generalizability, the researcher’s limited understanding of the technology, limited access to data, potential for bias, ethical concerns, complexity, and limited control over the digital tool. In order to overcome these limitations, researchers should be aware of the limitations and strive to triangulate as many data from as many of the aforementioned types of data sources.

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that what we have provided offers some guidance for this important endeavor. In this chapter, we have reviewed the dramatic evolution of the digital economy and introduced the concept of digital forensics for the study of organizational communication in the digital economy. The digital forensics approach highlights forms of research that focus on situations in which organizations and organizational members utilize digital tools for communication, thus leaving digital traces that can fruitfully address research questions regarding a wide variety of objects of study.

REFERENCES CONCLUSION As demonstrated across the many chapters of this handbook, digital data are becoming increasingly abundant, and by that virtue, increasingly accessible for researchers to leverage in their inquiries of digital organizational communication. And, as many chapters in this handbook show, digital data provide new opportunities and challenges for the qualitative study of organizational communication. The opportunities include the possibility to engage with new types of empirical material and to mobilize the kinds of analytical skills that students and scholars engaged in qualitative studies of organizational communication already have. At the same time, however, studies of digital and datafied organizational phenomena also raise new questions about samples, access, validity, and representation that we need to grapple with. As humans and organizations become increasingly datafied, new openings for research arise and new questions become pressing for our field. Such issues involve both technical, analytical, and epistemological challenges that qualitative studies of organizational communication will have to engage with in years to come. Our hope is

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32 Hybridity, Visibility, and Organizing: Globalization and Qualitative Methods in Organizational Communication Research Shiv Ganesh, Cynthia Stohl, and Samantha James How can ethnography be global? How can ethnography be anything but micro and ahistorical? How can the study of everyday life grasp lofty processes that transcend national boundaries? After all, participant observation, as sociologists have crafted it, aims for the subjective interpretation of social situations or the foundations of human interaction. It was designed to elucidate social processes in bounded communities or negotiated orders in institutions. It was incontrovertibly intended for the small scale. It was certainly not meant for the global! (Burawoy, 1998, p. 4)

For the past 30 years, organizational communication scholars have grappled seriously with ways to study and understand globalization. Each new generation of scholarship on globalization has built upon the past while conceptualizing globalization in new and increasingly complex ways, uncovering novel forms of organizing and exploring fundamental challenges relating to global ethics and global competencies. Although disagreement and debate have been an integral part of scholarly projects regarding the ontological, epistemological, communicative, and ethical

attributes of globalization, there is one issue about which most scholars agree: globalization engenders the need to be reflexive of our parochial research practices and re-examine our theoretical and methodological commitments in terms of (1) the degree to which our approaches are culture bound, (2) the ability to address the increasing complex and ­volatile nature of globalization, and (3) globalization’s relentless presence in all aspects of our lives. As Stohl and Ganesh’s (2014) review indicates, the field has responded ­proactively, if imperfectly, to its 20th-century parochialisms. However, in the past ten years the intensification of globalization coupled with technological developments, political and economic upheaval, and global crises have radically altered the communication landscape. Consider, for instance, the communication dynamics surrounding the COVID-19 epidemic, the ascendance of populism around the globe, and the intensification of the climate crisis. Scholars have persuasively argued that

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the rapid digitalization of all forms of activity and behavior have brought about a seismic shift in people’s ability to see and be seen (Brighenti, 2010; Flyverbom, 2022). We see contemporary scholarship taking into account how global technological developments, digital ubiquity, and socio-political-economic change have fostered the ascendance of visibility as a major force in assembling, sustaining, and transforming global organizing. This visibility shift has been aptly characterized as reconfiguring sociomaterial practices of organizing (Leonardi & Treem, 2020). Visibility has also supercharged globalization, and scholars of organizational communication have begun to investigate these complex intersections, resulting in the emergence of a new generation of scholarship on globalization and visibility. In contrast from previous generations that emphasized uncertainty, connectedness, and ubiquity, which ultimately placed globalization as a takenfor-granted and unremarkable backdrop in the organizing landscape, now globalization is back in the foreground of scholarship— in the form of highly visible global crises (Ganesh et  al., in press). Thus, despite the attentiveness to parochialism in the 1990s and later (e.g., Boyacigiller & Adler, 1991; Martin, 2001; Schaffer & Riordan, 2003; Stage, 1999; Tan et  al., 1998), there now emerges a need for scholars to reconsider the legacy and implications of extant organizational communication methods and analytic frameworks as we grapple with a crisis-laden global environment. This chapter takes seriously the questions the editors of this volume have posed for its contributors: How do current developments in organizational communication studies implicate the use of qualitative methods for studying them? Accordingly, we ground our chapter in the following provocation: Global visibility makes the rigid bifurcation between quantitative and qualitative research methods unsustainable. We recognize, of course, the many scholars who have effectively used mixed methods and triangulation in their

studies of globalization (Foote et al., 2021), but our argument transcends any particular method or methodology. Rather, we suggest that contemporary globalization and its accompanying visibility demands that researchers take on what we describe here as a hybrid analytical stance. We set the stage for this stance by first exploring a set of by-products of visibility that create considerable dilemmas for organizational communication research, especially on globalization. We then discuss how a new generation of research on global visibility illuminates a form of epistemological parochialism embedded in the continuing bifurcation between quantitative and qualitative research. Epistemological parochialism refers to the commonplace assumption that particular research techniques need to be associated with discrete sets of analytical sensibilities, including, for instance, the idea that qualitative research methods are primarily descriptive, exploratory and heuristic, or that quantitative work is necessarily realist, postpositivist, and predictive. We then expand on the idea of a hybrid analytical stance, identifying the criticality of paying attention to how researchers establish the reach, significance, meaning, and value of their work. We lay out four dualities that a hybrid analytical stance engages, exploring how these dimensions are reflected to varying degrees in several qualitative global organizational communication studies. We then further develop these ideas with an ethnographic research exemplar. To conclude, we offer some final suggestions for organizational communication researchers studying globalization as they attempt to develop a hybrid stance toward their work.

VISIBILITY AND GLOBALIZATION Highlighting visibility as a central social phenomenon underscores the mounting depth, intensity and velocity of globalization that began in the mid 20th century. These

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related phenomena, grounded in the digitalization of human activity, had profound effects on organizational communication. Specifically, increasing availability and accessibility of information (Flyverbom et al., 2016), recognizability and prominence of multiple organizational identities (Scott, 2013), knowability of organizing processes (Cruz, 2017), and attainability of previously private or proprietary information (ter Hoeven et  al., 2021) continually transform organizational communication phenomena, especially in the global context. Below, we discuss four by-products of the ascendance of visibility: datafication, connectedness, scale, and anomie, which irrevocably complicate the dynamics of global organizational communication. The concept of datafication refers to the conversion of virtually every aspect of our individual and collective lives, including relationships, spaces, and temporalities, into visible information; that is, data that can be seen, collected, analyzed, and disseminated (Cukier & Mayer-Schoenberger, 2013). Andrejivic (2007) referred to this datafied communication environment as a digital enclosure—one where every communication act produces data about itself. Datafication is inextricably tied up with spatiotemporal dynamics of global organizing and contemporary modes of power. Most obviously this involves the rendering of organizational data to be instantly comparable across time and space and a variety of dimensions. Datafication also produces global organizational identities through processes such as algorithmic aggregation of data from an assortment of sources and time periods, that become autonomous from how organizations themselves want to be seen. It also creates new global hierarchies of data accumulation and sytems of control where original sources of data have little agency nor sovereignty regarding the extraction and use of the data. Second, visibility implicates connectedness, which we understand as a state of being in relation. Entities that are connected

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are in positions of mutual influence, definition, and control. Network perspectives see organizations and organizing processes as connectedness in action (Stohl, 1995), “an endless series of textured relationships that move into and influence one another” (p. 22). Increasing global visibility not only allows organizational connections and relationships to be seen and made, but it also enables hidden connections to come to light, both temporally in terms of past history and future potential, and also spatially, in terms of seemingly isolated agents in different parts of the world. Globalization has exponentially increased not only the set of connections available to organizations and individuals; it has increased their complexity, resulting in confusing configurations of multi-level actors, multidimensional processes of brokerage, and unusual and often temporary coalitions, partnerships, and alliances. In the current era of visibility, it is not too much of a stretch to say that even the quality of isolation is defined by the global network. As Ganesh and Barber (2009) argue, global digital infrastructures, by virtue of their very design, structure patterns of access and inaccessibility, use and nonuse, and inclusion and exclusion. Third, over the last three decades, increases in visibility have impacted the scale of organizing in multiple ways. Ganesh and Stohl (2020) discuss several features of visibility that can sharply alter organizing scales. They explore the ways in which the contemporary global communication environment has become intemperate, where seemingly, “minor problems and issues related to organizing might become misleadingly and unpredictably inflated, immoderate and urgent” (p.  271). For example, disproportionate attention to particular events and behaviors is fueled by the visibility and virality of social media messaging, expanding the breadth and depth of outrage of new and previously unconnected and widely distributed stakeholders who rapidly become part of the emerging organizational context. Scale

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complexity can be seen easily in the term “cancel culture,” or the rapid rate in which netizens respond to events that happen in multiple communities both online and off. Rapid scale expansions and contractions are also evident when one considers how proximity has become a heightened feature of increased visibility: What were previously seen as distant spatiotemporal events or processes become closely linked and tied together in new and surprising ways. Clearly, increased digital propinquity means that organizations of all types across multiple sectors and regions can readily share resources and work on joint and immediate tasks. But perhaps even more significant is that proximate digital traces suggest causal interorgani­ zational attributions that may or may not be accurate. Utilizing a search engine, for example, to find out more about Ben & Jerry’s global sales in 2022, yields hundreds of proximate stories regarding the lawsuit between Ben & Jerry and its parent company Unilever, regarding sales in Israel, many of which allege or assume anti-semitic conspiracies on the part of the U.S. political left. It is not surprising that organizational conspiracy theories thrive in the contemporary environment. These impact the scale of global organizing, ensuring that boundaries of organizing are shifting and inconsistent, that organizing efforts can scale up globally and back down quickly and unpredictably, and that these movements can occur rapidly, unpredictably, and chaotically. Finally, increased visibility is intricately related to contemporary conditions of global anomie through processes such as magnification, monitorization, distortion, and refraction (Ganesh et al., in press). As global crises, ranging from climate emergencies to pandemics, become more visible and impactful, so too do the cognitive and emotional incapacities of people, communities, and governments to deal with these systemic crises. For Durkheim (1993), both subjective feelings of alienation, loss, helplessness, and fear, as well as objective structural conditions are captured by the

word “anomie” and summarized in the word dérèglement—a rule that is a lack of rule. Taken together, these conditions, associated with increased visibility, create considerable dilemmas for organizational communication researchers in terms of the sources of our data or evidence, the boundedness of our studies, and our modes of description and explanation. On the one hand big data can provide unprecedented, aggregated insights about human behavior; but on the other, big data are also often thin data and cannot substitute for the richness and irreducibility of the human experience, and one cannot come to grips with human suffering purely by looking at data. Connectedness also makes it wellnigh impossible to think about case-based research in terms that are bounded, or that reproduce container metaphors for organization (Taylor et  al., 2021). Global work necessarily involves an attention to connectedness and that, in turn, means that the immediacy of fieldwork always needs to be held with and against a datafied and global backdrop. As Lane and Stuart (2021) argue, conditions of heightened communicative visibility mean that researchers need to “expand methods, data sources, and analyses to more completely capture local ecologies, particularly the otherwise ‘invisible’ relationships and interventions” (p. 462). This consequently means turning to datafied environments in which local organizing takes place, examining the shape of the digital enclosure, studying and capturing social media feeds, and paying careful attention to larger global digital politics and dynamics. Increased scale also implicates the need to shift and expand the mode of explanation. Just as big data can be thin data, so can thick descriptions become thin explanations. If researchers work continually in a descriptive mode, developing a framework for the significance of the study can be difficult. Instead, as Burawoy (1998) argues, researchers need to pay considerable attention to spatiotemporal variety: what is happening “elsewhere,”

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what happened in the past, and what might yet happen. The very name of Burawoy’s approach to doing global sociology is, after all, an extended case method. Such extension cannot be performed purely upon in situ insight and data. Developing appropriate modes of explanation also necessitates that researchers expand their toolboxes and become improvisational and even entrepreneurial about their techniques. The complexity of datafication, the intensification of connectivity, the instantaneousness of scale, and the problematic of anomie all point to the idea that the global world is multicausal, and that we need to rely on multiple logics and techniques to b­ etter apprehend the enormity of global problems. To do this, researchers cannot maintain rigid bifurcations between qualitative and ­quantitative forms of data collection, selection, and explanation.

DEFINING, CHALLENGING, AND CONFRONTING PAROCHIALISM: VARIED EPISTEMOLOGIES Thus far, we have argued that the ascendance of visibility as an organizing force is increasingly complicating organizational communication research on globalization, requiring us to think through anew how we treat the sources of our data, the boundedness of our studies, and our modes of explanation. To grapple with this, we first need to address the history of parochialism in organizational communication studies regarding any kind of research not based within the boundaries of  the United States, and the emerging issue of epistemic parochialism.

Types of Parochialism More than twenty years ago, Stohl (2001) identified three types of parochialism that became apparent once globalization was

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recognized as a powerful and inexorable force intersecting and transforming social life. Theoretical parochialism referred not only to the cultural and colonial biases embedded in social scientific and interpretive organizational studies (Asante, 1987; Munshi, 2005; Sanborn, 1993), but captured the problematic nature of assuming similar theoretical relationships among constructs across contexts. Notably, macro theories of globalization were just beginning to be a part of the organizational communication discourse, and most organizational communication work was operating within an intercultural/international frame, rather than a global one. Methodological parochialism was conceived as more than the privileging of the production of “objective, decontextualized nomothetic knowledge” (Guba & Lincoln, 1982, p. 240) that represented many organizational studies in the 1970s and 1980s. Rather, it addressed the problematic, but common, wholesale adoption of similar quasi-colonial research protocols (be it qualitative or quantitative) across time and space. For example, participant observation often unwittingly transgressed social norms, at times interviewing techniques compromised employees, surveys asked questions and demanded responses that made no sense to the population or the context that was being studied. Informed consent was often illusory, and ethical issues were left unexamined. The point was that in global research, no matter what methodology or method was used, it needed to be spatially grounded and temporally updated. A third type of parochialism, pragmatic parochialism, referred to the activities and approaches related to the entire research enterprise, from the initial formulation of the research question, to the possible formation of a research team, through the ongoing instantiation of research practices to the dissemination of the results. Pragmatic parochialism elides the practical context of globalization; that is, it omits an understanding of the past

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and present economic, sociocultural, political, and business practices. Very few organizational studies at the time were authored by multidisciplinary international teams, the choice of research sites was based on convenience and desirability, often described as vacation empiricism (Teagarden et al., 1995). Moreover, there was very little focus on organizations outside the corporate context, despite the fact that civil and governmental organizations were playing an increasing role in global organizing.

The Shape of Contemporary Parochialisms Over the last two decades, organizational communication researchers have engaged with these parochialisms substantively. However, it would be a stretch to say that they have overcome them. The most recent editions of two of the most influential textbooks on qualitative research methods, both written by organizational communication scholars, exemplify the state of the field. Lindlof and Taylor (2017) acknowledge the theoretical opening of the field to global perspectives, saying that, “recent globalization has expanded the practice of qualitative research among scholars in areas such as Australasia—a welcome development that diversifies the range of scholarly and organizational voices depicted” (p. 40). However, the second edition of Tracy’s (2020) textbook alludes to research in the Global South in only one sentence (p. 172), and the vast majority of the book remains within the bounds of the United States. In a sense, this disjuncture encapsulates the field’s stance on globalization research: On the one hand, scholars recognize its importance and have worked hard to challenge their parochialisms; on the other, blinkers about the global nature of our world continue to be intractable and difficult to remove. Theoretically, macro-level explanations of organizational communication phenomena

have flourished in the field in the last two decades. The establishment of postcolonial scholarship as a vital portion of contemporary research on globalization through the work of Cruz, Munshi, and Broadfoot (see Broadfoot & Munshi, 2007; Broadfoot et al., 2018) and others makes extant theoretical parochialism visible (see also Chapter 9 in this volume). Cruz’s (2017) work on debunking Eurocentrism, for instance, deftly uses the idea of Africa to make visible the parochialism of much Western theory on organizing and communicating. “Africa” functions imaginatively as a decolonizing logic in her work, and is put to good use as a fulcrum to address and critique contemporary trends in organizational inquiry on subjects such as liquidity, hybridity, and visibility. Methodologically, there have been many transformations over the last two decades in how organizational communication scholars have conducted research on globalization. Most obviously, scholars have engaged with the contemporary abundance of data by developing powerful methods of computational analyses to study machine learning, neural networks, and artificial intelligence to try and come to grips with the often subterranean forces that shape datafied globalization (e.g., Schecter et al., 2023). Less obviously, scholars have developed more culturally appropriate methods of research engagement in different parts of the world. Dutta (2020), for instance, stressed the importance of critical listening and dialogue in formulating a research project about the environmental organizing efforts of an indigenous community in Northeastern India that involved the startling move of taking a public oath to say: “[I]f I cannot gather/bring any useful resource to these indigenous communities, I will never visit the tribal villages again” (p. 40). Methodological parochialism is nonetheless alive and well in organizational communication studies of globalization. This is still evident in design choices, most obviously in the form of using questions and scales generated and tested in the U.S. to study

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communities in other parts of the world. For instance, despite Horan et  al.’s (2022) wellintentioned attempt to get beyond WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) samples in their study of superior-subordinate communication amongst nuns and priests in India, their study relied on Infante and Gorden’s (1986) verbal aggressiveness scale, which was constructed and validated with a sample from—you guessed it—the midwestern United States. Less obviously, our own interactions with colleagues who do research in the Global South as well as our own experiences continue to underscore how culturally inappropriate some U.S. university regulations continue to be around such issues as written consent or confidentiality, which are premised on problematic assumptions about literacy and individualism. They do not consider how problematic, insensitive, or insulting it might be to ask for written consent oral cultural settings. Our conversations with ethnographers who have done work in collectivist cultures in the Global South, as well as our own work, underscores that in most cultures the idea of an individual interview done in an isolated, self-contained space is a myth: a dyadic encounter often transforms quickly into a group conversation or even an impromptu village meeting—or conversely, group conversations can quickly turn into one-on-one encounters if communities decide that the topic is irrelevant, and drift away. This last point leads us to considering how pragmatic parochialisms are evident in the field today. Here, too, the situation is complex. On the one hand, it is clear that universities both in the U.S. and across the world now value interdisciplinarity and collaborative and international research much more. On the other hand, it seems to us that this move has stymied the ability of research cultures to flourish outside the U.S.–Europe ambit. Much like the impact globalization has had on many local industries, the push toward a global research culture has given more weight to historically powerful

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Western institutions of knowledge production. Our own experiences indicate that international collaborations can stifle cultivating country-specific talent. Senior researchers are rewarded more for collaborating with researchers in other countries and publishing in outlets that are global/Western, or more specifically, U.S.-led. This, in turn, can have devastating impacts on local research publications. Sage publications, for instance, recently closed their India books division after 40 years in the industry because of the combined impact of the pandemic, publication dynamics, and institutional priorities in Indian universities that push researchers into submitting their work to Western journals. Even as we urge all researchers who do global work to double their efforts to engage with these parochialisms, we believe that the problematics posed by datafication, connectedness, scale, and anomie have made visible another kind of parochialism, related to epistemology. As mentioned, epistemological parochialism refers to the idea that qualitative and quantitative research techniques are sharply bifurcated and associated closely with particular epistemic stances. In particular, qualitative work in organizational communication has been closely associated with the interpretive turn in organizational communication studies (Putnam & Pacanowsky, 1983). Interpretive as well as critical paradigms were, in their early years, defined self-consciously against work that was characterized as positivist or postpositivist, and against their associated quantitative methods.

Confronting Epistemic Parochialism It is time to pick apart those distinctions for several reasons. For one, to argue, as we are doing here, that qualitative and quantitative techniques should not be mutually exclusive is not to reduce epistemic diversity and deny major differences between positivism, interpretivism, critical theory, postmodernism,

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and new materialism. Rather, it is to make visible the diversity of epistemic stances that have existed in both quantitative and qualitative “camps” for some time now. Qualitative methods in global organizational communication research now clearly spans a range of perspectives. For instance, Gibbs et  al.’s (2021) inductive, qualitative study of globally distributed teamwork is realist rather than impressionist in its orientation, where researcher identity and politics are not part of the representational conversation. Conversely, Villanueva’s (2022) study of urban equity advocacy is frank about its researcher positionality, embraces a view grounded in postcolonial studies, and is normative in its orientation toward the need for effective advocacy in the context of racial inequity. The breadth of theoretical traditions in qualitative inquiry evident in this very volume also highlight the epistemic diversity of qualitative work. There is not much evidence of quantitative work in organizational communication that has taken critical stances; in fact, such work is rare in communication studies, broadly speaking. However, recent trends indicate that this trend is changing and that epistemic diversity in quantitative work is increasing. Scharrer and Ramasubramanian (2021) endorse the term “quantitative criticalism” to describe “quantitative researchers who conduct research not to reveal some universal ‘truth’ but rather to expose injustices and inequalities and bring data to bear on the structures and forces that help explain those injustices and inequalities” (p. 11). Further afield, work on data feminism has recently argued that data science is a manifestation of power relations, and that critical inquiry on the subject requires researchers to grapple with quantitative and computational work (D’Ignazio & Klein, 2020). Thus, epistemic orientations should not be reduced to specific methods. It should be clear that we are not merely arguing for a mixed methods approach to research, although we observe the useful

uptake of mixed methods work in cognate areas such as social network and management studies. For instance, Gluesing et  al. (2014) employed a mix of ethnography and data mining techniques to study global innovation networks. More recently, Jemielniak and Stasik (2021) developed the idea of thick big data to take “advantage of the available large repositories of quantitative data to inform qualitative research” (p. 212). There is a clear and vibrant tradition of mixed methods research in organizational communication studies, too (Myers & Powers, 2017; see also Chapter 1 in this volume), although such work has not engaged with dynamics of ­visibility or globalization just yet. What we hold instead is that the complex dynamics of visibility in global settings require us to work and conduct research across multiple epistemic orientations. More than a generation ago, Ganesh et  al. (2005) argued for the importance for critical scholars interested in questions of global transformation and social change to collaborate more closely with network scholars and researchers of digital technologies to come to terms with and appreciate the complexities of resistance. The need for both collaborative work across perspectives and an attunement toward epistemic difference even within “single method” studies is far more acute today. To facilitate such work, we outline what we call a “hybrid analytical stance,” illuminating its various dimensions with examples from organizational communication research on globalization.

DESCRIBING THE HYBRID ANALYTICAL STANCE A hybrid analytical stance does not simply mean taking a mixed methods approach to globalization research questions. Analytical stances are not the same as theoretical stances; rather, they involve paying attention to how researchers establish the reach,

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significance, meaning, and value of their work. An analytical stance devoted to the hybrid value of qualitative and quantitative analysis, then, pays simultaneous attention to both sides of multiple dualities. This stance begins with the formulation of the research question, continues through to the conduct of analysis, and culminates with the drawing of conclusions. At each stage, a hybrid approach embraces particular sets of dualities. Beginning with the collection of data, tensions between depth and scale are encountered. When one considers the selection of data itself, then a duality related to compilation and creativity emerges. Third, at the level of explanation, a duality between patterns and uniqueness becomes salient. And finally, in terms of concepts and theory-building, dualities between universality and specificity become apparent. Below, we elucidate on where elements of each duality can be seen in contemporary scholarship as well as provide some potential examples of what taking a hybrid analytical stance may look like in practice.

Depth and Scale A classic difference between qualitative and quantitative approaches to data collection has been depth versus scale. Archetypally, qualitative work is associated with richness and depth, while quantitative work enables reach and breadth. A recent example of qualitative depth is Wyant and Kramer’s (2022) research on local employee sensemaking in multinational organizations, which used Weick’s (1979) theory to deeply understand the specific case of local employees adapting to change during socialization in a multinational corporation. In the context of globalization, however, historic emphases on rich and deep data need to co-occur with attention to breadth. This is because the very nature of global connectedness makes it difficult to work with a container metaphor of organizing. Qualitative work in

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organizational communication has sometimes dealt with this by taking a comparative approach. For example, Elers et al.’s (2021) study of nonprofit organizational intervention encompassed several sites of data collection. A more explicitly hybrid stance might even involve collecting both quantitative and qualitative data as part of a broader ethnographic project. In our own longitudinal work with the platform collective Loomio, for example, we combined qualitative and quantitative techniques of data collection, examining user data from across the world that the collective provided for us, and conducting a large survey that spanned six continents, even as we constantly contextualized what we were seeing during interviews and workshops with the organization (Ganesh et al., 2022).

Compilation and Creativity A second duality that a hybrid analytical stance necessitates involves apprehending the dynamics of both compilation and creativity in research following data collection, at the moment of data selection. Historically, excellent qualitative research has always relied on creativity and intuition, lateral insight, and the centrality of the researcher as a human instrument. For instance, de la Garza (2013) describes the creative ontology that undergirds her ethnographic work. It is in this spirit that some organizational communication scholars have followed Clifford (1986) in framing their work as fiction—i.e., texts fashioned and created by researchers themselves (e.g., Welker, 2004). Certainly, qualitative researchers have emphasized systematicity, rigor, and order in their work, but these practices inevitably produce what one might call a “quant-lite” approach to research, where qualitative researchers mimic quantitative scholars’ approach to creating the impression of rigor, by reporting on the frequency of themes, the number of people interviewed, the total number of pages transcribed, and so forth (cf. Tracy, 2012).

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Our attention to creativity lies at the moment where researchers make selections and choices about data to illustrate their findings, often focusing on specific narratives, exemplars, interviews, and vignettes to illustrate insights. Research on globalization in organizational communication studies continues to rely on creative, researcher-driven processes. This is evident in the work of such researchers as Ban (2017), who strongly emphasized creative researcher presence in their study of discursive tension in Chinese house churches, illustrating this by actually living in the guest room of the site of study for six weeks and carrying out interviews and participant observation as a full member of the organization. However, compilation, in the form of relying upon aggregated data rather than exemplars, may become increasingly important for qualitative researchers to apprehend. This is particularly the case when researchers work with archival data or big data. Kang et  al. (2016), for example, relied on material from a database to understand the emerging field of organizational communication in China, even as they based analysis on their own experience and the voices of others as they called for a more localized understanding of frameworks to promote a more globalized focus of inquiry in organizational communication. Work by Kim (2018) also exemplifies some aspects of a hybrid approach to data selection. Her study of how enterprise social media reproduce status hierarchies in globally distributed work teams was founded on data about the site of study compiled from both quantitative distributions of employee roles around the globe as well as more archetypally anecdotal and informal observations about differences between “core” and “complementary” organizational functions.

Patterns and Uniqueness A third set of dualities that a hybrid analytical stance engages lies at the moment of

explanation, when researchers are making sense of their data. Here, we posit that researchers need to grapple both with patterns as well as uniqueness. In a sense, this duality pertains to establishing the significance of the study itself. Burawoy (1991, 1998) distinguishes between generic and genetic modes of establishing significance. A generic mode of significance is often utilized by quantitative researchers in terms of establishing explanatory patterns in the form of prevalence, relationships, representativeness, and holistic data, and attempting to generalize on the basis of the likelihood that all similar situations have similar attributes. The second mode, which Burawoy urges us to adopt, is a genetic mode, where the significance of a case lies in what it tells us about the world in which it is embedded and that produced the case in the first place. Historically, qualitative research on globalization has relied on genetic modes of significance, given its reliance on case-based work. Cheong et  al. (2014), for example, established the significance of their analysis in a genetic sense, arguing that their study of Tzu Chi, a transnational Chinese spiritual NGO “highlighted the divergent transnational engagements of Chinese actors in civic collaborations and spiritual humanitarian work to build global civil societies” (p. 20). However, in an era of big data, the relationship between genetic and generic modes of significance have begun to blur. In some cases, qualitative researchers have engaged in quantitative work to establish the genetic significance of their work. Ganesh (2018), for example, conducted a survey of 38 villages in order to establish the prevalence of indigenous displacement, before engaging in more in-depth work with specific indigenous communities. At other times, as Bisel et  al. (2014) discussed, qualitative scholars have deliberately engaged in large-scale interviewing projects, collecting “big” qualitative data to establish the generic significance of the work, and to ensure that their data were representative.

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Studies of glocalization, or the idiosyncratic combination and adaptation of global forces to local dynamics epitomize what attention to both patterns and uniqueness looks like. Chen’s (2022) analysis of glocal dynamics in the growth of Zoom, for instance, illustrates how the explosively exponential growth of Zoom at the onset of the pandemic was accompanied by a wide range of strategies to manage privacy and security concerns across a range of nation-states.

Universality and Specificity The last duality that a hybrid analytical stance embodies lies not just at the explanatory stage of research, but at the level of abstraction of the theoretical construct or social concept. We refer to this as the duality between universality and specificity. Here, universality refers to the span of this concept across multiple organizational activities or processes, or its spatiotemporal breadth, and specificity refers to the historic and embedded nature of the theory itself. In many ways the word “global” itself encapsulates this duality. While the term is in some senses one of the most theoretically broad concepts that any organizational communication scholar could work with, at the same time, concepts associated with it are historically specific and contingent. The term “neoliberalism,” for instance, now dominant in critical accounts of organizational life (Ganesh et  al., 2005), throws into explicit relief a particular historical epoch and set of events, unlike other concepts associated with a globalization lexicon such as connectedness or, convergence (Stohl, 2001) that are seen as more universal. Qualitative research has historically been associated with specificity rather than universality, and indeed, as Fairhurst (2014) points out, has been critiqued for its inability to address universal organizational communication phenomena. Burawoy’s (1998) provocation, at the start of this chapter, asks

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the very same question. While this chapter’s implicit answer to this question lies in how qualitative research apprehends all four of the dualities we are laying out, at this point we suggest that a hybrid analytical stance involves explicit attention to the theoretical duality already implicit in the term globalization itself. One contemporary example that challenges the historical tendency in globalization research to over-generalize or over-essentialize is Long and Buzzanell’s (2022) recent research on women entrepreneurship in China, Denmark, and the United States. Adopting a feminist perspective that combines reinscription and intersectionality, the authors emphasized patterns of inscription and reinscription in their interviews without disregarding the cultural nuances of each unique entrepreneur. Another example is Mitra’s (2018) work on Natural Resource Management in the U.S. Arctic, which provided a deep dive into the process of organizing for global sustainability through context and situation-specific communication practices of key decision-making, relationshipbuilding, and risk-management. Yet another example is Biwa’s (2020) work on Namibian women miner discourse, which builds the idea of African feminisms to both describe the collaborative symbolic action of female miners as well as challenge universalized Western feminist ideals more broadly.

