Rahul MitraWayne State University | WSU · Department of Communication
Rahul Mitra
Ph.D., Purdue University
About
46
Publications
17,994
Reads
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675
Citations
Citations since 2017
Introduction
Rahul Mitra is an associate professor, whose research is at the intersection of organizational and environmental communication. His scholarship focuses on environmental organizing, sustainability and corporate social responsibility (CSR),and meaningful work discourses. His expertise is in qualitative and ethnographic research methods.
Education
August 2009 - August 2013
August 2007 - May 2009
Publications
Publications (46)
This study explores perceptions of online racial hate speech directed at Asian Americans in the United States during the COVID-19 pandemic. We examined how individuals’ enactment of resilience communication in response to that threat affected their self-reported estimates of personal health. Using a nationally representative survey (n = 1767) that...
This chapter draws from an ongoing oral history project with Black, Indigenous, and Person of Color (BIPOC) entrepreneurs in Metro Detroit navigating the personal and professional trauma of the COVID-19 pandemic. Our chapter blends narrative strands from these oral histories with our own researcher “back-stories” to demonstrate the intersecting the...
We examine suburban residents’ sense-making of Detroit’s water insecurity, especially in the context of the city’s extensive water shutoffs, which have affected more than 100,000 families since 2013. Using in-depth interviews with 20 residents of Oakland, Wayne and Macomb counties that surround the city, we theorize on the ontological differences (...
Uncertainty is at the forefront of many crises, disasters, and emergencies, and the COVID-19 pandemic is no different in this regard. In this forum, we, as a group of organizational communication scholars currently living in North America, engage in sensemaking and sensegiving around this pandemic to help process and share some of the academic unce...
Studies of emerging professions are more and more at the crossroad of different fields of research, and field boundaries thus hamper the development of a full-fledged conversation. In an attempt to bridge these boundaries, this article offers a ‘generative dialogue’ about the redefinition of the professionalization project through the case of corpo...
Movements in Organizational Communication Research is an essential resource for anyone wishing to become familiar with the current state of organizational communication research and key trends in the field. Seasoned organizational communication scholars will find that the book provides unique insights by way of the intergenerational dialogue that i...
Studies of online interaction have rarely examined processes of (de)legitimizing professional expertise in participatory digital spaces, or connected them with broader themes of politics and community. This chapter explores practitioners’ vernacular rhetoric in the emerging field of environmental sustainability in an online discussion thread on Lin...
This study examines religious disengagement among African-American young adults through a communicative lens. Drawing on in-depth interviews, we unpack the tensions between organizational and institutional disengagement in participants’ accounts and trace the relational factors shaping their use of specific stigma management strategies. Participant...
Purpose
This paper undertakes a comparative case study (Stake, 2006) of two multi-stakeholder initiatives (MSIs) building resilient water systems to address how they communicative frame and manage key tensions. “Glacier” is the North American convener of a MSI focused on developing reliable and measurable standards of water stewardship in catchmen...
This study advances a theoretical framework of sustainable organizing, grounded in the communicative practices of key organizational actors. I situate this study in the enactment of natural resource management (NRM) in the U.S. Arctic, drawing on qualitative fieldwork and in-depth interviews. The theoretical framework hinges on four iterative sensi...
This essay serves to introduce and synthesize the articles included in this Critical Sociology Symposium dedicated to “Social Institutions and Sustainability.” Our goal is to encourage shifting between and betwixt multiple epistemological lens to interrogate both what “social institutions” and “sustainability” might mean, to create a truly transcen...
Although largely espoused by contemporary organizations, implementing sustainability is often vague and ineffective. In contrast to most studies that employ resource-based or institutional perspectives to study sustainable organizing, we draw on discursive positioning theory to examine how sustainability practitioners make sense of and enact their...
This article examines the negotiation of organizational tensions by purpose-driven consultancies, for-profit firms also motivated by social change agendas in their implementation of organizational development for corporate clients. Using two case studies – APCom training ethical corporate leaders, and GreenD communicating environmental sustainabili...
Popular culture is the representation of a society in artifacts, symbols, and rituals of everyday life – represented through media such as television, radio, news, books, movies, and music. Studying popular culture thus offers organizational communication scholars an understanding of fundamental workplace and organizing processes, as evident to ord...
This study, based on in-depth interviews with 45 practitioners in the emerging field of environmental sustainability, argues for a more nuanced approach to studying the meaningfulness of work. Drawing from the tension-centered approach, we posit that sustainability practitioners derived meaningfulness in tensional ways from circumstances and factor...
Sustainability involves development that meets the needs of the present without compromising future generations' prosperity. Organizational communication research on sustainability and sustainable development can be grouped in four broad areas: examining sustainability in terms of organizational viability in the presence of ongoing internal and ext...
