Content uploaded by Majia holmer Nadesan
Author content
All content in this area was uploaded by Majia holmer Nadesan on Nov 16, 2020
Content may be subject to copyright.
1
Nadesan, Majia (2003). Transversing Dualisms and Situating the Embodied Self in
Organizational Theory and Practice. In R. E. Ramsey & D. Miller (eds.), Experiences
Between Philosophy and Communication: Engaging the Philosophical Contributions of
Calvin O.Schrag. State University of New York Press.
Transversing Dualisms and Situating the Embodied Self in
Organizational Theory and Practice
In this chapter I take up the significance of Schrag's view of the embodied self for the
study of organizational communication and, more generally, for the study of organizations.
Schrag's ontology of the embodied self provides the grounds for critiquing contemporary
organizational practices that invoke modernist dualisms that bifurcate the subject from the object
and the individual from the community. At first glance, Schrag's approach to critiquing dualistic
thinking may appear similar to other post-modern and critical frameworks. However, an
important contribution Schrag's work offers is its emphasis on the individual. Critical and
postmodern approaches tend to pit the individual against the "system" or "management" and then
address individual agency as resistant forms of bricolage and/or by postulating subversive
pleasures. In contrast, Schrag wants to center the individual as a responsive and responsible self,
but in a way that avoids the modernist fallacy of autonomous individualism. Thus, I believe that
the primary significance of Schrag's ontology of the embodied self for organizational
communication theory and practice is that it allows us to view individuals as agents endowed
with the capacity and responsibility to act ethically in their relation to self and others. By
centering the act, the decision to act ethically or not, Schrag extends the role of the subject
beyond that of bricolager.
Transversing the philosophy of consciousness and the philosophy of de-centered subjects
2
is Schrag's temporalized, spatially situated, embodied self. Yet, for some, Schrag's focus on
subjective agency may raise suspicion. However, to say that Schrag insists on the importance of
the self is not to slide into the modernist aporias surrounding the philosophy of consciousness.
Instead, Schrag navigates a careful path between approaches that erase subjectivity and
approaches that hypostatize it. As I shall demonstrate in this chapter, Schrag's concerns over
both trajectories are not armchair concerns. The former approaches, those that erase subjectivity,
are not restricted to philosophical theorizing but are also invoked in everyday organizational
practices. Likewise, those approaches that hypostatize the subject, through assumptions of
autonomous individualism, are also invoked daily in the workplace. All of this is to say that
although we academics would like simply to shed the subject-object dualism and be done with it,
it has bequeathed a legacy of material conditions that we cannot so readily sunder.
Schrag's construct of the self has profoundly shaped my research on individual agency in
the enactment of organizational life. Through seminars with Schrag and through my reading of
his texts, I developed a profound appreciation for his efforts to retain a phenomenological subject
in an era within which the subject has been declared dead. I have struggled with the forces that
constrain, control, produce, and enable agency throughout my work. More recently, I have
turned to Schrag's reflections upon subjectivity and ethics, particularly the roles of responsivity
and responsibility, in my efforts to address a few of the challenges of contemporary
organizational life. Accordingly, in order to illustrate Schrag's relevance for organizational
theory and practice, I will draw upon some of the applications I have made in my own research.
The Subject-Object Duality in Organizational Life
3
In Communicative Praxis and the Space of Subjectivity, Schrag critiques the human and
natural sciences for generating an artificial dichotomy between spirit and nature, understanding
and explanation:
Both epistemological and metaphysical constructionism, which define understanding and
explanation as alternative species of knowledge and install an ontological cleavage of
spirit and nature, disfigure the texture of communicative praxis. The hermeneutical
project of making sense together, on the part of the human and natural sciences alike,
installing the double requirement of understanding and explanation, occasions not the
continuation of an epistemological problematic but rather a displacement of it.
