George Cheney

• PhD, Purdue University, 1985
• Professor (Full) at University of Colorado Colorado Springs

The benefit corporation (BC) in the United States is a new type of corporation legally required to generate profit for its shareholders and to pursue public benefit. BCs explicitly work to balance profit maximization and social mission, which is an ongoing challenge for businesses with an expansive view of the bottom line. This multiple case study...

Organizational rhetoric has not received sufficient attention in organizational communication but also in organizational studies in general. The theme of this first of two tandem chapters is “merger,” referring to that impulse of rhetoric itself, to the related function of organizing, and to the points of contact within the parallel but not exactly...

Based on Kenneth Burke's shift from Aristotle's views on rhetoric to the more central treatment of identification, scholars of organizational rhetoric and communication have adopted it as a key concept to explain how organization succeeds, struggles, and fails. This chapter examines identification, the logics used by Burke to support and explain it...

This chapter focuses on Aristotle's rarely examined third definition of rhetoric, and on Kenneth Burke's early, less cited works from the 1930s. We focus on their conceptualizations of rhetoric, their forays into ethics and politics, and how the combination of the two approaches together help us revive in a deeply practical way the study of organiz...

This is the second of two tandem chapters that focus on organizational rhetoric and organizational communication. While Chapter 2 stressed the theme or merger, Chapter 3 stresses “division” as an inescapable complement to merger, again within multiple domains of inquiry as well as human experience. Chapter 3 also emphasizes the ways the term “disco...

This entry considers globalization and the related metaphor of the “global village” and relates them to the context of intercultural communication, a subdiscipline that has, for the most part, not engaged macro‐global forces. Along the way, we consider questions such as the meanings and trajectories of globalization, its dominant discourses, key co...

The concepts of alternative forms of organization and organizing are germane to organizational studies writ large and to the subfield of organizational communication. Here we interrogate the ambiguity of the terms themselves while also considering the family resemblances of organizational forms under this rubric. The discussion proceeds with an exp...

The idea of workplace democracy invokes Western democratic ideals, while simultaneously bringing into relief significant social and environmental challenges facing contemporary organizations under neoliberal capitalism, including growing inequality and resource limits threatening indefinite economic expansion. This entry contextualizes workplace de...

This paper aims to contribute to a greater understanding of the theory of virtue ethics and its applications in the business arena. In contrast to other prominent approaches to ethics, virtue ethics provides a useful perspective in making sense of various business ethics issues with an emphasis on the moral character of the individuals and its tran...

The current emphasis on organizational transparency signifies a growing demand for insight, clarity, accountability, and participation. Holding the promise of improved access to valid and trustworthy knowledge about organizations, the transparency pursuit has great potential for enhanced organizational effectiveness and widened democratic practice....

This article examines the organizational identities and strategic communication of two New Zealand primary export organizations as they managed intense public debate surrounding the potential impacts of genetic modification. We examine the similarities and differences in identifications at multiple levels in these organizations, illustrating the va...

This special issue of Organization treats cooperatives as alternative forms of business and organization, focusing on worker-owned-and-governed forms. In reviewing extant research and considering the seven articles in this special issue, we treat five main challenges that workers' cooperatives face: (1) the organizational resources, structures, and...

This paper is an attempt to articulate some general principles which might guide anarchist thinking about organized alternatives to market managerialism and might be read as a sort of manifesto for defining 'the alternative'. That is to say, it describes what we include in our list of useful possibilities, and what to exclude on the grounds that it...

This article calls upon scholars of organizational studies to take more active roles in confronting and addressing the social, political, economic and environmental problems of today. The article begins with the observation that the birth of organizational studies was deeply concerned with changes, problems and opportunities in an increasingly ‘org...

The Mondragon Cooperative Experience (MCE) is a general but recognized term that refers to the totality of contexts surrounding the Mondragon cooperatives in the Basque Country, Spain. The centrepiece of that movement and institution is the Mondragon Corporation (hereafter called simply Mondragon) – a large, diverse conglomerate of cooperatives fed...

The concept of 'professionalism' has gained everyday resonance in the twenty-first century, especially given recent corporate scandals. However, George Cheney argues, as much as it may be discussed, professionalism has lost much of its broader social and community-related implications, as the trends of careerism, consumerism, and contingent employm...

Contributers 1. Introduction Kim Korinek and Thomas N. Maloney Part 1: International Law, Human Rights, and Migration in the Global Context 2. Living with Noncitizens: Migration, Domination and Human Rights James Bohman 3. The Rights of Aliens: Legal Regimes and Historical Perspectives Tony Anghie and Wayne McCormack 4. How Should Corporate Social...

This essay considers a range of issues related to workplace democracy in the contemporary industrialized world. Although drawing from a broad multi‐disciplinary literature, the essay emphasizes topics that can be usefully explored from the perspective of communication and sound contributions that can be made to theory and practice from such an enga...

