Understanding Organizations through Language

Susanne Tietze, Laurie Cohen, Gill Musson

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2003
• Print ISBN: 9780761967194, 9780761967187
• eBook ISBN: 9781446239599
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Management
• Index: Business

`Makes fascinating reading and at the same time provides a good grounding in the study of the language of organizations, both for those who know little of the area and for those who are looking for a comprehensive overview of the field. Overall I would warmly recommend this book as an asset for students and teachers of organizational behaviour and for those with a general interest in the way in which language shapes our lives and work?

- Organization Studies

`The book is extremely clear in its explanation of how language works.... The authors treat their readers as curious, intelligent and concerned to find new and powerful tools to come at the workings of organizations from a lateral and newly illuminating perspective? - Virginia Valentine, Semiotic Solutions, London

`The authors are able to apply their personal fascination with language to give students insights into organisational behaviour that significantly surpasses what is normally achieved by the tired old rituals of standard organizational behaviour texts and teaching? - Tony Watson, Nottingham Trent University

Taking issue with functional approaches to communication, Understanding Organizations through Language offers a viable alternative based on `webs of meaning?. Instead of viewing communication as a thing that can be unproblematically controlled and managed, the authors use semiology as a theoretical bedrock to develop a new metaphor for communication. Understanding Organizations through Language applies this approach to areas of interest, including: metaphor, story-telling, discourse, gender, leadership and electronic communication.

Spanning the gap between highly theoretical organization studies texts and highly prescriptive communication texts, the book talks to the reader in a sophisticated yet approachable style. This style is complemented by a range of examples, activities and mini case studies. Also included are chapter summaries and further reading suggestions, making this a useful text for both academics and students.

Advanced undergraduates and postgraduates will utilize this book for any course dealing with communication, particularly courses in HRM and organizational behaviour.

CHAPTER ONE

Spinning Webs of Meaning: Language and Social Reality

This chapter describes the basic assumptions we, the authors, make about social reality and the processes through which it is constructed. It focuses on the role of language in the processes of bestowing meaning to the social world: an interpretive perspective is explained and espoused. Within this approach the willingness to examine one’s own beliefs and assumptions is recognised as crucial to the development of genuine dialogue between different social groups.

Objectives

In this chapter we will:

• introduce the notion of social construction;
• explain the central role of language to the processes of meaning making;
• explain the interpretive perspective on social life; and
• introduce the notion of dialogue as the key aspect to understanding other worlds of meaning.

Words and signs are around us during every waking minute, and even in our dreams signs and symbols make up the journeys of our sleeping hours. We cannot escape words, we cannot but communicate. Language and communication are essential to what makes us human. How we talk, which language we use, and how we can express ourselves is intrinsically tied in with our concepts of identity and our sense of self. For example, everyone who has ever learned and practised a foreign language will appreciate that it is difficult to express one’s true self when struggling to articulate in a foreign language. The power of language in expressing one’s identity is vividly illustrated in a moving story told by a former colleague about one of her PhD students, a young man from Malaysia. Although their supervision sessions were conducted in English, the student always brought his wife with him, who did not speak any English at all. So she sat there looking at the floor, a mute presence, usually ignored. One day there was a knock at the colleague’s office door. It was the PhD student’s wife, all by herself. She took our colleague by the hand and led her across the campus, to the music department and into a beautiful room with a grand piano. She motioned for our colleague to sit down. She herself sat down at the piano and proceeded to play the first movement of Rachmaninov’s Second Concerto.

To us, this story reveals the need to express who we are. Normally, we do this through talking (language), or through dressing in a particular way (using symbols) and socialising with particular people, as behaviour and practices carry a symbolic function too. However, the ‘mute’ woman in our story was on foreign territory, an alien to the academic world and its emphasis on intellect as a prime feature of worthiness and standing. Her piano playing was a symbolic gesture that carried the following message: “I am a human being, too, with my own amazing talents and unique gifts. This is an expression of my humanity.”