1
These oppositions--explanation and understanding, mind and body--rest ultimately in the
subject-object dichotomy that finds its fullest expression in many forms of modernist thought.
The inability to conceive of the mind and body in conjunction, to view consciousness as
incarnate, leads, on the one hand, to an "objectivization of the body on the level of ontological
construction" inviting "a reductionism of the motility of the human body to an instance of
mechanistically determined particles in motion."
2
On the other hand, it leads to a perception of
the self as sovereign and autonomous, "whose self-constitution remains impervious to any and
all forces of alterity."
3
The mind-body dualism's ubiquity is not limited to philosophical discourses. The
discourses of objectified body and autonomous, rational mind are invoked and enacted in
everyday communications and actions. It is my argument that they are invoked so thoroughly in
no other place than the contemporary workplace. In the following section I use Schrag's
observations to explore how organizational discourses and practices objectify individuals' bodies
4
while, simultaneously, they presuppose and appeal to a disembodied view of their souls. I argue
that organizations' responses to the alienation affected by their practices (typically) tend to
reproduce the conditions that produced the alienation in the first place. Organizational practices
grounded in dualistic thinking cannot be remedied by human resource or leadership programs
that also fragment and bifurcate subject and object, individual and community.
Objectivizing Practices
Historically, organizational practices have aimed at harnessing and disciplining the
recalcitrant energy of employees. At issue were the physics of employees' effort, force, and
bodily mechanics (e.g., see Foucault).
4
Frederick Taylor's scientific management and Henry
Ford's assembly line illustrate systems of production based on the mechanistic disciplining of
and control over the human body. In the contemporary scene, computer surveillance systems
that monitor employee keystrokes and/or regimented phone protocol illustrate current
applications of this pre-occupation with the production of, and governance over, compliant
bodies. This process of reducing employees to the energy and mechanics of their bodily
productions presupposes an ontology of personhood that Schrag describes as an idem-identity.
An idem-identity appeals to "objective criteria of identification" and finds "its touchstone
in the oneness of numerical identity," thereby securing the "concept of permanence in time, or
more precisely, permanence outside of time. . . ."
5
Practices and theories informed by an idem-
identity view individuals as immutable beings, object-like, and subject to objective criteria of
identification. In my own research, I have explored how the knowledge and practices of
organizational personality testing function to represent individuals using this ontology of
personhood.
5
My research on organizational personality testing was triggered by a phone call from a
friend whose job candidacy was rejected based on his personality "profile."
6
His expressed fear
that he would be forever barred from meaningful employment based upon the tests' capacity to
reveal some inferior, latent, fixed "inner" core triggered memories of Schrag's seminars on
existential phenomenology. Accordingly, that moment of fusion of past and present led to an
essay within which I implicitly explored the phenomenological relationship between subject and
object in this organizational practice for knowing employees.
Personality testing is commonly used by American corporations as a hiring and
promotion tool.
7
Among the estimated 5,000 to 6,000 corporations that use personality testing
are Beatrice Foods, Amstar Corporation, Minolta, Target, Apple, AT&T, Citicorp, Exxon, 3M,
Allied-Signal, and Honeywell. For these corporations, personality testing serves as an
"objective" representational technique that purports to render the essence--i.e., attitudes, values,
motivations--of present and future employees transparent and, most importantly, calculable.
8
Many tests are generated and analyzed by specialized computer programs, thereby centralizing,
simplifying, and rationalizing selection and promotion processes. From a managerial
perspective, personality exams transform information into data by quantifying and formalizing
knowledge about the heterogeneous, temporally unstable characteristics of the workforce.
Although employee data may not, in fact, render employees more malleable, American
management appears convinced about the superiority of this manner of knowing employees.
What struck me as most significant about personality testing is that it presupposes that
individuals possess a fixed inner nature that can be scientifically revealed using primarily
quantitative measures. The testing therefore reduces individuals to an idem-identity; it reduces
6
them to an invariant essence thought to remain permanent across time.
