Karen Lee Ashcraft

• PhD
• Professor (Full) at University of Colorado Boulder

Affect theory has met with an uneven welcome in communication studies, although attending to affect (i.e., the fluctuating intensities of encounter) could enhance the scope and impact of communication inquiry. This article makes a case for sustained engagement at the field level, across subfields. I argue that affect confronts a premise at the hear...

Research on identity at work tends to take the individual as unit of analysis. This chapter explores how we might address identity beyond the person—not merely as a social practice led by conscious humans, but as a semi-conscious bodily encounter that activates the individual. Drawing on affect theory, the author makes the case for a pre-individual...

Despite abundant scholarship addressed to gender equity in leadership, much leadership literature remains invested in gender binaries. Metaphors of leadership are especially dependent on gender oppositions, and this article treats the scholarly practice of coding leadership through gendered metaphor as a consequential practice of leadership unto it...

The Work of Communication: Relational Perspectives on Working and Organizing in Contemporary Capitalism revolves around a two-part question: "What have work and organization become under contemporary capitalism-and how should organization studies approach them?" Changes in the texture of capitalism, heralded by social and organizational theorists a...

While knowledge theorists give attention to knowing in practice, two common habits in the empirical literature, which we call knowledge inherency and skepticism, serve to re-center certain practitioners. The sites in which we study knowing thereby remain limited, hindering a fuller practice turn. We argue that this enduring tendency is problematic...

The current literature yields contrasting diagnoses of the diversity problem in the professions: (a) a dominant ‘absence’ view, which explains the exclusion of certain people as a lack to be rectified and (b) an alternative ‘presence’ view, which explains exclusion as a consequence of tacit inclusion. Although the latter challenges the former by ex...

Professional Team Sport and the Trade in Civilized and Primitive MasculinitiesA Dark Day for the NBA: Civilized and Primitive Masculinities Face Off in the Discourse of DeclineBoyz or Men? The Tacit Racial Contract of Professional SportReferences

The Oxford Handbook of Critical Management Studies provides an overview of theoretical approaches, key topics, issues, and subject specialisms in management studies, as well as a set of reflections on the progress and prospects of Critical Management Studies (CMS). CMS has emerged as a movement that questions the authority and relevance of mainstre...

This essay aims to bring politics closer to home in two main ways. First, we address geographical and disciplinary spaces and identities in order to propose a fruitful `breeding ground' for critical management education (CME) in the US context: organizational and instructional communication studies. Second, we engage recent calls for self-reflexivi...

This essay aims to “materialize” organizational communication in three senses. First, we seek to make the field of study bearing this name more tangible for North American management scholars, such that recognition and engagement become common. To do so, we trace the development of the field’s major contribution thus far: the communication‐as‐const...

This essay aims to “materialize” organizational communication in three senses. First, we seek to make the field of study bearing this name more tangible for North American management scholars, such that recognition and engagement become common. To do so, we trace the development of the field’s major contribution thus far: the communication‐as‐const...

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...

This article pursues two central goals. First, I seek to advance the sustained study of occupational identity as a pivotal mechanism for organizing work and, thus, as a productive means of integrating the aims of two scholarly movements: 1) the ‘dislocation’ of organization (i.e. beyond container metaphors of site) and 2) the renewed emphasis on wo...

This paper reconsiders the usual contrast between “old” and “new” organizational forms, exploring what happens when postbureaucratic control meets bureaucratic formalization. It develops earlier work on “organized dissonance,” first, by recasting postbureaucratic practice as a hybrid of contrary forms. The paper then situates feminist bureaucracy a...

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...

This article engages in two broad tasks. First, it articulates the basic premises of a "critical communicology of gender and work," suggesting a communication-oriented model for examining the relationships among gender, discourse, organizing, and power. The four basic elements of this model are (1) a postmodern feminist conception of subjectivity,...

Corporate scandals generate public scrutiny of organizational communication practices, invoke discourses about systemic change, and problematize firms' legitimacy as communication agents. Accordingly, the authors situate corporate scandal as a crucial social problem that organizational communication scholars can usefully inform, and they propose th...

Scholars of organizational communication have begun to focus diligently on organization as gendered, yet we continue to neglect the ways in which it is fundamentally raced. With this article, we seek to stimulate systematic attention to the racial dynamics of organizational communication. We argue that the field's most common ways of framing race i...

Recent trends in popular culture suggest an emerging discourse of professional masculinity in crisis. This essay examines two illustrative films, Fight Club and In the Company of Men, whose characters bemoan the impending demise of the masculine businessman. To revive him, they (re)turn to what we call a "civilized/primitive" masculinity, embodied...

This article revisits the relationship between feminist and bureaucratic organization. Much feminist critique has denounced bureaucratic impersonality and proposed the reunion of professional and personal. Yet, little is known of what happens when actual organization members merge “private” matters with “public” life. This article turns to feminist...

The ethnographic study reported here examines executive maternity leave as a succession event that manifests itself in a novel transition pattern that I term “temporary executive succession.” In a study of one entrepreneurial firm, I investigated what happens when a founder takes a maternity leave, specifically, how the initiating force of maternit...

Tells a personal tale of a conflicted feminist self and how using such individual tensions can inform organizational communication. Explores the ongoing evolution of a reluctant feminist identity through organizational micropractices that spur and impede alignment with feminisms. Presents a particular standpoint on the strained connection between w...

Although feminist thought increasingly infuses the study of organizational communication, much of the feminist literature to date has failed to engage the practices of women in actual organizations. This case study moves to address that neglect, using data gathered in an organization founded by and largely comprised of women. Specifically, the essa...