THE HYBRID ANALYTICAL STANCE IN PRACTICE: THE CASE OF K-POP ORGANIZING Thus far, we have argued in favor of adopting a hybrid analytical stance in organizational communication research on contemporary globalization and its accompanying visibility. In sum: the by-products of visibility accentuate extant parochialisms and exacerbate the methodological issues that organizational communication researchers face in

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terms of the sources and selection of data or evidence, the boundedness of their studies, the modes of description and explanation they use, and even their theoretical constructs, thus creating the need for a hybrid analytical stance. To further illustrate what a hybrid stance might look like, we draw from a study the third author (Sam) has been conducting. This study examines Korean pop music (K-pop) fan organizing in the United States and South Korea to understand fans’ communicative organizing practices. The expansive K-pop fan network that exists today results from global marketing efforts by the industry, and contemporary global fandom is shaped by its increased visibility on digital social media platforms. Fan organizing illustrates many of the issues we have discussed related to datafication, scale, connectedness, and anomie. Fandoms are connected on a global scale and social media companies collect and profit from fandom data. Using those platforms, however, fans organize large-scale promotional efforts for artists. Moreover, they mobilize social campaigns and fundraise for charities that are seemingly unrelated to their interest in K-pop. Sam takes an explicit hybrid analytical stance in her work, using participant ethnography and following fans where they are. As an avid K-pop superfan, she participates in this culture like other fans do: Sam shares official and fan-made content online, competes for tickets to in-person concerts, and attends fan-led community building events. Collecting data for this project has thus involved paying attention to depth. However, an attention to scale inflected the project early on as well: Sam participated in K-pop communities in Austin, Texas; worked in a store that specializes in physical K-pop album sales; and interviewed fans from all over the world before engaging in a yearlong ethnographic immersion in Korea. Korea was not a “container” of K-pop fandom, in this regard, even though it was its heart. Attention to scale and depth co-produced a glocal

framework in which boundaries were neither rigidly drawn nor imagined. Sam has also been attuned to the duality of compilation and creativity during the data selection process. Certain ethnographic events involved intense affective moments, which she experienced together with thousands of other fans, such as the stadium concert during which she and other fans collectively sang acapella in unison without guidance from one traceable leader. Moments of strong shared personalized and communal emotion illustrate the image of a mobilized fan collective. Furthermore, Sam compiled a large set of aggregated data to paint a vivid picture of fan organizing. When super-group BTS announced their enlistment in the Korean military, fans around the world reacted differently to the news, depending on their location and local fan community’s opinions. Compiling this large dataset of fan reactions on various social media platforms helped demonstrate the vastness and diversity of K-pop fandom opinions and actions around the world. Selecting creative moments and compiling datasets for analysis dramatized the numbers and helped situate the experience in the larger context. Furthermore, a focus on patterns and uniqueness shapes Sam’s ability to develop unique and yet connected interpretations and explanations. As mentioned, a focus on patterns entails investigating the emerging trends in data, such as entrepreneurial logics that seem to drive fan organizing. Fans organize to sell fan-made products, resell merchandise, and, in an extreme—albeit common—example, organize entire international trade systems for buying albums in bulk to reduce overseas shipping costs. However, this organizing context is uniquely shaped by contemporary globalization and the Korean context. That is, certain findings can only be used to describe K-pop fandom as it exists in an era of digital ubiquity. K-pop has always been digitally embedded, most non-Korean fans discovering the genre through virtual content. It is significant that the K-pop music

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industry’s international popularity spiked at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, when production companies created high-quality online video content for their artists, social interaction was primarily digital, and consumers’ (potential K-pop fans) attention was directed toward on-line content. Looking at patterns and uniqueness provide us with generic specificity. Like other international music phenomena, K-pop is a combination of industry decisions and market conditions. However, in this case, the conditions (e.g., the COVID-19 pandemic, resulting stay-at-home orders, and digital embeddedness) resulted in a unique creative phenomenon that can only be understood by taking a hybrid analytical stance. K-pop is an example of a “contra-flow”, as its global popularity challenges the unidirectional spread of culture from the West to the rest of the world (Kang, 2023). The way international fans organize around K-pop, as a Korean media content, tells a story of fandom distinct from that of the popular Western genre that still dominates global music charts. Fans who previously knew nothing about Korean culture or broader global issues are suddenly invested in an international community of their peers. Here, we see how the hybrid analytical stance tells us not just about the world in which the case is embedded but the global context that produced the case in the first place. Finally, Sam is attuned to both universality and specificity in her theorizing of fans’ communicative organizing. As described above, the context of K-pop fan organizing is unique to our digitally ubiquitous time. This historical specificity builds a picture of what K-pop itself looks like as a cultural phenomenon produced in the present moment, shaped by unique contemporary factors. However, universality is seen in the way many of the organizing processes found in these data align with the social movement organizing literature. Traditional collective action theory was enlivened with attention to the organization-less, socially networked,

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emergent forms of organizing—i.e., “connective action.” K-pop fandom is a great example of that. This case also supports the work by Bimber et  al. (2012) who demonstrate that traditional bounded hierarchical organizations not only continue to be central players in the global system but are active participants and contributors to emerging forms of collective action. Fans shape their identity through joining official fan clubs and participating in formal bounded organizations as well as creating shared goals, boundary-less social networks, organizing beyond the hierarchical traditional networks that production companies expect of them. Taken together, these processes enabled Sam to shift away from initial assumptions and findings that would not have been possible without the deepening of a hybrid analytical stance. Specifically, her research notes illustrate her transition from data collection in the U.S. to ethnographic work in Korea, merging scale and depth. A hybrid stance that involved looking at K-pop fandom both around the world and in Korea enabled greater insight into the situatedness of feelings such as shame. When working at the K-pop store in Austin, Texas, for example, Sam observed customers reckoning with shame as they negotiated their individual identities as fans of Korean popular culture. Many fans in the U.S. and others she interviewed around the world had fallen in love with the genre in the privacy of their bedrooms, connecting with fans online but never before in person. They reported feeling ashamed about their dedication to K-pop. At this point, this seemed like a uniquely U.S. K-pop fan experience. Then, as the analysis deepened during ethnography in Korea, she found that shame in fandom did not disappear in Korea, but worked differently. K-pop fans in Korea attend public events, buy greater quantities of albums, and display more impressive feats of mass organizing. Yet they hide their faces at concerts and use anonymous profiles to communicate online. Shifts in insight were apparent even in the term “K-pop” itself, and Sam was able to

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build both a universal and historically specific conception of the term. Before beginning this project she thought, along with many others (e.g., Kang, 2023), that the term simply referred to Korean popular music, and that members of the Korean music industry would simply refer to the genre as “pop.” Through her ethnographic work, however, she came to realize the name for K-pop in Korea is historically “idol-pop,” a term used to delineate the genre from mainstream popular music. Not until foreign reporters coined the term K-pop did the idol music industry integrate the title into their own materials and ultimately, identity. Whether idol music or K-pop, the name used refers to a global phenomenon broader than Korean contemporary popular music. K-pop is a genre marker used to draw fans around the world into a community unlike any other fanbase.

CONCLUSION We began this chapter by observing how contemporary globalization continues to evolve and shift, in the process prompting researchers to update their methodological “toolkits,” reshape their epistemic orientations, and apprehend the increasing complexities of contemporary connectedness. The ascendance of visibility in global communicative phenomena complicates the conduct of research for four main reasons: datafication, connectedness, scale, and anomie. We believe that these problematics shift methodological, epistemic, and theoretical ground for organizational communication researchers, and in order to make way for these shifts, we propose that qualitative organizational communication researchers adopt a hybrid analytical stance. Taking this stance involves embracing dualities at multiple levels of the research process: from data collection and data selection to the production of explanations and, ultimately, concepts and theories.

Embracing dualities and attuning to hybridity clearly goes beyond simply using mixed methods in any given research project to increase the reliability or validity of a study. Rather, we suggest that the need for a hybrid analytic stance is grounded in the complexities and communicative problems posed by the current era. Certainly, the four dualities we have outlined do not capture the fullness of the hybridity that we believe researchers of globalization need to embrace. Our aim in this chapter was to provide them as an initial, and hopefully useful, heuristic for researchers to use as they navigate the increasing theoretical and methodological complexities of globalization research. Indeed, we should be prepared to address more dualities as heightened visibility continues to shift and reshape our approach to experiencing and understanding the world. In closing, we offer two final suggestions for organizational communication researchers studying globalization as they attempt to develop a hybrid stance toward their work. First, we believe that when approaching globalization research, scholars should take a collaborative stance for multiple reasons. Hybridity involves combining and bringing together potential contradictions, after all, and in the current era, no single methodological toolkit is complete. Hence, we suggest that qualitative researchers join forces with quantitative and computational researchers (see also Ganesh et al., 2005). Second, increasing complexity also implies increasing commitment. Following the very best traditions of qualitative work, we encourage long-term and longitudinal approaches to globalization research, not only because the rapidly changing global environment demands that we pay attention to the speed and scale of change, making oneoff “snapshot” studies more untenable, but because the dilemmas and wicked problems produced in the current era of globalization necessitate a sustained ethical commitment on the part of researchers. One final observation: The search for new methods and methodologies, new analytical

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sensibilities, and new theories is part of the fibre of academic research. Therefore, we are aware that what we are calling “hybrid” now may be taken as a necessary or core feature of research in a decade or two, and that what counts as “hybridity” down the line will look very different from how we have defined it in this chapter. What we believe will continue to hold true, though, is the need for qualitative organizational communication researchers to continue to examine their own parochialisms, to keep responding to the exigencies of their era, and to do the very best they can to engage with the deep social and communicative issues of their time. We have considerable confidence that our field is more than capable of rising to this task.

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33 Organizing Postqualitative Research in Organizational Communication Kate Lockwood Harris

In many ways, postqualitative inquiry defies conventions for qualitative methods. The prefix “post-” signals this break from takenfor-granted premises and implies this research comes after the end of qualitative methods. “Post-” further suggests this collection of methodologies fundamentally shifts not only research conduct, but also assumptions about truth, being, and ethics that guide existing qualitative practice (St. Pierre, 2021). To overview the theories, implications, and applications of this approach, this chapter focuses on one type of postqualitative inquiry, that guided by feminist new materialism (FNM). At its core, FNM refuses to separate ways of being from ways of knowing, and so the “how-to” of research becomes inseparable from knowing itself. Reports of research cannot stand apart from the conditions that produce research, and so, as Taylor (2016) put it, FNM “renders ‘methods’ as tools…and ‘methodology’ as a thinking frame for research obsolete” (p. 7). Further, given its emphasis on responding to

ethical problems, FNM methods are not ways of gathering, analyzing, and reporting data, but an ongoing way of relating to “problems that need a different response” (St. Pierre et al., 2016, p. 105). As such, and as I continue to detail later, although the term “post-” could imply a rupture from qualitative methods, in this chapter, I frame postqualitative research, and its feminist new materialist iteration, as one way of relating to qualitative research. I do so because postqualitative inquiry requires a relational approach to knowing and being. By relational, I mean that the focus is not on who or what you or I or any other entities—such as “postqualitative research” or “qualitative research” or even the discipline called “organizational communication”—are, at our core. Instead, the focus rests on how you and I and all so-called entities constantly intertwine. This antiessentialist principle, one that assumes the entire world is connected, is often dubbed a relational ontology (Kuhn et  al., 2017).

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Although postqualitative research does not discard entities, it concentrates on dynamic processes whereby interior and exterior are not easy or meaningful distinctions. In this way, postqualitative inquiry resonates with the part of the organizational communication discipline that plays constantly with the tension between organization, as container and noun, and organizing, as process and verb, while always emphasizing the latter. As the chapter goes on, I first historicize postqualitative inquiry through an FNM lens. I then overview three key FNM principles and their methodological implications. These include holism, diffraction, and agency. After that, I detail a few examples of completed studies to make an FNM methodology more concrete, even while maintaining that FNM, in its dynamic relations, remains elusive and emergent in ways that defy standard descriptions of method. To emphasize this point again, in FNM, the researcher, the way of doing research, and the “object” being researched are not distinct. As Coleman et al. (2019) articulated, “research practice and methods both are entangled and make entanglements, or to put it slightly differently, … research practices and methods are entanglements of various entities that also make various entangled entities” (para. 7). Accordingly, methods and methodology, as well as ethics and onto-epistemological assumptions, cannot be separated. Method becomes not only the way to know about an object of study, but also a way to make that object of study, as well as other “entities.” These “entities” that research makes become as much a part of the methodological considerations as the “object” of study. Said differently, the thing known and the knowing process become inseparable. Accordingly, for organizational communication scholars doing postqualitative inquiry, organizational communication cannot be simply a disciplinary location. Instead, the field is part of the organizing processes scholars study. To demonstrate this implication of postqualitative inquiry, in this chapter

I do not situate postqualitative research “in” organizational communication as if the field is a preexisting container with a uniformly demarcated “outside.” Instead, I emphasize the ongoing process and practice of organizing by considering multiple scholarly and theoretical relations that, for some readers, may not hew to the field’s identity. Such a potentially disorienting move is not only postqualitative, but also deeply consistent with ample theorizing about how organizations, including academic fields themselves, are constituted through communication. That which seems not to be organization, or in this case not the organizational communication discipline, is, as Vásquez and Kuhn (2019) might say, dis/organization, the entwining of organizing and disorganizing processes. Further, a rigid understanding of what is “in” an organization stunts the discipline’s conceptual nuance and global engagement, a problem deeper relationships with multiple fields can address (Ganesh et  al., 2005; see also Chapter 32 in this volume). More recently, Ngwu (2022) showed that fluid histories of the discipline, especially those grounded in African feminism, support decolonization and disrupt a Eurocentric tale that makes what is “in” the discipline of organizational communication static. With these calls for relational organizational communication in mind, I turn next to historicizing some of postqualitative inquiry’s relations to the discipline.

ORGANIZING A RELATIONAL HISTORY OF POSTQUALITATIVE INQUIRY As I have already intimated in my discussion of the term’s prefix, postqualitative research develops complex relationships to the past. For instance, two different stories about the history and origins of FNM operate alongside one another. In one story, mind and body, culture and nature, discourse and

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materiality have never been separate entities (Todd, 2016). In this story, FNM proceeds alongside myriad traditions that have always valued holism and non-separation. Watts (2013), for example, said that Indigenous peoples’ “ability to speak to the land is not just an echo of a mythic tale or part of a moral code, but a reality,” and only through colonial lenses does it seem like “land is simply dirt and thought is only possessed by humans” (p. 32). Watts asserted communication between humans and the earth as indigenous ontology, one available prior to the violence of colonialism. In a second story, FNM emerges after and as a response to Cartesian dualism. In this history of FNM, scholars posit the separation of mind/body and culture/nature as their starting point and critique systems of oppression that emerge from that split. FNM becomes an alternative way forward in the world. The former story decenters Euro-American intellectual histories and worldviews, and the latter attempts to remedy the violence Cartesian traditions have wrought. As my comments about these multiple histories of FNM and postqualitative inquiry signal, the terms “new” and “post” are not necessarily literal. Traditionally, these words indicate detachment from the past, and amidst dominant cultures that understand time as linear, rather than cyclical, “new,” or “post” can be hard to read as relational. Yet as I have noted in my other work (Harris, 2019), these theories take a studied attitude toward history: They root in it, retain relationships to it, and refuse to disconnect from it. In this context, “new” and “post” do not mean “never done before” or “dissociated from what came prior.” Rather, “new” emerges through deep connection with ongoing presents, futures, and histories of intellectual and activist life. Reflecting this theory’s embeddedness in multiple times at once, van der Tuin (2014) claimed that FNM “concepts, traditions, epistemologies and futures are always generated with the texts and projected futures of the past, and in the living present as always/

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already moving towards a future” (p. 235). In this sense, “new” is not separate from “old” any more than children are: Kids always embody genetic, experiential, cultural, and historical elements of that which is not young at all, reaching through biological, relational, and affiliative ancestry in the present, despite the apparent newness of their bodies. In postqualitative inquiry, and in FNM research, “post” and “new” mark the importance of noticing what endures, how, and why, and the relations of possibility and inequity embedded in answers to those questions. Given this careful orientation to time, pasts, futures, and nonliteral use of the words “new” and “post,” Rosiek et al. (2020) urged humility about putting FNM and postqualitative inquiry’s transformative potential into practice: We should not expect such a reorientation would be a smooth process even for those convinced of its necessity, that it would involve lurches, false starts, and backsliding of various forms. The material-semiotic architecture that both enables and constrains our practices of scholarship, knowing, and civic responsibility in Western settler colonial societies is very old and runs deep. It is encoded into our language; our habits of perception, feeling, and desire, our identities, the social communities that sustain those identities and desires, the legal codes that bound and bind those communities, the material arrangements of property, land, food consumption, power grids, and much more. (p. 335)

As Rosiek et  al. noted, systems of inequity and oppression are pervasive, especially those that depend on a material-discursive divide, so a total break from these systems is unlikely to occur suddenly. Pretending that such severing is possible—through assertions of being outside of these systems or pure—can easily reinforce whiteness, misogyny, and queerphobia (see also Chapters 7, 8, and 10 in this volume). Further, such a sanitized approach “ends up naturalizing white dominance” (Pal et al., 2022, p. 566; see also Chapter 9 in this volume). As such, a growing number of scholars with expertise in FNM and postqualitative inquiry note that

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claims about a tradition being different (i.e., “new,” “beyond,” “after,” “post-”) can actually erase difference, making colonialist dispossessions, exterminations, and thefts continue to seem normal and acceptable. FNM gives such careful attention to entwined histories and futures, along with the changes they might enliven, because of its radical relationality. “Things” are never isolated but subsumed under “phenomena,” ongoing flows and reconfigurings of connection that may be temporarily simplified for sake of study, but ultimately remain deeply intertwined with all that exists. So, too, FNM itself is deeply relational. It shares affinity with affect theory and practice-based approaches to organizing (Ashcraft, 2021; Gherardi, 2019); it offers echoes of Deleuzian thinking (Hein, 2016; Mease, 2021); it engages in a troubled connection with object-oriented ontologies and actor network theory (van der Tuin, 2014); it is often uttered in the same breath as sociomaterial approaches to organizing (Leonardi, 2013; see also Chapters 25 and 29 in this volume). Amidst these multiple and complex relations, the following three connections to additional theories cannot be refused without losing something crucial to FNM. First, FNM would not exist without the insights and implications of queer theory (Barad, 2012; see also Chapter 10 in this volume). Second, it is intertwined with decolonial frames that draw it near to Latinx Communication Studies (Tarin, 2019). Third, without attention to difference, inequity, and power, FNM is neither postqualitative nor FNM (Harris & Ashcraft, 2023).

ORGANIZING HOLISM As I mentioned, FNM assumes non-separation, and this holism sets up a fundamentally relational worldview, way of being, and ethics. In organizational communication, scholars routinely attribute much of FNM thinking to Barad (2012), who uses the term

relational ontology to describe what, for purposes of this chapter, I am calling holism. Routing through Bohr, Teller, and other quantum physicists, Barad (2007) rejected particularism, “the view that the world is composed of individuals and that each individual has its own roster of nonrelational properties” (p. 333). Instead, they argued that, theoretically and empirically, the world is fundamentally made up of phenomena, ongoing series of intra-actions. Despite being hailed as the prevailing FNM scholarship, Barad’s opus is only one starting point for this style of thinking, and multiple other ways to describe relational holism exist. In Cruz’s (2015) work, for example, holism is a principle of African feminist organizing and communication theory. As a consequence, work/family, public/private, individual/society, and gender/ age must be considered together. Detailing another approach to holism, one grounded in a Chinese qi cosmology, Zhao (2020) wrote: [A]ll the things are relationally constituted, conditioned, and continuous with each other, and are further divided into yin-yang qualities and correlations that nurture dynamic senses of becoming and doing. In other words, placed within the animating and transforming qi field, things continually take up various visible forms, cadences, shapes, and tones in relation to their contingent manifold of relations along with our ongoing experience yet without getting ossified into a static structural identity. Therefore, things are at once uniform and plural, continuous and different. (p. 87)

For Zhao, the holism animating FNM or postqualitative inquiry rests in a distinctive Chinese cosmology and history in which no “things” have identity independent of ongoing, changing relations. In another approach to holism and relationality, one grounded in queer and Black feminisms, Muñoz et  al. (2015) said that these intellectual projects demand the active self-attunement to life as varied and unsorted correspondences, collisions, intermeshings, and accords between people and nonhuman objects, things, formations, and clusterings. (p. 210)

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Together, Cruz (2015), Zhao (2020), and Muñoz et  al. (2015) not only emphasize interdependent existence as a fact of the world, but they also root their claims in specific geographic and cultural histories, ones that center theories and analyses of race. In yet another approach to the holism that underwrites FNM research, Schaeffer (2018) highlighted that “indigenous peoples have long lived the inseparability of environmental damage as an onslaught against their knowledge practices” (p. 1009). In other words, some indigenous traditions have never conceptualized knowledge and reality—especially relations to/with the environment and the land—as in any way divisible. By drawing together Chicanx decolonial theory and FNM, with particular attention to Anzaldúa’s work, Schaeffer celebrates Haraway’s cyborg theory and also points out its missing analysis of power, especially racial power: Haraway’s refusal of the nature/culture divide through her theorization of the cyborg, or the intermingling of human/machine—was a powerful move, yet it had the effect of blurring the lines between elected cobecomings between humans and machines versus the uneven and compulsory ways certain groups were forced into tangled relationality with techno-objects (and animality). (p. 1009)

Schaeffer’s simultaneous appreciation and critique of Haraway’s work is, in many ways, characteristic of FNM methodology. In order to enact relationality, FNM scholars often offer affirmative readings of texts and phenomena without discarding critique (Bargetz & Sanos, 2020). They do so because, as a consequence of their commitment to holism, FNM scholars assume that change toward justice occurs through relationship across difference, an ethic that requires non-abandonment. Enacting this methodological principle often means drawing together seemingly disparate theoretical traditions, including ones with apparently anti-feminist aims. For example, noting that FNM and objectoriented ontologies (OOO) have some fundamental incommensurabilities, van der Tuin

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(2014) devoted an entire article to tracing the connections among these schools of thought. Sometimes, FNM methodologists are quite explicit about what this refusal to abandon or disconnect relationships means for critique. According to Barad, “critique is over-rated, over-emphasized and over-utilized, to the detriment of feminism” (Dolphijn & van der Tuin, 2012, p. 49). Thus, some FNM methodologists argue that maintaining effective relationships—the fuel for FNM-inflected change—means eschewing critique. As Lather (2016) clarified, this reorientation to and reimagining of critique is powerfully creative: [T]he new emerges out of infiltrating/embedding/ infusing, not killing. Intensifying, multiplying, and extending its realms of application, such change is wholly immanent. Rather than the “oppositional pathos” of humanism, it is about power and the body as they are enacted, intensifications turned on themselves, a kind of jiujitsu spread across a wide field, and its contacts with power in a field of relations. (p. 127)

Lather’s reference to jiujitsu highlights the skill and care involved in redirecting force into a different power dynamic, one that does not simply respond to violently oppressive systems with more of the same. To do so requires setting aside what Keating (2013), relying heavily on Anzaldúa’s work, called oppositional consciousness, “an inflexible ontological framework” (p. 6) that emphasizes “a binary either/or epistemology and praxis that structures our perceptions, politics, and actions through a resistant energy— a reaction against that which we seek to transform” (p. 2). In an effort to exercise less oppositional orientations to the world, FNM scholars often make both/and arguments, for example, noting specific ways in which most of their work both advances and detracts from feminist ethical/political projects (Harris & Ashcraft, 2023). Even as FNM refigures critique, it also cannot abandon critique, especially if it is to transform the colonialist-racist histories and

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presents of academia. While encouraging scholars to re-envision critical interventions, Allhutter et  al. (2020) also avowed that critique is “essential for feminist new materialist engagements” (p. 406). Specifically, when FNM scholarship distances itself from critique, it limits its ability to offer a meaningful analysis of race, thereby retaining a white epistemic framework (Hinton & Liu, 2015). Because FNM refuses a politics of purity or abandonment, it continues to embrace critique even as it reworks it. Indeed, to jettison critique is to flatten an analysis of racial inequity: “The narrative of moving beyond critique … risks ignoring the work of attending to power and difference … It also implies overlooking the complicated ways in which (‘conventional’) critique may still be useful for the acknowledging and undoing of power relations” (Bargetz & Sanos, 2020, p. 508). So even as FNM reworks its relationship to critique, it still—per its fundamentally relational principles—will not disavow critique. Under this reading, critique and affirmation may not be such separate methodological-political commitments. For example, Bargetz and Sanos (2020) called to “move beyond a merely reparative or optimistic view and, instead, attend to the (utopian) ambivalences of critique” (p. 512). Indeed, that ambivalence is inherent in Barad’s own (aforementioned) statement that critique is overrated: Barad attempted to reimagine critique by critiquing it. I make this observation to suggest that Barad’s way of transforming the world, one that cultivates a nuanced reflection on how to increase equity, affirms critique as a crucial way to articulate and actualize feminist politics. This postqualitative and FNM orientation to critique resonates with the work of several organizational communication scholars. For Pat Parker, critique “lays bare ‘certain practices’ that keep the center in place” and names phenomena for scholars “who may lack the vision to see oppressive practices,” all while enhancing equity in organizational communication (Linabary et  al., 2021, p. 145).

Similar to Parker’s suggestion that critique can shift practices within this academic discipline, Ashcraft (2018) advocated that organizational scholars use critique to attune to the operation of power in the field of organi­ zational communication, not only in external organizations. Although neither of these examples explicitly adopts the label “postqualitative inquiry,” both reject separation between the field’s objects of study and the field itself. That non-separation, and the style of critique it animates, indicates the influence of holism and relationality in organizational communication inquiry. These same principles also guide one of the most well-known concepts from FNM: diffraction.

ORGANIZING DIFFRACTION Another way that FNM scholars enact nonseparation is through diffraction (see also Chapter 30 in this volume), FNM’s main method. Barad’s description of diffraction is abstract, made through reference to complex physics and optics. In a more concrete moment, Barad (2014) described diffraction as a multiplicity of processes, such as the kinds earthworms revel in while helping to make compost or otherwise being busy at work and at play: turning the soil over and over—ingesting and excreting it, tunnelling through it, burrowing, all means of aerating the soil, allowing oxygen in, opening it up and breathing new life into it. (p. 168)

Using a different metaphor, one might think of diffraction in terms of waves. Waves influence one another, and it is hard to say when or where a wave starts or ends. Two seemingly different waves may approach the shore and overlap, connect, and become indistinguish­ able. Accordingly, this method is less concerned with distinguishing any single wave and more interested in the overall flow and motion of the water. Waves are also interconnected with myriad other aspects of the environment. So a method for studying this

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phenomenon takes the totality into account by attuning to ongoing relations including the moment waves touch each other, the tidal motion and the moon’s influence on such, the sea life growing on rocks that thrives on the waves’ spray, and so forth. Instead of carving out parts or even individual waves for analysis, diffraction considers the whole. For organizational communication research, diffraction moves away from studies of or in an organization toward organizing practices, processes, or phenomena. Examples of such orientations occur in Harris et  al.’s (2020) analysis of moving agency in violence across multiple organizational sites and in Brummans’s (2022) Buddhist-inflected approach to process organization studies. Of course, no research project can attune to the total whole, so FNM scholars make what Barad (2007) calls “cuts:” They—along with the apparatus of study—select some parts of an interconnected, moving whole. FNM scholars pay close attention to the ethical implications of cuts by making cuts clear. For instance, in writing this chapter, I have made a “cut” by citing scholarship published only in English and English-language outlets. This cut is one effect of my personal limitations as someone who is fluent only in English, despite some formal education in two additional languages. The cut is also structural, invoking global histories of colonialism whereby English became so dominant that not only can I become one of the most “educated” people in the United States without fluency in another language, but the entire U.S. educational system supports this monolingualism. Scholars repeatedly make the same cut I have made, often without mention, and FNM is concerned with the ethical problems produced as these cuts accumulate. Practically, diffraction often means reading multiple texts for their connections, including texts that seem to be at odds with one another. In this style of analysis, diffraction is not something a researcher does to texts, but the effect of texts’ and researchers’ impacts upon one another. Wurth (2014)

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distinguished such diffractive reading from post-structural analysis, noting the ­ former is concerned not with how one text appears in/through another (as in i­ntertextuality), but with the “entwinement itself as an intra-medial event” (p. 260, emphasis in original). An extended example occurs in Wurth’s (2014) engagement with an artwork wherein one person hand-copied a novel onto the pages of a medical textbook from the 15th  century. For Wurth, the handwriting is evidence of a cut because  the  writer’s body is no longer present, yet the handwriting also appears on images of ­bodies in the textbook, thereby referencing the relationship between the embodied act of writing and the written word itself. Through these kinds of crisscrossing connections, Wurth focuses on—to return to an earlier metaphor—the moments when waves meet each other. The reading and analysis Wurth (2014) performed differs from what Sedgwick (2003) called paranoid reading, which anticipates the future with anxious hypervigilance and, in so doing, “disallows” readings focused on pleasure (p. 144). Although paranoid reading might characterize prevailing critical theoretical orientations, ones designed to expose previously unnoticed oppression (a useful habit that also risks making violence ubiquitous), another queer possibility “attune[s] exquisitely to a heartbeat of contingency” (p. 147). Sedgwick encourages “flexible to-and-fro movement” and multiple reading practices, “changing and heterogenous relational stances” (p. 128). So, at one moment, an FNM scholar might read to expose previously unnoticed oppression; at another moment, an FNM scholar might read to amplify joy. As may be evident, diffraction is not keenly interested in—or is perhaps unfaithful to—descriptions of the world “out there.” Diffraction’s move away from such representational logics is indebted to reflexivity (Harris, 2019; Harris & Fortney, 2017). Organizational scholars who practice reflexivity assume that neutral, objective

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research(ers) cannot exist, and reflexive practice accounts for taken-for-granted assumptions and values in both scholars and organizations (Cunliffe, 2016). Such reflexivity is based on reflecting, wherein a polished mirror offers a clearer image of the world, but diffraction emphasizes differing, the process whereby nothing is ever wholly separate or the same (Anzaldúa, 1987; Minh-ha, 1997). Under reflexivity, descriptions of the world remain separate from the world, but can be more or less accurate. Under diffraction, the world and descriptions of it interweave. An example illustrates these differences and relations a bit more. As a researcher practicing reflexivity, I notice how my own perspective shapes my analysis. Most of what I see looks green, but I produce a more accurate account of the world if I also notice that I am looking through a window made of blue glass. I then ascertain that what I am seeing is probably yellow, not green. Diffraction is less concerned with whether what I see is actually yellow or green, and more concerned with how the cones and rods in my eyeballs, the light from the sun, and wavelengths all conspire to produce blue, yellow, and green. Where reflexivity accounts for distortions that create partial accounts of reality, diffraction emphasizes “a non-dualistic, non-separational model of identity and difference, in which…entities, diffractively crisscross, interfere, and co-establish one another” (Geerts & van der Tuin, 2016, para. 2). As such, when FNM scholars practice diffraction by drawing together disparate schools of thought, seemingly opposed texts, or siloed disciplinary practices, they also embrace ongoing tensions, contradictions, and dilemmas (Harris, 2016). To do so is one way to affirm and value difference, rather than resolve it by creating coherence or identity. Amidst differences between reflexivity and diffraction, both share an interest in noticing and shifting how power and inequity shape knowledge processes. To further emphasize these points and why they matter for FNM’s methodological

and ethical orientation to difference, I turn to Bozalek and Zembylas (2017). As they put it, diffraction shows “light in darkness and dark in lightness” and offers “an understanding of how binaries can be queered, and how differences exist both within and beyond boundaries” (p. 115). Accordingly, diffraction makes efforts to distinguish one “thing” from another messy, if not impossible, and, in so doing, departs from both interpretive and phenomenological approaches to research. Diffraction chafes against the separate codes and categories that traditional qualitative inquiry requires, but it may be closer friends with situational analysis, Clarke’s (2005) postmodern adaptation of grounded theory in which a researcher first maps all the elements in a situation, including nonhuman elements, and then assesses all the relationships among the elements. To do so resists heterogeneity, but despite this potential resonance with diffraction, Clarke relies on reflexivity. Yet to use reflexivity may paradoxically require the absence of relationship: Can a qualitative researcher prove difference without reinforcing separation? By contrast, because it takes relationship as ontology, diffraction requires multifaceted, ongoing changes in how everything is both similar and different because those dynamics are the never-ending stuff of relating. This refusal to aver total separation between things becomes so “meta” that scholars use it even in their methodological discussions of diffraction and reflexivity themselves. In a characteristically FNM move, one that may seem familiar by this point in the chapter, Serra Undurraga (2021) showed how reflexivity and diffraction interact with one another, refusing to separate the two as distinct methodological approaches. In effect, Undurraga offers a diffractive analysis of diffraction and reflexivity. Tracing these relationships between methods that may be at odds is, of course, very much in keeping with FNM’s interest in considering, very carefully, the emergence of differences and their specificities. Van der Tuin (2014) made this point plain, saying that diffraction

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“allows for affirming and strengthening dynamic links between schools of thought… or scholars that only apparently work toward the same goals” (p. 234). The move is double: It is both to draw connections among seemingly separate traditions and entities while also, in making those connections, noticing differences in goals that seem to be aligned. For organizational communication, to practice diffraction might mean becoming less rigid about the field’s borders and more focused on inequity. To engage this diffractive process is to affirm difference, even while critiquing the ways that difference gets used to devalue some humans, nonhumans, and ways of being. Indeed, a focus on how difference justifies violence underwrites FNM’s approach to agency and what it means to be human.