This commentary offers reflections on the preceding articles and frames ethics of community engagment by (organizational) communication scholars in terms of broader issues about the enterprises of applied research. The brief essay considers how we approach and position ethics (writ large) in our work and then offers the following dialectics for con...

In his monumental work Economy and society , Weber (1978, 1st pub. 1922), explained bureaucracy both in terms of principles of societal order and with respect to its place in the modern world. In seeking to answer the fundamental question “How do we understand un‐coerced obedience?” Weber examined the history of societies and empires ranging from a...

This chapter argues for a broadening of organizational communication scholarship through the consideration of meanings of work including meaningful work. First, we define meaningful work especially within the frame of a broader examination of meanings of work. Along the way, we consider the concept of meaningful work within a constellation of terms...

The field of corporate communications describes the practices organizations use to communicate as coherent corporate "bodies". Drawing on the metaphor of the body and on a variety of theories and disciplines, Corporate Communications: Convention, Complexity and Critique challenges the idealized notion that organizations can and should communicate a...

This essay celebrates the ways in which organizational communication scholars have engaged contemporary issues of social and economic justice but asks us to take the next step to bring our energies and insights together with our listening skills and compassion to the wider community.

The retirement village sector1 is one part of the increasingly marketized `aged-care' services in New Zealand and in many other parts of the industrialized world. While critical researchers have examined organizational and residents' representations of aging, retirement, and retirement communities in the context of `the market', there is no researc...

This essay positions contemporary "professionalism" as a contested term and a nexus of important theoretical and practical concerns for communication scholars, including, for example, those engaged in the empirical, interpretive, and critical examinations of culture and the self. We advance communication-based understandings of the meanings and pra...

Should business strive to be socially responsible, and if so, how? The Debate over Corporate Social Responsibility updates and broadens the discussion of these questions by bringing together in one volume a variety of practical and theoretical perspectives on corporate social responsibility. It is perhaps the single most comprehensive volume availa...

Should business strive to be socially responsible, and if so, how? The Debate over Corporate Social Responsibility updates and broadens the discussion of these questions by bringing together in one volume a variety of practical and theoretical perspectives on corporate social responsibility. It is perhaps the single most comprehensive volume availa...

Should business strive to be socially responsible, and if so, how? The Debate over Corporate Social Responsibility updates and broadens the discussion of these questions by bringing together in one volume a variety of practical and theoretical perspectives on corporate social responsibility. It is perhaps the single most comprehensive volume availa...

Despite the potential political impact of industry attempts to influence public policy about genetic modification, little research has focused on critical understanding of industry perspectives. This article explores the rhetorical and discursive construction of public messages about this controversial issue by two major New Zealand export industri...

This colloquy results froma series of discussions between the authors concerning issues of (a) the status of labor activity in organizational communication study, (b) the dimensions of and prospects for workplace democracy in practice, and (c) the need for the discipline of communication to attend more seriously to the material world. The authors w...

In response to the growing interest in issues related to attachment in organizations, this paper develops a theory of identification in the workplace based on three key aspects of Structurational theory. In this model, the identification process is treated as a duality involving identities that create and are created by identifications, which are t...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to discuss issues of PR theory and practice. Design/methodology/approach – The paper presents seven questions that are crucial to the conversation between PR theory and practice. The questions center on these concepts, in turn: identity/image, organizational culture, modes of representation, advocacy, audienc...

An important avenue toward responsible and sustainable business is social entrepreneurship, although its appearance has been more marked in practice than in academic research. Indeed, there is but a nascent body of academic literature published on the subject, with a smattering of studies across disciplines. In this paper we draw on that literature...

Purpose Aims to explore the historical development and current usages of the concept of social entrepreneurship. Design/methodology/approach The paper first examines the socio‐political conditions leading to business repositioning in the traditionally governmental role of catering to the financial needs of civil society. It then reviews several mo...

This essay addresses the need for organizational communication scholarship to come to terms with the contested nature of globalization through analyses of collective resistance. We argue that organizational communication has largely situated the study of resistance at the level of the individual, and characterized it as an element of micro-politics...

This essay treats both democracy and the market. The essay assesses the condition of modern workplace democracy and reconsiders the potential for genuine and thoroughgoing democratic practices within corporations that find themselves “globalizing” and responding to market forces. To ground my analysis, I draw upon the case of the Mondragón cooperat...

Within the personal branding movement, people and their careers are marketed as brands complete with promises of performance, specialized designs, and tag lines for success. Because personal branding offers such a startlingly overt invitation to self-commodification, the phenomenon invites a careful and searching analysis. This essay begins by exam...

Corporate rhetoric as organizational discourse Rhetoric is the humanistic tradition for the study of persuasion. Identified most closely with the ancient Greeks and Romans, rhetoric's classical emphasis is best captured by Aristotle's famous definition ‘the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion’ (1954. p. 3). This...

