Management Communication Quarterly

This article highlights the contributions that discourse analysis can make to the study of organizational resistance. Specifically, it demonstrates how using a discursive lens can provide insights into the targets, practices, and consequences of resistance. First, discourse analytic approaches can reveal how acts of resistance target multiple organizational audiences simultaneously, often developed through diverse texts directed to internal and external stakeholders. Second, discourse analysis enables researchers to examine the complex, dynamic, and interconnected nature of resistance practices and to avoid constructing simple dichotomies between such features as covert and overt forms of resistance or individual and collective resistance. Third, discourse analysis highlights the intended and unintended consequences of resistance by examining how organizational members engage with, adapt to, and transform organizational practices. Future directions are proposed for research on discourse analysis and organizational resistance.

This article provides an overview and critique of the extant research on work-place resistance. It argues that much of this research has developed around an implicit duality of resistance and control. In other words, critical studies have highlighted either the growing ubiquity and subtlety of managerial control or have privileged workers’ abilities to carve out spheres of autonomy within these control mechanisms. It suggests that, in contrast to this implicit dualism of control and resistance, a dialectical approach better captures the notion of resistance and control as mutually constitutive, and as a routine social production of daily organizational life.

Research exploring corporate culture management has identified cynicism as a significant way some workers resist attempts to control their identities. The metaphors of defense and distancing are popular ways of explaining this cynicism. The article argues that these metaphors posit an already-present self as the object of protection. Drawing on empirical research of a communications firm, it is suggested cynicism might also be understood as the on going production of subjectivity rather than its defense or distancing from cultural controls.

Recent theories underscore the indefinite, conflicted, and discursive character of labor identity and resistance, highlighting local practices and meanings. This article examines an empirical and political dilemma provoked by such models: what to do when once-dominant voices resist a loss of control. Drawing on interviews conducted with commercial airline pilots, the author examines how privileged professional men engage gendered threats. The analysis demonstrates how organizational efforts to induce crew empowerment threaten pilot identity, as well as how pilots resist emasculation by embracing mandatory changes. The study illustrates ways to grapple more fully with the implications of discursive, dialectical models of resistance. In particular, the author urges attention to tales of declining control as discursive realities that engender emotional resistance to social change.

This article examines discursive forms of resistance used by a splinter group of a U.S. airline pilots’ union in its campaign against a contract settlement supported by union leaders. Forms of resistance included oppositional tensions, military metaphors, and dualities that surfaced in central themes of the campaign. These discursive strategies revealed ironies of advocating unity while promoting division and arguing to eliminate a two-tiered pay scale while supporting class distinctions between pilots. These tactics were similar to and different from approaches that oppositional groups within conventional unions typically used. Overall, these strategies pitted pilots against pilots, professionals against professionals, union against union and suggested that organized resistance is constructed discursively, ironically and in tandem with routine resistance practices.

To explore the implications of the Internet for the relationship between organizational communication and power, this article compares two online forums established in response to the introduction of a new e-organization: the Development Gateway. The article analyzes postings to the forums to explore the capacity of the Internet to foster democracy, and to investigate how power and resistance are exercised through this medium. Findings show that, rather than equate resistance with participation, as some models of democracy do, the dynamics of power and resistance are more complex, and resistance and power can take participative and nonparticipative forms.!