ORGANIZING AGENCY In telling the story of FNM and/or postqualitative methodologies, scholars regularly observe that these traditions break from liberal understandings of human agency, ones that focus on free will. By contrast, FNM and postqualitative methods emphasize nonhuman or extra-human agency where humans are only one element in a larger, dynamic flow of agencies. As many scholars have argued, however, this story about FNM and postqualitative inquiry begins from the frame of whiteness and colonialism. As Rosiek et al. (2020) penned, To someone already convinced of the ubiquity of non-human agency, the prevalent interest among Eurocentric scholars with justifying a departure from their inherited humanist ontologies seems like a highly provincial obsession, one that distracts from the more substantive work of shaping productive ontological relations with a world full of human and non-human agents. (p. 337)

In addition to distracting from the substantive work Rosiek and colleagues name, arguments about nonhuman agency also reinforce

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whiteness in other ways. Jackson (2018), for example, noted FNM’s ubiquitous claims that discourse has become overly agentic, a common rationale for the material turn. As Jackson asserted, these stories about why FNM matters avoid “a rigorous examination of the enabling racialized and sexuated conditions of discursivity” (p. 629), further noting that Black feminists would have little interest in simply reducing the supposed hyper-agency of discourse, given that whiteness has cast Black femininity as simultaneously hyper-agentic and non-agentic. Related, in his discussion of Black feminist materialisms, Towns (2019) stated, “modern scientists and philosophers were theorizing humans and matter as distinct categories in a context wherein they were justifying the classification of Black slaves as legally threefifths human” (p. 5). After providing this reminder about the historical conditions in which white men developed these c­ oncepts, Towns issued an imperative that communication studies understand its theories (and thereby the methodologies that emerge from  them) as inherently racialized, noting that the field’s conceptualization of “human” is a “trope for whiteness and maleness” (p. 355), an argument he later elaborated (Towns, 2022). In the contexts of arguments such as Rosiek et  al.’s (2020), Jackson’s (2018), and Towns’ (2019, 2022), to suggest that postqualitative inquiry or FNM is distinct in its theorization of nonhuman agencies is to erase the ways in which prevailing understandings of “human,” “agency,” and “matter” are entwined with anti-Blackness, anti-indigeneity, and misogyny. Extending this argument about (human) agency in FNM and/or postqualitative methods, scholars have noted the anxiety that swirls as these approaches challenge and reinforce existing power structures. Both van der Tuin (2014) and Todd (2016) attested that interest in nonhuman agencies surged at the same historical moment when “human” was no longer exclusive to white, cis, hetero, men. Carrington (2017) added:

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As if the constant risk of death were not enough, the persistent whiteness of the ignorance that enjoins us to let go of the human before we are done with it makes me reluctant to articulate the queer forms through which I might enact livability, agency, and resistance in terms that are not explicitly Black and human. I know that objects can and do resist, but the reason I know this—my epistemological ground—is that my ancestors were objects. (p. 281)

Here again, in agreement with other scholars cited in this chapter, Carrington ­demonstrates that when theories or theorists “discover” the agency of objects, they whitewash violence and erase the visceral, life-ordeath stakes of the category human, along with the knowledge systematically denied or eradicated through ongoing erasure of in­equities, murders, and the histories that inform the present. This pattern occurs in some sociomaterial organizational scholarship that risks replicating whiteness and colonialism (Harris & Ashcraft, 2019). Noting further problems with casting postqualitative and FNM discussions of extrahuman and nonhuman agency as novel, Rosiek et al. (2020) observed that many academics avoid engaging with Indigenous agent ontologies. They aver that in Indigenous agent ontologies and related traditions, humans need to be comfortable with, perhaps even seek out, a condition of being an instrument of another agency. … This stands in contrast to liberal individualism and its epistemic correlates in Western thought, where sublimation of human agency into other processes is almost always framed as negative, as a restriction or subversion of human freedom. (p. 339)

To return to the opening theme of this section, Rosiek et al. suggest that, for the small group of powerful humans who have long enjoyed the illusion of their independence, to understand agency (not merely resistance) in a context where one is acted upon, or to enjoy being merely an element of change but not its director, is terrifying. How could it not be for those who have used, humiliated, abused, destroyed, and murdered people

whose sublimation they required to secure the role of director? Overall, in these schools of thought, agency only exists in relationship, through connection, and amidst interaction. These assumptions are at odds with those approaches that restrict human agency to moments when an individual is disconnected from other beings and systems, a “freedom” achieved through isolation, loneliness, and the absence of relationship. Organizational communication scholars have issued similar critiques, and points of resonance with these FNM and postqualitative understandings of agency exist, in particular, in organizational communication’s postcolonial scholarship (see also Chapter 9 in this volume). In conversation with Spivak and Fanon, among others, Broadfoot et al. (2018) noted that some people are marked as objects, not acting subjects, and sorted into “agency haves and have nots” when “there is little recognition of the agency that is exercised by the person who is acted on—or objects to such action” (p.  123, emphasis in original). Detailing agency as a process of translation, Broadfoot et al. emphasized the situational, relational interdependencies of agency. Their move away from an individualist approach to agency, their attention to processes by which people are objectified and multiple forms of agency flattened, resonates with some aspects of an FNM and postqualitative approach to agency, especially those grounded in Black feminist materialisms and Indigenous agent ontologies. Methodologically, the consequences of adopting these understandings of agency are enormous. Prediction and control have no place in FNM and postqualitative methodologies. What Barad (2007) calls responseability—the capacity to respond with full consideration of ethical relating—does. “Choice,” the centerpiece of so much EuroAmerican philosophy, becomes passé. Even phenomenological accounts of human experience get called into question because a human’s experience is never just their own but always imbricated with myriad relationships and phenomena that exceed them. Trying to

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use research to identify change becomes less possible. Instead, the emphasis is on enacting relationships differently. One example of such reorientation to qualitative inquiry exists in a collection of articles on creative-relational methodologies, where de la Garza’s (2020) practice resonates with many postqualitative, relational, and FNM methodologies. Describing her MAP (Movement, Art, Poiesis) praxis, de la Garza encouraged scholars to release “our habituated pseudo-agentic power of expression to the emergence of poiesis,” and said: There is no plan of analysis here, no need to consider what we will produce. Rather, the goal of this methodology, of this praxis, is to help us reach the embodied and psycho-emotional place of readiness for a poiesis of understanding the ecological crises in our relationships. (p. 76)

de la Garza writes against the “­neocolonial compulsion to consume” (p. 75) and the “­neoliberal academic production line of more projects, more outcomes,” focusing instead on a “properly tuned human instrument” (p. 76). In an essay I hear as further echoing de la Garza, St. Pierre et al. (2016) remarked that if “the doer is produced either by or alongside the deed, then the work of method is not completely in our control” (p. 105). Instead, it emerges, and this is one reason why many FNM and postqualitative methodologies rely on the arts and embodiment. So, if method is not something a researcher does, but something done to, through, and with a researcher, in relationship with all other organizing flows, how might a postqualitative organizational communication researcher approach a study inflected by FNM? I turn to this question in the next section.

THE “HOW” OF POSTQUALITATIVE AND FNM INQUIRY Despite my many caveats about how FNM and postqualitative inquiry changes the

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taken-for granted assumptions upon which qualitative organizational communication research operates, I also want to offer some concrete examples of how FNM connects to and shifts the usual elements of such inquiry. I offer these not as a “how-to” guide or prescription for these methods. Indeed, none of the key texts for FNM and postqualitative methods “explains how to do qualitative research; for example, how to produce qualitative ethnographic material, strategies for analyzing such material, or explications of criteria for the quality of research” (Søndergaard, 2016, p. 163). Instead, I offer ideas for how FNM and postqualitative inquiry might relate to existing ways of organizing and communicating qualitative research. Each example shifts qualitative methods toward FNM and postqualitative approaches without breaking altogether from the long tradition of more interpretive, phenomenological inquiry that guides much of this discipline. Because of my own expertise in sexuality, violence, and educational organizations, I have selected examples that focus on these themes. Allen’s (2019) work on youth sexuality offers many ways to enact FNM and postqualitative inquiry in relationship to humanist qualitative research. Allen opens the piece by noting St. Pierre’s (2011) encouragement for scholars to focus heavily on theory, less on method, which tends to be preoccupied with rules and procedures that are thought to ensure rigorous, positive outcomes. Even from this starting point, as Allen appreciates St. Pierre’s postqualitative moves, Allen also refuses to set aside existing traditions, noting that she has been constituted within them and therefore cannot (and does not want to) entirely step outside of them. Noteworthy, here, is the relationality typical of much FNM inquiry: Allen maintains connections to that which she seeks to transform and change, and she does so in part through carefully crafted connections to histories, futures, and scholarly communities. Allen (2019) continues to enact FNM methods as she articulates research questions

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(RQs). Describing moments that occurred both before and after the “typical” process of data collection, Allen discusses how some organizational members at the proposed research site resisted the study while Allen was working to secure access to that organization. Allen also details how people challenged her research findings during a presentation she gave of her work long after it was completed. Having already expanded the relevant timeline of the study to consider these moments of pushback as data, despite their being outside the official “data collection” phase, Allen further marks the shift in inquiry by contrasting two RQs that emerge from this pushback. A more typically humanist qualitative RQ would ask, “What do these moments tell us about the subject under study?” A more postqualitative RQ asks instead, “How do the methodological moments make the topic under study?” (p.  291). The former question maintains a separation between the research topic and the way it is researched, while the latter follows FNM’s entanglement of ontology and epistemology to assume that the topic and the way of knowing it cannot be disentangled. Allen (2019) further enacts postqualitative, FNM commitments when she emphasizes seemingly incongruous perspectives. Following a reminder that “onto-epistemological consistency has traditionally been a characteristic of ‘high-quality’ qualitative research,” Allen notes that retaining a relationship to this hallmark of qualitative rigor while also embracing elements of FNM guarantees her own inconsistency (p.  258). As I outlined earlier, FNM commitments in (organizational) communication theorizing show up as an embrace of such dilemma. Seeming contradiction is a site of theoretical possibility because drawing together supposedly “incoherent” elements of the world is the practice of relationship, of connecting in ways that affirm difference. Consistent with this embrace of inconsistency, Allen notes that she is “‘messing’ with two o­ ntologically distinct methodological foundations” (p.  285).

To do  so—with ­ theoretically-informed attention  to inequity—is to organize one ­ aspect of FNM-inflected postqualitative methods. Last, Allen (2019) resituates and reframes a researcher’s authority in keeping with an FNM approach to both holism and agency. She notes that “researcher and methodology intra-actively be-come simultaneously,” and as a consequence, “researchers can no longer be understood as the curators of their projects, designing and controlling research and its outcomes” (p. 290, emphasis in original). As Allen observes, one implication of this assumption is that FNM and/or postqualitative research “risks appearing anti-intellectual [or] methodologically irresponsible” (p. 292). It cannot guarantee positive or just outcomes, given that the researcher is only one dynamic component of knowing and being that does not belong exclusively to the methodologist. Søndergaard (2016) provides another useful example of FNM, postqualitative inquiry in a study of violence in children’s video games and schools. Like Allen (2019), Søndergaard offers a contrast between a more traditional RQ and an FNM-inflected RQ, saying that lots of researchers ask questions about how video games influence children’s violence and aggression. A typical RQ on this topic might be: When children play violent video games, do the games make them more likely to shoot classmates at school? Søndergaard begins postqualitative inquiry, reframing this question by (1) being curious about these adult concerns about children, (2) moving away from causal/directional questions, and (3) asking instead about flows and relationships. The FNM-inflected RQ then becomes: “Where [do] violence and aggression move in children’s everyday lives, how [do] flows of violence and aggression intraact, what feeds into them, and, as an extension, which kinds of violence and aggression become objects of adult concern” (p. 164)? This reframed question guides not only how Søndergaard analyzes research interviews

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with participants—who are entirely young boys—but also the reporting of “findings.” Instead of offering representative themes across all interviews, Søndergaard first presents them one at a time. By providing lots of detail from each interview, Søndergaard calls attention to how violence flows in the research process itself: One participant talks about the violent contents, not only of video games, but also of everyday life at school; the participant discusses how that everyday school violence is connected to social power dynamics in the classroom, to racism, to classmates’ ineffective ways to meet their needs; the participant muses on how all this relates to war, poverty, loss, grief, climate change, dreams, apologies, and fear. Søndergaard (2016) makes only limited analytic comments in the initial description of the interview, and then, after offering this detail, provides a more extended analysis that explicitly traces the flows of violence. Again emphasizing a nonrepresentational approach, Søndergaard likens the analytic process to pouring “phosphorescent dye into the processes entangled by violence and aggression” (p. 167). In this metaphor, the dye makes it possible “to see currents, branches, veins [in the material-discursive apparatus]—some would be thick and sturdy, others fibrous, all entangling with other kinds of processes, other currents of phenomena, which would dilute or disperse the phosphorescent dye along the way into new tones and nuances” (p. 167). After noting the multiple flows of violence and aggression that appear in the interviews with boys, Søndergaard observes that these participants express ambivalence about violence in much the same way that society at large does: They, like society, see it not only as a possibility and even an occasional necessity, but also as something that is largely unacceptable. Søndergaard concludes that games are “a very limited and controlled part of the flows of aggression that are present in the children’s lives” (p. 170). Through this analysis, Søndergaard shows that adults’ concerns with children’s video games,

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particularly causal questions about them, are so narrowly focused that adults consider neither how violence patterns society as a whole, nor how young boys learn that selfdefense and war are necessary for enacting adult masculinity. In short, adults overlook most of the violent flows children encounter in school and instead channel their anxiety about school safety onto the virtual world of games. As they do so, adults dismiss the violent circumstances of adult life of which children are acutely aware and for which they are preparing. Last, I offer an example from my own work on university responses to sexual violence, with a specific focus on Title IX policies (Harris, 2019). Like all scholarship, it has both strengths and weaknesses, so I encourage you to trust your own observations about positive and negative aspects of this model. There are some of both in this description. Similar to Allen’s (2019) example, I, too, extended the “timeline” of the research to encompass things that happened before and after traditional data collection and participant observation. My analysis included my difficulties navigating tensions between Institutional Review Board (IRB) and Title IX offices before beginning the “formal” aspects of the study. I did so to emphasize that the so-called “object” of research—institutional response to sexual violence—comes into being in relationship to the study itself. Continuing this emphasis on the entanglement of ways of studying and objects of studying, I also noted participant critiques of my informed consent materials, objections some participants raised to my findings, along with assessments of those objections that colleagues offered during what is known as peer debriefing. Each extension of the study before and after the typical period of “producing” qualitative data is a way to decenter researcher authority and instead show ongoing relationships—in this case to laws, institutional policy, fears of job loss, trauma, systemic racism and its investments in sexism, and the norms of interpersonal disclosure.

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The study also enacts diffraction by changing typical questions about institutional responses to sexual violence (Harris, 2019). Instead of focusing on if or how often sexual violence occurs, I argue that violence communicates. This argument shifts from representational concerns (e.g., How do people talk about violence? Are reports of violence accurate?) to inquiries that trace how violence expresses itself. Instead of emphasizing talk about violence—as institutions do when they mandate employees to report instances of assault to particular offices—the focus becomes how violence makes itself known: in attrition rates, in gossip, in depression and PTSD, in inequitable patterns of labor on the basis of gender and race, in stilted or shattered relationships, in stories that defy measurement, in addiction to alcohol and drugs and consumerism and overwork, and in the resilience and growth that people and systems who have experienced violence often develop in its wake. Relying on FNM and postqualitative understandings of agency, the same study also shows how institutions “cut” violence and discourse, leaving the former exclusively in the realm of the material, physical, embodied world, and supposing that the latter can do no harm (Harris, 2019). This split obscures some forms of violence: only individuals are embodied, so group-based patterns of harm untethered from any individual actor (e.g., systematic racism) get overlooked; only certain kinds of speech are considered active/agentic, so the institution can dismiss some complaints (e.g., those in which a student requests an institutional response to violence but does not name a perpetrator). The same split, even as it enhances violence, also enables institutional members to make their own decisions about the extent to which the institution intervenes. It also provides more guarantee that the institution will respond to its knowledge of wrongdoing, rather than use nonresponsiveness to protect the violent status quo. Each of these examples takes up bits and pieces of FNM and postqualitative

inquiry amidst a scholarly community in which qualitative research is still the lingua franca. Across these three studies, the principles of non-separation guide the work in assumptions that discourse and materiality are intertwined, in disrupting subject/object splits, or in moving away from entitative frameworks. These projects reject entitative thinking both in their fluid approach to the discipline of organizational communication and also in their disruption of the organization as a container. Further, in each example, the researcher shows how they are not the sole designer or analyst, emphasizing interdependence of the many elements of the phenomena in question. And further, the style of inquiry itself changes. As I emphasized at the outset of this section, however, because of the assumptions that guide postqualitative and FNM methodology, it is continually in a process of dynamic becoming, so these examples are meant as possibilities, kernels of inspiration for organizational communication researchers, not edicts to be taken up as a device for sorting that which is (not) FNM or that which is (not) postqualitative organizational inquiry.

CONCLUSION Allen (2019) said that “putting feminist new materialist ideas to work…is an act of intellectual vulnerability,” because postqualitative research, by its nature, is “constantly being remade” (p. 292). Indeed, explicitly postqualitative and FNM methods are just beginning to shape organizational communication research. For example, some scholars have focused on extra-human agency to reconceptualize organizational communication’s theories of resistance (Wilhoit & Kisselburgh, 2019) and work-life balance (Long et  al., 2018). In another indication of postqualitative inquiry’s growing influence, Tracy’s (2020) second edition of her qualitative methods book incorporates discussion of

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new materialist and postqualitative practice. Even so, by this point of the chapter, I hope you are not fooled by these claims to newness, especially since they might stop scholars from noticing the seeds of these ways of knowing in organizational communication scholarship’s more distant history. Looking forward, organizational communication scholars might advance the field’s growing commitment to equity (Ballard et  al., 2020) and decolonization (Pal et  al., 2022; see also Chapter 9 in this volume) by relying on FNM and postqualitative inquiry, especially as one way to stay attuned with and responsive to pressing social problems. Amidst mounting environmental crises, diffracting the field’s scholarship may be useful. As just one example, Wilhoit Larson (2021) has encouraged organizational communication scholars to draw upon feminist and humanistic geography to analyze place in contemporary workplaces. This attention to place could be further nuanced in conversation with Marker (2018), who emphasized the importance of place as methodology for Indigenous knowledge systems. Where Wilhoit Larson usefully relies on interdisciplinary resources to introduce place as an analytic for the study of organization, Marker notes that “place as inquiry and methodology may ultimately open new possibilities for thinking about the sacred geographies that, in this Anthropocene epoch, expect a great deal more responsibility and relationality from the human beings” (p. 463). By combining attention to place in terms of a feminist ethic of care, as Wilhoit Larson does, and place as a sacred relationship that troubles a division between science and spirituality, as Marker does, organizational communication might rely on postqualitative inquiry to address the environmental catastrophe that we are all witnessing. Indeed, Tarin (2019) already offers one such example of drawing together environmental activism, Indigenous rights, and new materialist theory in organizational analyses. Similar diffractions of scholarship “in” organizational communication and

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scholarship which, through various cuts, is considered “outside” the field, can continue to connect the “new” and “post-” forms of inquiry to the multiple histories and possible futures of the discipline.

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Ganesh, S., Zoller, H., & Cheney, G. (2005). Transforming resistance, broadening our boundaries: Critical organizational communication meets globalization from below. Communication Monographs, 72(2), 169–191. https://doi. org/10.1080/03637750500111872 Geerts, E., & Van der Tuin, I. (2016). Diffraction and reading diffractively. The New Material­ ism Almanac. https://newmaterialism.eu/ almanac/d/diffraction.html Gherardi, S. (2019). Organizational communication in practice: Does it really work? ­Management Communication Quarterly, 33(1), 112–116. https://doi.org/10.1177/ 0893318918808938 Haraway, D. (2018). Modest_Witness@Second_ Millennium.FemaleMan_Meets_­OncoMouse™: Feminism and technoscience (2nd ed.). Routledge. Harris, K. L. (2016). Feminist dilemmatic theorizing: New materialism in communication studies. Communication Theory, 26(2), 150– 170. https://doi.org/10.1111/comt.12083 Harris, K. L. (2019). Beyond the rapist: Title IX and sexual violence on US campuses. Oxford University Press. Harris, K. L., & Ashcraft, K. L. (2023). Deferring difference no more: An (im)modest, relational plea from/through Karen Barad. Organization Studies. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1177/017084062311 69424 Harris, K. L., & Fortney, J. (2017). Performing reflexive caring: Rethinking reflexivity through trauma and disability. Text and Per­ formance Quarterly, 37(1), 20–34. https:// doi.org/10.1080/10462937.2016.1273543 Harris, K. L., McFarlane, M., & Wieskamp, V. (2020). The promise and peril of agency as motion: A feminist new materialist approach to sexual violence and sexual harassment. Organization, 27(5), 660–679. https://doi. org/10.1177/1350508419838697 Hein, S. F. (2016). The new materialism in qualitative inquiry: How compatible are the philosophies of Barad and Deleuze. Cultural Studies Critical Methodologies, 16(2), 132–40. https://doi.org/10.1177/15327086 16634732 Hinton, P., & Liu, X. (2015). The im/possibility of abandonment in new materialist ontologies.

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34 Qualitative Research in Organizational Communication Post-COVID-19 Kirstie McAllum, Stephanie Fox, Laura Ginoux, H e a t h e r M . Z o l l e r, A n d r e a Z o r n , and Theodore E. Zorn

When the World Health Organization declared on 11 March 2020 that the COVID-19 outbreak constituted a global pandemic, many researchers envisaged a relatively short pause in their research trajectory. Some used the initial lockdown to finish off book projects or find the perfect sourdough recipe. Others, including graduate students with inflexible deadlines, watched with dismay as their fieldwork ground to a halt or struggled to analyze data while sharing the kitchen table with children doing schoolwork at home. Research methodology and career stage influenced COVID-19’s impact on people’s experience of research during the pandemic. Disrupted plans meant sacrifices for scholars whose career security and progression depended on research productivity, networking, and publishing opportunities (Fosci et  al., 2020). People who held significant caregiving responsibilities in families, especially women, were particularly affected (Squazzoni et  al., 2020; Stephens et al., 2020). As the pandemic wore on, periodic lockdowns and ongoing

demands for social distancing pushed the qualitative research community to combine existing methods and create innovative ways to conduct online, in-person, and hybrid projects in an unpredictable research and sociopolitical landscape. Looking back on how organizational communication scholars navigated the challenges and consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic, Tracy’s (2020a) iterative phronetic approach to qualitative methods seems particularly relevant, perhaps even prophetic (see also Chapter 20 in this volume). Tracy explains that phronesis or practical wisdom emphasizes “practice in context” (p. 6), acknowledging that individual motivations and actions are always socially and historically grounded in context. She takes inspiration from Flyvbjerg’s (2001) notion of contextual research, which encourages researchers to elucidate and deliberate the challenges and risks of their research practice in context, in order to imagine how they might do things differently, “in full knowledge that

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we cannot find ultimate answers to these questions or even a single version of what the questions are” (Flyvbjerg, 2001, p. 140). This chapter focuses on how the pandemic context compelled qualitative organizational communication researchers to question taken-for-granted methodological assumptions and reconsider previously successful methodological choices. Researchers at ease with incremental “trial-and-error tinkering” were prodded—and, at times, forced—to adapt existing methods and “be willing to try making up something new” (Gersick, 2016, p. 317). This chapter documents and assesses pandemic-induced changes and challenges at all stages of the research process. In the following sections, we explore its impact on research design, recruitment, data collection, data analysis, and dissemination of research findings. We hope that this discussion will contribute to the emergence of methodologies that integrate innovations that qualitative organizational communication researchers willingly embrace as part of the “new normal” and valued pre-pandemic practices that researchers wish to retain or recover.

RESEARCH DESIGN We begin by considering how the pandemic influenced research planning. Qualitative research design entails choices in constructing the research design such as selecting research sites, participants, data collection methods, as well as data analysis strategies and techniques (Ravitch & Carl, 2019; see also Chapter 14 in this volume). Design also involves decisions about the overall framing of a study, for example as an ethnography, interview-based study, case study, grounded theory, or critical discourse analysis (Creswell & Poth, 2018). We discuss how the pandemic influenced the selection of new research projects as well as decisions about research that was in progress at the time of widespread lockdowns.

Selecting New Projects There are good reasons to think that the pandemic experience, as well as anticipation of its continued effects and other society-­ changing crises, has influenced the topics that qualitative organizational scholars choose and how those topics are framed. Organizational communication studies have already explored the effects of the pandemic on organizational socialization (Woo et  al., 2023), relational communication (Jämsen et  al., 2022), job crafting (Sahay & Dwyer, 2021), and sensemaking (van Zoonen et al., 2022). The pandemic context invites further organizational research on employee wellbeing, team functioning, ways of organizing work, (in)equality, social movements, and organizational and industry survival, all topics of interest to qualitative organizational communication researchers. The pandemic has and should continue to shift who or what groups we study. For example, societal views of what work is considered essential have changed through the pandemic (van Zoonen et al., 2022). In addition to greater attention to demands on healthcare workers, the special challenges faced by essential workers in organizations such as supermarkets and meat-packing plants attracted the attention of qualitative organizational communication scholars (Dempsey et al., 2022). Another topical consideration relates to organizational boundaries. The pandemic has prompted changes and accelerated trends toward more flexible workspaces. Although the container metaphor never adequately described organizations, the pandemic spurred greater blurring of the boundaries between work/home and organization/“not-organization.” Many organizations have changed their policies regarding off-site work since the beginning of the pandemic, while others have reduced on-site space and changed office layouts. Locating the “site” of an organization may become more challenging, for example, in conducting ethnographies or case studies of

POST-COVID-19

“an” organization. Such changes may not only prompt qualitative organizational communication researchers to reconsider methods, but actually reframe what the study is about as the focus shifts from a work site with predictable participants to something much more diffuse, fluid, and unpredictable. Managing tensions and conflicts that arise due to different attitudes toward health and safety requirements and the politicization of those measures are also interesting topics. Government mandates and restrictions affect organizational viability, practices, and routines, inviting research on issues of control, trust, and organizational autonomy, as well as on the role of improvisation and the development of workarounds. Additionally, surveillance takes on new meanings in the context of mask and social-distancing mandates; in many cases, front-line workers had to enforce COVID-19 policies (e.g., be the “mask police”). Of course, emerging protocols and trends will suggest new foci for qualitative organizational communication research. The communication challenges workers face in social distancing, masking, and coordinating via digital collaboration tools are obvious topics. So too are new and creative ways to celebrate and socialize (in both senses, i.e., nonwork relationship-building and assimilating new organizational members) (e.g., Jämsen et al., 2022; Woo et al., 2023).

