Organizational communication as cultural performance

TLDR

Organizational communication research has long been guided by a systems metaphor, but recent scholars advocate a cultural metaphor that has focused on static structural features, overlooking the processes that create, maintain, and transform these cultural structures. This paper proposes to incorporate processual insights by conceptualizing organizational communication as cultural performance. The authors analyze five cultural performances—ritual, passion, sociality, politics, and enculturation—highlighting them as promising empirical entry points and discuss how shifting from a systems to a cultural metaphor alters the nature of research questions.

Abstract

For the past ten to fifteen years, the "systems" metaphor has guided organizational communication research. Recently, a sizable number of management and organizational communication scholars have suggested a different guiding metaphor—that of organizational culture. Present notions of organizational culture, however, tend to focus on static, structural features of culture, and researchers are often content to document the existence of such cultural features as organizational jargon, stories, ideologies, and strategic knowledge. Such a focus, though valuable, overlooks the cultural processes by which these structures are created, maintained, and transformed. We argue in this paper that we can introduce process notions into our understanding of organizational culture by looking at organizational communication as cultural performance. We examine five cultural performances described (often obliquely) in current organizational literature—performances of ritual, "passion," sociality, politics, and enculturation—and we suggest that these performances are auspicious starting places for empirical research. We conclude with a discussion of the different nature of the research questions implicated in a switch from a "systems" to a "cultural" metaphor of organizations.