My first exposure to the idea of an idem-identity came in a seminar with Schrag on
existential phenomenology. In explaining the foundations of the subject-object dualism, Schrag
introduced us to Sartre's dialectical formulation of being-in-itself and being-for-itself. Ex-
istence, Schrag explained, is not defined by a fixed facticity--being-in-itself--but rather is
produced through the process of its transcendence--being-for-itself.
9
However, unlike Sartre,
whose tendency to intellectualize transcendence led to unresolved dialectical tensions, Schrag's
explanations and illustrations emphasized the subject's grounded, embodied situation. Although
acknowledging Sartre's limitations, it was clear to me that Schrag valued his efforts to theorize a
subject, who although situated, always/already struggled to exert meaningful agency (not merely
resistance). Schrag's admiration for Sartre's struggle to mediate subject and object,
transcendence and situation, triggered my own interest in this classical conundrum.
Years later, as I listened to my friend recount his fears, I realized that this conundrum had
material significance in everyday organizational practices because it is foundational to much
organizational theorizing and managerial practice. However, unlike philosophical thought that
struggles to mediate the poles of the dualism--subject and object--organizational practices tend to
sublate subject to object. In the case of personality testing, the emergent, transcendent aspects of
the subject's being are reduced to fixed, variable measurements, represented as essential hidden
truths that can be revealed only through the technical knowledge of scientifically formulated
instruments. In other words, personality testing invokes what Schrag refers to an idem
articulation of identity that appeals to "objective criteria of identification" and finds "its
touchstone in the oneness of numerical identity," thereby securing the "concept of permanence in
7
time, or more precisely, permanence outside of time. . . ."
10
According to Schrag, this tendency
to sublate or marginalize agency and transcendence is often an outcome of the ascendancy of a
particular form of knowledge, techne.
In Communicative Praxis and the Space of Subjectivity, Schrag takes up Aristotle's
tripartite system of practical action, theory, and instrumental activity:
praxis--"practice," "action," "performance"
theoria--"knowledge for its own sake,"
poiesis--"artifactual production," an activity that "produces an object that lies
beyond the dynamics of the activity itself."
11
Praxis has as its form of knowledge "practical wisdom," or phronesis. Theoria has as its form of
knowledge episteme. And poiesis has as its form of knowledge techne. Techne entails both
"calculation" of results and the "mapping of means" to attain an end.
Schrag notes that although techne is an indisputably critical form of knowledge
orientation, its application has a disturbing tendency to intrude upon the other forms of
knowledge. For example, most management research focuses exclusively on improving
organizational profitability. As a consequence, almost all organizational phenomena studied--
e.g., leadership, culture, climate, ethics, corporate philanthropy--are reduced to independent
variables posited in relation to the ultimate dependent variable--profit. Now, although this
formulation makes sense (pun intended!), its exclusive, almost religious pursuit blinds us to other
issues and phenomena that are relevant to employees' work experiences and to community
relations. The reduction of all (or most) organizational research to instrumental thought
constitutes colonization by techne. Life cannot be divided into separate spheres whose logic is
8
dictated exclusively by a particular interest. And yet, organizational theory attempts this division
and, further, organizational theory and practice also attempt to colonize all conduct, all praxis, by
reducing them to calculuses of quantification. This colonization of praxis is illustrated in a story
shared by a student in one of my classes. She recounted how her manager required that all of his
subordinates remove candy from their desktops after he conducted time and motion studies of
how much time was "lost" due to its consumption. It seemed that the candy facilitated employee
dialogue. When organizational theory or practice attempts to engineer every motion, every
experience of employees in the pursuit of maximized profit, then we see an intrusion of techne
into praxis.
My research on personality testing illustrates how techne has colonized both episteme
(theoria) and phronesis (praxis) in organizational knowledge about employees.
