The Contradictions of Communicative Labor in Service Work
David Carlone, Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, Volume 5, Issue 2 June 2008, pages 158 - 179
Boundaries dividing communication and culture from economy are fluid. The US services economy, with broad and deep growth, illustrates this fluidity. This paper applies theorizations of the relationship between communication and capitalism to a customer service job-training course for dislocated workers. A site of communication education, the course teaches students to be successful customer service representatives. Customer service communicative labor bridges production and consumption and, thus, is contradictory. The communicative labor translates the communication commonplace of mutuality into a self-other technology to affirm customers, and also requires a technology that objectifies customers. Job-training students resist this contradiction.
A Consultative Training Program: Collateral Effect of a Needs Assessment
Kathleen Lucier, Communication Education, Volume 57, Issue 4 October 2008, pages 482 – 489
I Work to Live, Not Live to Work: How Generation Y Talks About Work, Career, and Work-Life Balance
Katherine Gronewold, North Dakota State University; Kristina Wenzel, North Dakota State University
This study examines the meanings that members of Generation Y prescribe to the concepts of work, career, and work-life balance and how these meanings will influence the workplace using the perspective of Jablin’s (1982) organizational assimilation. Findings suggest that members of Generation Y assess having a career more positively than "just working". Additionally, work-life balance is a priority, but one that many members of Generation Y do not feel is entirely achievable.
Coping with workplace incivility: Strategies targets utilize while staying in the organization
Jennifer Linvill, Purdue University; Stacy Connaughton, Purdue University
Workplace incivility has become a pervasive issue in organizations across multiple sectors and industries. Despite a growing body of literature, little empirical research exists on how targets (victims) of workplace incivility cope. This study begins to fill this void. Employing a social constructionist meta-theoretical lens, and drawing on data from in-depth interviews, the study unearths the coping strategies that targets (victims) of workplace incivility utilize. This study offers several theoretical and practical implications.
Theorizing Organizational Stability and Change within Government Agencies
U.S. government agencies at federal, state, and local levels function in environments characterized by sedimented modes of practice, new discourses and artifacts of risk, competing knowledge claims, and various conceptions of how to best carry out decision making. By analyzing how “change,” “risk,” “sustainability,” and “participation” are enacted within distinct-yet-complementary government settings, the papers engage normative dimensions of government organizing and conceptualize the ways that organizational communication serves as both the source and medium of agency.
This case study reveals a series of significant and effective changes that resulted from administering a needs assessment to managers working in a bank undergoing a major change in the organizational culture. The assessment changed not only the training objectives or the client organization, but also the training design. What originally began as a didactic, management-driven training shifted to a trainee-focused design using a collaborative approach. These changes only occurred after recognizing that the trainees had valuable skills, ideas, and knowledge of processes that could be tapped for the training. In the end, the trainee's individual knowledge and collective expertise served as the foundation for a new management plan specifically fitted to the context and needs of a developing organization.