The ethnographer and management researcher Tony Watson (2001b: 19–20) muses about the difference between humans and hedgehogs:

Humans [unlike hedgehogs] do not have guidelines for behaviour and interaction with others ‘wired into’ their brains. Humans have continually to ‘work on’ their humanness. They have to achieve humanness. They have to think about what it is to be female or male, a parent, a teenager, an ageing individual, a husband, wife, lover, friend, enemy, brother, sister, manager. We have an awful lot we need to make sense of to survive mentally. And we could not handle alone all these sources of anxiety. Our capacity for culture, language and concepts partly creates these problems. It makes possible, through the provision of the very words for example, the question ‘Who am I?’, or the question, ‘Why should I follow this managerial instruction?’. But it also assists us with handling them.

We see language as both the medium through which, as well as the context within which, these fundamental processes of identity are forged. We propose to investigate these processes to see how meaning is bestowed on things, people, actions and practices through and in language.

An evening amongst friends …

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The evening progressed like so many evenings we had spent together. We talked, mostly about the same things, going back and forth over the same subjects until they were worn and soft with use. I sometimes think it was like we were weaving a cloth of our talk, all the strands of our lives threading back and forth, up and down, making a dense, intricate sort of pattern that we repeated and repeated until we could understand it. We never got bored of it, we were so easy with each other, wrapped up in these conversations that had gone on for years. (Denby, 2001: 46)

This is a short extract from the novel Corazon by Joolz Denby. Have you similar experiences? What part do they play in your life?

The novel is about a woman drawn into a new age religious cult – but it also provides interesting insights about words, meanings and misunderstandings. Potential readers be warned, there are some gruesome scenes and no happy ending.

Words and the meaning we attach to them are the fabric of life. How – and why – meanings are attached to words and phrases is the subject of this book. This includes consideration of how the meanings of words are changed and how words can carry different meanings. For example, much of the language of advertising uses words taken from religious or spiritual contexts. Zen, uplifting, harmony, inner peace, soulful are frequently cited to sell bubble baths, yoghurt or furniture. Whether these words carry both old and new meanings simultaneously, or simply have become polysemic (carrying different meanings), or have become empty slogans, is subject to debate. In this book we concern ourselves mainly with explaining the very processes of meaning making and how meanings change.

The anthropologist Clifford Geertz describes humans as being essentially defined by systems of meaning: “Man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun …. and culture is those webs” (1973: 5). We agree with this metaphor as it views humans as being both actively making/spinning their worlds and bestowing meaning onto them as well as being passively suspended in the thus created worlds. Watson (2001b: 27) develops the idea of the basic two-sidedness of social life in so far as there is the side in which individuals can be seen to initiate, choose and shape their world, and the side in which they can be seen as being constrained and shaped by influences external to themselves. He writes:

Human initiative (‘agency’) is not simply constrained by the circumstances in which it occurs (‘structure’), it may equally be enabled. The structures and circumstances in which humans find themselves partly shape what they think and do, yet humans also shape those thoughts and circumstances (the extent to which they are able to do this varying with the power associated with the position in which they find themselves).

We argue that language is central to these processes of weaving, shaping and influencing. Therefore, at the core of this book lies the view that sharing and negotiating meaning is fundamental to social/organizational life. These processes can be illuminated and investigated through a semiological analysis (see Chapter 2).

A case study

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Judith is fifty-five years old, and is the owner/manager of a nursing home. As a nurse, she worked as a night sister in a large teaching hospital in a northern city in the UK for 20 years. She has been in business for herself for three years.

Judith sees nursing as her vocation. She completed her professional training within the UK NHS (National Health Service), and anticipated lifelong employment within that organization. She spoke of her early days in the NHS as challenging, but rewarding; at that time she strongly believed in what the NHS was trying to do. She said that she had “NHS values”, that she belonged there. To Judith, what is most important is providing high-quality, personal attention for her patients, and she explained how she felt this approach used to be at the heart of NHS policy and practice.

In the last few years of her employment within the NHS, Judith became increasingly disillusioned. She explained how she felt that the Health Service was changing, becoming less caring and more business-like, and she found herself increasingly at odds with the organization and its direction. She profoundly disagreed with the radical shift in NHS policy, and felt that within her hospital she could no longer practice the highest quality nursing, the sort of nursing that she was trained for. She said she felt constrained and disabled by the new regime. What Judith found especially difficult was trying to reconcile her commitment to patients with the new emphasis on financial control, efficiency and accountability to managers. After 20 years Judith decided to resign.