12
Increasingly,
personality testing serves as the dominant managerial way of accumulating centralized,
formalized knowledge about employees. This knowledge is believed to be an important tool that
can improve productivity, absenteeism, and employee turnover. Yet, the ironic fact is that even
the literature on personality testing acknowledges that measurements on personality variables
have not been "proven" to predict any measure of organizational success. Although lacking
predictive validity, I believe that the reason personality testing and other such instrumental
orientations remain popular is because they represent the form of technicism described by Schrag
as serving a cybernetic program of social engineering. The quest in the organizational literature
is, therefore, to better calibrate the measures rather than to question them because they fit within
the language and objectives (i.e., the discourse) of social engineering. In effect, personality
testing represents in organizational theory and practice an instance where the interests of poiesis
9
have colonized those of both praxis and theoria.
Even while organizational practices and theories objectify employees by reducing them
to quantifiable measures, other approaches to controlling employee behavior appeal to a
disembodied view of their soul. In the next section I explore how the subject pole of the subject-
object dualism gains ascendancy in recent managerial approaches to organizational spirituality.
Subject--Agency
As Schrag explains, efforts to avoid an objectifying view of being often result in a
disembodied view of agency, a subject freed from all constraints, from facticity and
responsibility. In seminar with Schrag we explored the phenomenological tendency to
hypostatize this subject in the pursuit of understanding experience and transcendence. Although
speculations regarding the foundations and forms of experience and the manner for their
transformation might appear initially as inconsequential, they are in fact profoundly political.
Accordingly, I would like to illustrate how corporate efforts to manage employees' experience
presuppose a disembodied view of agency by drawing upon my research on "corporate soul."
13
Perusing bookstores in search of interesting books, I was struck by how many
management texts herald "corporate soul" as the latest and greatest management technique.
Titles range from Briskin’s The Stirring of Soul in the Workplace
14
to Behr and Lao-Tzu's, The
Tao of Sales: The Easy Way to Sell in Tough Times.
15
Further research revealed that corporate
soul talk is also widespread in the popular media. Fortune magazine asks, “Should your
company save your soul?”
16
while Lee and Zemke provide empirical examples of “The Search
for Spirit in the Workplace.”
17
Although the precise meaning of spirituality vary, nearly all
accounts view it as a means for simultaneously boosting corporate productivity and for
10
facilitating individual “self-actualization” through work.
18
Accordingly, spiritual attitudes and
values are represented as transforming a “mundane task into an artistic mediation,”
19
promoting
the form of “self-knowledge”
20
critical for business success, and directly impacting “job
performance,”
21
or the “bottom line.”
22
As Klein and Izzo put it, “Corporate Soul is the
expression of this primary life-giving energy in work and the workplace. When Corporate Soul
is awake, work flourishes, overflows, and manifests as productivity, creativity, innovation, and
inspiration.”
23
Failure on the part of the individual to express their "deeper more authentic self"
is often cited as responsible for depressed corporate soul and, concomitantly, low corporate
productivity.
24
Throughout the literature, the therapeutic techniques for promoting corporate soul are
primarily individualistic in orientation and tend to emphasize personal meditation, authentic self-
expression, and karmic accountability. For example, the literature advocates genuine expression
of the inner core self:
Each of us has a core from which our most valuable thoughts and feelings originate.
When we’re in touch with that center and use it to guide our behavior, we act as
genuinely as we can. Unfortunately, most of us take precious little time to reconnect with
this dimension of our life, especially at work.
25
In addition to meditation, proposed strategies for fostering corporate soul include "self-hypnosis,
induced altered states of consciousness, and guided visualization” with the intent to change or
control thought processes.
26
Corporate soul is proffered as a “solution” to worker stress because
it urges employees to shed their “victim mindset” by focusing on the "Now" and by
acknowledging personal mastery and karmic (i.e., destined) responsibility.
