Locating possibilities for control and resistance in a self-help program.

Publication: Western Journal of Communication

Publication Date: 01-OCT-06

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COPYRIGHT 2006 Western States Communications Association

Locating Possibilities for Control and Resistance in a Self-Help Program

"Self-help" books, magazines, training seminars, videos, and television programs are a ubiquitous part of American culture. Conveying a common theme, these self-help texts communicate a message designed to encourage individuals to engage in systematic self-management (Lair, Sullivan, & Cheney, 2005). Purveyors of this message have focused on improving aspects of our home, romantic, social, and organizational lives. Of concern for critical communication scholars, self-help takes a distinctly rational, managerial approach to the improvement of life (Hancock & Tyler, 2004; Tracy & Trethewey, 2005). As Tracy and Trethewey put it, "The self is the subject of numerous advice books or self-help guides, and therefore, identity is increasingly constituted by public, profit-driven, and institutionalized discourses" (p. 173). It is important, then, to study how individuals and groups engage, adopt, and resist these attempts to shape identities and, thus, control decision-making. While some scholars argue that self-help discourse contributes to the ongoing managerial colonization of the everyday life world (Deetz & Mumby, 1990; Hancock & Tyler), scholars have not yet taken seriously the possibilities for resistance rooted in self-help texts and programs.

This study engages one popular example of the self-help genre to explore the ramifications of self-management as a resource for both organizational control and resistance. In doing so, we treat control and resistance as a dialectic (Mumby, 1997, 2005) that must be studied together, simultaneously. Therefore, this research investigates how organization members engage a self-help program, how that program functions to regulate identity, and how that program reinforces or undermines organizational control. For scholars in organizational communication, this study contributes to our understanding of identity, control, and resistance by providing insight into the opportunities for both control and resistance built into the translation between self-help discourse and identity.

Uncovering Resistance

Answering calls to treat resistance as an ever-present counterpoint to control (Giddens, 1984; Mumby, 1997, 2005), organizational communication scholars since the early 1990s have engaged in empirical examinations of resistance (Ashcraft & Pacanowsky, 1996; Clair, 1994; Holmer-Nadesan, 1996; Larson & Tompkins, 2005; Tracy, 2000; Trethewey, 1997). From these detailed case studies, scholars have uncovered patterns of control and resistance that emerge in specific contexts that inform our theoretical understanding of resistance and its relationship to control. In general, this research has positioned resistance as dialectical, discursive, and linked closely with identity. The following sections seek first to theorize the nature of resistance in modern organizations, then to engage some of the controversies surrounding our conceptualizations of resistance, and finally, to position the self-help movement as consequential for scholarship on control and resistance.

The Contested Nature of Resistance

Traditionally, critical scholars of organizational communication emphasize domination at the expense of resistance (Ashcraft & Mumby, 2004; Jermier, 1998). An emphasis on domination often masks the agency of humans as they experience contemporary life, inhibiting responses that might effectively fight domination. Recent scholarship has shown control and resistance to be mutually constitutive, rather than existing in an either/or relation (Ashcraft & Mumby; Collinson, 1994; Ott & Herman, 2003). In his reconsideration of hegemony, Mumby (1997) writes:

Hegemony is more appropriately conceptualized as a continuum ranging from the total integration of worldviews into a single, all encompassing ideology ... to situations in which there is widespread resistance and a plurality of voices competing for pre-eminence. (p. 364)

Thus, Mumby argues, the widely accepted perception within critical communication studies of hegemony as ideological domination achieved through consent should rather be understood as a dialectic between control and resistance. Further, attempts to control may simultaneously represent opportunities for resistance (Collinson; Mumby, 1997, 2005). For example, even as Fleming and Spicer (2003) argue that cynicism may actually reproduce power structures, they also acknowledge the need to investigate resistance empirically "to discern whether cynicism helps or hinders other modalities of resistance" (p. 171). Finally, in the words of Collinson,

Resistance and consent are rarely polarized extremes on a continuum of possible worker discursive practices. Rather, they are usually inextricably and simultaneously linked, often in contradictory ways within particular organizational cultures, discourses and practices. Resistance frequently contains elements of consent and consent often incorporates aspects of resistance. (p. 29)

Understandings of resistance are further complicated by conceptualizing the nature of resistance as discursive, either as spoken or written text or as structure (Alvesson & Karreman, 2000). Generally speaking, at both levels, communication plays a central role in analyzing relations among power, control, and resistance (Mumby, 1997, 2005; Townsley & Geist, 2000). Within the critical communication tradition, communication is broadly conceived of as constructing social reality. The created reality (1) typically privileges some people and interests over others and (2) may become naturalized, or taken for granted, over time, solidifying the disparity among people and interests. People live within this naturalized reality (Berger & Luckmann, 1967).