Considers how the argument that communication is a "practical discipline" is compelling because it suggests that educators should be finding ways to make their research and teaching relevant to the world. Discusses a need to work through what the ideal of engagement is. Identifies 10 strategies that are most important to the authors, and considers...

This article brings together previous research efforts by the authors and reviews a wide range of relevant literatures to explain and analyze paradoxes of employee participation and workplace democracy. Although the authors do not take the position that all or even most of these paradoxes are necessarily harmful, they do maintain that there are a v...

Public relations as contested terrain: A critical response This handbook offers a broad overview of public relations and articulates multiple visions of what public relations is and ought to be. Like a number of the writers in this theoretical section of the volume, we see public relations as a contested disciplinary and interdisciplinary terrain....

This chapter summarizes the state of theory and research in organizational communication. The authors highlight the central concerns and major challenges addressed by organizational communication researchers. They begin by isolating the central intellectual and practical currents, and then they identify defining and constituting concepts in organiz...

Claims organizational or management communication finds itself in a difficult rhetorical dilemma. Suggests that even evolving and outward-looking networks have a tendency toward closure, self-affirmation and self-legitimation. Claims repeated and conscious decisions--affirmative action as understood in its older sense--are needed to push beyond the...

This article reports a case study of change-related communication in the business services department of a large local-government organization in New Zealand. The authors argue that popular contemporary management discourse celebrates change and creates assumptions that guide managerial practice and the interpretation of managerial actions. Thus, t...

In response to the growing interest in issues related to attachment in organizations, this paper develops a theory of identification in the workplace based on three key aspects of structuration theory. In this model, the identification process is treated as a duality involving identities that create and are created by identifications, which are the...

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...

Natural persons (i.e., real people as opposed to “corporate or organizational persons”) have come to be treated—often implicitly but sometimes quite explicitly—as mere objects (or in other cases not treated or mentioned at all) in some of the more popular and influential ways of talking about “doing business.” Although we recognize that certain dim...

The metaphor of “Student as Consumer” appeared upon the social horizon in North America and Western Europe seemingly for all the right reasons: the responsibility of higher education to its publics, the attendant accountability, an interest in practical applications of knowledge, and spiraling increases in the cost of going to college. Widespread a...

In this paper we articulate how Michel Foucault's perspective on “discipline” applies to the modern organization. Primarily, we explicate Foucault's view of discipline and demonstrate its usefulness for organizational analysis, particularly as it serves to extend Weber's thesis on the increasing rationalization of advanced industrial society. From...

What does it mean to speak with a collective voice? This is the central question addressed in "Rhetoric in an Organizational Society". The author explains how in advanced industrial society many of the messages that individuals see and hear are associated with organizations of great size, resources, and power. Organizational messages take the forms...

When you look closer, you see the Common Market is bogged down in innumerable petty, inglorious disputes, some as small as grains of sand, a few more important… But they are in reality mere pretexts. There is something else that stops the integration of Europe, something few people ever mention, that really makes these disputes insurmountable obsta...

Books reviewedSOCIAL SCIENCE AS CIVIC DISCOURSE: ESSAYS ON THE INVENTION, LEGITIMATION, AND USES OF SOCIAL THEORY. By Richard Harvey Brown. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989. pp. xvii + 227. $29.95.FRAMEWORKS OF POWER. By Stuart Clegg. London: Sage Publications, 1989. pp. xix + 297. $49.95.FOUNDATIONS OF SOCIAL THEORY. By James S. Coleman....

Contemporary life is so unavoidably affected by the organizations to which we belong that it has become necessary to rethink our traditional understanding of both individual and collective rhetoric. This essay lays the groundwork for considering organizational rhetoric as an area of theoretical and practical investigation within communication studi...

The notion of “text” has emerged as an important and controversial frame for postmodern social inquiry (see, for example, the collection of essays in Baynes, Bohman, & McCarthy, 1987). While offering a particular angle on “textuality” and building on Kenneth Burke’s (1954/1964) method of “indexing,” this essay argues for the literal application of...

The concepts of organizational identification and organizational commitment are examined in an effort to explicate both their interrelations and their distinctiveness. The essay establishes identification as a term referring to the “substance” of individual‐organizational relationships and commitment as referring to their form.

It was hypothesized that the three types of service organizations identified by Mills and Margulies (1980) would exhibit differences with respect to perceived “innovation communication” (communication about innovations that may precede and/or accompany diffusion‐adoption processes) as well as differences in perceived individual innovativeness and p...

The authors examine the communicative, organizational, and political dimensions of how the National Conference of Catholic Bishops (NCCB) treated the issue of nuclear arms control in the early 1980s. They argue that the NCCB as an organizational unit shaped a new “corporate advocacy” role for itself; the bishops responded to internal and external n...