"Developing Critical Communication Theories for Collaboration"

Stanley Deetz
Department of Communication
University of Colorado
Boulder, CO 80309-0270, USA
stanley.deetz@colorado.edu

Ams.ik.l@abs.dk

Abstract:

Workplace collaboration of various forms is important for all types of organizations.

The core concepts of stakeholder representation, enhanced creativity, and positive

communicative practices apply to for-profit businesses, public agencies and not- for-profit

groups. The central questions Whose objectives should count? How much should

they count? and How will they be accounted for?arise in all modern organizations.

Productive collaboration requires structural changes in the organization, an understanding

of control processes as they currently operate, and communication systems that can make

the opportunity for productive participation a reality. Greater collaboration is important for

both the economic health of organizations and critical for meeting the complex conflicting

needs of society. The political and economic are centrally connected.

Corporations can be understood as complex political sites. Corporations are political

in process and outcome. The modern corporation has a variety of stakeholders with

competing interests within and between each of them resolved in internal decisions.

Corporations could be a positive social institution providing a forum for the articulation

and resolution of import ant social conflicts regarding the use of natural resources, the

production of meaningful goods and services, and the development of individuals. These

political processes are often closed, however, owing to a variety of practices that produce

and privilege certain interestsprincipally managerial in both public decision making

and in the production of the type of person that exists in modern organizations and society.

Recognizing the existence of multiple stakeholders with competing legitimate interests is

not to make corporate organizations more political, but to explore the politics that is

already there, a politics that is often denied or obscured to the benefit of particular group

interests. Corporate practices and decisions are already value- laden rather than simply

economic. Even with more stakeholder participation, productive collaboration has not and

will not necessary resulted.

Overcoming subtle control process and fostering productive mutual decisions requires

changing the way we think about huma n communication. What might appear to be more

benign communication conceptions and practices none -the-less have tremendous impact on

the success and viability of collaboration. The form and practices of collaboration, not just

its existence, matter. Communication is an integral part of any form of collaboration.

Influence centered, informational views of communication led us to overlook

processes in the formation of social meanings that can be merely reproductive or genuinely

transformational. A critical/ dialogic view of communication offers possibilities not

present expressionist/information/ adversarial view that dominates contemporary society. A

dialogic communication conception shifts our attention from choices within politically

defined contexts with fixed decisional alternatives to concern with the constitution of

political contexts and the alternatives. Concern with effective use of language changes to

questions of whose language it is, its social/historical partialities, and means of reclaiming

alternative voices.

Within the workplace most collaboration, unfortunately, has developed with liberal

democratic conceptions of communication. As such they have provided new forums where
stakeholders could be represented. While these new forums are significant, most of these

have been contrived in ways that reduce the actual value representationthey lack an

opportunity for voice. Both forums and voice must be considered in assessing

representation. And, often the interaction itself is systematically distorted. The stakeholder

can speak but, owing to contrived and flawed understandings, the representation is skewed.

There are several ways this happens. In general a prior social construction (a

predetermination or prejudice) stands in the place of the indeterminant character and open

negotiative possibilities of actual people and events in actual situations. Such constructions

contain embedded values that are not disclosed. Since the construction is treated as the

reality it is not open to discussion nor are alternative value premises and means of

construction/reconstruction considered. Many standard forms of discursive closure become

common. Generally managerial values and perspectives become implicitly universalized and

neutralized rather than under stood and contestable. Hence, conflict is suppressed and

decisions are routinized rather than actively discussed with the possibility of mutuality and

creativity.

Creating corporations that are economically and socially sound begins with a mutual

commitment to the entire set of stakeholders. Positive collaboration requires both a

commitment to a stakeholder model of work organizations and to a communication concept

capable of providing voice to relevant groups and individuals. The pursuit of self- interest

whether expressed in the name of profits, particular stakeholders, or one's own strategic

advantage works against any genuine attempt at communication or productive joint

decision making and presents deep moral difficulties. To the extent that managers or other

stakeholders experience the needs of others, they grow, they free themselves from routines
and habitual positions, and begin to reclaim suppressed needs and conflicts. Having

conflicting needs and goals is a reality of being human at the individual and organizational

level. Positive communication practices provide creativity in meeting what appear to be

conflicting needs and goals rather than in preferencing some and suppressing others. In

conflict that we can begin to see a potential path that may otherwise be hidden by our

everyday routines and "taken for granted" ways of understanding the world. This

framework suggests that responsibility does not rest in agreement or consensus but in the

avoidance of the suppression of alternative conceptions and possibilities.