27
11
In my essay I argued that corporate efforts to shape individual experience by promoting
New Age Corporate Spiritualism are questionable because they implicate a view of individuals
as individualized, autonomous agents who are solely responsible for and empowered to shape
their destinies. The discourse's emphases on individual experience and transcendence through
therapeutic self-reflection are ultimately solipsistic in orientation. Corporate efforts to motivate
employees through New Age techniques typically erase employees' material situation and their
communal responsibilities. For example, New Age Corporate Spiritualism rarely promotes
strategies for fostering community, either within the corporation or between the corporation and
its environs.
28
Instead the emphasis is on individual self-actualization. Moreover, the discourse
rarely acknowledges that employees have (family) responsibilities outside the sphere of work.
Instead, individual employees are exhorted to self-actualize exclusively through their work. In
demanding that individuals focus on the Now while engaged in work, the discourse of New Age
corporate spiritualism elides the fact that some work is tedious and physically onerous. In
representing individuals as autonomous agents whose work reflects their karmic destiny, the
discourse de-politicizes the many social and economic factors that limit employment
opportunities. In effect, the discourse represents individuals as agents lacking corporeality and
commitments whose primary destiny is to actualize exclusively through work (provided
magnanimously by the corporation). Accordingly, in response to employee demands for a
reduction in the ever-increasing work expectations (e.g., ever expanding hours, tasks, and skill
requirements), the discourse of Corporate Spiritualism promotes a change of attitudes regarding
the meaning of work. Rather than addressing the erosion of community and family time, the
discourse offers the corporation as a stand-in for community and family. In sum, New Age
12
Corporate Spiritualism's odd blend of karmic destiny and individual empowerment implicates
individuals as solely responsible for their successes and/or failures in the new, increasingly
Darwinistic, economic environment.
New Age Corporate Spiritualism constitutes another instance where techne has
colonized other forms of knowledge and practice. The process of reducing spiritual thought to a
means for motivating employees constitutes a reduction of knowledge to a calculus of
quantification guided by the objectified result of increased productivity. Further, the reduction
of spiritualism to a feedback control mechanism that serves a program of corporate engineering
constitutes the "intrusion of technicism" into the domain of praxis.
The point of this critique of corporate spirituality is to demonstrate that organizational
practices that sever individuals from their facticity--their embodied situation and their
community--by focusing exclusively on their psyches are as detrimental as those practices that
objectify individuals by reducing their identity to fixed, atomistic attributes or behaviors.
29
The
mind-body dualism is ubiquitous in organizational theory and practice, I believe, because its
reductionism simplifies the difficult process of modeling and attempting to control the
complexity of organizational life. And yet, the irony is that these approaches often generate
cynicism, alienation, and resistance on the part of employees. By attempting to artificially
fragment realms of experience that are integrally entwined, dualistic organizational
practices/discourses are transparent in their means and ends. Most individuals will not succumb
readily to a system of cybernetic control that is both visible and self (i.e., organizational) serving.
But while focusing on organizational practices, I do not want to imply that individual
employees are always virtuous or altruistic in their conduct. One area that we critical
13
organizational theorists typically overlook is that of individual responsibility. In focusing on
systems of control we tend to de-emphasize the importance of individual accountability and
responsibility. Thus, in the final section of this chapter, I explore how Schrag's efforts to
transverse the unwieldy dialectic of subject and object yield a view of agency that is temporally
and spatially embedded, yet exerts agency and moral choice.
Reconciling Dualisms: Body and Mind and Individual and Community
Many post-modern thinkers have successfully re-thought the subject in ways that avoid
dualistic thinking. For example, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze,
30
and Laclau and Mouffe
31
are
thinkers whose works exemplify creative and fertile approaches to the problem of subjectivity in
social and philosophical theory. While these thinkers have significantly influenced my work and
that of many critical organizational scholars, I would like to address a very important
contribution Schrag makes that is not present in other "post-modern" approaches, or that tends to
be de-emphasized. After developing my account of his contribution, I will draw out how his
view of the embodied process of "hermeneutical self-implicature" might inform organizational
theory and practices.