As a demoralized night sister, Judith had a vision of the high-quality, one-to-one care she would be able to offer to the elderly residents in her future nursing home. After having purchased the home, inheriting, of course, its residents and their families, Judith continued to work in the NHS for three months. During these months she worked night and day, stopping only occasionally to “cat-nap on the floor, under the buzzers so that if anyone needed me I could hear”. She describes those early days as “your worst nightmare. Because I didn’t have a clue how to run the place …. It was horrific … If anyone had asked me after three months, I would’ve said that I’d have made the most awful mistake of my life”. She felt “totally and utterly out of control.”

Apart from the problem of doing two jobs, there were aspects of the venture that Judith had not considered. She was unprepared to deal with personnel issues, operational matters such as the on-going maintenance of the building, food preparation and laundry; and the social dimension of business life, which involved extensive networking with families, doctors and outside agencies. “Everything about it was new … I mean, I didn’t know what the daily routine was, how they got people out of bed, who did what … I’d met these people once, for an hour on the Saturday, and then Monday morning at eight o’clock it was mine”. At the time, Judith was overwhelmed by what she saw as these new and ever-increasing demands on her time, energy and personal resources – she was having to do things far beyond the role of a nurse.

Judith explained how as time went on she regained her sense of control and self-confidence. She described her home as happy and caring, and felt she offered her residents and their families high-quality provision. She had the respect and support of her staff and had established very positive working relationships with professionals and agencies outside the home.

Although Judith had become a successful owner/manager of a small business, she spoke with utmost pride and passion about “giving one-to-one care”, “not minding night work” and “getting my hands dirty.” When asked directly, she acknowledged that she had certain management skills, but said that she saw herself “first and foremost as a nurse.”

• To what extent is Judith suspended in webs of meanings not of her own making?
• To what extent is she spinning her own webs of meaning and in doing so changing the structure of the web?
• Can you think of examples from your experience?

Interpretive understanding

Our view of organizational life is a processual one; that is to say we see organizations not as static entities, but as dynamic processes, constantly constructed and reconstructed through activities and practices, being woven in and through language and talk. Hence, we cannot claim to offer our readership a guide to finding out how things really are in their respective organizations. Indeed, any reader with such hopes will be bitterly disappointed. However, what we do offer is a particular framework (semiology) through which readers can attempt to understand how ‘things’ come to be imbued with particular meanings, that is, how meaning is made. We see language at the core of such processes and agree with Boden when she says that language, “is the lifeblood of all organizations and, as such, it both shapes and is shaped by the structure of the organization itself” (1994: 8). By this, we do not mean that language is simply a mirror of an objectively existing reality – an unchanging and unchangeable “web” so to speak – rather, that it both creates and reflects organizational realities. Language is not a “mere messenger from the kingdom of reality” (Gergen, 1999: 11), but to use language is to engage in a social process of constructing particular realities.

Whenever we talk, we are partaking in the process of constructing a particular social reality.

The meaning of words?

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Words such as empowerment, leadership, performance, knowledge, global, flexibility, excellence are examples of expressions that are frequently used in organizational contexts. You might wish to supplement this list with others, some of which may be more specific to your organization.

• Do these words carry any particular meanings within your unit/department/work group? Do they carry different meanings outside these contexts?
• Have these words been used for a long time? If yes, has their meaning changed over time? If no, how have they been introduced?
• Who uses these words: when, where – and why?

Based on the above exercise you might have found that these words do not carry simple or absolute meanings and that there is no one-way relation between the word and the organizational reality ‘out there’. You might also have found that some words are quite powerful and persuasive. This might be a function of who uses them (for example, a hierarchically senior person, someone you respect), but equally their power might lie ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgement
• Introduction
• CHAPTER ONE Spinning Webs of Meaning: Language and Social Reality
• CHAPTER TWO A Semiological Approach to Meaning Making
• CHAPTER THREE Understanding Organizations Through Metaphor
• CHAPTER FOUR Understanding Organizations Through Stories and Narratives
• CHAPTER FIVE Understanding Organizations Through Discourse
• CHAPTER SIX Language, Culture, Meaning
• CHAPTER SEVEN Gender and Language
• CHAPTER EIGHT Leadership and Language
• CHAPTER NINE Meaning Making in the Electronic Age
• Conclusion
• References
• Index