This chapter draws from a qualitative study, comprising of interviews with 14 gay professionals in India, to theorize passing as an ongoing communicative practice capable of actively resisting and speaking back to dominant structures of heteronormativity and hypermasculinity at the workplace. Using the constant comparative approach, we trace the co...
With the foregrounding of “clean energy” policies by climate change concerns, the rhetorical constitution of “America” as a collective subject, mobilized to adopt the clean energy economy (CEE), becomes crucial. Here, I analyze the constitutive rhetoric of Pew Charitable Trusts’ landmark 2009 report on the CEE, drawing from the ventriloqual perspec...
In this article, I draw from the culture-centered approach to explore contemporary negotiations of career and work, positing career as a form of cultural practice. Rooted in postcolonial theory and subaltern studies, the culture-centered approach examines the active accomplishment of culture through everyday communicative practices, amidst the stru...
This paper unpacks the communicative constitutions of resilience and sustainability in global communication through research exemplars that address grand challenges for engagement of new generational workforce, better inclusion of professional immigrants, sustainable organizational development and leadership, and infrastructure design for global wa...
Noting overlaps between leadership and transformation processes, I outline a critical digital perspective that shifts focus from transformational leadership behaviors to how leadership “trans-formations” occur. Specifically, this article avers that naming particular identities, processes, and concepts by leaders and change participants enacts trans...
This chapter reviews and critiques the literature pertaining to corporate reputation in emerging markets. Drawing from the culture-centered approach, it interrogates how the concepts of "corporate reputation" and "emerging markets" are constructed. Five main themes of corporate reputation are evident: resource or asset owned by the firm, stake soci...
This article examines the “hybrid” discourses of neo-capitalism at play in the emerging economy context of India through the case study of a prominent Indian company, which launched an ambitious organizational project in 2006-2008: the cheapest car in the world. I critically analyze the company’s media releases with attention to the genre, social c...
My aim in this essay is to show how foreignness/community is continuously performed in “ordinary” life, both reifying and resisting normative/normalized ways of being. Drawing on Giorgio Agamben's concept of potentiality, I outline a performance-based framework that sees foreignness-as-potentiality passing into the actuality of community. Foreignne...
Companies operating and located in emerging economy nations routinely couch their corporate social responsibility (CSR) work
in nation-building terms. In this article, I focus on the Indian context and critically examine mainstream CSR discourse from
the perspective of the culture-centered approach (CCA). Accordingly, five main themes of CSR stand...
This essay answers the call for intersectional examinations of difference constitution/ negotiation. I outline a dialogic framework of difference, actively accomplished via communication in conjunction with material conditions of object, site and body. The essay draws from an ethnography with Sri Lankan Tamil refugees in India. It finds that the re...
This study, focusing on the emerging economy context of one of India's largest automotive companies, Tata Motors, analyzes the thematic framing of corporate social responsibility (CSR) and corporate reputation. Five CSR frames are shown: institutionalization, community development, modernization, mainstreaming, and nation-building. Reputation is fr...
I examine organization–media linkages in an emerging economy context, specifically India, tracing how the media upholds organizational ideologies/interests, while silencing dissidence. I provide a conceptual framework to understand the reification and disbarment strategies at play, which are seen to operate through 4 core themes: national progress...
Community formation/sustenance in the real/virtual realms is especially important in an age where media are increasingly convergent and interactive. Using the theory of interpretive communities, this article analyzes a network of queer Indian bloggers/readers/commenters and their reading of the mainstream media coverage of India's first national Ga...
I examine here Theory and Scholarship (taken to be formalized social scientific frameworks that seek to map out the real world and social actions in an objective fashion) via an autoethnographic lens. Chiefly, I ask how autoethnography as a research method reconfigures them: how may we extend knowledge using autoethnography? While much critique has...
Queering and transgendering practices have been visible across the Internet since the time of multiuser domains (MUDs), MUD object oriented domains (MOOs), e-mail lists, and Web bulletins. This article maps some themes of queering in the Indian digital diaspora through an intergenerational lens, produced in the acts of online and offline coauthorin...
Questions
Question (1)
A project I'm due to start in the fall would benefit greatly from allowing participants in a geographic area to indicate their location on a map (digitally) and answer 2-3 open-ended questions related to that location. Co-urbanize would be great, but it seems restricted to policymakers (i.e., not for scholarly research). Community Remarks also seems great, but the basic package costs $2,000. I found this large list from searching online, but I'm not sure which of these are any good or may be used for scholarly research, which is why I'm turning to ResearchGate for some feedback. What have you used in your ethnographic or urban planning research? Thank you in advance for ideas and tips!
List I found: http://blog.openplans.org/2014/12/21299/
