Welcome
to Week 6, this week you need to be careful about some abstract principles
which will be introduced in lecture and textbook, because those theories and
principles are considerably relevant to another discipline of academy –
philosophy. But don’t worry, I’ll try to provide you a concise and
comprehensible guide here to help you out.
In
theory, critical approaches adopt a radical frame of reference by considering
organisations as site of domination (Miller 2012, p.101). Individuals from
these dominating organisational forces are likely to be emancipated from
critical approaches.
As
suggested by critical thinkers, some important concepts of critical approaches have
to be considered thoroughly:
l Power
l Control
l Ideology
and Hegemony
l Emancipation
l Resistance
The
theory of concretive control and the feminist theories of organisational
communication are employed to demonstrate how a critical lens can be placed on
organisational communication processes (Miller 2012, p.119).
The
theory of concretive control argues that power is embedded in a system of
identification and discipline, even in a workplace designed with democratic and
participatory ideals, the ideology of management is upheld through the everyday
practices of organisational members.
The role of sociology is not simply
one of accumulating knowledge, but ‘one of emancipation and change’. Critical thinking is a way of deciding whether a claim is always true, sometimes true,
partly true, or false. By taking feminism into consideration, traditional views
of organisation - in their traditional and bureaucratic forms – are inherently
patriarchal – highlight the importance of individualism, cause-and-effect
thinking, and autonomy.
But according to
critical theorists, things can be changed in contemporary organisational
communication, the civil rights and feminist movements not only created
opportunities for previously disenfranchised groups but also helped shape a
worldview in which issues of identity and difference became central. Thus, with
the emergence of challenges to a single (white, male) vision of society,
various groups began to voice their own visions of the social order that fundamentally
rewrote previously accepted premises about what is good, right, and possible.
For example, gay rights organizations have challenged dominant definitions of
“family,” and the feminist movement has helped change long-held beliefs about
women’s roles in society.
Here,
I’ll put a media story that can help us understand the contemporary femininity
in organisational communication. South China Morning Post (2013) published a
news article that portrayed the relationship between sexual harassment and
male-dominated workplace. In this article, a survey generated by SCMP indicates
that forty three per cent of companies in China
did not have a policy covering sexual harassment. It is misleading that sexual harassment
is only an issue among the staff that does not warrant management intervention,
instead, it is emphasised that the hegemonic aspect of relationships between
male and female in the workplace is not as equal as it ought to be.
This
is what exactly feminist scholars struggling with, the gender equality in
workplace.
References:
Miller, K 2012, Organisational communication – approaches
and processes, 6th edn, Wadsworth Cengage Learning, Boston.
South
China Morning Post 2013, ‘Too many turning a blind eye towards sexual
harassment’, South China Morning Post,
5 September, viewed 11 November 2013,
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