Reading :: Control through Communication

Control through Communication: The Rise of System in American Management
By JoAnne Yates 

I read this 1989 book in grad school and still go back to it sometimes. Recently I returned to it again on advice of an anonymous reviewer of a manuscript I had submitted. It's an excellent book and well worth reading, and I'll only touch the surface of it in this brief review.

In a nutshell, Yates examines the revolution in managerial communications between 1850-1920, examining primarily the archives of the Illinois Central Railroad, Scovill Manufacturing Company, and DuPont. 

The book falls into two parts.

In the first part (Ch.1-3), Yates takes a broad view of the era, examining the rise and development of managerial methods and the need for internal communications (Ch.1), the emerging communication technologies that enabled a rise in internal communication (Ch.2), and the explosion of internal communication genres (Ch.3). Importantly, these innovations (technologies, genres) did not stay inside corporations, but made their way to other parts of our lives.

In the second part (Ch.4-8), Yates conducts closer analyses of the three organizations whose archives she studied. These chapters provide necessary detail, but frankly did not hold my attention as well.

In my first read-through in graduate school, I was mainly focused on Chapters 2-3. (For what it's worth, I think this book exerted a stronger influence on my grad school office mate Mark Zachry, who went on to write his dissertation based on the archives of a meatpacking company.) Reading through it again, I focused on those same chapters again, this time with a couple of decades of theory and research to help me understand them. Predictably, I now see new connections: to genre assemblages, to cultural heritage as represented in genres, to Latour's archival research. 

The book is still about 1850-1920, but as we undergo new changes in how we communicate at work, it seems more relevant than ever. I can imagine it being a blueprint for some doctoral student, writing in 2035, examining the profound shifts we have undergone from the introduction of the IBM PC in 1980 to the present. 

If you're interested in workplace communication, and especially in how technologies and genres change how we understand our work and ourselves, definitely pick this book up.

Reading :: Narrative Methods for Organizational and Communication Research

Narrative Methods for Organizational and Communication Research
By David M. Boje

I've been meaning to read this book for a while, but finally scheduled time for it when some collaborators and I began analyzing stories from a community research project. Fortunately, the book is slim (137pp without the bibliography and notes) and pretty direct.

Boje's focus here is on laying out different traditions for analyzing stories and narrative. The two are different:

Narrative requires plot, as well as coherence. To narrative theory, story is folksy, without emplotment, a simple telling of chronology. I propose 'antenarrative.' Antenarrative is the fragmented, non-linear, incoherent, collective, unplotted and pre-narrative speculation, a bet. (p.1). 

He connects antenarrative to the crisis of postmodernism and outlines ways to analyze antenarratives (as opposed to narrative in the classic sense): "eight antenarrative analysis options that can deal with the prevalence of fragmented and polyphonic storytelling in complex organizations and to provide teaching examples of these methods that are applicable to organization studies" (p.1). These options are treated in separate chapters:

• Deconstruction analysis
• Grand narrative analysis
• Microstoria analysis
• Story network analysis
• Intertextuality analysis
• Causality analysis 
• Plot analysis
• Theme analysis

Before getting into these options, Boje establishes five dimensions of antenarrative:

• Pre-plot: Antenarrative precedes emplotment (p.3)
• Ambiguity: "Antenarrative is constituted out of the flow of living experience" and is thus speculative, oriented toward meaning-making (p.3)
• Flow as sensemaking: Antenarrative is "a sensemaking to lived experience" (p.4)
• Fragmentary: It precedes closure and thus involves multiple interpretations (p.4)
• Collective before consensual: "It is before the plots have been agreed to" (p.4)

In the subsequent chapters, Boje examines each of the eight options, which are grounded in different sets of literature and different research traditions. He gives considerable attention to each. In this review, I won't: I'll skip to two that I think are most relevant for my work.

One is causality analysis (Ch.6), in which antenarratives advance tentative causal links. Boje quotes Nietzsche's question of whether causes lead to effects or whether effects lead to a search for causes. In antenarratives, people nominate causes for the effects they see around them. Examples include origin stories and stories of praise or blame. To explore these, Boje catalogs different processes:

• identifying temporal language in antenarratives
• the relation between microstories and macrostories
• tracing intertextual linkages of assertions across stories
• developing a narrative mapping of causal assertions (p.102)

The second chapter I focus on is the one on thematic analysis (Ch.8), which (Boje notes) is not strictly associated with stories (p.122). In fact, whereas "taxonomy cells in narrative theory are little theme cages to entrap stories," Boje emphasizes how antenarratives move in between and outside taxonomic classification (p.122). In an antenarrative approach, then, Boje exhorts us to ask: 

• What gets left out of themes?
• What goes on between the cells of themes? (p.125)

I found this book helpful in terms of thinking through how to analyze antenarratives (perhaps not narratives, although that is what the title implies). Chapter 6 was especially helpful along these lines, cataloging different approaches to causality analysis and providing methodological cites so we can study them further. 

On the other hand, I was not a fan of the prose, which is a little too pomo for me. That is, sometimes things that I think are fairly banal and unsurprising (e.g., people try to make sense through stories, those stories aren't necessarily internally coherent and are usually not coherent with others', a lot of causal links are post-hoc rationalizations) are presented as being shockingly revealed, often through highly figurative language. That figurative language could, in many places, be replaced by simple illustrations from concrete studies. In fact, doing so would have really helped me to understand how to apply these techniques in my own work -- techniques that seem to get lost in the shuffle sometimes.

Despite this drawback, I found the book helpful both in its advice and its bibliography. If you do qualitative research and have been thinking about analyzing narratives or antenarratives, definitely take a look.