Stanley Deetz

• University of Colorado Boulder

Organizational ethics includes the consideration of a wide number of issues of rights, responsibilities, values, and proper conduct in contemporary organizations and in organizations' relations to host societies. Conceptions and studies of organizational ethics have focused on both internal practices and social consequences and have been descriptiv...

Organizational cultures can be evaluated through an analysis of site specific micro communicative practices within a critical theory of communication and organizations. In order to do so, corporate organizations are presented as social/historical institutions designed to fulfill needs for competing groups including owners, workers, managers, consum...

To meet current and ever shifting problems people continually need new and better ways to attend to, talk about, and respond in the world. All communities can have an impoverished language for talking about human interaction and making decisions in times of fundamental and rapid change. Three current impoverishments are discussed. Engaged scholarsh...

Due to misunderstandings and an insufficiently explicated methodological base, the unique and important role of interpretive methods in the behavioral sciences has been often overlooked. By distinguishing interpretive-understanding from subjective insights based on empathy and from explanations based on normative paradigms, the present essay elucid...

Like Weiss, I too dislike some of the postmodern writings on organizations. I too worry that shallow works given even more shallow and opportunistic readings can have negative social consequences. But I also recognize that most of Weiss's concerns are not unique to postmodern writings. Many of the problems he discusses could also be descriptive of...

When Gibson Burrell and Gareth Morgan wrote Sociological Paradigms and Organisational Analysis, I doubt that they, or anyone else, would have anticipated the widespread impact or resultant contestation that their four-paradigm grid would have. Many grids had appeared before in sociology and after in organizational studies, but none have gained the...

If commercial corporations are to stay economically viable and the general society is to stay healthy, corporate decisions must be even more responsive to rapidly changing environments and stakeholder needs and responsible in increasingly complex and interdependent social contexts. The dominant economic conception of corporations and the accompanyi...

This essay has been by necessity a gloss of a complex look at the relations of power, control, and personal identity construction in a workplace. Features of the nature of the work process combine with social strategies to construct a reproductive self-referential system. Corporate organizations are central institutions in contemporary life; they m...

Noting that scholars are beginning to take the relation between media corporations and other commercial corporations as seriously as they have traditionally taken the relation between the state and the press, this paper focuses on the public's belief that media are largely apolitically and value neutral. The paper argues, however, that the media ar...

Personal identity and mutual understanding are primary products of interpersonal interaction. Descriptive accounts of interpersonal relationships need to be augmented by consideration of the ethical issues raised by the nature of identity formation and mutual understanding. Ethical ideals developed in the enlightenment tradition fail to account for...

Critical perspectives on cultural research in organizations have received much attention recently. Future directions for this work are explored here through a review of central concepts and research. Continuation, but with greater theoretical focus, is expected for studies of language, metaphor, stories, and myths, which investigate the creation an...

Based on a survey questionnaire mailed to SCA members who teach in four‐year colleges or universities, this article reports on speech communication faculty characteristics, career profiles, and career paths. Conclusions point to limited upward mobility between institutions, a diversity of satisfactory careers despite a predominate “publish or peris...

TRUTH AND METHOD. By Hans Georg Gadamer. New York: Seabury Press, 1975; pp. 576. $24.50. Originally published as WAHRHEIT UND METHODE, by J.C.B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck) Tubingen, 1960. The translation was edited by Garrett Barden and John Cumming from the second (1965) edition.NOVANTIQUA: RHETORICS AS A CONTEMPORARY THEORY. By Paolo Velesio. Bloomingto...

Many organizational theorists have adopted models of organizations as consensual social realities. These realities are often inadequately described because the process by which they are produced and reproduced in organizations is not discussed. This paper briefly describes how this process takes place in discourse, providing a basis for analyzing o...

The fundamental shifts in thinking about communication theory and research that are suggested in the hermeneutic writing made available during the last decade are reviewed in this paper. The issues reviewed include a consideration of hermeneutics as a philosophy of social science, the modern conception of textuality, and the status of interpretive...

Noting that a shared social reality that is constituted, sustained, and modified in symbolic interaction is central to life in an organization, this paper contends that contemporary developments in rhetorical theory make possible careful descriptions of how discourse functions in maintaining and changing that social reality. The paper demonstrates...

American descriptions of the communicative process differ from hermeneutic descriptions in their assumed conception of human understanding. American studies have generally assumed a “reproductive” view of understanding — trying to discover means for avoiding intersubjective misunderstandings by eliminating prejudices. Gadamer presented a “productiv...

While other philosophic bases exist for interpretive research, hermeneutics is one of the most original and widely , accepted Yet it is still largely misun derstood by and, in many cases, un known to persons studying commu nication in the United States. This paper develops the essential philo sophic nexus composing hermeneutics and considers the im...

In prepredicative experience language is constitutive of the possibilities for meaning and action. Language as a tradition— meaningful prior to subjective existence—gives a “world” to things, thereby enabling things to acquire a particular nature and to exhibit possibilities for action to man. Communication and understanding are possible, not becau...

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Ohio University, June, 1973.

and from discussions in the research seminars at Baruch College (CUNY), IESE, INSEAD, Rotterdam School of Management, Stern School (NYU), and the Wharton School. We thank Ann Nelson (Zurich) for her help with the English language. Our research project is partly supported by the Swiss Network of International Studies (SNIS). Both authors contributed...