Adapting Existing Projects Whereas some research shifted the topical focus to COVID-19 related issues, the pandemic forced researchers with studies underway to modify research design and reconsider the feasibility of projects in the planning stage (Stephens et  al., 2020). Travel restrictions halted studies that involved international travel. In some cases, government-imposed lockdowns and participant unavailability or hesitancy made in-person data collection impossible. Researchers found many plans stymied or

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unrealistic. Given that qualitative research such as interviewing, participant observation, and community-based methods often entails close physical contact, the need to design research protocols that mitigated health risks seemed to favor quantitative methodologies that do not present the same physical dangers. On the other hand, the emergent element of qualitative research designs (Creswell & Poth, 2018) means that qualitative researchers have always embraced recursivity and flexible design, where procedures can be undertaken or modified repeatedly until a specific condition is met (Leech & Onwuegbuzie, 2008). Qualitative organizational communication researchers typically focus on participants’ meanings and experiences, and where participant-driven data will lead is difficult to fully anticipate, identify, or plan in advance. So, researchers often find themselves responding to these in real time once research is underway. Thus, qualitative research design involves “fidelity to participants and their experiences rather than a strict adherence to methods and research design” (Ravitch & Carl, 2019, p. 18). This flexibility allowed organizational communication researchers committed to qualitative work to innovate with their research designs. Perhaps the standout feature of the “pandemic pivot” in qualitative research design was the shift from physical to virtual contact with participants and research sites. As working online became the “new normal” for everyone, designs including online data collection and analysis became more acceptable (Kobakhidze et  al., 2021; Stephens et  al., 2020). Some, for example, redesigned their organi­zational ethnographies as video-ethnographies (Bencherki, 2021). In the next section, we describe how researchers adapted various design elements to maximize insights in light of limitations brought on by the pandemic, including digital recruitment, data collection, analysis, and dissemination.

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RECRUITMENT Recruitment has never been easy, even before the pandemic. Participants may perceive qualitative organizational communication research to be time-consuming, burdensome, or invasive. Moreover, in a period of organizational flux where organizational members’ time and energy are consumed by coping with ongoing change, individuals, teams, and organizations may be less willing or avail­ able to participate in research. Mental health issues related to constant connectivity, workfamily imbalance, and conflict experienced by individuals working from home exacerbate this problem. Despite these issues, virtual studies multiplied during the pandemic. Virtual data collection methods, which we discuss in the following section, make it possible to recruit participants in geographically remote or hardto-access locations, increasing the breadth of perspectives included in studies. Digital technologies also make it easier to recruit participants who may otherwise experience transportation issues. For example, Zoom meetings enable flexible scheduling and give participants a sense of control over time. Nonetheless, the pandemic has also exacerbated the digital divide: Virtual participation requires access to technology, adequate Internet bandwidth, and a baseline level of digital literacy that could lead researchers to neglect marginalized populations. The current methodological focus on technical solutions (e.g., dealing with patchy video) ignores broader issues of diversity and exclusion that underpin the digital divide between rural and urban areas and participants in high-, medium-, and low-income countries (Reñosa et al., 2021; Roberts et al., 2021). Once researchers decide which participants they wish to recruit, they need to connect with them. The pandemic made online recruitment using social media such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and list-servs an almost taken-for-granted element in the research toolkit (e.g., Quickfall, 2022; Woo

et al., 2023). However, sometimes this means that researchers find themselves negotiating access with multiple gatekeepers. Moreover, social media can generate numerous, unpredictable complications, such as participants’ misunderstanding the study’s purpose or sharing the post (and potentially commenting on it as they do so) across platforms, requiring researchers to reply to hundreds or even thousands of messages. Quickfall (2022) describes having 11,500 people look at her recruitment tweet when she only wanted 6 participants. Researchers also need to decide whether to use a personal, professional, or project account, knowing that tech-savvy participants will “presearch” them, inspecting their political affiliations, reported attitudes toward the research topic, previous research publications, and personal information available through a Google search and various social media accounts. As Reich (2015) comments, social media flattens the power differential between researcher and participants; during online recruitment, participants hold “power in their ability to technologically open or close access” (p. 400). Social media also tends to blur the boundaries between personal and private. Researchers may struggle with “friend requests” that would facilitate snowball sampling, but that make the distinction between “social friendship and friendship for research purposes” fuzzier (Lunnay et al., 2015, p. 103). In addition to using digital tools to publicize studies, the pandemic context encouraged researchers to experiment with virtual forms of explaining projects and obtaining consent, most commonly by emailing participants the information and consent form. Researchers typically asked participants to express consent by replying to the message. In other cases, research ethics committees and institutional review boards required digital versions of traditional paper-based consent forms. However, generating an electronic signature can be challenging for those with lower digital literacy. Reñosa et  al. (2021)

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describe using “selfie consents” where participants took a photo of themselves with the signed consent form. Another issue involves how to discuss the content and meaning of the information sheet when not co-present. Although Lobe and her colleagues (2020) suggest that participants ask questions about projects by email, asynchronous exchanges do not allow for a two-way conversation to explain, for example, vocabulary that participants do not understand. Moving forward, researchers may wish to retain the benefits of digital recruitment, including the wide accessibility of participants and greater control and flexibility for participants. However, researchers will need to redress digital divide challenges. In addition, some researchers found that digital contact created a lack of intimacy and connection, one of the classic ideals of fieldwork (Marcus, 2001), necessitating new ways of establishing rapport, a consideration we take up in the following section.

DATA COLLECTION One of the most jarring consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic for qualitative research was the abrupt halt of most in-person data collection due to health and safety risks. At the same time, decision-makers frequently sought quick access to actionable information, which stands in contrast to the typically lengthy time from data collection to dissemination of findings in qualitative studies. During crises, rapid qualitative data collection can be useful to identify the causes of the crisis, assess infrastructure and control strategies, and describe participants’ perceptions and interpretations of the crisis situation (Vindrola-Padros et al., 2020). Therefore, given the tension between the constraints of the COVID-19 crisis and the continued need for qualitative research, organizational communication researchers had to find innovative and immediate

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solutions to commence or continue collecting data. Methodological writers encouraged them to hone their ability to conduct “agile” (Watson & Lupton, 2022), “resilient” (Rahman et al., 2021), and “adaptable” research (Torrentira, 2020). This imperative to be flexible went beyond bricolage, or “the piecing together of diverse materials so as to produce an emergent construction” (Weinstein et al., 2008, p. 65), to encompass débrouillardise, a French word that describes the cultivation of flexibility, resilience, and resourcefulness in methodological decisionmaking. Driving changes in data collection were the virtualization of fieldwork, changes in where the “field” or research site is assumed to be, and fieldwork relationships.

Virtualization Although for many methodologists, the “gold standard” (Jenners & Myers, 2019, p. 165; Weller, 2017, p. 623) of data collection remains in-person, face-to-face methods because they facilitate personal connection (Denzin & Lincoln, 2018; Rudrum et  al., 2022), the move to virtual methods in organizational communication studies was quietly underway well before the onset of the pandemic (Stephens, 2017). In 2006, Rodham and Gavin suggested that online research was in its infancy. By 2021, Taylor et al. asserted that “traditional” ethnographies in organizational communication were in decline relative to virtual interviews and collection and use of online data. But what does virtual data collection involve? It can entail employing “versions of traditional methods using internet venues instead of face-to-face interactions” (Lobe et  al., 2020, p. 2) or synchronous online methods that are analogous to “traditional” ones, such as online interviews, online focus groups, and observation of online interactions. Yet, virtual data collection also encompasses asynchronous methods, such as interviews using email, chat, and instant

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messaging technologies; observation of posts uploaded to message boards, discussion groups, and forums; and journaling and diaries (Lupton, 2020; Rodham & Gavin, 2006, see also Chapter 18 in this volume). Both synchronous and asynchronous virtual data collection methods increase the geographic breadth of data collection without adding cost or travel time, or jeopardizing personal safety (Lobe et  al., 2020; Lupton, 2020; Oliffe et al., 2021; Reñosa et al., 2021; Roberts et al., 2021). For example, a doctoral candidate at the Université de Montréal in Canada remotely observed and interviewed a female entrepreneur in Iceland. Although virtualization enhances accessibility, even willing participants may be unable to connect. Technical glitches caused by weak or insufficient Internet connection can interrupt synchronous data collection and result in dropped calls (Archibald et al., 2019; Gray et al., 2020). This staccato rhythm can be detrimental to the pacing, flow, and topicality of conversation. Consequently, a researcher might lose important interactional nuances (Oliffe et  al., 2021). Other issues include poor lighting, strange camera angles, and the inability to look the other in the eye, making researchers’ ability to detect and read micro-expressions more difficult or causing researchers to overlook nonverbal cues (Denham & Onweugbuzie, 2013). Overall, technical challenges mean researchers must possess the skills to compensate for this potential loss of richness, such as knowing when to wait an additional second or two for the signal to sync after a lag (Jenner & Myers, 2019). Roberts et al. (2021) suggest complementing synchronous data collection with previously recorded or asynchronously collected data. Indeed, connectivity challenges may be mitigated by asking participants to take photographs or draw maps and then send scanned copies (Watson & Lupton, 2022). Doing so can also redress linguistic inequalities (Dougherty et al., 2018). Of course, when researchers expand the range of data created and collected (e.g.,

photographs, drawings, video diaries, mobile ethnographies), they also expect more of participants in terms of time, skills, and involvement with the research project (Wagner et al., 2016). Moreover, although the pandemic normalized virtual methods for both researchers and participants when face-to-face methods were impossible (Dodds & Hess, 2021), their use has revealed the impact of the digital divide among researchers, only some of whom can afford access to technologies (Budhwar & Cumming, 2020). This means they might have been—and continue to be—less able to practice débrouillardise (“resourcefulness”) by adapting research design and pivoting data collection strategies.

Multiplying and Fracturing Field Sites Locations for data collection have shifted dramatically since the pandemic. Lockdowns led to shifting and proliferating workspaces for some people. As Wilhoit Larson (2020) notes, spaces become organizational when they are where work gets done. Pandemic workspaces not only included clinics, supermarket checkouts, and home offices, but also cars, kitchen tables, cloud-based meeting spaces, shared folders and documents, and ongoing discussion threads. This means that our understanding of research “site” has necessarily mutated, expanding and challenging traditional conceptions (Taylor et al., 2021). Fieldwork is no longer carried out in predetermined physical spaces where the researcher physically goes (e.g., office, warehouse, headquarters, factory floor), but stretches across multiple sites (Ganesh & Stohl, 2013; Marcus, 1995). To explore how organizing gets done across multiple spaces (physical, virtual, or both), qualitative organizational communication researchers may want to use visual and mobile methods such as video- and photo-elicitation (Wilhoit, 2017; see also Chapter 19 in this volume) or go-along or walking interviews

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(Brummans & Vézy, 2022; Feinberg, 2016), during which researchers accompany participants as they explain the spaces and platforms they use. Spinney (2015) argues that mobile methods that follow “traces and connections across space and time” also allow us to “move with our participants physically, virtually or emotionally” (p. 242). As such, these methods can help qualitative organizational communication researchers document their participants’ embodied knowledge, emotions, and experience of inequalities (Finlay & Bowman, 2017), thereby offering precious windows into issues such as mental health and inequity at work that the pandemic exacerbated.

Fieldwork Relationships Changes in data collection influence relationships among researchers and participants. In this section, we discuss how the rise of virtual methods has influenced rapport building and issues of control. First, creating rapport may be more challenging in virtual contexts. The degree to which virtualization influences rapport is a significant methodological issue because participant disclosure depends on trusting, respectful research relationships (Marcus, 2001). If this connection is missing, data quality diminishes. Research findings to date are mixed. Some researchers find online interviews impersonal, exemplified by participants who report wishing they could have shared a cup of tea (AdamsHutcheson & Longhurst, 2017; Seitz, 2016). Participants’ decision to turn off their video cameras can likewise hamper relationshipbuilding (Roberts et  al., 2021). However, Jenner and Myers’ (2019) comparison of inperson and online interviews found little difference in interview duration and participant willingness to disclose, and they concluded that privacy, rather than technical mediation, is key to high-quality data. Moreover, improvements in video technology that better simulate in-person encounters and increased

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public familiarity in using online tools are promising. Indeed, participants may find online data collection methods less formal, intrusive, or anxiety-inducing (Rudrum et al., 2022; Weller, 2017). For example, Jenner and Myers (2019) describe participants’ relief about not having to tidy their homes before the researcher arrived. Participants may even speak with greater “naturalness and spontaneity” (Oliffe et al., 2021, p. 3) or authenticity (James & Busher, 2006) when connecting virtually from their own homes. Indeed, because online interviews can feel like a friendly conversation, some participants might “divulge more than they would have done in a physical co-present encounter” (Weller, 2017, p. 10), a situation that she dubs “over-rapport.” How researchers open up a virtual interaction can influence rapport-building. For instance, incorporating interpersonal rituals, such as greetings, into virtual interviews can create rapport. But when the first moments of the interview are oriented toward obtaining consent (especially salient if recording), the interaction can become stilted and awkward. This is especially so when the participant, the researcher, or both have their camera disabled (Weller, 2017). Lack of visual cues reduces researchers’ ability to read silences which could be interpreted in a variety of ways: The participant may be reflecting, confused, or waiting for the interviewer to ask the next question (Jenner & Myers, 2019). Conversely, having cameras turned on can facilitate a feeling of close physical proximity. Beyond rapport, virtual fieldwork may change the ongoing nature of relationships and communication between participants and researchers. Tracy (2020b) argues that such methods may incentivize “the practice of short, transactional, disinhibited, and/ or hyper-strategic communication” (Taylor et  al., 2021, p. 626) among organizational members and between participants and researchers. For instance, shadowing organizational members during video-conferencing

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calls provides fewer opportunities to develop relationships and to document the less visible organizational backstory (see Barley in Taylor et al., 2021). If researchers are organizational outsiders, virtual data collection makes learning about relevant context even harder (Roberts et al., 2021). As we expand upon in the section on data analysis, virtual data collection likewise may diminish researchers’ ability to delve into how participants’ embodied identities shape organizing. What researchers may experience more directly are differences in access to and confidence in resources that facilitate participation in organizational spaces. For example, digital exclusion becomes more visible, whether based on lack of access to equipment (computers, tablets, phones) and reliable Internet connections (Rudrum et  al., 2022) or levels of digital literacy for things like sharing, commenting, or annotating images (Roberts et al., 2021). Given the normalization of virtual data collection strategies, an “ever-changing technological landscape” (Lobe et al., 2020, p. 1) is likely to remain a perennial challenge for both researchers and organizations (Roberts, et al., 2021). Additionally, the technological changes wrought by the pandemic have introduced new dynamics related to control. Although many research traditions encourage greater participant agency in the research process, researchers may not anticipate technological power shifts. Researchers must negotiate new forms of partnership when participants play an increasingly active role in navigating platforms, tools, and locations during data collection (Jenner & Myers, 2019). Participants may not engage in data collection as researchers anticipated. Researchers can clarify expectations (e.g., about sharing video or audio) but may still lose control over how participants choose to interact. For example, participants may decide to do an interview while driving (Oliffe et al., 2021), turn off their camera (Sipes et al., 2019), or strategically place themselves outside of camera range when discussing sensitive topics (Dodds & Hess, 2021).

Participant control over data sharing may lead to different research outcomes. A “Zoom tour” (a technology-mediated form of the goalong method; see Watson & Lupton, 2022) of a participant’s workspace might be considerably shorter than the in-person equivalent. Participants may also limit what researchers can see by tightly controlling the field of vision of the camera so that much remains invisible (Grunditz, 2021). Researchers cannot direct attention to objects of interest by lingering in a room or pointing, as they would in person. On the other hand, developing conversations about participants’ preferences and choices can create greater trust. Some researchers have found that when participants collaborate with researchers to resolve technical issues, they create relational bonds that facilitate subsequent data collection (Archibald et  al., 2019; Lobe et  al., 2020; Lupton, 2020; Roberts et al., 2021). In light of our discussion, we offer several tips with regard to post-pandemic relationship management before and during data collection. First, regarding technology, qualitative organizational communication researchers should clearly explain to participants what to expect and how to navigate the virtual interface at the beginning of the interaction. For example, several methodologists explain that facilitating focus groups online is harder than in-person, because participants on mobile devices find it difficult to see other participants in the smaller view screen (Lobe et al., 2020; Lupton, 2020). They recommend that moderators cap the number of participants at five or six and send instructions to participants, including a request to minimize distractions and an explanation of how to use the “raise hand” function to facilitate turn taking. Marzi (2020) and Dube (2020) suggest organizing workshops before data collection begins to familiarize participants with technology, reduce potential technical problems, and develop relationships, although the reduction in frustrating technical glitches must be balanced against participants’ time investment. Second, researchers can work in pairs when conducting online interviews

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or focus groups: One can focus on building rapport during the interview or discussion, while the other manages technical issues, takes notes, or posts follow-up questions in the chat (Dodds & Hess, 2021; Roberts et al., 2021). Such strategies can improve data quality. Ultimately, we believe that time spent is less important than the quality of engagement that is achieved.

Ethical Considerations As the concept of a workplace shifted and more research moved online, the pandemic also introduced new ethical conundrums. Although some researchers claim that the fundamental ethical issues in virtual data collection are similar to or the same as their face-to-face equivalents and require only small amendments in the ethics evaluation process (Lobe et al., 2020), in our view, the physical distance between participants and researchers and the increased blurring of boundaries among personal and professional spaces during data collection raise important ethical questions (Roberts et al., 2021). First, when conducting virtual data collection, it is harder to verify participants’ identity (and age, in the case of minors) in online interviews or discussion groups (Rodham & Gavin, 2006). More commonly, confidentiality becomes problematic when using asynchronous data such as discussion boards. For instance, in blogs, the boundary between space for private reflection and content for public consumption can be fluid (Kurtz et al., 2017). The confidentiality challenge is compounded when following users across multiple platforms: If participants feel they are in an anonymous space (i.e., a message board that uses pseudonyms), they may share private feelings and thoughts more freely, which can be helpful in identity-related research (Rodham & Gavin, 2006). Other platforms, however, may link participants’ pseudonyms to their real identity. Even when collecting texts in the public domain, researchers should inform participants of this public-private paradox.

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Second, confidentiality becomes problematic when “everywhere” is a potential data collection site. Although virtualization can enhance participant control (e.g., participants can cut video, use a virtual background, or withhold their current health status; see Roberts et  al., 2021), participants may still lack privacy and be overheard. Masri and Masanat (2020) noted that participants cut calls or refused to answer questions when other household members were in hearing range. Virtual platforms’ security is an ongoing concern (Lobe et al., 2020). While most recommendations focus on protecting participants from researchers seeing too much, researchers must also be cognizant that they may inadvertently witness instances of bullying, harassment, or violence aimed at themselves or others that call for an ethical response (DeGroot & Carmack, 2020). These “ethically important moments” (Guillemin & Gillam, 2004, p. 261), where researchers decide how they will report incidents or provide participants with resources and support, can cause researchers considerable emotional strain. Focusing excessively on the technical elements of virtualization can lead the research community to forget that sitting in front of one’s computer screen can be a d­ angerous, difficult terrain too (Peterson et al., 2022). Finally, while the vast majority of studies on pandemic-related methodological considerations focus on technological affordances and challenges in building rapport, we also urge qualitative organizational communication researchers to attend to ethical questions related to social divisions such as views on mask mandates and support for the current government and their policies, which the pandemic brought to the surface.

Mindful Adaptation of Participatory and Engaged Data Collection Strategies These changes in rapport building, participant control, and ethical issues also have

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consequences for both the communities in which participants are embedded and those who are the “end users” of qualitative organizational communication research, raising several new questions. First, how might the virtualization of data collection methods and the delocalization of fieldwork impact engaged scholarship and participatory research? Literature published during the pandemic focuses primarily on how qualitative methods can be adapted to “collect” or “capture” data virtually, thus reinforcing what Dempsey (2010) deems an extractive research model, where researchers obtain data that will be shared with members of the research community without seeking input from or providing feedback to participants during the research process. Extractive models stand in contrast to partnership models that enable communities to negotiate and co-design how data generation might take place (Hall et  al., 2021). Yet, because such negotiations require extensive interaction with community members, researchers must consider the benefits and costs of participation. In crises (and beyond), we must attend to participants’ “affective environment” (Lupton, 2020, p. 20). In a pandemic, people may be overwhelmed with caretaking burdens or may be enduring conflict or surveillance on multiple levels in their homebased workspaces (Rudrum et al., 2022). A second question relates to balancing the need for timely, accurate, and actionable research results to guide crisis response and the time required for establishing trusting relationships and conducting quality research. In their critical literature review of rapid qualitative research, Vindrola-Padros and Johnson (2020) explain that rapid methods can save time (the most common reason for adopting rapid techniques); reduce costs; increase the amount of data collected (due to the shorter duration of data collection); improve efficiency and accuracy; and obtain “a closer approximation to the narrated realities of research participants” (p. 1598). As mentioned earlier, rapid data collection can also

reduce pressure on participants. However, there is a “lack of consensus in relation to what is meant by ‘rapid’” (Vindola-Padros et  al., 2020, p. 2193)—e.g., four to eight weeks— and what precisely rapidity pertains to (data collection, analysis, member checking, or dissemination, etc.). Moreover, there is a persistent tendency to link the terms “quick” and “dirty” together, and the research community frequently links the perceived credibility of qualitative research findings to time spent in the field (Johnson & Vindrola-Padros, 2017; Tracy, 2010). Budhwar and Cumming (2020) worry that “rushed research” (p. 442) leads to “mistakes.” Others argue that immersive, short-term studies constitute “intense routes to knowing” (Pink & Morgan, 2013, p. 351). In short, these issues remain unresolved.

DATA ANALYSIS We now address how the pandemic has influenced data analysis, focusing first on tools to facilitate data analysis, before turning to analytic lenses that we believe should continue to be used after the pandemic. Asynchronous cloud-based technologies and real-time video- and audio-conferencing tools made collaborating with others during the pandemic easier. The pandemic also fostered the uptake of automated digital tools for transcription. Hopper et al. (2021), for instance, argued that using YouTube’s closed caption generation for transcription saves on cost and time, and that sharing transcripts with participants and initial coding decisions within the research team through Google Docs makes research more “thorough” and collaborative (p. 861). VindrolaPadros and Johnson (2020) found that such technologies speed up analysis by producing transcripts more quickly (e.g., using voice recognition software) or by eliminating the transcription process altogether (e.g., direct coding of video or audio data, or generating thematic mind-maps that can be shared with

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and commented on by participants). Direct coding means researchers will not eliminate nonverbal cues that might otherwise be lost in transcription. However, other researchers worry that direct coding lacks interpretative depth (Burgess-Allen & Owen-Smith, 2010) and argue that transcription is already a form of analysis (Bird, 2005), as researchers deliberate about what is significant and what to exclude (e.g., word stress, pauses, and silences). The availability and potential attractiveness of these tools, which reduce qualitative workload, necessitate reflexive analytical decisions. Rather than unquestioningly accepting that transcription is a crucial first step in data analysis, Markle et  al. (2011) propose that researchers should continuously evaluate the “technological landscape” (p. 17) to improve our research designs in light of emerging possibilities. Creative approaches that combine digital and researcher transcription in novel ways may likely spur changes in the training of new qualitative communication researchers. Changes in practice will also influence research collaboration. Just as Reñosa et  al. (2021) encourage “self-proclaimed technophobes” (p. 2) and “techno-reticent researchers” (p. 5) to pair up with tech-savvy colleagues during data collection, data analysis may likewise require team composition to account for familiarity with new analytical tools. The pandemic also spurred changes in the lenses we use to analyze qualitative data. The stark inequalities in COVID-19 exposure and illness rates brought greater attention to questions of power, difference, and social justice (Laster Pirtle & Wright, 2021). The pandemic both exacerbated and reinforced inequalities based on nationality, race/ethnicity, gender, immigration status, income, and other differences. Disparities in work-from-home policies and access to resources led to differential vulnerabilities to COVID-19, and inequality among countries left citizens in the Global South with little access to protective equipment and vaccines (Obinna, 2021; Venture

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& Reis, 2021). Alongside the pandemic, previously existing social inequalities were driving movements for social justice. For example, the United States. saw a rise in social movements addressing sexual violence such as #MeToo as well as racial discrimination and police violence such as Black Lives Matter. Black Lives Matter and other movements among people of color spread globally, from France to indigenous groups in Australia, to protests against President Bolsonaro in Brazil and activism addressing colorism in India (Shahin et al., 2021). By making these tensions highly visible, the pandemic accelerated the existing theoretical focus on inequality. Scholars using critical, feminist, and intersectional lenses encourage organizational communication scholars to consider how research participants experience overlapping vulnerabilities due to their positioning within social hierarchies (Crenshaw, 1989; Harris, 2016; Linabary et  al., 2021; see also Chapter 30 in this volume). Postcolonial and decolonial lenses are particularly well suited to investigate patterns of exploitation that may undergird our research sites, often in takenfor-granted ways; to highlight instances of resistant organizing from the margins; and to recover silenced voices, including those from the Global South (Nkomo, 2011; Pal, 2016; Sastry & Basu, 2020; see also Chapter 9 in this volume). For example, Dempsey et  al. (2022) examined industry discourse in meatpacking plants about COVID-19 outbreaks among their largely minority and immigrant workplaces, using Mbembe’s (2019) concept of necropolitics to track how the industry constructed states of exception at the expense of workers’ health and sometimes their lives. This social focus on questions of power and difference also intensified reflexive selfanalysis regarding power and difference in the field of communication and organizational communication in particular (Cruz & Sodekee, 2020; Muhkerjee, 2020; Ng et al., 2020). These reflexive academic movements foreground issues of power, conflict, and

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difference that should be considered when analyzing qualitative data. The pandemic also reinforced the need to analyze relationships between materiality and communication (Gist-Mackey, 2018; Harris, 2016). For example, organizational communication scholars drawing from feminist new materialism and CCO (communicative constitution of organizations) scholarship analyze data by seeking to account for the agency of other-than-humans (Harris, 2016; Mease, 2021), which is relevant for theorizing the influence of both viruses and public health policies. Outside of CCO, critical scholars often theorize the material as both an antecedent and product of communication and human agency. For example, research connects constructions of gender, race, and class with material social structures such as job-seeking success (Gist-Mackey, 2018), food access (de Souza, 2019), and embodiment and illness (James & Gill, 2018; Zoller, 2003). The pandemic also highlighted the utility of research that examines organizing-disorganizing dialectics (Bisel, 2009; Fairhurst & Sheep, 2019). Using the lens of (dis)organizing allows scholars to avoid privileging order and attend to examples of conflict, tension, and failure in data, along with consensus, collaboration, and order (see also Vásquez & Kuhn, 2019). Taking a disorganizing lens to examine the pandemic may highlight examples of chaos and dissolution in both formal organizations and in/visible citizen organizing, from managing chaotic and unsafe working conditions to citizens providing mutual aid and protesting. Moving forward, we hope that attention to issues of inequality, power, and difference becomes routine in qualitative data analysis in the field of organizational communication. These issues influence everyday organizing across contexts, and they should not remain the domain of critical scholars alone (Zoller & Ban, in press). Although interpretive scholars do not generally address conflict as a primary focus, organizational communication

researchers should consider how their data analysis connects with what will remain ongoing inequities that were exposed and exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. These topical and analytic changes also have implications for publishing and sharing research.

RESEARCH DISSEMINATION During the pandemic, academic publishing outlets began to encourage more rapid sharing of research and increasing numbers of scholars started to use alternative outlets to share practical research insights with relevant audiences. These audiences include practitioners, policymakers, the press, and the public. These outlets are critical given that high levels of fear and uncertainty during pandemics (particularly related to new illnesses) create the conditions for the spread of misinformation, disinformation (du Pre & Overton, 2022), and conspiracy theorizing (Lewandowsy & Cook, 2020). For example, during the first two years of the COVID-19 outbreak, false information linked vaccines with tracking microchips and denied the value of risk reduction strategies such as mask wearing. The spread of misinformation and disinformation was exacerbated by a lack of trust in science, expertise, and official sources, a development stemming in part from political polarization and politically motivated cybercampaigns to seed distrust (Himelein-Wachowiak et  al., 2021; Osmundensen et al., 2021). Given that media sources sought out qualitative researchers during the pandemic as a way to counter misinformation, organizational communication researchers can prepare for future crises by engaging in more outreach training as a regular part of academic conferences and doctoral training. To combat misinformation, many journals created pathways for reduced review time and open-access publication. As a field,

POST-COVID-19

organizational communication researchers need to evaluate the benefits and drawbacks of that approach and grapple with the politics and quality of open access publishing to make reliable studies available to the public. Currently, open access requires financial resources to cover publication costs that are not available to all researchers. When it is feasible, open access requires more than simply making scholarship more widely available and discoverable on the Internet. Writing with the goal of accessibility demands developing “carefully crafted texts to be read and enjoyed” (Kiriakos & Tienari, 2018, p. 264) by a broader audience. Currently, the complexity of the academic article structure and formulaic writing conventions can mean that texts are only conceptually accessible to “select others”—i.e., other researchers (Grey & Sinclair, 2006). Organizational members, community partners, and the general public may struggle to understand let alone apply research findings (Aguinis et al., 2014). In addition to adapting writing styles, some have suggested researchers should engage in bridging activities like community events, presentations, and blogging to make their findings more accessible (Bartunek, 2007; Hodgkinson & Rousseau, 2009). Debates about research accessibility have taken on new dimensions as the pandemic has foregrounded the need for interdisciplinary collaboration to address wicked social and organizational problems. Organizational communication researchers are working with researchers from health sciences, natural sciences, and computer science to understand topics such as international and interorganizational partnerships in health and science (e.g., vaccine development and dissemination); disaster response and coordination during pandemics and other socio-political and environmental crises; and the impact of artificial intelligence on working lives, organizational processes, and social structures. These forms of collaboration have accelerated questions about what “open science” means

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for qualitative organizational communication researchers. Open science is a broad term that refers to the conduct and dissemination of research in a transparent, accessible, and collaborative way, encompassing things such as interdisciplinary research networks and citizen participation in studies. Such an approach might help (re)build public confidence in scientific findings, by moving from a “trust me, I’m a scientist” posture to a more transparent “here, let me show you” one (Bowman & Keene, 2018, p. 364; see also Dienlin et al., 2021). For qualitative organizational communication research, this may entail publicly disseminating a study’s proposed methodology or sharing its research design, interview guides, anonymized data, or coding strategies. Although some qualitative researchers may feel uneasy with the postpositivist epistemology underpinning the open science movement, in some respects the movement is paradigmatically agnostic. Indeed, advocates’ pleas for qualitative researchers to “make explicit which tradition and theoretical lens they work from” and “carefully reflect upon their own values prior to going into the field and prior to interpreting and reporting the findings within the context of these a priori values” (Haven & Van Grootel, 2019, p. 237) would resonate with many researchers. Furthermore, by documenting and accounting for the multiple changes that occur throughout the research process, qualitative organizational communication researchers can overturn the tendency to evacuate the messiness of qualitative research in published accounts by creating a “victory narrative” (Lather, 1997) based on a “logic of trajectory, strategy and purpose” (Höpfl, 2011, p. 32). Finally, the pandemic should spur organizational communication researchers to greater engagement with marginalized communities. Moving forward, we hope that engagement leads to a greater focus on disseminating research in ways that are beneficial to the communities involved. Focusing on mutual benefit may mean translating research findings into useful resources for marginalized communities or involving community

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members themselves in conducting and sharing research through community-based participatory research (CBPR) methods. Newcomers to community-based research should foreground ethical considerations related to researcher praxis (see Ganesh & Zoller in Ballard et  al., 2020), carefully weighing the degree to which organizations and communities benefit from research practices (Dempsey, 2010; Sastry et al., 2019). Promoting critical engagement with praxis and social change will require training for academics as well as changes in university policies regarding tenure and workload, in order to recognize and support the time needed to engage in this type of labor. As we consider qualitative research in terms of praxis, we hope that organizational communication scholars who engaged in pandemic-related research continue to theorize how to prevent and/or better manage future health crises, particularly as that risk grows in the face of global mobility, ecological incursions, and growing inequality. Having traced the influence of the pandemic on the research process from planning to publication, we conclude by encouraging more explicit conversations about what changes we hope to leave behind and which to embrace.

