David Carlone

• PhD
• Professor of the Practice at Vanderbilt University

Within organizational communication research and theory, capitalism most often appears either as a competitive market system or as a context of labor exploitation. Some scholarship seeks to make firms more competitive in a context of market driven, global competition. More frequently, capitalism is understood to be a context that hinders successful...

Scientific management advocates a rational, objective approach to the management of labor. The approach identifies managers as those responsible for studying, designing, and assessing the work of employees. Organizational communication scholars have engaged with this tradition of management through a focus on its problems, such as its narrow concep...

A key to improving urban science and mathematics education is to facilitate the mutual understanding of the participants involved and then look for strategies to bridge differences. Educators need new theoretical tools to do so. In this paper the argument is made that the concept of “boundary spanner” is such a tool. Boundary spanners are individua...

Online teaching and learning has been adopted throughout higher education with minimal critical attention to the challenges it poses to traditional definitions of academic labor. This chapter explores four areas where the nature of academic labor becomes contestable through the introduction of online instruction: (1) the boundaries demarcating work...

Boundaries dividing communication and culture from economy are fluid. The US services economy, with broad and deep growth, illustrates this fluidity. This paper applies theorizations of the relationship between communication and capitalism to a customer service job-training course for dislocated workers. A site of communication education, the cours...

As organizational communication scholars, we routinely orient ourselves to organizations as places of work while often ignoring the diverse forms of communicative work and communication about our working lives that underpin such locales. In this essay, we consider how the study of meaningful work problematizes the boundaries of organizational commu...

Researchers asked 17 participants in a job-training program to describe their personal struggles following an economic restructuring. Examined through a critical theoretical lens, findings indicate that the learners enrolled in the program to reclaim security, dignity, meaningful work, and caring relationships. Program planners at community college...

The purpose of conducting this study was to understand how neoliberal discourses manifest within the local context of a short‐term, job‐training program offered at a two‐year college in the USA. Ethnographic data were collected at the local site through interviews, observations and document analysis. We then situated these data within a global cont...

This paper studies attempts to regulate employees' identities through self-help programs to examine control and resistance. Extant research shows how identity regulation secures organization control. Less attention is paid to resistance of such control. This study addresses this limitation by examining one self-help change program, The 7 Habits of...

Each year, managers and employees spend billions of dollars retaining management consultants, buying business books, and attending seminars to regain certainty. Some of this quest occurs in the lectures of star management consultants, such as Stephen R. Covey. For his audience, a Covey lecture is a liminoid event, that is, a middle phase in a secul...

Recently, we have been struggling to interpret a series of minor yet absurd spectacles that span the industrial and popular-cultural realms. These events have compelled our scholarly interest, but lack a ready-made frame for diagnosing their significance. Consider these examples: In the summer of 1996, vivacious 'TV talk-show cohost Kathie Lee Giff...

In their contributions to this forum, Nadesan, Cloud, and Weaver have critiqued and extended our argument for the benefits of collaboration between organizational communication and cultural studies. Originally (Carlone & Taylor, 1998), we argued that communication scholars should integrate the resources of these fields to fashion new ways of engagi...

Popular management writing and discourse fascinates me for two reasons. First, it makes me ask the questions, “Why did this writing and discourse ever become „popular??” and “Why would someone ever want to read popular management literature?” Second, popular management writing and discourse fascinates me because so much of it professes new forms of...

Systematic data on the recent history of communication studies in U.S. higher education are much needed. Statistical data can mislead, however, when numbers are reported without careful attention to the shifting classification schemes that underlie them. The work that is needed in order to understand the recent emergence of a communication discipli...

This review essay examines a broad multidisciplinary literature on democracy and work, highlighting issues of theory and practice of special interest to communication scholars. The essay treats relevant and selective research from the following fields (in addition to communication studies): the sociology of organizations, political science and publ...

This study examined the relationship between motivation and compliance‐gaining strategy selection across three different interpersonal communication situations. In general, results suggested that motivation to control others is a predictor of strategy selection whereas low levels of general motivation may be associated with strategy avoidance. Impl...

Thesis (M.A.)--University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1995. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 245-247).