Conceptualizing control and resistance as discursive text and structure brings meaning and identity to the fore. Most recent studies of resistance have defined resistance "in terms of an individual's ability to articulate alternative meanings to that of the dominant constructions" (Ganesh, Zoller, & Cheney, 2005, p. 6). From this perspective, although there are dominant discourses such as race (Ashcraft & Allen, 2003), gender (Ashcraft & Mumby, 2004; Clair, 1994), and class (Cloud, 2001), many discourses compete to define the modern worker (Holmer-Nadesan, 1996). The multiple discourses that shape the modern worker have led to a conceptualization of modern workplace identities as highly fragmented (Deetz & Mumby, 1990) or, alternatively, as "crystallized" (Tracy & Trethewey, 2005). A crystallized conceptualization of identity suggests that rather than real or fake identities, the "self is multi-dimensional" (p. 186). On the other hand, despite, or perhaps because of, the highly fractured nature of identities, organizations try to shape identities in particular ways to produce the "appropriate individual" (Alvesson & Willmott, 2002, p. 619). As a result, the multifaceted identity of the worker then becomes a key site in which control is contested.

Evidence of a shift in control practices to identity-specific, meaning-based systems is well documented. Whether characterized as "concertive" (Tompkins & Cheney, 1985), "normative" (Kunda, 1992), or "self-surveillance" (Deetz, 1998), scholarship in organizational communication since the cultural turn in the 1980s has focused on meaning and ideology as significant in shaping the identities of both workers and managers. These current means of control differ significantly from previous forms of control (see Edwards, 1979) in that control is exercised by getting people to accept certain ideologies or to identify with certain organizationally sanctioned value premises (Tompkins & Cheney, 1985). Though these types of control systems have been well documented, resistance toward these meaning-based control systems is less understood.

Engaging Controversies of Resistance

Whereas the previous section details resistance as dialectic, discursive, and identity based, this section discusses some shortcomings and controversies in the resistance literature. This paper addresses two important issues related to resistance: the individual and collective nature of resistance and the metaphor of organization as a container. One key controversy in the resistance literature is how to account for resistance as individual and collective. The critical, discourse-centered perspective described previously has been criticized by those who claim that a discursive, meaning-centered approach diminishes the collective ability of organized labor to achieve concrete material gains (Cloud, 1998, 2001, 2005) and that a focus on the individual has caused scholars to ignore important collective social movements that have arisen to challenge global capitalism (Ganesh et al., 2005). Each of these critiques accurately suggests that when scholars focus on resistance at the level of individual identity, important opportunities for collective and potentially transformational resistance may be overlooked. On the other hand, in the context of high-tech, knowledge-intensive organizations, such as the one studied in this research, individual identity may still be the key point of contestation for control and resistance efforts. "Knowledge-intensive" organizations differ from traditional manufacturing and manual service organizations in that they "rely primarily on individual and collective forms of intellectual capital" (Deetz, 1998, p. 155). In these organizations, such as software development companies or aerospace engineering firms, the control methods used to manage employees tend to differ from those used in more industrial occupations. Studies of such organizations (Alvesson, 2001; Deetz, 1998; Kunda, 1992; Larson & Tompkins, 2005) suggest that control efforts are directed toward shaping identities. Thus, the identity of the individual becomes an important site for resistance. This study explores the nature of resistance as individual and collective in the context of one knowledge-intensive workplace.

Another significant shortcoming of the resistance literature is that it largely studies and conceives of resistance within the container metaphor of the organization (Cheney & Christensen, 2001). With a few notable exceptions (Ashcraft & Mumby, 2004; Holmer-Nadesan, 1996; Trethewey, 1997), the control and resistance literature has not adequately linked micropractices to larger structural dimensions such as class, race, and patriarchy (Mumby, 1997). In addition, though scholars have argued that macrodiscourses, such as managerial capitalism (Deetz & Mumby, 1990; Nadesan, 1999), play a significant part in understanding control/resistance, few studies have linked these larger discourses to actual micropractices. In fact, much of the research on resistance can be critiqued for focusing too heavily on micropractice while ignoring larger discourses and events (Ganesh et al., 2005).

This study addresses this limitation by examining control and resistance across porous organizational boundaries at the intersection of a macrodiscourse and organizational micropractice. Specifically, we examine the moment of encounter of a popular self-help program as it is experienced by...

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