CONCLUSION In this chapter, we have hypothesized about the influence of COVID-19 on the future of qualitative organizational communication research. We do not know how long the changes induced by the pandemic will last, or whether and how scholars will make sense of those changes long term. Although we are (optimistically) writing about post-COVID-19 research trends, we acknowledge that it is difficult to identify and gauge the extent of change at the same time as we continue to live through it. Retrospective sensemaking will enable us to ascertain if methodological

changes occurred specifically because of the pandemic, or if the pandemic merely sped up the pace of change. However, qualitative organizational communication researchers’ experiences to date have already produced lessons that will continue to influence research in terms of context, processes, and paradigms. At the contextual level, COVID-19 has introduced such widespread organizational changes that future fieldwork will have to take the pandemic’s role into account. As we have discussed, the pandemic spurred changes in worksites, technologies, and organizational policies and exacerbated social and economic conflicts in ways that will influence qualitative research for the foreseeable future. In terms of research processes, the pandemic has forced scholars to consider how they might prepare for disruption in their research designs. Organizational communication researchers have long been interested in the concept of resilience, understood as “the ability to ‘bounce back’ or reintegrate after difficult life experiences” (Buzzanell, 2010, p. 1). In addition to asking if they are bouncing back to the “old normal” or creating new norms via innovation, researchers would do well to consider resilience communication in their own research processes and academic units, remaining vigilant about issues of equity as they consider the price of maintaining resilience. Decision-makers must take pandemic stressors—and the inequitable distribution of those stressors—into account when evaluating qualitative researchers for things like reappointment and tenure (Ballard et  al., 2020). As a field, organizational communication research has more work to do in addressing divisions between the Global North and South, including fractures in access to resources and funding. How will qualitative organizational communication researchers in various parts of the world experience the relationship between home/away in their data collection, and how will resource challenges influence

POST-COVID-19

post-pandemic travel as universities continue cost-cutting (Brindusa Albu & Costas, 2018)? And how does inequality impact how we are at “home” working with participants, colleagues, and collaborators elsewhere (thus being simultaneously “away”) thanks to digital devices? Paradigmatically, we have encouraged organizational communication scholars to use the COVID-19 pandemic as an inflection point to consider the need to adopt critical lenses to analyze our data. Issues of power and inequality influence the full range of research questions and topics. These issues should therefore be a point of consideration, even for interpretive scholars who generally focus more on consensus. This moment also underscores the need for critical scholars to focus on the development of emancipatory paths. Along with critical considerations, we have discussed how the pandemic has generated additional urgency around conducting applied research and developing practical dialogue with research participants and practitioners. These changes encourage qualitative organizational communication researchers to better articulate the value of their work for participants and for the public at large. Post-COVID-19, we believe that the challenges organizational communication researchers experienced during the pandemic will make qualitative research even richer. The methods, tools, and perspectives researchers experimented with will be added to pre-pandemic ones and will widen and strengthen the field to the degree that we remain vigilant about rigor and depth in creating ethical and impactful engagement.

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Sahay, S., & Dwyer, M. (2021). Emergent organizing in crisis: US nurses’ sensemaking and job crafting during COVID-19. Management Com­ munication Quarterly, 35(4), 546–571. https:// doi.org/10.1177/08933189211034170 Sastry, S., & Basu, A. (2020). How to have (critical) method in a pandemic: Outlining a culturecentered approach to health discourse analysis. Frontiers in Communication, 5, 1–8. https://doi. org/10.3389/fcomm.2020.585954 Sastry, S., Stephenson, M., Dillon, P., & Carter, A. (2019). A meta-theoretical systematic review of the culture-centered approach to health communication: Toward a refined, “nested” model. Communication Theory, 31(3), 380– 421. https://doi.org/10.1093/ct/qtz024 Seitz, S. (2016). Pixilated partnerships, overcoming obstacles in qualitative interviews via Skype: A research note. Qualitative Research, 16(2), 229–235. https://doi.org/10.1177/ 1468794115577011 Shahin, S., Nakahara, J., & Sánchez, M. (2021). Black Lives Matter goes global: Connective action meets cultural hybridity in Brazil, India, and Japan. New Media & Society, 0(0), 1–20. https://doi.org/10.1177/146144482 11057106 Sipes, J. B. A., Roberts, L. D., & Mullan, B. (2019). Voice-only Skype for use in researching sensitive topics: A research note. Qualita­ tive Research in Psychology, 19(1), 204–220. https://doi.org/10.1080/147180887.2019.1 577518 Spinney, J. (2015). Close encounters? Mobile methods, (post) phenomenology and affect. Cultural Geographies, 22(2), 231–246. https://doi.org/10.1177/1474474014558988 Squazzoni, F., Bravo, G., Grimaldo, F., GarcíaCosta, D., Farjam, M., & Mehmani, B. (2021). Gender gap in journal submissions and peer review during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. A study on 2329 Elsevier journals. PLoS ONE, 16(10), 1–17. https://doi.org/ 10.1371/journal.pone.0257919 Stephens, K. K. (2017). Organizational communication methods published in MCQ, 2001–2015: Trends and pedagogical implications. Management Communication Quar­ terly, 31(1), 130–138. https://doi. org/10.1177/0893318916675735 Stephens, K. K., Jahn, J. L. S., Fox, S., Charoensap-Kelly, P., Mitra, R., Sutton, J., et al.

(2020). Collective sensemaking around COVID-19: Experiences, concerns, and agendas for our rapidly changing organizational lives. Management Communication Quar­ terly, 34(3) 426–457. https://doi. org/10.1177/0893318920934890 Taylor, B. C., Barley, W. C., Brummans, B. H. J. M., Ellingson, L. L., Ganesh, S., Herrmann, A. F., et al. (2021). Revisiting ethnography in organizational communication studies. Man­ agement Communication Quarterly, 35(4), 623–652. https://doi.org/10.1177/089331 89211026700 Torrentira, M. C. Jr. (2020). Online data collection as adaptation in conducting quantitative and qualitative research during the COVID-19 pandemic. European Journal of Education Studies, 7(11), 78–87. https://doi.org/10.46827/ejes. v7i11.3336 Tracy, S. J. (2010). Qualitative quality: Eight “big-tent” criteria for excellent qualitative research. Qualitative Inquiry, 16(10), 837– 851. https://doi.org/10.1177/1077800 410383121 Tracy, S. J. (2020a). Qualitative research meth­ ods: Collecting evidence, crafting analysis, communicating impact (2nd ed.). Wiley. Tracy, S. J. (2020b). Let’s talk: Conversation as a defining moment for the communication discipline. Health Communication, 35(7), 910–916. https://doi.org/10.1080/1041023 6.2019.1593081 van Zoonen, W., Rice, R. E., & ter Hoeven, C. L. (2022). Sensemaking by employees in essential versus non-essential professions during the COVID-19 crisis: A comparison of effects of change communication and disruption cues on mental health through interpretations of identity threats and work meaningfulness. Management Communication Quarterly, 36(2), 318–349. https://doi. org/10.1177/08933189221087633 Vásquez, C., & Kuhn, T. (Eds.). (2019). Dis/ organization as communication: Studying tensions, ambiguities and disordering. Routledge. Ventura, D., & Reis, R. (2021). Bulletin no. 10: An unprecedented attack on human rights in Brazil: The timeline of the federal government’s strategy to spread Covid-19. (L. Misiara, Trans.). CEPEDISA/USP and Conectas Human Rights.

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Vindrola-Padros, C., Chisnall, G., Cooper, S., Dowrick, A., Djellouli, N., Symmons, S.M., et  al. (2020). Carrying out rapid qualitative research during a pandemic: Emerging lessons from COVID-19. Qualitative Health Research, 30(14), 2192–2204. https://doi.org/10.1177/ 1049732320951526 Vindrola-Padros, C., & Johnson, G. A. (2020). Rapid techniques in qualitative research: A critical review of the literature. Qualitative Health Research, 30(10), 1596–1604. https:// doi.org/10.1177/1049732320921835 Wagner, P. E., Ellingson, L. L., & Kunkel, A. (2016). Pictures, patience, and practicalities: Lessons learned from using photovoice in applied communication contexts. Journal of Applied Communication Research, 44(3), 336–342. https://doi.org/10.1080/0090988 2.2016.1192292 Watson, A., & Lupton, D. (2022). Remote fieldwork in homes during the COVID-19 pandemic: Video-call ethnography and map drawing methods. International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 21, 1–12. https://doi. org/10.1177/16094069221078376 Weinstein, D., Weinstein, M., Nelson, C., Treichler, P., & Grossberg, L. (2008). Bricolage and bricoleur. In L. M. Given (Ed.), The Sage encyclopedia of qualitative research methods (pp. 65–66). Sage. Weller, S. (2017). Using internet video calls in qualitative (longitudinal) interviews: Some

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implications for rapport. International Jour­ nal of Social Research Methodology, 20(6), 613–625. https://doi.org/10.1080/1364557 9.2016.1269505 Wilhoit, E. D. (2017). Photo and video methods in organizational and managerial communication research. Management Communica­ tion Quarterly, 31(3), 447–466. https://doi. org/10.1177/0893318917704511 Wilhoit Larson, E. (2020). Where is an organization? How workspaces are appropriated to become (partial and temporary) organizational spaces. Management Communica­ tion Quarterly, 34(3), 299–327. https://doi. org/10.1177/0893318920933590 Woo, D., Endacott, C. G., & Myers, K. K. (2023). Navigating water cooler talks without the water cooler: Uncertainty and information seeking during remote socialization. Management Communication Quarterly, 37(2), 251–280. https://doi.org/10.1177/ 08933189221105916 Zoller, H. M. (2003). Health on the line: Identity and disciplinary control in employee occupational health and safety discourse. Journal of Applied Communication Research, 31(2), 118–139. https://doi.org/10.1080/00909880 32000064588 Zoller, H. M., & Ban, Z. (in press). Communication and organizational power and politics. In V. Miller & M. S. Poole (Eds.), Handbook of organizational communication. DeGruyter.

Afterword from the Perspective of a Management Scholar Silvia Gherardi

The title of this afterword attributes the positioning of “management scholar” to its author. However, this situated author (that is, I, Silvia Gherardi) is not completely happy with the way the handbook and its editors are positioning her, even though she has, in principle, accepted this positioning. It is within a particular discourse that a subject (and its position as a subject) is constructed. As a compound of knowledge and power, it becomes part of a more or less coercive structure that ties it to an identity. This is exactly what the title of the afterword does: It attributes an identity to its author and legitimates its discursive moves. For Davies and Harré (1990), the concept of positioning belongs to social psychology. They use the term for the analysis of a narrating self and of narrated topics as discursive practices within the dynamic occasions of encounters, or the production of texts. Therefore, the positioning of the author of this afterword is accomplished through discursive moves, the expression of norms, the

use of language, and the affirmation of values that reflect the socially constructed image of a management scholar. Yet, when I write that the author of the afterword is not completely happy with the positioning of the narrating self within the socially constructed image of a management scholar, the author’s identity becomes a question of negotiation. The handbook constructs (as do its editors) the author as belonging to the community of management scholars, a community that is supposed to be “other,” different from the “communication” community. Its title, however, qualifies the handbook as an “organizational communication” book. This qualification begs several questions, including: Should “organizational communication” be an other community? Are there invisible borders that operate between these communities? Are there lines that differentiate the “organizational” from the “managerial”? Since borders divide and unite, organizational communication scholars would appear to constitute a hybrid community. If so, I feel happier, since

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the adjective “organizational” makes me feel “at-home” while the noun “communication” makes me feel intrigued. And what to do with the adjective “managerial”? If it is only loosely attached to the author’s subjectivity, it becomes necessary to clarify some biographical elements in order to construct a situated identity. This is the identity of an organizational sociologist who has never worked in a business school, and who is critical of the social image of “management” as a form of command and control. Moreover, as a narrative identity, it positions the author as feminist, and as feminist new materialist. If managing takes the place of management, if managing is seen as a collective enterprise, based on knowledgeable practice grounded in response-ability (Gherardi & Laasch, 2021), then the author may accept an identity as management scholar. In that case, I am happy to write that I regard managing as flowing-with, and reading as a becomingwith the chapters of this handbook. From this repositioned positioning, I describe the curious practice of traveling from one chapter to the next along the thirty-four chapters of this handbook. My curious practice is informed by Donna Haraway (2015), who, in her turn, is inspired by Viviane Despret’s curious practice of “going visiting” (see also Haraway, 2016, p. 126). Despret advocates the cultivation of thinking-with other beings, both animate and inanimate, and Haraway (2015, p. 5) writes that [v]isiting is not an easy practice; it demands the ability to find others actively interesting, even or especially others most people already claim to know all too completely, to ask questions that one’s interlocutors truly find interesting, to cultivate the wild virtue of curiosity, to retune one’s ability to sense and respond—and to do all this politely!

My reading as curious practice is an act of curiosity in order to be(come) surprised, with the conviction that something interesting is about to happen when those whom I visit intra-actively shape what occurs. Visiting is

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a  subject-and-object making dance, and the choreographer is a trickster (Haraway, 2015, p. 6). Or perhaps I should write “the curiographer,” for curiography is a feminist methodology (Valtonen & Salmela, 2023) situated at the crossroads of postqualitative and postanthropocentric debates. It is a process of knowledge co-constitution that values sensitivity, literal engagements, openness, politeness, and listening. While “going visiting” the chapters of this handbook, I was particularly curious to listen to the construction of various voices (of the authors and of the Others), and to how the voice of the I/eye emerged in/from the text. The I/eye concept is used in postqualitative inquiry (Ringrose & Zarabadi, 2018) to highlight the problematic positioning of the researcher as an extended self, as a multisensory “eye,” and as a multitudinous and relational “I.” The researcher is rather a fractured “I,” or “eye”, an organ that becomes different in each encounter, that becomesdifferent throughout each research-becoming event. The I/eye is a researcher-in-becoming, a subject who becomes-with their research, with their research “participants,” and with the data they “collect” and “analyze.” In going visiting and listening to the voices as they emerged in/from the chapters, my experiences were affected and affective. I/eye was changed by the voices that materialized in the texts, bringing to me the traces of other texts, read by my colleagues, co-composing a unique intertextual correspondence. Is the concept of voice a central concern in the practice of qualitative organizational communication research? It is when managing is conceived as flowing-with the multivocality of everyday organizing. However, traditional qualitative research often presumes that voices “speak for themselves,” and researchers often make methodological choices that reduce complicated and conflicting voices to analytical “chunks” that can be interpreted free of context and circumstances. Thus, I wonder how the concept of voice may be upsetting qualitative methodologies once

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we reflect more deeply on its materiality, its openness to other more-than-human voices. The model of the speaking subject that has been assumed by the Enlightenment as “presence,” “authenticity,” “agency,” and “self” is increasingly being critiqued by posthumanist and postqualitative scholars. Having a voice implies entry into language and the figurations of rationality and politics. The late Bruno Latour (2004) suggested “add[ing] a series of new voices to the discussion, voices that have been inaudible up to now, the voices of nonhumans” (p. 69), in order to enlarge our vision of democracy in ways that involve both humans and more-than-humans who communicate on shared terms. The concept of voice may be transformed into “voicing” (Revill, 2021, p. 121)—as in “voicing the environment.” In this case, it is understood “as a composite of intentions and contingent effects drawing together a multiplicity of interpretations, semiotised threads, affordances and agencies” (Revill, 2021, p. 133). The concept of voicing is useful, then, because it decenters what is being voiced and by whom, and it enables us to question qualitative research in non-conventional ways. If there is no subject in the humanist sense, what form does research (or thinking/ thought) take? Lisa Mazzei (2016, p.  151) presents us with this challenging question: “What might it mean to think voice in its many forms as not linked to an ‘I’ of the humanist subject?” Her answer is: “No longer a voice of the ‘I,’ voice becomes one of duration, voice without a subject, and becoming-voice in lines of articulation” (p. 160). Postqualitative inquiry (Lenz Taguchi, 2013; MacLure, 2009; Mazzei & Jackson, 2017) has taken up Deleuze and Guattari’s (1986, p. 18, emphasis in original) claim that “[t]here isn’t a subject; there are only collective assemblages of enunciation.” Consequently, research processes do no longer begin with a subject who speaks with a voice; rather, an assemblage of enunciation, to repeat Deleuze and Guattari’s words, can only speak of the whole that constitutes  it.

Voice  is  thus reframed as “voice without a subject” (Mazzei, 2016, p. 151), as an assemblage of forces, bodies, affects, and things. Considering voice as an element entangled with other elements in an agentic assemblage implies that voice in qualitative research is always already material and that the material is always already discursively constructed. Thus, researchers may account for voice as a material-discursive practice, inseparable from all elements (human and more-thanhuman) in an assemblage. In turn, new research practices are required that are able to engage or compose-with (Manning, 2013) “the materiality of language [voice] itself— its material force and its entanglements in bodies and matter” (MacLure, 2013, p. 658). In other words, these practices have to be able to address questions such as: What happens when voice exceeds language and is more than (un)vocalized words emanating from a speaking subject? If the materiality of voice is not limited to sound (i.e. self-present language emitted from a human mouth), how do we account for it? That is, how might the materiality of voice be located in the space of intra-action among human and non-human objects? (Mazzei & Jackson, 2017, p. 1090)

Alongside voice we have to take silence (Mazzei, 2008) into account: How silence is an important force that has implications for qualitative inquiry. How do we account for the refusal or inability to speak about issues such as racism or the way white privilege is (not) addressed? To elaborate research practices that are able to locate voice (and silence or voicelessness) within an agentic assemblage is equivalent to elaborate research practices that, in considering managing as flowing-with, account for the changing and stabilization of the agentic assemblage. In decentering a humanist conception of voice and management, research practices move toward posthuman considerations of voice and management as being reconfigured in the agentic assemblage’s intra-actions between the material and the discursive. While new materialists typically

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refer to the concept of assemblage to highlight the idea that agency is distributed (i.e., agencies of several elements; see Bennett, 2010; Fox & Aldred, 2015), I prefer to keep with the French term agencement as it is used by Deleuze and Guattari (1987). Thus, I view agency as emerging within/from the vital materialities of the entangled elements that intra-act within a practice (Gherardi, 2016). In turn, it makes more sense to me to speak of “a field of forces,” rather than about entities endowed with agency. While I went visiting the chapters of this handbook, and learned how these texts made their authors’ voices present, I was particularly moved by the curiosity of finding answers to the posthuman challenge of decentering the human subject, and by the feminist new materialist invitation to reconsider matter as mattering. While reading about theoretical approaches to investigate organizational communication, about methodologies and methods of data collection and analysis, and about the future of this field of inquiry, I found myself engaged in a sort of counterfactual interest, reaching beyond the discursive turn and its focus on “speaking subjects.” I had a sort of imaginary conversation in which I was acknowledging the constitutive role for communication in accomplishing organizing and organization, while at the same time questioning how this field’s methodologies and methods could be changed in order to accommodate the ethics and politics of research practices in less human-centered ways, thus retaining the co-presence of the human and the more-than-human. This challenge continues to intrigue me: How can we approach the human as sociomaterially configured within research practices? The subsequent move away from discursive data with its main focus on interpretation and sensemaking, and the renewed interest in the nonverbal, nonconscious dimensions of experience, brought about by the turn to affect (Blackman & Venn, 2010), have been accompanied by a renewed interest in the body and its capacity of being affected, as

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well as of generating affects in other bodies (see Massumi, 2015). This move brings with it the invitation for qualitative researchers in organizational communication to engage in the analysis of processes of affecting and of being affected, which are similarly relevant in studies of materiality. It is an invitation to describe how human and more-than-human participants relate to each other in situations of co-presence by acting and reacting on each other, aligning in specific ways in their co-production of relations of power. Such sequential descriptions of co-presence in situations unfolding through processes of interrelation allow researchers to account for their empirical analysis of experience as emerging out of the present, out of the sociomaterially configured situation of co-presence, hereand-now (Sørensen, 2013). It is a methodological posture that enables researchers to stay with the level of “what is going on” in the situation, rather than focusing on “how it is produced” or “how it is understood.” This is relevant for the study of managing as flowing-with because it attunes (Manning, 2013) researchers to the situation and to the becoming of situated communicative practices. My aim here, then, is to join with many of the authors of this volume in developing a posthumanist empirical approach, in which “humans” are relationally configured with whatever is present in specific situations, and are deeply entangled in the world, rather than being privileged or positioned as distant judging observers. However, the road to developing methodological techniques that align with a posthumanist approach is still strewn with difficulties and pitfalls. When I think in terms of managing as flowingwith the rhythm of organizational/organizing practices, I think in terms of a practice approach, of a practice as the agencement of entangled, discursive-material, elements. As one example, I suggest considering three processes that challenge conventional methodologies and require special attention. These processes characterize the research site of digital organizing and managing. One is the

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process of liminal innovation in digital work practices in times of crisis and uncertainty; the second is the process of platform organizing; and the third one is the formation of digital online identities. Digital working, digital organizing, digital hybrid workspaces, digital technologies are all phenomena that blur the boundaries between home and work, and that change the expectations of the postCOVID-19 workforce. All are forces that alter the spatial arrangement of working, managing, organizing, and doing qualitative research. The pandemic and its accompanying experience of lockdowns have shifted the boundaries between consolidated ­ practices and new “repairing” practices (Cozza et al., 2021), allowing for liminal innovation (Orlikowski  & Scott, 2021) and ongoing learning. In times of crisis, various tensions emerge: established practices encounter challenges, become infeasible, or no longer make sense. Orlikowski and Scott (2021, p. 1) refer to these tensions as “pragmatic, tactical, and existential.” They prompt liminal innovation by shifting the boundaries between experimental and established practices. Liminal innovation is seen as “the continuous process of leveraging tensions and creating opportunities to become generative in times of crisis” (Orlikowski & Scott, 2021, p. 5). The materializations of these reconfigured practices are increasingly digital, and increasingly involve the organizational form of the platform, thus questioning the boundaries conventionally imposed between “decided order” (i.e., formal organizations) and “nondecided order” (institutions and networks), to use Ahrne and Brunsson’s (2011) terms. Platforms may be regarded as a third organizational form, a new kind of social ordering that comprises both platform organizations and platform organizing (Rachlitz, 2023). Platform organizations are formal organizations involved in the process of platform organizing, that is, in “the processes necessary for the social ordering emerging ‘around’ platforms” (Rachlitz, 2023, p. 11). These

processes are constituted by organizing a platform’s technology, its market, its networks and its meta-organizations. Social practices are increasingly dependent on platform organizing and liminal innovations of digital working, digital organizing, digital managing, and digital communicating. Internet, social media, and communication technologies are dissolving organizational boundaries in favor of organizational models in which various degrees of organizationality (Schoeneborn et al., 2019) constitute hybrid forms of organization as fluid, fragmented, multiple. The “dark side” of an apparent fluid form of organizing is attracting the interest of critical scholars who question the relation between online identities and “the increasingly toxic virtual dynamics that have discursive and material effects on societies” (Barros et al., 2023, p. 15). In the introduction of their special issue on online identities in and around organizations, Barros and colleagues (2023) propose three metaphors for exploring different, but coexisting, phases of dominant online technology: the Internet as a place, a tool, and a way of being. What we witness now is not the ­separation of the offline and online world, nor their mutual influence, but rather a reduction in the divide between these two “worlds” and the blurring of the boundaries between life spheres such as home/work or private/public, which is brought forth by the spread of remote technologies, social media affordances, and social networking practices. Social realities are fully mediated, and the image of managing as flowing-with enables a vision of the communicative constitution of organizations as ongoing processes in-formed (Manning, 2013) by politics, regulations, resistance, and emancipation, by liminal innovation, and by the digital shaping of work. My hope is that this afterword contributes to the ongoing discussion within this handbook about the methodological consequences of moving from a focus on the “humanist subject” to “posthumanist practices”—particularly those associated with digital organizing

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and managing. This movement that attunes researchers to the entanglement of doings, affects, temporality, discursivity, and materiality, as well as to how their epistemic practices (and their positionings as researchers) emerge within/from this field of forces.

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reconfiguration of digital work in crisis. Infor­ mation and Organization, 31(1), 1–6. https:// doi.org/10.1016/j.infoandorg.2021.100336 Rachlitz, K. (2023). Platform organising and platform organisations. puntOorg Interna­ tional Journal, 8(1), 3–35. https://doi. org/10.19245/25.05.pij.8.1.2 Revill, G. (2021). Voicing the environment: Latour, Peirce and an expanded politics. Envi­ ronment and Planning D: Society and Space, 39(1), 121–138. https://doi.org/10.1177/ 0263775820944521 Ringrose, J., & Zarabadi, S. (2018). DeleuzoGuattarian decentering the human I/eye: A conversation with Jessica Ringrose and Shiva Zarabadi. In K. Strom, T. Mills, & A. Ovens (Eds.), Decentering the researcher in intimate

scholarship: Posthuman materialist perspec­ tives in educational research (pp. 207–213). Emerald Publishing. Schoeneborn, D., Kuhn, T. R., & Kärreman, D. (2019). The communicative constitution of organization, organizing, and organizationality. Organization Studies, 40(4), 475–496. https://doi.org/10.1177/0170840618782284 Sørensen, E. (2013). Human presence: Towards a posthumanist approach to experience. Subjectivity, 6(1), 112–129. https://doi. org/10.1057/sub.2012.31 Valtonen, A., & Salmela, T. (2023). Exploring earthly relations through curiography. In M. Calás & L. Smircich (Eds.), A research agenda for organization studies, feminisms and new materialisms. Edward Elgar.

Afterword from the Perspective of Two Organizational Communication Scholars Eric M. Eisenberg and Patricia Geist-Martin

We thought of life by analogy with a journey, a pilgrimage, which had a serious purpose at the end, and the thing was to get to that end, success or whatever it is, maybe heaven after you’re dead. But we missed the point the whole way along. It was a musical thing and you were supposed to sing or to dance while the music was being played. (Watts, 2022)

Humans are social animals, drawn to one another for many reasons—for companionship; to love and to reproduce; to sing or dance to music, and, in general, to accomplish things they cannot do alone. This last reason is the focus of organizational studies, and the primary means of organizing employed by humans is organizational communication. But studying organizational communication turns out to be a surprisingly slippery proposition, inasmuch as both the means and ends of communication are highly diverse and always shifting. Large publicly traded corporations have little in common with small nonprofits or family businesses, and organizing traditions and cultures vary considerably

across regions and nations. New communication media are invented seemingly monthly, both shaping interaction and affording new options for connection. Consequently, it is wise for both scholars and practitioners to approach organizational communication with the expectation of diverse forms, patterns, and structures. Constantly shifting networks of relationships forged through communication are the load-bearing structures of contemporary organizing. For decades, people largely studied organizational communication by taking an arms-length approach to the phenomenon. Theories were devised and concepts tested using quantitative methods aimed at producing meaningful correlations among variables and generalizable truths. While some things were learned from this approach, much was missed, and in particular the often-messy ways in which meanings were created, negotiated, or imposed. These questions required a qualitative approach, one more focused on collaborative sensemaking, often seen

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from the perspective of the communicators themselves. As James Barker indicates in the foreword, the chapters in this handbook make a compelling case for the value of this qualitative approach. They reveal the tremendous diversity of aims and methods that fall under the umbrella of qualitative organizational communication research. Along with this variability, some common motifs are detectable and worth describing. Specifically, most of the contributors to this volume seem motivated by the desire to give voice to the voiceless, to challenge traditional categories and definitions of work to make space for new ones, and to reimagine organizational communication research as a practice that can have a tangible positive impact on the world and ourselves. That these desires should be prominent is not a surprise to anyone. We live in a period of late capitalism wherein the corporate colonization of the lifeworld (Deetz, 1992) has become intolerable for many. Democracy is at risk around the world, slavery and racism persist and are even spiking, income inequality is exploding, and the possibility of conducting peaceful dialogue across differences increasingly seems like a pipedream. The effects of a global pandemic on employment has led many to reckon with the role that work plays in their quality of life, leading to feelings by some of being trapped and the need to escape. There are many reasons to be fearful, but one source of optimism is that this much disruption could trigger significant shifts in our species’ evolution and hopefully a collaborative, encompassing step forward. Toward this end, we read much of the work in this handbook as fueled by the desire to build something better, fairer, and more inclusive. Throughout the handbook authors acknowledge the significance of identity and intersectionality in conducting research, both for participants and researchers. In Chapter 8, Jasmine Austin and Tianna Cobb state that “every researcher operates from a social location that shapes our identity, experiences,

and perspectives…[which in turn] informs our motives and decisions before, during, and after research.” Each of us approached reading this book with a positionality that informed our interpretations (see also Chapter 30 in this volume). For this reason, we first offer stories of how we each began our study of organizational communication. Following our stories, we offer central motifs that we garnered from our reading of the handbook chapters. We close this afterword with our impressions of the changing landscape of qualitative approaches to organizational communication inspired by this handbook.