In attempting to avoid the aporias of a centered subject, thinkers such as Foucault and
Deleuze reject a unified self and they eschew the language of personal experience.
Consequently, rather than exploring more traditional existential concerns such as self-
constitution and self-understanding, many post-modern thinkers address "competing discourses,"
"resistance," and "bricolage." Experience, personal ethics and self-development, responsibility,
and community are therefore rarely discussed because the vocabulary of much post-modern
14
thought simply does not allow it. In effect, issues surrounding self-hood are primarily left to
Lacanian's, who tend to emphasize identity rather than self-hood and experience, and
feminist/cultural studies scholars who primarily address these phenomena from the localized
vantage point of gender, race, or class. Although these approaches are insightful and productive,
what typically is lost is a more generic discussion of the self, its implicature in facticity,
language, and community, its quest for self-understanding, and its moral responsibilities. Now,
some readers might argue that my choice of the word "generic" is in itself problematic because it
implies transcendentalism. Transcendentalism has a bad name these days but surely we must
have some kind of quasi-transcendentalist framework if we require that our formulation of the
self be always/already indebted and obligated in relation to its environmental others. Schrag's
"quasi"-transcendentalism avoids the pitfalls of essentialist constructions of facticity and
consciousness while it transverses the equally problematic poles of existential relativism and
moralistic dogmatism. I wish to stress that I am in no way implying that post-modern, Lacanian,
feminist, or cultural studies approaches suffer from either existential relativism or moralistic
dogmatism. Rather, my point is that the localized nature of much of the current work on
selfhood and experience tends to impinge against development of a more generalizable
framework for exploring personal ethics and responsibility. It is my belief that such a
generalizable framework is needed because the effects of localized practice always/already ripple
outward, affecting the lives of countless others. Accordingly, I will sketch Schrag's formulation
of the situated self, the who of which is implicated through decision and action, before
developing organizational applications.
Schrag takes subjectivity as a starting point but his subject is not centered in the
15
metaphysical, modernist sense. His experiential, corporeal subject is always/already situated in
time, space, language, community, and has the capacity for "transcendence."
Schrag's phenomenological subject lives in an ever-emergent present that fuses the
horizons of past and future. Wise to the problems that bedeviled Husserl and Mead's
formulations of this living present, Schrag existentializes the concept through his articulation of
the subject's emergence through temporal-spatial action and communication. For example, In
Communicative Praxis and the Space of Subjectivity Schrag describes the subject as process, as
an "event of temporalization" achieved within a fusion of past, present, and future.
32
Rejecting
transcendental consciousness and a transparent representation of time, Schrag's past is not re-
presented--i.e., it is not representational--and his subject is not unified or one-dimensional, and
the locus from which it operates is "shifting" because of its continual emergence.
This very Heideggerian formulation of the subject's temporality is complemented with
insights about the subject's motility and spatiality derived from Merleau-Ponty:
The presence of the subject is a bodily presence. This immediately shifts the emphasis
away from a preoccupation with an elusive seat of unification and mental contents and a
fugitive epistemological point.
33
Schrag's use of spatiality is not geometrical or concerned with a "locality of position."
34
Rather,
Schrag argues that "bodily presence is an event rather than a position."
35
In developing this
account, he adopts Merleau-Ponty's "spatiality of situation"--a spatiality of bodily gestures and
motilities that is expressive of the subject's immediate experiences and intentionality as well as
his or her cultural embeddedness. Schrag's appropriation and elaboration of Merleau-Ponty's
work enables him to avoid over-intellectualizing the subject while, simultaneously, it enables
16
him to address the subject's corporeality and expressivity without lapsing into the problems of
behaviorism.