OUR STORIED ORIGINS IN ORGANIZATIONAL COMMUNICATION In the stories that follow, we provide an historical context for our social locations entering the organizational communication discipline as graduate students in the late 70s and early 80s. Although our origins contrast greatly, we both found our home in qualitative organizational communication research, all the while facing skepticism and marginalization from many disciplinary colleagues.

Patricia’s Organizational Communication Beginnings After earning my master’s in Communication, I became intrigued with organizational communication when I was hired to train engineers at John Deere Tractor Works in Waterloo, Iowa. My goal was to guide them in creating and presenting their multimilliondollar ideas to diverse audiences, including their supervisors, upper-level management, and outside vendors. The complexities of communicating in organizations came alive as the engineers described the organizational politics constraining what they could and could not say in the process of communicating their ideas. I was naïve to all of this, and

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motivated by the challenge of assisting their delicate maneuvering through these constraints and creating successful persuasive presentations. I drew upon everything I learned in my master’s degree the year before, including coursework focused on interpersonal communication, persuasion, and performance of literature. But I found myself wanting to learn more about organizational communication. I found Purdue University’s doctoral program to be the perfect choice, not only because of the extensive course offerings focused on organizational communication, but also the sheer number of faculty and graduate students researching organizational communication questions. The program of study at Purdue required coursework in a range of quantitative and qualitative methods. However, with Charles Redding, Phil Tompkins, Linda Putnam, and Nick Trujillo teaching the organizational communication seminars, I was happily saturated in qualitative methods. It was an honor to attend the 1983 reception honoring Linda Putnam for the publication of her book with Mike Pacanowsky, Communication and Organizations: An Interpretive Approach. My final seminar, Ethnographic Approaches to Organizational Communication, with Nick Trujillo, placed each of us in different settings throughout a hospital, shadowing nurses, doctors, ministers, administrators, and staff, writing and sharing our field notes each week. This culminating experience set the stage for my dissertation, which was focused on communication among administrators, nurses, and physicians in two hospitals as they implemented a controversial policy. It was in graduate school and through my professional affiliations that I encountered both the light and dark sides of academia. The light side for me was being situated at Purdue during an explosion of qualitative organizational communication through the work of Charles Redding, Phil Tompkins, Linda Putnam, and Nick Trujillo, and graduate students such as Patrice Buzzanell, Cynthia

Stohl, Connie Bullis, George Cheney, James Barker, Sandy Herrod, Mark Cox, as well as many others. Stories from the field were topics of everyday conversations in seminars, hallways, social gatherings, and in our collaborative work. My thinking and writing inevitably drew upon my BA in literature and writing from the University of Iowa, setting the stage for interpreting and writing in a narrative fashion about the people I interacted with and interviewed. The light shined bright in August 1992 when I attended the Alta Conference on Interpretive Approaches to Organizational Communication in Utah. So many of the greats were there: Eric Eisenberg, Buddy Goodall, Larry Browning, Fred Steier, Kathy Miller, and Connie Bullis, as well as graduate students Bob Krizek, Kerry Strayer, and Lexa Murphy. We talked for hours about provocative questions related to identity, spirituality, and justice in organizations—the modest beginnings of the issues raised in this handbook about intersectionality, marginalization, oppressive dualities, dialogism, resistance, methodological flexibility, and a host of other noteworthy and promising directions for future research. When I look back at that wonderful experience, I most remember the singing and the music being played. The light also emanated from what I learned from Phil Tompkins as his assistant for the years he served as editor of Communication Monographs, and from what I learned from Linda Putnam and Barry Brummett when I served as their assistant director of the largest basic communication course in the nation. In these positions, I contemplated academe as a massive organization whose members’ identities and social positionings were networked to professional disciplines, other institutions, families, and communities. One of the dark shadows, and it was dark, was the rampant sexual harassment that I witnessed in academe. I imagine it was, and likely still is, pervasive in every organization. Perhaps the #MeToo movement has shed some light on this dark corner of

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organizations, but the trauma continues. Not surprisingly, sexual harassment became one of the foci of my research for that very reason (Clair et al., 2019; Geist-Martin & Scarduzio, 2017; Kaland & Geist, 1994; Scarduzio & Geist-Martin, 2008, 2010, 2016; Townsley & Geist, 2000). In fact, many of the chapters in this handbook reveal the insights that can come from research based on researchers’ experience, positionality, and identity. I am thankful for the cadre of qualitative organi­ zational communication scholars in this volume who willingly took deep dives into topics, issues, and problematics they have faced in their organizational lives. A second dark shadow in our discipline was how we were “encouraged” to write in ways that created a terministic veil over how we conducted our research and to present it as a “manufactured, packaging” of our social science research (see Chapter 10 in this volume). Not only was any personal backstory discouraged, so were certain topics as worthy topics for research. I was told specifically not to research gender topics, lest I would be labeled for researching exclusively that area and would have trouble getting jobs and making a name for myself in the discipline. This handbook clearly reveals how far we have come in making the “invisible visible” (see Chapter 8 in this volume).

Eric’s Organizational Communication Beginnings Throughout my academic career, I have been drawn to subjects about which I had the least familiarity. My undergraduate degree in Communication at Rutgers University was highly theoretical, so I chose Michigan State University for graduate school, which was at the time a methodological mecca. As a young person, no one in my family was in business, hence the businessman or woman seemed to me an exotic species. Consequently, when it came time to select a subfield of communication, organizations seemed the most enticing.

In graduate school my interests were divided between the cutting-edge methodologies being developed by my advisor, Peter Monge, and the mysterious and chimerical ideas shared with me by Art Bochner, who was a visiting scholar at MSU while I was there. When it came time to write my dissertation, I wanted to write about strategic ambiguity but could not navigate the relentless (and often implicit) pressure I felt to study something that could be expressed as variables and operationalized for statistical analysis. As a result, I ended up studying inter-organizational communication among networks of health care organizations for my dissertation, which was never published (or even bound, for that matter). This was my first experience with seeing how conventional ideas about what counts as meaningful or legitimate scholarship can act as constraints on our work. A later, and more profound, example was tracking the publishing career of my friend and colleague Buddy Goodall, as his work—while widely read and respected by many—always seemed to be placed in the corner just outside of the world of “real” organizational communication scholarship. As I shifted my research focus from variable analytic, positivist approaches to more interpretive ones—buoyed largely by my experiences at the Alta conferences that Patricia described above—I experienced many of the issues described in this handbook, of marginalization and accusations of doing work that is not legitimate scholarship. After publishing a paper about strategic ambiguity (Eisenberg, 1984; which some colleagues critiqued as aphoristic and impossible to operationalize), I doubled down and wrote about jamming experiences (Eisenberg, 1990), which excited some people, but irritated others. My twin scholarly muses have always been Karl Weick and child psychologist Adam Phillips, both of whom have been criticized for sometimes featuring style over substance. No matter. My true aim in writing, echoing theirs, is to

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give full voice to the aesthetics of contingency (Eisenberg, 2006). Later in my career, I chose to focus less on research and more on using what I knew about organizational communication to be a university leader. As department chair (10  years), dean (13 years), and now as interim provost, I have found that the insights generated by organizational communication do indeed work in the wild and have served me exceedingly well. I use concepts from framing and network theory all the time, with good results; and more recent work on critical and postcolonial scholarship have been helpful in navigating the administrative challenges around Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion that higher education is currently facing. Finally, my expertise in organizational culture—how it forms, is shaped, and can change—has been exceedingly helpful in managing institutional change at my university. Reading Patricia’s account of her journey in the field lets me see how privileged my experience has been as a cisgender white man. For example, I did not experience any of the harassment she describes. However, there is one institutional dynamic that has greatly affected my career that is worth mentioning, in part because it is absurd on its face and partly because it has come under serious criticism of late. That dynamic is the love affair that some institutions of higher education have sustained with continuous progress against national or global metrics expressed as “rankings.” In much the same way that publicly traded companies are expected to show continual quarter over quarter growth in earnings, universities often pursue rankings growth as a central part of their corporate strategy. Schools strive to climb the Carnegie categories (R2,  R1…), and the U.S. News and World Report releases annual report cards showing where you are in the pecking order. And while it might be best for many—faculty, students, and communities—to be satisfied with their current positioning, such complacency is

seen by many as absurd, even un-American. University boards, in particular, are often fond of using these measuring sticks as primary indicators of “progress.” This way of thinking about the effectiveness of academic institutions has powerful echoes of Deetz’s notion of corporate colonization of the life world, mentioned above.

MOTIFS AND IMPRESSIONS If there is one motif that appears most frequently in this volume, it would have to be the dynamic multiplicity of meaning. All of the authors go to great lengths to resist the idea that qualitative research in organi­ zational communication has as its goal capturing definitive and immutable facts of organizational life. To the contrary, and to varying degrees, authors see the research process as deeply committed to creating opportunities for multiple discourses, meanings, identities, realities, and relationships to emerge and to commingle in making sense of organizing processes. In addition, there is consistent recognition that throughout the research process, from negotiating access to writing and sharing findings, understandings of people, relationships, and phenomena can—and likely will—change over time, and that this iterative process is a feature of, not a problem with, any qualitative methodology. A second motif that figures prominently in this handbook is the notion that however it is conducted, qualitative organizational communication research is relational, and that the nature and quality of collaboration and cultural humility in these relationships is key to the success of any inquiry. Shifting from seeing qualitative inquiry as “mining for meaning” to the “co-construction of understandings through relationships” brings the importance of reflexivity and deep self-awareness to the forefront. Most of the authors in this volume begin with the

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idea that qualitative researchers must reflect on their positionality and how they appear to the people they aspire to visit and better understand. In this way, qualitative researchers create organizational meaning as they communicate relationally to process “what is difficult to talk about and yet important to feel, breathe in, and document” (see Chapter 12 in this volume). Following the notion that all qualitative research is relational is the third motif found throughout this volume—specifically, that such research is also always embodied. Authors reject mind-body dualism repeatedly as a means to more deeply explore the embodied, material, lived experience of participants in organizations. Opening qualitative organizational analysis to multisensory understanding of organizations provides additional avenues for exploring the layers of communication in organizational life. Exploring how researchers and participants may co-orient to one or more of these layers taps into these embodied, emotional, ephemeral, and aesthetic experiential forms. And going one step further, the rapid rise of cyborg forms, artificial intelligence, and other sophisticated human machine interactions will require us to consider human sensing and sensemaking as it manifests in interaction with a relation to nonhuman actors. A fourth motif that characterizes these chapters is that qualitative inquiry into organizations must always reckon with issues of relationships of power, in particular how discourse produces material differences that constrain options and freedoms. Many of the authors advocate for innovative research methods that explicitly seek to create discursive openings, democratizing research by inviting members of vulnerable groups to participate and collaborate in the research process. The handbook describes a wide range of strategies for becoming more inclusive, inviting participants to offer their perspectives and priorities, often challenging institutional norms that restrict their voices.

THE CHANGING LANDSCAPE OF QUALITATIVE ORGANIZATIONAL COMMUNICATION RESEARCH Looking back over the chapters of this volume, we gained a number of impressions about the changing landscape of organi­ zational communication as we reflected on the contributions this handbook offers. For the most part, these impressions represent our consideration of what constitutes qualitative organizational communication research today compared with what it was when we entered the field over 40 years ago. We reflect on the ways these distinctions offer heuristic value by raising new questions for reflection.

Moving from Disembodied to Embodied Communication Early on, our theories and methods were almost exclusively cognitive, reflecting our academic envy of Psychology. In fact, most topical literature reviews mainly drew upon studies in this field, rather than our own. Over time, there was a shift from the study of attitudes and beliefs (mainly via paper and pencil tests) to the study of communication behavior. Research often emphasized a container metaphor of organizations, focusing on behaviors that occurred inside the boundaries of an organization. As organizational studies began to recognize the permeability of these invisible boundaries and the multitude of identities individuals communicate in work and life, research strategies evolved to gain understandings of individuals’ embodiment—both participants’ and researchers’. Moving away from privileging the mind over the body, research began to ask new questions focused on the body as our means for expressing and communicating identity and meaning in organizational life. In turn, rather than emphasizing cognition and what could be seen and measured (i.e., disembodied

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research), research questions and answers started to be based on multiple senses, including people’s experiences of marginalization, disempowerment, and cultural erasement. Conceptions of communication as “intersections of embodied standpoints” (participants and researchers) offer nuanced theoretical knowledge through “active engagement with reflexivity, sensuousness, and methods” (Ellingson, 2017, pp. 11, 41). The result has been a more complete understanding of communication that better resonates with human experience broadly construed. Organizations too often rely only on survey methods to gain feedback from employees. What innovative qualitative methods can organizations utilize to gain insight about employees’ embodiment and then utilize that knowledge to improve their day-to-day experience? How might these experiences of embodiment change when mediated through digital media and nonhuman actors?

Moving from Centralized Control to Distributed Cognition At the outset, organizational communication theories were aligned with management thinking more generally, which in turn was heavily shaped by a “Central Processing Unit model” of organizations, wherein the senior managers were the thinkers and the employees were the doers (a former student of Eric’s described these jobs as “neck-down,” since you were not expected to think). Over time, this approach has been shown to be completely off base, even laughable. Just as intelligence is distributed throughout the human body that keeps the various systems functioning without the need for language or reflexive consciousness, so too is knowledge distributed throughout organizations. Recent talent shortages have made it abundantly clear how vulnerable organizations can become when they lose employees at any level or function. And with the advent of virtual and network organizations and the

practical availability of artificial intelligence, it has become very clear that knowledge is everywhere. Thus, the critical challenge is to recognize that individuals participate in organization by offering their specialized, embodied knowledge based on their histories, culture, experiences, and perceptions. Importantly, their participation may be limited by past experiences of marginalization, stereotyping, and disenfranchisement. The ideal is for organizations to become communities of sharing ideas and shared understandings, where individuals are confident that their embodied knowledge is encouraged and utilized in the functioning of the organization. What can we change or develop in organizations to ensure that every member feels their contributions are valued and incorporated?

Moving from Top-Down to Continuously Shared Power and Voice Over the years, qualitative organizational communication research has evolved from a focus on organizational effectiveness, leadership—that is, top-down models—toward more ethically and politically enhanced alternatives. These include developing and conducting research to expose unequal power relations and to suggest organizational changes that encourage equitable voice and create opportunities for participation. Key in this shift has been the growing recognition that Western-centric understandings of organizational communication are incomplete at best and misleading at worst. The story of organizations, and of our discipline, may be told differently from marginalized and indigenous perspectives, as well as from differing cultural perspectives. For example, one of the reasons Danish employees tend to be the happiest in their work is because of the low power distance created through more autonomy and empowerment at work (Kelly, 2022). This standpoint further reinforces the

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need for organizational communication scholars to know and interrogate the historical patterns and events that enable and constrain communicators throughout the world. How can organizations offer intriguing, astonishing, real, and practical opportunities for people to voice both their passions and disenchantments in their work?

Foregrounding Multiplicity and Uncertainty Given our academic interests, the recurring emphasis in this handbook on pervasive multiplicity of meanings and interpretations in organizational communication is most welcome to us. Nearly all of the chapters in this handbook eschew simple answers and limited interpretations of organizational communication processes. Fifty years ago, effective communication was almost universally seen as synonymous with clarity and certainty, based on an information transmission perspective. Today, it is well understood that communication always has multiple goals and that perceptions are unequivocally partial, suggesting that the purpose of communication is less about shared meaning and more about connection and collaboration, and that curiosity and doubt are more effective strategies than judgment and certainty. A degree of ambiguity is necessary for effective, even satisfying communication (Eisenberg, 1984); moreover, the poetic and aesthetic offers opportunities for resilience and flourishing (Geist-Martin & Scarduzio, 2017; Parsloe & Geist-Martin, 2020). The COVID-19 pandemic has loosened the rigidity about where and when individuals work. While the idea of telecommuting is not new, skepticism and uncertainty about how much work is accomplished off-site remained, until now. While particular careers and employers have demanded a return to work at specific times and locations, the notion of “in office” has become

more flexible, embracing uncertainty and a multiplicity of options for where and when work is completed. Some organizations have developed “work from anywhere” policies that offer employees opportunities to work remotely in other states or provinces, even other countries. Multiplicity abounds for digital nomads with new websites, apps, and technological tools, including tips for applying for a digital nomad visa. For example, Boundless Life (www.boundless.life/careers) offers “a life of unity with your family, your community, nature and the world. It’s a life you don’t need a vacation from.” Nomads Embassy (https:// nomadsembassy.com/) focuses on three pillars of a digital nomad life–information, support, and community. The seismic shifts in work worldwide translate to embracing uncertainty and multiplicity in what counts as “the workplace.” How can we apprehend the multiplicities of the experience, flexibility, and satisfaction of digital nomadic workers for “in place” workers?

Can’t Be Doing Nothing In the late 20th century, and like most social scientists at the time, organizational communication researchers aimed to draw a bright line between studying organi­ zations and seeking to change them. In the past, college tenure and promotion committees reinforced this perspective by questioning the standing and value of our work that was applied, community engaged, or just useful for making positive change in the world. While related debates continue in some circles, the chapters in this book reflect a greater open-mindedness for—and in many cases appetite for—doing scholarship that makes a tangible difference in society and quality of life for each community. There is much talk of reinventing the modern research university, and almost all of it emphasizes the role that academia can play in addressing social and community

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challenges. While each university-community necessarily engages in dialogue to consider their specific goals, undoubtedly, their mission necessarily focuses on equity and social justice, by connecting university/ community knowledge with the social issues faced by the community, as well as addressing disadvantages, exclusions, and marginalization faced by its members. How can organizations match community needs with their missions? And how can this effort be continuously evaluated and adapted as community needs evolve?

Appreciating and Celebrating Intersectionality Not surprisingly, 40 years ago, organizational communication research lived in the binary, treating gender (usually just male and female) as an independent variable predicting whatever concept the research was investigating. Over time, organizations have recognized the significance of creating strategies to ensure policies, benefits, and overall workplace cultures are equitable and inclusive. Yet, too often, what goes unrecognized is the value of considering individuals’ intersectional identities in their lives lived in society and organizations, which many of the chapters in this handbook call attention to and celebrate. The call to contemporary research is to unveil the multitude of biases that support the particular identities, including those that are white, masculine, heterosexual, able-bodied, and others. Even today, masculine traits tend to be the prototype of effective organizational leadership. It seems that more and more policies are put into place to regulate and improve social justice, equity, and inclusion. However, the day-today practice of these values in organizations leaves much to be desired. What forms of research might help us to understand the perpetuation of biases and the steps that anyone in organizations can take to communicate equitably and inclusively?

Inventing New Genres of Scholarship With the evolution of visual culture, virtual and augmented reality, and the rise of easy access to artificial intelligence, traditional ways of sharing the results of our research must be expanded to fit the tastes and needs of the times. Embodied, performative, multimedia, virtual, and other creative expressions should all be seen as welcome experiments. The idea that ideas can be separated from the means of expression, that insight and aesthetics operate in separate domains, is being challenged by how people are learning today. Chapters in this handbook envision creative approaches to research that celebrate new ways of seeing, learning, and discovering what might have been invisible in the past. Taking a more open, interdisciplinary approach to methods of research, expression, communication, and organization will allow us to learn by expanding our worldviews, to learn from and connect with others with perspectives that differ from and expand our own. If we follow this path, we may be able to both grow smarter and become more human.

REFERENCES Clair, R. P., Brown, N. E., Delemeester, H., Dougherty, D. S., Geist Martin, P., Gorden, W., Turner, P. K., & Sorg, T. (2019). #MeToo: An article, a forum, and a utopian dream. Journal of Applied Communication, 47(2), 111–129. https://doi.org/10.1080/0090988 2.2019.1567142 Deetz, S. A. (1992). Democracy in an age of corporate colonization: Developments in communication and the politics of everyday life. SUNY Press. Eisenberg, E. M. (1984). Ambiguity as strategy in organizational communication. Communi­ cation Monographs, 51(3), 227–242. https:// doi.org/10.1080/03637758409390197 Eisenberg, E. M. (1990). Jamming: Transcendence through organizing. Communication

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Research, 17(2), 139–164. https://doi.org/ 10.1177/009365090017002001 Eisenberg, E. (2006). Karl Weick and the aesthetics of contingency. Organization Studies, 27(11), 1693–1708. https://doi.org/10.1177/ 0170840606068348 Ellingson, L. L. (2017). Embodiment in qualita­ tive research. Routledge. Geist-Martin, P., & Scarduzio, J. (2017). Workplace wellness as flourishing. In J. Yamasaki, P. Geist-Martin, & B. F. Sharf (Eds.), Storied health and illness: Communicating personal, cultural, and political complexities (pp.  157–189). Waveland. Kaland, D., & Geist, P. (1994). Secrets of the corporation: A model of ideological positioning of sexual harassment victims. In S. Bingham (Ed.), Conceptualizing sexual harassment as discursive practice (pp. 139–155). Praeger. Kelly, J. (2022, January 4). Leadership lessons from the happiest place in the world. Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackkelly/2022/ 01/04/leadership-lessons-from-the-happiestplace-in-the-world/?sh=5b8694a37780 Parsloe, S., & Geist-Martin, P. (2020). Falling in love with the process: Cultivating resilience in health crises. A stroke survivor’s story. Kendall Hunt.

Scarduzio, J., & Geist-Martin, P. (2008). Making sense of fractured identities: Male professors’ narratives of sexual harassment. Communica­ tion Monographs, 75(4), 369–395. https://doi. org/10.1080/03637750802512363 Scarduzio, J., & Geist-Martin, P. (2010). Accounting for victimization: Male professors’ ideological positioning in stories of sexual harassment. Management Communi­ cation Quarterly, 24(3), 419–445. https:// doi.org/10.1177/0893318909358746 Scarduzio, J., & Geist-Martin, P. (2016). Workplace wellness campaigns: The four dimensions of a whole person approach. In T. R. Harrison & E. Williams (Eds.), Organizations, health, and communication (pp. 172–186). Routledge. Townsley, N. C., & Geist, P. (2000). The discursive enactment of hegemony: Sexual harassment and academic organizing. Western Journal of Communication, 64(2), 190–217. https://doi. org/10.1080/10570310009374671 Watts, M. (Host). (2022, October 17). Alan Watts: Learning the human game (No. 17) [Audio podcast episode]. Being in the way. The Alan Watts Organization, in partnership with Ram Dass’s Be Here Now Network

Index Note: Page numbers followed by “f” indicate figure, “t” indicates table and “n” indicate note in the text. Abdallah, C., 564 Abdi, S., 187 abduction, 67, 70, 71, 76–79 abductive phase, 76 abductive reasoning, xxxiii, 5, 9, 70, 77, 78, 383, 394, 559 accountability, 112, 152, 210, 245, 267, 271, 351, 501, 592 active participating, 320, 322–323 activism, 241 anti-rape, 497 brand activism campaign, 346 communication, 241 actor-network theory, 74, 104, 109, 111, 117, 556 Adams, T. E., 225, 226, 232 Adebayo, C. T., 146 aesthetics, 35, 66, 131, 227, 230, 233, 234, 358, 362, 364, 389, 426, 556, 675, 676, 678, 679 affect, xxxviii, xi, 361, 371–372, 428, 471–491, 556, 628, 666, 667, 669 affective transmission, 475 affordances, 5–7, 83, 116, 125, 210, 309, 340, 474, 516, 518, 519, 539, 540, 593, 600, 602, 651, 666, 668 Afifi, W., 574 after-action review (AAR), 272 agencement, 667 agency, 25, 30, 33, 37, 55, 93, 105, 108, 111, 112, 114, 115, 126, 129, 134, 148, 164–167, 172, 176, 183, 205, 207, 232, 243, 244, 265, 283, 293, 300, 309, 393, 423, 424, 428, 441, 448, 456, 460, 465, 482, 483, 493, 495, 516, 518, 538, 540, 553, 560, 609, 626, 631, 636, 638, 650, 654, 666, 667 nonhuman, 363, 633, 634 agents, 46, 51, 56, 74, 105, 112, 115, 131, 307, 349, 428, 429, 441, 475, 483, 495, 609, 633, 634 nonhuman, 114, 360, 555 Ahmed, S., 473 Ahrne, G., 668 Alaimo, C., 592 Albu, O. B., 347, 486 Alcoholics Anonymous (AA), 287 Alejano-Steele, A., 7 Allen, B. J., 146–148, 230, 502, 503 Allen, L., 635–638 Allhutter, D., 630 Almjeld, J., 542 alternative organizing, 162, 165, 166 Alvarez, M., 208 Alvesson, M., 54, 55, 108, 302–304, 313, 496, 497, 562 Alyan, A. A., 207

analytic memos. see memos Anderson, L. B., 24, 366, 367, 392 Andriopoulous, C., 532, 534 Anguiano, C., 243, 249 Antaki, C., 444 anteinterview, 313 anti-essentialism, 148, 150 anti-foundationalist position, 69–70 Antonacopoulou, E., 407, 410 Anzaldua, G., 90, 182 Application Program Interfaces (API), 596 applied communication, 146, 241, 247 applied tensional analysis (ATA). see tensional analysis methods argumentative approach, 424–426 Aristotle, 48–51, 418, 425, 426 Arminen, I., 443 Armstrong, R., 542 artifacts, xlii, 24, 25, 29, 33, 72–74, 79, 162, 164, 173, 174, 190, 204, 212, 221, 266, 331, 334, 362, 363, 366, 367, 385, 386, 420, 423, 426, 428, 433, 441, 449, 460, 482, 522, 524, 537, 542, 556, 579 artificial intelligence (AI), 307, 339, 592, 598, 612, 655, 676, 677, 679 artificially intelligent communication technologies (AICTs), 598–599 arts-based method, 406 Asante, G., 194 Aschauer, M. A., 24 Ashcraft, K. L., 106, 127–129, 189, 323, 372, 442, 474, 477, 482, 486, 494, 499, 500, 502, 535, 630 aspirational talk, 433 assemblage, 322, 401, 402, 541, 555–557, 560, 666, 667 discursive, 401–402 Atay, A., 231 atmosphere, 556 audience, xliii, 23, 46, 48, 49, 55, 105, 131, 156, 241, 244, 264, 273, 311, 335, 340, 347, 363, 367, 381, 385, 387, 388, 389, 404, 405, 419, 420, 423–428, 433, 486, 495, 520, 537, 542, 590, 654, 655, 672 Austin, J., 148, 496, 672 authenticity, 50, 269, 649, 666 authoritarianism, 48 autoethnography, 29–30, 153–156, 187–188, 220–323, 407 approaches, xxxiv challenges in, 232–234 crystallized focus, 228–230 developments, 230

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dimensions of, 226–230, 234 intersectional approach, 230 layered account, 222 organizational, 188, 222–234 process, 225 product, 225 queering organizational, 188, 230–232, 234 reflexive critique, 227–228 tracing, 222–224 axial coding. see coding axiological commitment, 13 axiology, 12, 144, 188, 270 Babis, D., 32 Bacevice, P. A., 364 Baillargeon, D., 460 Bakhtin, M., 455, 456, 466 Bakhtinian heritage, xxxviii, 455 Bakken, T., 551 Ban, S. G., 539 Ban, Z., 392, 616 Barad, K., 483, 486, 499, 628–631, 634 Barbour, J. B., 254, 306, 325 Barge, J. K., 244–246, 252 Bargetz, B., 630 Barker, J. R., 107, 324–326, 672, 673 Barley, S. R., 474, 513, 601, 602 Barley, W. C., 37, 328, 331, 348 Barrett, M., 601 Barros, M., 668 Basu, A., 393 Batch, M., 30 Bateson, G., 77 Baxter, L. A., 539 Bell, D., 144 Bell, E., 125 Bencherki, N., 322, 361, 479, 480, 556, 558, 560 Benoit-Barné, C., 495 Bergen, E., 454 Bergeron, C. D., 460, 463 Bergson, H., 558 Bernard, T., 171 Bersani, L., 182 Beverley, J., 166 Bévort, F., 97 Bhabha, H. K., 231 Bhattacharya, K., 227 big tent, 389, 505 Bimber, B., 619 biocapitalism, 175 Bisel, R. S., 148, 269, 367, 616 Biss, D. C., 25 Biwa, V., 617 Black, E., 420, 423 Black, Indigenous, people of color (BIPOC), 144, 147, 148, 157n1 Black, Indigenous, and women of color (BIWOC), 147 Black women, 150, 155

Blaschke, S., 105, 344 Blithe, S. J., 409 Boas, F., 26 Bochner, A., 224 Boden, D., 442 Bogardus, E., 300 Boivin, G., 107 Boje, D. M., 313, 407, 410 Borgerson, K., 124 Bormann, E. G., 407, 410 Boromisza-Habashi, D., 207, 209 Bossaller, J., 95, 96 Boudens, C. J., 407 Boudès, T., 403 Bowring, M. A., 184 Boylorn, R. M., 226 Bozalek, V., 632 Braithwaite, C. A., 207 Branton, S. E., 134, 331, 487 bricolage, 647 bricoleur, 311, 430, 578–579 Broad, G. M., 249 Broadfoot, K. J., 29, 571, 612, 634 Brommel, B. J., 238 Brown, A. D., 408, 409–410 Brown, C., 171 Brown, M. H., 411 Browning, L. D., 402, 406, 426, 673 Brownlee, K., 207 Brown Trinidad, S., 96 Brummans, B. H. J. M., 114, 323, 407, 433, 561, 563, 572, 631 Bruner, J. S., 400, 402, 403, 409 Brunner, E., 347 Brunsson, N., 668 Bruscella, J. S., 367 Budhwar, P., 652 Buetow, S., 302 Bullis, C., 427 Bullough, A., 18 Bulut, E., 32 Burawoy, M., 610, 611, 616, 617 Burke, K., 52–54, 419, 425–426, 429, 433 burnout, 291, 311 Burns, C. S., 95, 96 Burris, M. A., 364 Butler, J., 182 Buzzanell, P. M., 308, 521, 617, 673 Caidor, P., 460 Call-Cummings, M., 522 Campbell, D. T., 4 Canary, H. E., 392 capitalism, 165, 167, 174, 366, 672 neoliberal capitalism, 165, 174 capitalist political economic structures, 175 Carbaugh, D. A., 201, 207, 214n9 caregivers, 134