For Schrag, the subject's temporality and spatiality are expressed/performed through
his/her action and communication, though praxis. Through the initiation of action, the subject,
the who as Schrag puts it, is called into being. The who is implicated by the experience of
making a "decision," a decision to act and/or communicate.
36
Each act is always a response to a
prior action, thus the who implicated through the decision, through the act, is
neither a sovereign and autonomous self, whose self-constitution remains impervious to
any and all forces of alterity, nor a self caught within the constraints of heteronomy,
determined by forces acting upon it. The self as the who of action lives between
autonomy and heteronomy, active and reactive force, pure activity and pure passivity.
37
Each decision/action/communication implicates the past and the future. The past encompasses
the subject's own personal past but also his or her community and culture.
Schrag refers to this rich understanding of temporality as "narrative temporality."
38
Schrag uses the idea of narrative to capture not only the speech acts and language games that
make up discourse, but also the stories that provide the horizons of interpretation within which
speech and language acquire sense. Narrative is always imprinted by the past and anticipates the
future. It is temporal in its form and in its sedimentations but it is always/already subject to
transformation through its iterations. Through narrative, the subject is fundamentally situated
within his/her community.
Community means for Schrag more than customs or norms because it encompasses
cultural narratives and "integrating purpose."
39
Consequently, community is a process, an
17
ongoing achievement, rather than a fixed state. It requires a particular manner of being with
others. Although Schrag discusses many ways of being with others, I wish to focus on his
conception of an "ethics of a fitting response."
40
At an ontological level, Schrag argues that the
relation between oneself and an other is not one in which the other is for-me; rather, the other
constitutes an exteriority that stakes a claim on my own subjectivity. In this sense, Schrag
follows Levinas in positing a fundamental alterity that infuses self-other relations. Thus,
although community encompasses the narratives that unite individuals historically and culturally,
it is not totalizing because it is, in part, constituted out of relations of alterity, exteriority.
Accordingly, Schrag's formulation of the (communal) integrating purpose cannot be considered
to be a dialectical one whose purpose is to sublate difference. Difference, as constitutive of the
other, poses an ontological claim on me, for me. The fitting response to this claim requires
responsivity and responsibility, the latter of which Schrag defines in relation to the call of
conscience, which always directs one to the "voice and face of the other."
41
Schrag does not
catalog the characteristics of a fitting response because that would deny the situated nature each
claim. Individuals, the whos implicated through their praxes, are not ethical because they are
characterized by certain virtues but because they heed others through their communicative and
practical decisions.
It seems to me that Schrag's articulation of the relationship between the self, others, and
community has vital significance for organizational theory and practice. On the one hand, his
account of the self as temporally and spatially embedded provides an approach that transverses
the theoretical and material pitfalls of dualistic organizational thinking and practices. On the
other hand, his view of the self's implicature through its decision and the
18
moral/ethical/transcendental implications of that decision provide a framework for addressing
organizational ethics and individual responsibility.
As organizational communication scholars and practitioners, we must address the self's
temporal, spatial, and communal embeddedness. Let me provide some brief illustrations of how
researchers and practitioners might address these dimensions of experience. First, few
organizational scholars have explored how individuals' temporal positioning in terms of
chronological age impacts their organizational experiences. And yet, the news media frequently
provide examples of how age bias has become more prevalent, as illustrated by Fortune's article,
“Finished at 40.”
42
Chronological age (and its phenomenological experiences) is constructed
within organizational narratives as an important identity marker and yet we as academics have
largely ignored it. Another temporal issue that could be addressed by scholars concerns the
temporal and spatial dislocation that many employees experience as they are forced to manage
multiple jobs simultaneously in order to make ends meet and/or because of conflicts between
family and work commitments. By exploring these pressing temporal issues from an
experiential or phenomenological lens, we as researchers "legitimize" employees' experiences as
salient organizational communication issues and we may help promote dialogue (and even
solutions) by providing rich, thick descriptions.