INDEX

Carlson, N.H., 289, 292 Carrington, A., 633, 634 Cartesianism, 69 case study, 171, 381–382, 406, 644 Casing a Promised Land (Goodall), 223 Castor, T. R., 115, 461 categorization, 181, 443, 478, 486, 562 Catt, I., 90 Central Processing Unit model, 677 Chakravartty, P., 147 Champine, T., 242, 243 Chaput, M., 426, 433 Charmaz, K., 393 Charrieras, D., 114 Chase, S. E., 411 Chawla, D., 231 Chen, W., 617 Cheney, G., 212, 250, 427 Cheong, P. H., 433, 616 Chia, R., 564 Chornet, D., 205 Chouliaraki, L., 170 Christensen, L. T., 433, 502 Christianson, M. K., 358 cisheteronormativity, xxxiv, 181, 183 civil society organization (CSO), 486 Clair, R. P., 366, 367, 406 Clarke, A. E., 632 class, 47–48, 53, 125–126, 144–146, 150–151, 166–167, 169–170, 389, 442–443, 494, 500, 502–503, 569–574 Clifton, J., 443, 444, 460–463, 615 close textual analysis (CTA), 347 Cnossen, B., 361, 556, 560 Coates, A., 9 Cobb, T. L., 148, 155, 672 coding axial coding, 388, 536 hierarchical coding, 388, 393 line-by-line coding, 387, 532, 536, 540 open coding, 387, 388, 393, 536, 537 primary cycle coding, 387, 388 secondary cycle coding, 386–389 co-generative theorizing, 245, 249 Coleman, R., 626 collaboration, 167, 240, 271, 460, 654, 678 collaborative learning. see engaged scholarship approaches “Collected Papers” (Peirce), 71 Collins, P. H., 502 colonialism, 162–163, 504, 578, 627, 631, 633–634 colonization, 174, 190 communication technologies, 339 communicative constitution of organizations (CCO), xxxiii, 103, 185, 214n12, 225, 353, 365, 366, 432, 552–553, 561, 565n3, 654 analysis of, 107 conversation analysis and ethnomethodology (CA/ EM), 110–111

683

discourse analysis, 107–109 epistemology, 106–107, 117 ethnography, 113–115 Four-Flows, 105 narrative analysis, 111–113 premises of, 104–106 ventriloquism, 115–116 community, 49–51, 78–79, 149, 166–169, 200–206, 210–212, 241–245, 248–253, 287–289, 291, 351, 541–543, 577–580, 618–620, 655–656, 664, 678 community-based participatory research (CBPR), 656 Community Learning Exchange (CLE), 288–289 compassion, 386 complementarity, 6, 9, 11, 13, 15, 16, 19 complete participating, xxxvi, 320, 323 Compton, C. A., 134, 185, 331 Computational Tomography (CT), 513 computer-mediated communication (CMC), 343, 513 Confessions (St. Augustine), 52 Conger, J., 446, 447 Conklin, T. A., 87, 95 Connaughton, S. L., 240, 244, 251, 445, 573 Conrad, C., 55, 502 consubstantiality, 433 consultative positionality, 247–248 context, 12–14, 24–25, 52–55, 84–85, 89–91, 164–165, 170, 290–293, 322–323, 342–345, 382–383, 391–392, 425–426, 511–512, 519–520, 535–537, 540–542, 617–619, 643–646 contradictions, 92–93, 135, 304, 531, 533–535, 540, 543 contradictions, 531 contrapuntal analysis. see tensional analysis methods control, 13, 15, 17, 30, 31, 32, 48, 56, 89, 93, 127, 128, 135, 144, 149, 163, 167, 174, 175, 244, 281, 285, 298, 299, 301, 311, 324, 341, 342, 347, 359, 406, 410, 411, 443, 446, 493, 494, 496, 500, 501, 504, 505, 522, 538, 539, 564, 591, 593, 597, 598, 599, 601–603, 609, 634–637, 645–647, 649–651, 665, 677 conversation analysis (CA), xxxviii, 438–441 big-D Discourse, 440 and ethnomethodology, 110–111 interactional approach, 443 intersection of, 443–448 issues of, 443 leadership, 447 mentality, 448, 449 and organizational communication research, 441–443 practical payoff, 448–449 pure, 441 robustness, 440 small-d discourse, 440 social action, 446 validity, 440 Cooks, L., 571 Cooper, K. R., 542 Cooperative Institutional Research (CIR), 18

684

THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF QUALITATIVE RESEARCH IN ORGANIZATIONAL COMMUNICATION

Cooren, F., 105, 106, 108–115, 332, 366, 407, 442, 455–456, 458, 460, 462–464, 466n1, 474, 495, 541, 553, 555, 557 co-presence, 667 Corbin, J., 25 Corman, S. R., 212 Cornejo, M., 574 corporate social responsibility (CSR), xxxi, 171, 347, 419 co-sexuality, 34, 185 Costantini, R. A., 460, 462, 463 Couldry, N., 560 counternarratives, 142, 147, 152, 155 Coutu, L., 203 Covarrubias, P., 203, 204, 206 COVID-19, 292, 293 conflicts, 645 consequences, 643 contextual research, 643 data analysis, 652–654 data collection, 647 ethical considerations, 651 extractive research model, 652 fieldwork relationships, 649–651 influence of, 656 issues, 645, 657 iterative phronetic approach, 643 mental health issues, 646 pandemic, xlii, 134, 135, 251, 309, 342, 644, 668, 678 recruitment, 152, 288, 291, 308, 313, 326, 331, 368, 644–647 research design, 644–645 research dissemination, 654–656 resilience, 656 retrospective sensemaking, 656 site research, 648 tensions, 645 travel restrictions, 645 virtualization, 647–648 workplace concept, 651 Zoom tour, 650 Cram, F., 19 Crenshaw, K., 130, 144, 145, 151 Creswell, J. W., 6–8, 86, 87, 95 Crick, N., 50 critical approaches, 31, 33, 301, 444, 493, 535 critical discourse analysis (CDA), xxxviii, 170 big tent, 505 concepts, 494 dialectical tension, 499 discourse/meaning dimension, 496f discursive event, 498 discursive opening/closure, 500–502 feminist, 502 meaning, 496–498 methodology, 492 multimodal discourse approach, 498 power, 493–496, 505 whiteness, 503

critical ethnography, 28–31, 34–35, 164–165, 167, 493 critical narrative analysis. see narrative analysis critical paradigm, 11t, 12t, 12–14, 239, 613 critical philosophical commitments, 12–13 critical race theory (CRT), xxxiii, 143 affiliations, 144 conceptualization, 148–151 counternarratives, 147 intersectionality, 143, 145 origins, 143 research, 143 standardization, 151 tenets, 144 themes in, 144 criticism, 45, 47, 52, 55–58, 419–421, 423–424, 426–428, 431, 444 critique, 170, 172, 230, 234, 248–249, 497, 500, 629–630 Cruz, J. M., 131, 148, 150, 151, 155, 307, 312, 326, 329, 612, 628, 629 crystallization, 74, 131, 228, 246, 387, 520 cultural anthropologists, 26 cultural discourse analysis (CuDA), 206–209, 212 culture, 16, 23–31, 33–35, 38, 148–150, 153, 205, 207–212, 221–225, 227–228, 464, 618–619 Cumming, D., 652 Cunliffe, A. L., 554 Curtin, N. J., 494 Czarniawska, B., 320, 327, 405, 409, 412 Dai, H., 135, 136 Dailey, S. L., 408, 410 Darics, E., 449 data, 225, 484, 589–590, 593 analysis, 155–156, 202, 271, 272, 652–654 big, 610 collection, 23, 202, 266–272, 309, 332, 333, 393, 465 gathering, 202 generation, 202 wrangling, 345 datafication, 591, 593, 596–597, 609, 611, 613, 620 Davies, B., 664 Davis, S., 148, 502 Dawson, V. R., 347 D/discourses, 134, 497, 539–540, 543 decision-making, 130, 591, 599, 617 deductive approaches, 76, 534, 535 Deetz, S., 88, 245–247, 249, 381, 449, 501 Defenbaugh, N., 238 De Fina, A., 440 definitional conundrum (of paradox), 532–534 De Institutione Oratoria (Quintilian), 418 de la Broise, P., 461 de la Garza, A., 635 de Lauretis, T., 182 Deleuze, G., 667 Delgado, R., 144, 154 Delphi participatory method, 10 democracy, 47–48, 51, 241–242, 666, 672

INDEX

De Molli, F., 556 Dempsey, S., 241, 245, 246, 500, 501, 573, 652, 653 D’Enbeau, S., 134 Denzin N. K., 224, 393 deontic rights, 443, 446, 447 Deppermann, A., 440 Descartes, 67, 69 de Wet, J. P., 136 Dewey, J., 26, 67–69, 72, 74, 75 dialectics, 133, 161, 164, 531, 533–534, 538–539, 543 dialogism, xxxiii, 66, 73, 673 dialogue, 59, 73–74, 77, 79, 248–250, 442, 522–523 diffraction, 482, 486, 581, 626, 630–633, 638 digital data, 339–340 accessing, 345–346 challenges and limitations, 349–352 characteristics of, 342–345 different types of, 341 disadvantage of, 346 ethical issues, 352 with ethnographic data, 347–348 interviews about, 349 intra-organizational datasets, 352 legal issues, 352 mediated interactions, 343–344 messy and/or incomplete, 351–352 methodological approaches, 346–349 mixed and developing forms of, 344–345 negotiating access, 349–351 nonpublic data, 350 nonpublic forms, 340, 341 public forms, 340 textual analysis of, 346–347 types of, 341 use of, 353 wrangling, 345–346 digital economy, 590–592 digital ethnography, xxxii, 28–29, 31–34 digital exhaust, 596, 598–602 digital forensics, xl, 589 approach, 594f, 603 digital format, 343–344 digital language, 343 digital material, 344 digital organizing, 668 digital platforms, 339–342, 346, 348, 351, 592, 596, 598 digital spaces, 512, 515–516, 520–522, 591–593, 596–597 digital technologies, xl, 589 communication about, 601–602 communication around, 602–603 communication on, 597–598 communication through, 600–601 communication with, 598–599 objects of study, 594 roles in processes of organizational communication, 594 digital texts, 343, 520 digital ubiquity, 591, 593, 597, 608, 618

685

digital work, 668 analysis, xxxix beyond transfer, 522–523 context, 524 explanandum, 521 explanans, 521 method transfer, 521–522 normalizing, 514–515 online and offline, 517–521 rise of, 512–513 themes, 523 virtualization of, 515–516 direct-to-consumer genetic testing organizations, 171–172 DiSanza, J. R., 427 disasters, 287, 289, 291–292, 364 discourse analysis (DA), 107–109, 496 discourse tracing. see tensional analysis methods discoursism, 55 discursive assemblage. see assemblage discursive closure, 429, 501, 502. see also critical discourse analysis (CDA) diversity management, 185 discursive opening, 493, 500–502, 505, 676. see also critical discourse analysis (CDA) Dobusch, L., 112, 113 Doloriert, C., 224 Doshi, V., 495 Dougherty, D. S., 88, 89, 97, 132, 133, 185, 332, 361, 365, 370, 493, 494, 497, 500, 503, 505, 521 downstream ventriloquation, 456–457, 466n3. see also ventriloquial analysis dramatism, 52–53, 422, 427 dramatistic approach, 419–420, 426, 428–429 Drew, P., 440 Drumheller, K., 88, 89, 97 dualism, xxxix, 59, 327, 484, 511, 522, 627, 676 duality, 19, 74, 92, 514, 516, 524, 557, 572, 608, 615–618, 620, 673 Dube, B., 650 Dunbar, C., Jr., 153 Durkheim, E., 610 Dutta, D., 133 Dutta, M. J., 148, 149 Dutta, U., 612 Dye, L. A., 410 Eagly, A. H., 123 Eco, U., 77 Edmonds, R., 207 Eger, E., 25, 189, 192, 331, 406, 449 Eguchi, S., 193 Eicher-Catt, D., 90 Eisenberg, E. M., 208, 209 Elers, P., 615 Eliot, T.S., 103 Ellingson, L. L., 228, 246, 327 Ellis, C., 224, 233 Ellison, N. B., 519

686

THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF QUALITATIVE RESEARCH IN ORGANIZATIONAL COMMUNICATION

embodied phenomenology. see phenomenology Emden, C., 401 emotion, 128, 131, 212, 383, 411, 472–473, 475 empiricism, 67–68, 123–124, 405, 612 emplotment. see narrative analysis Endacott, C. G., 349, 598, 599 Endres, D., 430 engaged scholarship approaches, 239 activism, 241 applied communication research, 241 co-action, 246, 248 co-design, 245, 248 collaborative learning, 241 collaborative positionality, 249–250 co-missioning, 245, 248 consultative positionality, 247–248 co-reflection, 246, 248 faith, 255 participatory positionality, 248–249 passion, 255 patience, 255 practical theory, 241 problem formulation, 244 problem solving, 244 relational touchpoints, 247f research design, 244 research touchpoints, 244–246 social justice, 241 theory building, 244 Engaged Scholarship Diamond Model, 244 enterprise social media (ESM), 342–345, 349, 350 entitative framing. see ontological framings environmentalism, 169 epistemic coloniality, 172 epistemic rights, 446, 447 epistemological parochialism, 608, 613 epistemology, xxxiii–xxxiv, 70–71, 78, 106, 122–124, 144, 162, 187–188, 210–211, 361–362, 569 epoché, xxxiii, 86–87, 92, 95 essentialism, 186 estheticizing process, 67, 75 ethics, 47, 49–51, 270, 324, 352, 386, 625–626 ethnic identity, 173, 182 ethnocommodities, 175 ethnography, xxxi, 23–24, 113–115, 153, 161, 162, 164–166, 222 analysis, 25 approaches, 24–26 autoethnography, 29–30 critical ethnography, 30–31 critical-rhetorical, 431 digital ethnography, 31–32 evolution, 25–26 history of, 26–28 institutional, 29, 32–34, 231, 369 methodology, 24–26 and organizational communication, 27–28 organizational ethnography, 33–34

popularity of, 26–28 types of, 28–35, 28t ethnography of communication (EC), xxxiv, 27, 210t community, 201–202 culture, 200–201 epistemology, 211–212 methods, 202–203, 212 ontology, 210–211 organization, 201 speaking/practices, 202 speech community, 201 theory, 212 ethnographic data, 34 ethnomethodology, 104, 107–109, 111, 381, 439 ethos, 50 Etter, M., 347 Eurocentric paradigm. see paradigms event, 147, 265, 293, 329, 412 Ewalt, J. P., 428 failure (methodological), 190 Fairclough, N., 170, 497, 498, 537 Fairhurst, G., 56, 107, 382, 385, 419, 426, 445, 495, 534, 535, 539, 617 Fanon, F., 231, 634 fantasy theme analysis. see narrative analysis female breadwinners (FBWs), 89 feminisms, 122, 125, 127–130, 133, 135, 617, 628 feminist approaches, xxxiii agendas, 127–128 autoethnography, 131 caregiving, 134 commitments, 124–125 distinctive feminist lenses, 128–129 doing gender justice, 125–126 domestic violence, 126 empiricism, 124 feminist organizational scholarship, 126–127 ideology-sustainability, 134 inclusion-exclusion, 132–133 intersectionalities, 133–134 onto-epistemology, 122–123 postmodernism, 123–124 sexual violence, 126 standpoint theory, 123 structure, 134 feminist new materialism (FNM), xli, 482, 625–628, 638, 654 Ferguson, M. W., Jr., 132, 503, 521 Fetters, M. D., 19 field actors, 74 field notes, 114, 154, 310, 330, 365, 385, 387, 483 field of relations, 484–488, 629 field sites, 263, 272 first-level codes. see coding Fisher, J. A., 290 Fisher, K., 91 Fiske, D. W., 4

INDEX

Fitch, K., 202 Flanigan, J., 208 flat ontology, 562 Flecha, R., 14 Fleming, P., 494 flexibility (methodological), 189–191 Flores, M. L., 7, 8 flows, 243, 477, 481–482, 484, 486–487, 635 fluidity (methodological), 190 Flyvberg, A., 50 Flyvbjerg, B., 382, 643 focus groups, xxxvi, 152–153, 297, 298 Follett, M. P., 73 Foot, K., 7 Forbes, D. A., 502 Ford, C. E., 441, 450 Foucault, M., 183, 495 foundationalism, 66, 69 Foust, C. R., 58 Fox, S., 407 Frandsen, S., 323, 331 Freeman, A., 144 Ganesh, S., 571, 607, 609, 614, 616 Garcia, G. A., 18 Garfinkel, H., 105, 110, 439, 447 Garza, S. A., 615 Gavin, J., 647 Geertz, C., 330, 404, 465 Geiger, D., 407, 410 Geist-Martin, P., 211 gender, 123–131, 133–142, 144–146, 150–151, 182–183, 230–231, 441–444, 499–500, 502–503, 569–571, 573–574, 638, 653–654 General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), 352, 370 generalization, 389 genetic testing, 171–175 Georgakopoulou, A., 440 Gergen, K., 245 Gherardi, S., 476, 486 Gibbs, J., 348, 350, 536, 598, 614 Giddens, A., 495 Gill, M. J., 96 Gill, R., 322, 325–327, 367, 493 Gillborn, D., 144 Gioia, D., 385, 395 Gioia methodology, xxxvii, 385 Giorgi, A., 86, 87, 94 Gist-Mackey, A., 30, 148, 154, 323, 326, 331, 373, 493, 500, 505 Glaser, B. G., 381 globalization, xl, 59, 607–611, 615, 620 Global North, 162–163, 172, 231, 656 Global South, 7, 162–165, 167–169, 171–172, 504, 612–613, 653 Glozer, S., 348 Gluesing, J., 614

687

Goffman, E., 56, 388 Goins, M. N., 148 Goldstein Hode, M., 497 Goodall, H. L., Jr., 221, 223, 224, 674 good story components appropriateness, 405 clarity, 404 fidelity, 404–405 interest, 404 originality, 405 relevance, 405 seamlessness, 405 spontaneity, 405 structure, 404 vitality, 404 Goodyear-Smith, F., 20 Gorden, W., 613 Gorgias (Plato), 418 Gotsi, M., 532, 534, 535 Graf, E-M., 441, 448 Graham, D., 207 Grammar of Motives (Burke), 52, 429 Greenbaum, T., 300 Greene, J. C., 5, 6 Greimas, A., 105, 112 Griffin, L., 57 Griffin, R., 146, 148, 232 Grimes, D., 503 Grimshaw, E., 207 Grobler, A. F., 151 Gronbeck, B., 423 Gross, A. G., 423, 424 grounded theory (GT), 409, 532, 536–537, 539–540, 543. see also tensional analysis methods group interviews, 18, 111, 300, 309–310 Groupo Industrial Gutiérrez de Velasco (GDV), 204 Guattari, F., 667 Gulinello, F., 208 Guntzviller, L., 393 Gylfe, P., 540 Habermas, J., 500 habitualization, 298–299, 305, 313 habitus, xlii, xliii Hafen, S., 406 Halberstam, J., 190 Hall, D., 91 Hancock, P., 92 Harasym, S., 166 Haraway, D., 123, 664 Harding, N., 184 Harding, S., 123 Hardy, C., 494 Harré, R., 664 Harris, K. L., 193, 477, 482, 483, 497, 631 Harrison, Matthew, 148 Harrison, Millie, 286 Hart, T., 205, 206, 208

688

THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF QUALITATIVE RESEARCH IN ORGANIZATIONAL COMMUNICATION

Harvey, D., 163 Haseki, M., 287–288 Hastings, S. O., 207 Hauber-Özer, M., 522 Have, P., 440 Hayano, D., 224 Haynes, J., 55 headnotes, 24 health contexts, 148 Heath, R. G., 501 Heckman, S. M., 148 Hedge, R. S., 231 hegemony, 498 Heidegger, M., 83, 88, 91 Helmer, J., 410 Hendrix, K., 148 Heracleous, L., 601 Hermant, E., 560 hermeneutic circle, 53, 90 hermeneutic phenomenology. see phenomenology Hernes, T., 551, 559 Herrmann, A., 29, 222, 226 Herzog, H., 300 Hess, A., 431, 432 hierarchical coding. see coding higher education, 29, 148, 224, 227, 385, 459, 482, 675 Hindmarsh, J., 443 historical discourse analysis (HAD), 45–49, 190–192, 220–221, 223, 229, 253, 285–288, 291–292, 300–301, 303–304, 307–308, 330–331, 333–334, 349–351, 369–371, 419, 513–515, 575–577, 579–580, 601–602 Ho, E. Y., 204–206 Holmes, T. L., 213n7 hooks, b., 232, 233 Hopper, T., 652 Horan, S., 613 horizonalization, 85, 87 Hsu, V. J., 188 Huffman, T. P., 390 Hultin, L., 284 humans, 671 action, 72 organizing, xxx Humphreys, M., 408 Hurlow, S., 542 Husserl, E., 83, 86, 88, 90, 93, 95 Hutchins, D., 571, 573, 574 Hutchins, E., 110 Hwang, J. M., 433 hybrid analytical stance, 614–615 compilation and creativity, 615–616 depth and scale, 615 K-pop, 617–620 patterns and uniqueness, 616–617 universality and specificity, 617 hybridity, 607 Hymes, D., 200–203, 214n13

identification, 25, 27, 37, 52–53, 381, 384, 419, 421, 427–428, 523 identities, 181, 191, 193, 201, 206, 208, 210, 212, 539, 569, 571, 672–673 liberalism, 59 social, 571 ideograph movement, 57 ideology, 34, 55, 58, 132–134, 163, 167, 169, 173 I/eye concept, 665 image management, 46, 51 imitation game, 16 imperialism, 164, 231 new imperialism, 163 inclusion-exclusion paradox, 132–133 incommensurability, 5 in-depth interviews, 132, 300, 348–349, 493–494, 513, 572 inductive approaches, 346, 534–536, 544, 577 Infante, D., 613 information, communication, and computational technologies (ICCTs), 307 informed consent, 233, 270, 289, 334, 352, 369–370, 611, 637 insider-outsider roles, 571–572 institutional ethnography. see ethnography institutional review board (IRB), 191, 233, 274, 285, 287, 289, 291, 351–352, 367, 369, 637 integrated model, 48–52 integrating data, 9 integrative method. see tensional analysis methods integrative methodology, xxxvii, xxxix, 382, 385, 532, 536, 539, 540, 543, 544. see also tensional analysis methods intensities, 477, 481, 484 interdisciplinary research approach, 232, 679 areas of study, 182 boundaries, xxxi collaboration, 167, 655 community, 543 critical social research, 171 debates, 127, 129 discussions, xxxvii ethnographic research, 37 field, 167 framework, 144, 168 genre, xxxiv landscape, 232 nature of narrative research, 400 projects, 167 resources, 639 roots, 126 study of language, xxxx teams, 10 International Communication Association (ICA), 205, 224, 391 internationalism, 59 interpretive phenomenology. see phenomenology interpretivism, 3, 11–12, 264

INDEX

interpretivist philosophical commitments, 12 intersectionality, 143, 145–147, 150–151, 154, 230–231, 569–571, 573–574, 581, 672–673 interviewees, xxxvi, 208, 273–275, 303–305, 307–310, 312, 331 interviewer, xxxvi, 187, 301–308, 310, 313, 328, 649 interviewer-as-romantic approaches, 303 interviews, xxxvi, 95, 297 accounts, 304, 310, 311 approach, 301 controlled conversation, 298 conversation, 298–299 craft, 298–299 current representations, 304–311 data, 408 field, 330 formal, 330–331 framing, 298 group, 310 history, 299–301 informal, 330–331 life-history, 406 philosophical approaches to, 301–304 photo-elicitation, 363–364 (see also visual data) representations of, 304–311 semi-structured protocols, 311 situations, 309–310 verbatim, 299 virtual, 522 intra-organizational datasets, 352 Introna, L., 284 in vivo codes, 388 irony, 534 Jackson, R. L., 148 Jackson, Z. I., 633 Jacquez, F., 247 Jahn, J., 282, 304, 306, 308, 310, 312 James, W., 52, 67 Jarzabkowski, P., 535, 552 Jayakumar, U. M., 146 Jefferson, G., 108, 110, 439 Jemielniak, D., 614 Jenner, B. M., 649 Jensen, P. R., 190, 332, 570 Jian, G. W., 514 Jiménez, G., 542 Jiwani, F. N., 290 job selection process, 148 Johannessen-Schmidt, M. C., 123 Johnsen, R., 554 Johnson, A. L., 188 Johnson, E. P., 193 Johnson, G. A., 652 Jones, S. E., 193, 303, 309, 392n1, 393, 516, 521 Kallinikos, J., 592 Kalou, Z., 214n15

689

Kang, D., 616 Kang, K. K., 287 Karikari, E., 171, 504 Kärreman, D., 54–55, 108, 112, 496–497 Katila, S., 475 Keating, A., 629 Kenney, S. C., 186, 187 Kerfoot, D., 185 “The Kernel of Pragmatism” (Peirce), 68 Kim, H., 350, 392, 600, 616 King, I., 564 Kingsford, A. N., 373, 386 Kisselburgh, L. G., 368, 371, 482 Kitzinger, C., 444 Kjær, K. M., 236 Kjærsgaard, M. G., 238 knowledge economy, 175 knowledge management (KM), 518 Koller, V., 449 Koopman, C., 592 Koschmann, M. A., 106, 393 Kramer, M., 24, 615 Krawchenko, T., 290 Krippendorf, K., 106 Krizek, R. L., 221, 401, 409, 412 Kroon, A. C., 394 Krueger, J., 98 Kuhn, T., 5, 106, 112, 298, 442, 626 Kunda, G., 328, 333 Kvale, S., 301–303 Laaksonen, S-M., 346 Laitinen, K., 346, 350, 599 Landmark, A. M. D., 446 Lane, J., 610 Lane, R., 68 language and social interaction (LSI), xxxiii–xxxiv, 104, 205, 212, 440, 448 Lanigan, R., 83, 89–91 Larsen, H., 238 Larsson, M., 441, 444 Lasswell, H., 52 Lather, P., 629 Latour, B., 57, 105, 560, 563, 666 law of the situation, 66, 72–73, 78 Lazarsfeld, P., 300 leadership, 48, 69, 92, 142, 146–148, 171, 184, 285–286, 438, 441–442, 444–447, 449, 494–495 learning organization (LO), 136 Lee, S. K., 7, 8 Leeds-Hurwitz, W., 202 LeGreco, M., 538 Leighter, J. L., 207 LeMaster, B., 188, 194 Leonard, A., 151 Leonardi, P., 349, 473, 474, 518, 519, 598, 599, 602 Lie, S., 207 life-history interviews, 406

690

THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF QUALITATIVE RESEARCH IN ORGANIZATIONAL COMMUNICATION

life story analysis. see narrative analysis Lincoln Y. S., 393 Lindemann, K., 225 Lindlof, T. R., 10, 322, 324, 381, 612 line-by-line coding. see coding lingua franca, xxxx–xliii, 638 Lipari, L., 250 Litrenta, M. L., 192 lived experience, 13, 16, 20, 26, 29, 30, 31, 39, 89, 90, 95, 96, 97, 126, 132, 133, 155, 232, 233, 243, 248, 249, 289, 401, 407, 408, 412, 430, 676 Llewellyn, N., 443 Lobe, B., 647 Locke, J., 67 Long, Z., 134, 308, 461, 617 Lopez, C. S., 225, 226 Luhmann, N., 104–106 Lundholm, S. E., 441, 444 Lyne, J., 423 Maclean, M., 406, 409 MacLure, M., 485 Mahalingham, R., 96 Maier, C. D., 492, 498 Mäkinen, E. I., 495 Making Social Science Matter (Flyvbjerg), 382 Malesh, P., 58 Malvini Redden, S., 389 management, 184 discourse, 539 meeting, 253 scholar, 664 Management Communication Quarterly (MCQ), xxxi, 128, 129, 224, 305, 359, 394, 424 Manly, J., 306 Manning, J., 183 mapping, 117, 167, 247, 347, 429, 455, 484, 486, 543 marginalization, 17, 30, 133, 144, 183, 225, 292, 306, 672–674, 677 Marker, M., 639 Markle, T., 653 Markus, M. L., 513 Martel, R., 20 Martin, J., 207, 407, 410 Martinez, J. M., 89–91 Martinez, L. V., 388 Martiny, K. M., 82 Marx, 55 Marzi, S., 650 Masanat, M., 651 masking whiteness, 503 Maslow, A., 76 Masri, A. A., 651 materiality, xxxviii–xl, 55–56, 371–372, 474, 477–478, 482, 498–500, 519, 537–538, 540, 543–544, 552–553, 557–560, 666–667 materiality and affect entitative framing, 473–474 entities, 472

mutual influence, 472 ontological framings of, 472–478 post-human, 472 materialization, 553, 558, 668 Matte, F., 108, 322 Mayo, E., 299 Mazzei, L., 666 Mbembe, A., 653 McAllum, K., 86 McCarthy, C., 454 McCloskey, D., 423 McCormack, D. P., 555 McDonald, J., 188, 231, 313, 325, 504, 572 McGee, M., 57, 423 McIsaac, C. M., 24 McKenna-Buchanan, T., 189 McNamee, S., 501 McPhee, R. D., 105 Mease, J. J., 303, 475, 477, 486, 493, 501, 542 Médecins sans Frontières (MSF)/Doctors Without Borders, 108, 109, 460, 541 Meisenbach, R. J., 89, 429, 433, 571, 573, 574 meliorism. see pragmatist approach membership categorization analysis (MCA), 441, 443. see also conversation analysis member checking, 154, 652 member reflections. see phronetic iterative qualitative data analysis (PIQDA) memos, 331, 340 analytic memos, 390, 393 Merleau-Ponty, M., 83, 90, 91 Mertens, D. M., 19 Merton, R., 300 Mertova, P., 403 metacommunication, 464, 501, 535 metaphor, 32, 55, 225, 322, 423, 429, 440, 500, 556, 630, 637 metaventriloquism, 464 metonymy, 423, 429 #MeToo, 125, 653, 673 Meyer, R. E., 362, 363 Middleton, M. K., 430 Mikkelsen, E. N., 92, 96, 97 Milburn, T., 202, 208, 210, 211 Miller, K., 227 Mintzberg, H., 449 Miron-Spektor, E., 534 Mitra, R., 617 mixed methods, 3, 4 aparadigmatic, 10 approaches, xxxi complementarity, 6 concurrent nested/embedded strategy, 8 designs, 4, 6–8 expansion, 6 initiation, 6 interpretation in, 8–9 multi-paradigm, 10 multiphase strategy, 8

INDEX

pragmatism, 3–5 purposes for, 6 sequential explanatory strategy, 8 sequential exploratory design, 7 single-paradigm, 10 transformative strategy, 8 triangulation, 6, 7 mixed research approach, 9–12, 19. see also mixed methods mixing critical and postpositivist paradigms, 16–18 modernization, 164 Molina-Azorin, J. F., 19 Molina-Markham, E., 207 Molloy, C., 290 Monahan, T., 290 Monge, P., 565n1, 674 Morgan, E., 207 Morgan, G., 264 Morsing, M., 433 motif, xli, 675–676 Moustakas, C., 86, 95 Muhr, S. L., 189 multimodal analysis, 441, 498. see also conversation analysis multiplicity, 25, 31, 35, 85, 105, 125, 455, 581, 666, 675, 678 multiplism, 5–6 Mumby, D. K., 174, 222, 410, 494, 496, 499, 571 Mungaray, K. R., 494 Muñoz, J. E., 182, 194, 628, 629 Murphy, A. G., 323, 329, 330 mutual influence framing. see ontological framings Myers, K. C., 649 Myles, D., 461 narrative content analysis, 411 data, 407 identity, 665 inquiry, 406 repetition, 407 temporality, 554 turn, 400 narrative analysis, 111–113 characters, 402t collecting published stories, 407 collecting visual images, 408 conducting interviews, 406 critical, 410 data in organizations, 408–409 definition, 400–402 discursive assemblage, 401 emplotment, 401 fantasy theme analysis, 410 good story components, 403–404 life story analysis, 410–411 observing lived experiences, 407 opportunities for, 412–413 sensemaking process, 401 sexual harassment, 406 thematic, 409–410

691

Näslund, L., 406 Nathues, E., 115, 116, 460, 461 National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), 328, 348 National Communication Association (NCA), 103, 142, 224 necropolitics, 653 negotiating access, xxxvi, 279 building confidence, 288–289 building relationships, 283–284 concerns, 280–282 crisis, 292–293 cultural considerations, 284 dangerous or difficult contexts, 289–293 dealbreakers, 284–286 defining, 280 dissertations, 286–288 hidden organizations, 289–291 issues of, 289–291 type of, 283 vulnerable populations, 290–291 negotiating identity, 325–326 neoliberal capitalism. see capitalism neoliberalism, 617 New Handbook of Organizational Communication (Putnam and Fairhurst), 419 new imperialism. see imperialism new social movement (NSM), 56, 58 New York Times, 300 Ngwu, N. M., 626 Nieto-Fernandez, B., 173, 176 Nissenbaum, A., 347, 598 nongovernmental organization (NGO), 135–136, 616 nonhuman agency. see agency nonhuman agents. see agency nonprofits, 148 organizations, 7 normativity, 183–188, 231 Novak, D. R., 306, 368, 369 Noyes. A. L., 521 NVivo, 36, 368, 387, 391, 392, 556 observational approaches, 310 observational data, 92 observational methods, 36 observational techniques, 521 O’Connor, E., 409 Ojha, A. K., 213n7 Olbrechts-Tyteca, L., 419, 424–426, 433 Olufowote, J. O., 410 one-on-one interviews, 152–153 ontological framings entitative framing, 473–474 mutual influence framing, 474–476 post-human framing, 476–478 ontological paradox, 47 ontology, xxxix, xli, 104, 106, 144, 186–188, 210, 372, 553, 555, 572, 627–628 Oostervink, N., 600 open science, 334, 655

692

THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF QUALITATIVE RESEARCH IN ORGANIZATIONAL COMMUNICATION

Orbe, M., 90, 93, 95, 146, 147, 226 orders of data, 213n6 Oreg, A., 32 O’Reilly, M., 448 organization as container, 32, 34, 206, 239, 626, 676 as process, 239 Organizational Autoethnographies: Power and Identity in Our Working Lives (Herrmann), 29 organizational communication, xxx discipline of, 36, 391, 626, 638 disembodied to embodied, 676–677 field of, xxxii, 104, 112, 166, 170, 171, 185, 222, 288, 300, 312, 313, 339, 353, 416, 426, 428, 449, 493, 495, 499, 502, 506, 552, 571, 616, 630, 654 top-down models, 677 organizational discourse analysis (ODA), xxxix, 108, 419, 424, 442, 532, 536, 539–540 organizational discourse studies (ODS), 108 Organizational rhetoric approaches to, 421–422t argumentation repertoires, 425 argumentative approach, 419, 424–426 classical approach, 419–424 conceptions of, 46–58 dramatistic approach, 419, 426–430 fieldwork approach, 419, 430–432 genres, 425 history of, 45 identification, 427 participant advocacy, 431 pre-classical, 46 organizationality, 105, 107, 110, 113, 668 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), 334 organizations, 213 conflicts, 464–465 culture, 207, 464 ethics, 51 ethnography, 33–34 hidden, 289–291 inquiry, 71–75, 132 narratives, 167–170 paradox research, 533 presentification, 114 organizations/organizing/organizationality, 105, 107, 110, 113, 319 organizing agency. see postqualitative inquiry organizing diffraction. see postqualitative inquiry organizing holism. see postqualitative inquiry Orlikowski, W. J., 668 O’Shea, S., 188 other, 26, 128, 151, 162–163, 166, 304, 664 Pacanowsky, M., 221, 222 Pal, M., 231 Palmer, B., 55 Palmer, V. M., 297, 298

Panayiotou, A., 535 paradigms axiological commitment, 14 epistemological commitments, 13 Eurocentric, 231 ontological commitment, 13 wars, 5 paradoxes, xxxix, 53, 531 paranoid organization, 323 paranoid reading, 631 Parker, M., 182–184 Parker, P. S., 145, 146, 148, 572, 630 parochialism contemporary, 612–613 epistemic, 613–614 methodological, 611, 612 pragmatic, 611 theoretical, 611 types of, 611 Parr, B., 205 participant observation, 87, 90–91, 154, 190, 212, 300, 319, 422, 429, 607, 645 participant viewpoint ethnography (PVE), 364 participatory action research, 249, 252, 381, 578 participatory methods active participating, 322–323 complete participating, 323–324 complete witnessing, 321 data collection, 324 embodiment, 327–328 ethnography, 323 field notes, 329–330 focused participating, 321–322 headnotes, 329 jottings, 329 leaving the site, 332–333 negotiating access, 324–325 negotiating identity, 325–326 phases and techniques, 324–333 raw notes, 329 shadowing, 321–322 showing up, 326–327 typology of, 320–324 witnessing continuum, 320f participatory positionality, 248–249 participatory research methods, xxxvi Patterson, G., 188 Pearce, C., 446, 447 Peirce, C. S., 67–71, 74–76, 83, 458, 466n2 Pemer, F., 406 pentad, 52, 421t, 428, 429 Perelman, C., 419, 424–426, 433 performative process stories, 564 Periyar Malineekarana Virudha Samithi (Periyar Anti-Pollution Campaign, PMVS), 167, 169 personal web usage (PWU), 86 Peters, K., 209 Peterson, B. L., 289, 290

INDEX

Peticca-Harris, A., 280 phenomenology advancement of qualitative, 98 approaches, xxxiii, 83, 84–85t challenges, 92–94 descriptive method, 86 embodied, 91 future, 97–98 goal of, 83 hermeneutic, 88, 90, 91, 97 hybrid, 97 intentionality, 86 interpretation, 90 interpretive, 87–92 research, 94–97 semiotic, 89–90 structural descriptions, 87 textural descriptions, 87 transcendental, 83–87 Philipsen, G., 200, 203 Phillip, N., 494 Phillips, A., 674 philosophical commitments, 11–12t photo elicitation interviewing (PEI), 363–364, 370 photo-visual methods (PVM), 332 photovoice, 133, 359, 361, 363–365, 370, 372, 406, 408, 484, 523 phronesis, 49, 50, 382, 383, 431, 494, 643. see also phronetic iterative qualitative data analysis (PIQDA) phronetic iterative approach, 76. see also phronetic iterative qualitative data analysis (PIQDA) phronetic iterative qualitative data analysis (PIQDA), xl, xxxvii, 381, 385f activities, 390–391 axial coding, 388 (see also coding) code, 387 compassion, 386 first-level codes, 387–388 generalization, 389 hierarchical coding, 388 (see also coding) issues, 386–391 iterative analysis approaches, 391–393 iterative approach, 384 member reflections, 389 as methodology, 382–383 open coding, 387 (see also coding) phronesis, 382 phronetic approach, 385 primary cycle coding, 387, 388 qualitative methodologies, 383–386 quality, 389–390 reflexive process, 384 research design and focus, 386–387 researcher, 386, 387 resonance, 389 secondary cycle coding, 388 social science, 383

693

strength of, 395 transferability, 390 umbrella approach, 384 physiological responses, 281 Pink, S., 31, 370 Plano Clark, V. L., 6–8 platform organizing, 668 Plato, 48, 49, 418 Plotnikof, M., 174, 571 pluralism, xxxiii, 66, 73–74, 77, 79 Poell, T., 351 Polkinghorne, D., 401, 409 Pollock, D., 57 Polster, E., 407 positionality, 569 analysis, 577–578 catalytic validity, 580 domination, 573 identities, 571 power, 573 privilege, 574 reflexivity, 580–581 relational, 570 positionally reflexive work, 570, 577, 581 positivism, 4–5, 16, 613 postcolonial approaches, xxxiv, 148, 231 postcolonial critical discourse analysis (PCDA), 162, 164, 170–176 postcolonial ethnography, 161, 164–167, 176 postcolonialism, xxviii, 59 postcolonial qualitative research, 161–176 commitments, 162 ethnography, 161, 164–166 reflexivity, 165–166 solidarity, 165–166 postcolonial theory, 171, 231, 504 post-human affective analysis, 483–487 post-human framing. see ontological framings postindustrial organizing, xxx postmodernism, 54, 123–124, 182, 264, 613 postpositivism, 4, 264 axiological commitments, 15 ontological commitments, 15 philosophical commitments, 14–15 postqualitative inquiry, 625 and feminist new materialism (FNM), 635–638 organizing agency, 633–635 organizing diffraction, 630–633 organizing holism, 628–630 peer debriefing, 637 relational approach, 625 relational history of, 626–628 relational ontology, xli situational analysis, 632 postqualitative organizational communication research, xli Poulakidakos, S., 58 Pöyry, E., 346

694

THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF QUALITATIVE RESEARCH IN ORGANIZATIONAL COMMUNICATION

power abuse of, 163 authority and, 115 axes, 136 centers, 30 colonial, 162 discourse and, 171, 494, 501, 505 as (dis-)empowerment, 145 domination and, xl, 570, 572–574, 578–581 dynamics, 17, 97, 130, 132, 149, 151, 170, 223, 243, 280, 500, 515, 516, 539, 574, 629, 637 embedded, 165 generative, 77 hegemonic, 173 identity and, 443 imbalance(s), xxxiv, 130, 161, 176, 447, 579 imperial sites of, 163 inequality and, 171 in interaction, 115 labor, 169 lines of, 231 of persuasion, 48 of storytelling, 239 oppression and, 13, 323 relations/relationships, 13, 17, 27, 32, 33, 54, 73, 131, 144, 162, 163, 165, 170, 171, 273, 383, 474, 494, 496, 521, 538, 541, 571–573, 614, 630, 677 resistance to, 229 systems of, 31, 143, 147, 188, 264, 494, 573 structures, 13, 14, 16, 17, 18, 30, 125, 131, 146, 165, 166, 170, 408, 513, 633 practical theory. see engaged scholarship approaches practice/practices, xxxx–xliii, 8, 24, 26, 27, 32, 35, 48, 51, 58, 72, 79, 92, 105, 106, 109, 110, 111, 113–116, 123, 128, 132, 135, 145, 146, 149, 150, 151, 153–156, 162, 163, 165–167, 170–172, 175, 182, 184, 188–190, 201–213, 222–226, 230–233, 240–246, 250–255, 265, 269, 272, 289, 294, 298, 299, 301, 304, 305, 310, 312, 313, 320, 322, 323, 328, 342, 344, 349, 361–363, 382, 384, 386, 389, 390, 392, 395, 401, 423, 430, 440, 444–450, 456, 474, 481–487, 493–499, 502, 503, 505, 512, 514–516, 519–524, 532, 534, 535, 537, 538, 540, 542, 552–561, 564, 570, 577, 581, 593, 597, 598, 599, 600, 601, 611, 612, 615, 617, 618, 626–628 pragmatist approach, 9, 66, 67, 71–75 abduction, 79 anti-foundationalist position, 69–70 ecological emergence, 74 estheticizing process, 75 experimenting, 79 law of the situation, 78 maxim, 71 mediating, 79 meliorism, 79 methodological opportunism, 78

methodology, 76 philosophical tradition, xxxiii pluralist community of inquiry, 79 qualitative vs. quantitative methodologies, 75–76 reflexive, 304 research method consequences, 78–79 scholars’ role in inquiry, 74–75 theory, 68–69 tradition, 67–71 valuation, 78 pre-individual sensations, 480t presentification, 115, 474, 495 primary cycle coding. see phronetic iterative qualitative data analysis (PIQDA) Priya, A., 96 process ontology, xxxix, 471, 551–565, 572 professionalism, 326 Ptacek, J. K., 573 public policy, 538 public scholarship, 241 Putnam, L. L., 56, 107, 241, 382, 385, 419, 426, 429, 430, 534, 539, 573, 673 qualitative analysis categorization, 562 materiality, 557–559 process, 551 spatiality, 555–557, 559 temporality, 553–555, 559 typification, 562 writing, 563–564 qualitative data collection methods, xxxv, 95, 143 qualitative relational practice (QRP), 240–244, 243, 246, 251, 254, 255 Qualitative Research Methods (Tracy), 391 qualitize, 9 quantitative methods, 8 quare theory, 193 queer and trans people of color (QTPOC), 193 queer approaches, xxxiv, 181 autoethnography, 187–188 backstage, 190 cisheteronormativity, 183 diversity management, 185 epistemologies, 186 ethnography, 187 intellectual foundations of, 182–184 interviewing, 187 kaleidoscopic approach, 186 methodologies, 185–186 normativity, 183 ontologies, 186 organizational communication, 193 queering organizational research, 184–185 reflexivity, 188–189 theory, 181, 231 work and organization, 192–193 Quickfall, A., 646

INDEX

Rabelo, V. C., 96 race, 125–126, 142, 172–173, 175, 193, 307–308, 501–503, 569–574, 629–630, 653–654 racism, 30, 128, 132, 142–146, 150, 153–156, 230, 233, 501, 503, 637–638 radical discourse, 54–55 Ramasubramanian, S., 614 Ramirez, J. J., 18 Ramos, J., 90 rationalism, 67 Ravazzani, S., 492, 498 realism, 68, 84 reasoning, three forms of, 70–71 re-centering whiteness, 503 recruitment, 646–647 Redding, C., 673 reflexive pragmatism, 304 reflexivity, 165–166, 580 self-reflexivity, 12, 14, 16, 129, 225, 306, 511, 517 Reich, J. A., 646 reification, 55 Reinig, L., 207 Reisigl, M., 504 relational dialectics theory, 133, 538, 544 relationality, 126, 190, 251, 327, 459, 472, 573, 628–629 relational positionality, 570 Renko, M., 18 Rennstam, J., 328 Reñosa, M. D. C., 646, 653 representation, xxxii, xxxvii, xxxix, 57, 97, 131–133, 135, 162, 164, 166, 167, 212, 213, 225, 228, 234, 304–313, 322, 326, 334, 390, 411, 422t, 429, 439, 487, 517, 552, 555, 563, 569–582, 603 research design, xxxv avoiding harm, 270–271 collaborative, 272 confidentiality, 270 consent, 270 current issues, 273–275 data analysis, 271 definitions, 262–263 ethics, 270–271 field research, 266 financial issues, 274 integrity, 271 interviewees, 274–275 issues, 273–275 iterative, 272 key elements, 263–271 key principles, 262, 271–273 linear, 267 managing logistics, 274 nonlinear, 272 paradigms, 263–264 positionality, 273 pragmatic, 272 principles of, 271–273 professionalism, 271

695

reflexive, 272 research paradigms, 263–264 research questions, 265–266 sampling, 268–270 snowball approach, 269 technical issues, 274 theories, 264 topics and problems, 264–265 research questions (RQs), 635–636 resistance, 170, 183, 229, 493–494, 668, 673 resonance, 52, 188, 226, 270, 389–390, 485, 632, 634 restitution, xxxix, 552, 560–561, 563 rhetor, 45–59, 51, 55, 126, 204, 205, 223, 363, 366–367, 400, 418–433, 501, 601 Rhetoric (Aristotle), 49, 418 rhetorical analysis, xxxviii approaches to, 421–422t argumentation repertoires, 425 argumentative approach, 419, 424–426 classical approach, 419–424 dramatistic approach, 419, 426–430 fieldwork approach, 419, 430–432 genres, 425 identification, 427 participant advocacy, 431 rhetorical approaches, xxxi conceptions of, 46–58 history of, 45 pre-classical, 46 The Rhetoric of Economics (McCloskey), 423 Riach, K., 187 Rice, R. E., 522 Rice, R. M., 24–25, 330 Richards, K., 448 Richardson, L., 228 Ricoeur, P., 403 Riese, J., 280, 283 Riessman, C. K., 410 Riley, P., 208, 209 Rivera, K. D., 388 Rivera-Lopez, H., 284 Robbins, C. R., 92 Roberts, J. K., 648 Roberts, K. H., 110 Robertson, B., 286 Robichaud, D., 407 Robles, J. S., 115 Rodham, K., 647 Rollock, N., 144 romantic approaches, 303 Rosiek, J. L., 627, 633, 634 Rudnick, L., 207 Rumens, N., 185, 188, 231 Sacks, H., 110, 439, 443 Sadler-Smith, E., 214n15 Said, E. W., 162, 231 Saldaña, J., 390

696

THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF QUALITATIVE RESEARCH IN ORGANIZATIONAL COMMUNICATION

Saludadez, J. A., 115 Sambrook, S., 224 Samra-Fredericks, D., 441, 443 Sanders, C., 86 Sandler, S., 455, 466n1 Sanos, S., 630 Sartre, J.-P., 403 Sator, M., 448 Scarduzio, J. A., 321 Schaeffer, F. A., 629 Scharrer, E., 614 Schegloff, E., 110, 439 Schieber, A. C., 10 Schoeneborn, D., 106, 107, 112, 113, 115, 116, 553 Schoots, J., 136 Schultz, M., 559 Schwägerl, C., 115 Schwartz, B., 383, 395 Schwartz-Shea, P., 563 science, 11–12, 24–25, 86, 124, 172–175, 298, 382–383, 654–655 scientific theory, 4, 423 Scollo, M., 202 Scott, C. R., 212, 283, 286 Scott, S. V., 668 Sedgwick, E., 182 secondary cycle coding. see phronetic iterative qualitative data analysis (PIQDA) Seedhouse, P., 448 Seidman, S., 182 self-awareness, 29, 95, 675 self-reflexivity. see reflexivity Senda-Cook, S., 430 sensemaking, xxxiii, 37, 72, 88, 94, 97, 104, 112, 113, 131, 227, 228, 231, 234, 266, 272, 281, 303, 313, 323, 330, 332, 383, 401, 409, 412, 459, 471, 472, 512, 515 theory, 96 sensing paradox, xxxix, 532, 534–536 sequential exploratory design, 7 Serra Undurraga, J. K. A., 632 sexism, 125, 145–146, 150, 153, 233, 637 sexual harassment, 128, 406, 449, 493, 497, 673, 674 sexuality, 134, 150–151, 182–185, 569, 635 sexual orientation, 123, 130, 144, 183 shadowing, 92, 107, 108, 111, 114–116, 249, 320–322, 325, 359, 363, 365–366, 474, 649, 673. see also participatory methods Shah, P. P., 411 Sharpe, K., 383, 395 Sheep, M. L., 534 Shepherd, M., 20 Shifman, L., 347, 598 Shoemaker, D., 232 Shome, R., 231 Shotter, J., 501 silence, 132 Sillince, J., 425 Silverman, D., 445

Simons, H., 57 sincerity, 25, 312 Situating Selves (Carbaugh), 207 Sivunen, A., 350 Slutskaya, N., 373 Smith, A. R., 91 Smith, J. A., 89, 94 Smith, P., 447 social experiences, 15, 17 social identities. see identities socialization, 148, 230, 304, 307, 311, 371, 411, 439, 442 social justice, 19, 28, 30–31, 37, 128–130, 165, 167, 241, 653 social media, 344, 347, 428, 516, 591, 601, 646 algorithms, 351 platforms, 351 private, 291–292 social movement organizations (SMOS), xxxiii, 56–58 The Social Psychology of Organizing (Weick), 404 social scientific research, 67, 75, 149, 492 sociomateriality, xxxviii, 56, 499, 518, 557 concepts of, 471 meaning, 472 muscularity, 481 phenomena, 479–480t principles, 472 Sodeke, C. U., 148 solidarity, 125, 161, 164–167, 170, 190, 573 Søndergaard, D. M., 636, 637 Sonenshein, S., 408 Sorce, G., 33 Sorsa, V., 33 space, 28–29, 114, 133–134, 150–153, 205, 331–332, 334, 474–477, 479–482, 485–487, 497–498, 504, 511–512, 521–522, 555–560 spacing, 110, 366, 555 spatiality, xxxix, 29, 479, 552–553, 555, 557–560 Spee, P., 552 speech codes theory (SCT), 203–206, 208–209, 211, 212 Spicer, A., 494 Spivak, G., 162, 166, 634 sports organizations, 148 Sprain, L., 209 St. Pierre, E. A., 635 Standing Council of Trade Unions (SCTU), 167 standpoint theory, 123, 502 Starks, H., 96 Stasik, A., 614 Stephens, K. K., 254, 282, 286, 288, 291, 293, 359 Stephenson, K. A., 556 Stevens, S. M., 58 stigma, 34, 185, 287, 571, 573, 574, 576 stigma communications, 573 Stohl, C., 108, 109, 222, 330, 595, 607, 609, 611 Stohl, M., 108, 109 Stratton, M. T., 86, 95 Strauss, A., 25, 114, 381 structure, 134, 267, 402, 412

INDEX

struggle over power, xxxix, 493–496 over meaning and action, 493, 496–498 over discourse and materiality, 493, 498–500 over discursive openings/closings, 493, 500–502 over difference, 502–504 Stuart, F., 610 subject, 48, 471, 666–667 subject positions, 487 Suddaby, R. 97 Sullivan, K. R., 327, 328, 333 suspicion, 505 sustainability, 132, 134, 433, 443, 502, 543, 617 symbols, 23, 201, 207, 498, 556 synecdoche, 423, 429 Sworn, H., 7 Tannen, D., 456 Tarin, C. A., 639 Taylor, B. C., 10, 37, 38, 114, 115, 167, 224, 225, 227, 233, 322, 324, 381, 612, 647 Taylor, C. A., 625 Taylor, J. R., 66, 105, 108, 442 technology, 512, 516, 519, 589, 593, 600, 602, 646, 650 temporality, xxxix, 7–8, 55, 253, 344, 552–555, 557–560 tensions, 531 analysis methods, 533t deductive approach, 534 inductive approach, 534 tensional knots, 534 tensional analysis methods grounded theory, 536–537 discourse tracing, 537–538 contrapuntal analysis, 538–539 integrative method, 539–540 ventriloquial analysis, 541–542 applied tensional analysis, 542 terra firma, 110, 366, 450, 459, 460, 553 Terry, D. P., 475, 501 text, 50, 52, 55, 170, 172, 341, 343–344, 391, 498, 517–518, 533, 598–599 textual analysis, xxxi, 24, 346–348, 493–494, 496, 498, 538 Thackaberry, J. A., 502 thematic narrative analysis. see narrative analysis thick description, 330, 563 Thomas, J., 30 Thomas, K., 148 Thyssen, O., 433 Tian, Z., 308 time, 24–27, 38, 254, 281–284, 303–307, 321–325, 329–330, 332–334, 343–344, 347–350, 386–388, 479–481, 486–487, 519–521, 551–556, 558–559, 561, 575–576, 644–652, 674 series analysis, 565n1 Todd, Z., 633 Toerien, M., 444 Tompkins, P., 673 totalitarianism, 48

697

Towns, A. R., 633 tracing, xxxix, 481, 543 Tracy, S. J., 25, 29, 37, 76–78, 211, 225, 226, 309, 321, 329, 332, 333, 382, 387–391, 393, 394, 516, 521, 612, 638, 643, 649 trans* employees, 392n1 transcendental phenomenology. see phenomenology transferability, 390. see also phronetic iterative qualitative data analysis (PIQDA) Transgender Resource Center (TGRC), 190, 191, 331 transphobia, 190 travelers, 303, 388 Treem, J. W., 321, 349, 518 Trethewey, A., 473, 475, 535 triangulation design, 7 Trujillo, C., 90 Trujillo, N., 221, 673 trustworthiness, 270, 331, 563, 580 Tull, A., 227 Turing, A., 16 23andMe, 172–175 Twitter, 291, 342, 346–347, 517, 596–597, 646 uncertainty, 96, 223, 304, 608 unobtrusive control, 427 upstream ventriloquation, 457–459, 466n3. see also ventriloquial analysis Vagle, M., 93, 97 van Amsterdam, N., 228, 238, 476, 479 Van De Mieroop, D., 444 van der Tuin, I., 627, 629, 632, 633 Van de Ven, A. H., 239, 244, 245, 254 Van Every, E. J., 66, 442 Van Gilder, B., 187 van Leeuwen, T., 498 Van Manen, M., 88, 89, 93, 94, 96 van Vuuren, M., 115 Vasilyeva, A. L., 115, 116, 209 Vásquez, C., 107, 108, 111, 115, 366, 535, 555, 563, 626 Vaughn, L. M., 247 Veblen, T., 26 Veneti, A., 57 ventriloquation, xxxviii, 454, 455–459, 461–463, 466 ventriloquial analysis, xxxviii. see also tensional analysis methods approach, 77, 545n2 craft, 461–463 downstream, 456–457 lens, 464 multivocality, 456 organizational conflicts, 464–465 organizational culture, 464 process, 461 scope, 459–461 tensional approach, 541–542 thesis, 455–459 upstream, 457–459

698

THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF QUALITATIVE RESEARCH IN ORGANIZATIONAL COMMUNICATION

ventriloquism, 77, 115–116, 454–456, 465, 540–541 verbatim interviews, 299 Vézy, C., 561, 572 video shadowing. see visual data vignette, 574–576 Villamil, A. M., 134 Villanueva, G., 614 Vindrola-Padros, C., 652 virtual interviews. see interviews virtual work, 512, 515, 516, 522, 523, 600 virtualization, 515, 647–649, 651–652 virtue, 49–50, 463, 476, 609, 665 visibility, 311, 351, 515–516, 523, 593, 600, 615, 617 visual culture, 362, 371, 679 visual data affect, 372 archaeological approach, 362 collection of, 358–373 consent, 369 content of, 359 dialogical approach, 363 documenting approach, 363 epistemology, 361–363 equipment, 368 ethical considerations, 369–370 institutional concerns, 369 interviews, 360 materiality, 371–372 methodological innovation, 371 methods, 358–359 multi-sensorial, 361 as a new form of communication, 359–360 participants, 368 photos and videos, 367 photo-elicitation interviews, 291, 371. see also interviews photovoice, 364–365 practice approach, 362 relationship with participants, 360–361 storage and organization, 368–369 strategic approach, 363 technology, 368 use of, 360 value of, 361 video shadowing, 365–366 visual rhetorical approach, 367 voice, 125, 132–133, 226–230, 245–246, 364–365, 462–463, 465, 665–666, 677–678 volunteer, 308 vulnerable populations, 290, 293 Vom Lehn, D., 97 Voting Rights Act (1965), 125 Walzer, A., 423, 424 Wang, C., 364

Warner, M., 182 Warren, S., 372 Wasson, C., 441 Watts, V., 627 Way, A. K., 189, 389 Weathers, C., 58 Webb, C., 4 Webster, L., 403 Weick, K. E., 66, 96, 104, 110, 390, 426, 564, 615 Wells, C. C., 367 Westernization, 164 Wetherell, M., 440 White dominance, 174, 503 whiteness, 97, 130–132, 144, 149, 172, 174, 183, 186, 193, 503, 571, 633–634. see also critical discourse analysis (CDA) White privilege, 503–504, 666 white woman, 157n1 Wiederhold, A., 329, 330 Wieland, S. M., 322 wild public networks, 347 Wilhoit, E., 114, 368, 460, 482 Wilhoit Larson, E., 364, 371, 639, 648 Wilkins, R., 208 Williams, H., 93, 94 Williams, P., 144 Windsor, C., 30 Witman, P., 286 witnessing, xxxvi, 23, 24, 29, 131, 319–321, 329, 330, 335, 383, 639 Witteborn, S., 33, 207 Wodak, R., 504 Wolf, K., 208 Wolfe, A. W., 242, 243, 409, 460, 462, 463 Woo, D., 502 Wood, J. T., 502 workability, 384 Working (Terkel), 407 writing, xxxix, 24, 89–90, 113–114, 156, 187–191, 222, 224–228, 232–234, 389–390, 420–422, 560–561, 563, 571, 655–656, 673–675 Wurth, K. B., 631 Wyant, M., 615 Yammer, 350 Yang, C., 407 Yanow, D., 563 Zachry, M., 426 Zahavi, D., 94 Zaug, P., 105 Zembylas, M., 632 Zhao, W., 628, 629 Zirulnik, M., 95 Zuboff, S., 513, 591