Spatiality and corporeality, as constitutive dimensions of organizational life, require
further investigation. Although there are endless ways of approaching these phenomena, I would
begin with the question of embodiment. How do job requirements, tasks, and expectations in the
new computer-mediated workplace constrain and enable individuals' bodily involvement in their
work and, concomitantly, how do individuals experience/interpret their bodily involvements?
19
How do they conform, resist, or actively transform them? An example that highlights the
integral role of tacit (i.e., bodily situated) knowledge in the workplace is provided by Cigna's (an
HMO) failed attempt to centralize its appointment scheduling services in Phoenix. In an effort to
systematize its geographically dispersed and relatively autonomous clinics, Cigna designated one
office building as a centralized locale for handling all patient requests for appointments in
Phoenix. Patient representatives at the central office were trained to use a new expert
(computing) system that was designed to plan and coordinate all scheduling. Receptionists in the
geographically dispersed clinics were required to have patients call this central office to make
appointments. Cigna felt that this system would be more rational, efficient, and transparent. It
was not. In fact, Cigna soon found its scheduling capacity to be severely compromised.
Enamored with complex "solution systems," Cigna had overlooked the ability of each clinic's
receptionists to make time, actively and creatively, for patients and doctors to connect. Each
receptionist's tacit knowledge, their ability to circumvent the restrictions of their clinic's
computerized schedules, was vital to operations yet it could not be replicated by a computerized
solution system nor by the centralized, but spatially disconnected (i.e., disconnected from the
everyday life of the clinics), service representatives. After patients complained in droves about
hour-long waits for scheduling appointments that were unavailable for months, Cigna reverted to
its previous, de-centralized system.
In addressing embodiment in the workplace, scholars should also address issues
pertaining to the (bodily) management of a "professional" identity. Corporate employees are
becoming increasingly diverse in terms of ethnicity, gender, national origin, and age.
Simultaneously, corporations are becoming ever more sensitized to the role of image and are
20
increasingly requiring (implicitly and explicitly) that their employees perform carefully
engineered bodily and etiquette protocols. In effect, workplace diversity is met with dictates for
conformity. What are the experiential effects of this clash? Tretheweys' work illustrates an
embodied approach to organizational identity that addresses how control operates to discipline
"unruly" bodies, that is, bodies that signify otherness.
43
She explored how "professional"
decorum and dress constrain women in the workplace, causing them to experience bodily
alienation and "leakages." Her work looks at the intersections between individual experience
and institutional relations, as they are enacted through bodily performances. More research, that
addresses other points of view on bodily involvement in the workplace, is called for.
In addressing management, system, and structure, however, we must not overlook the
role of individual accountability and responsibility, the role of the everyday who implicated
through praxis. Individuals have an ontological, transcendental (even!) responsibility to exist
ethically in their relations with others in their lifeworld.
44
Too often we critical and post-modern
scholars seem, by default, to affirm lower-level employees simply by virtue of their subordinate
positioning. At least, I know that my own research has been complicit with this tendency. And
yet, employee resistance or bricolage can often have harmful consequences for co-workers,
families, or those in their community. Indeed, in a study in which I focused on service-workers,
I found that employee resistance was often directed at other low level employees, effectively
undermining the kind of solidarity needed for these employees to have greater negotiating power
with management.
45
Post-modern and critical celebrations of resistance must, I feel, be tempered
by deeper scrutiny of the effects engendered by such resistance.
Schrag's model of a "fitting response" nicely complements critical and post-modern
21
organizational celebrations of resistance by foreground the effects for the other engendered by
both routine and unorthodox organizational decisions and praxes. In exploring the ethics of a
"fitting response," it becomes necessary to expand our horizons for understanding ethics beyond
those of community values, norms, rules, and laws. A decision is not ethical in the sense
described here merely because it conforms to some normative framework. History has
demonstrated most persuasively that normative frameworks can naturalize oppression just as
easily as they can protect against it. In exploring the relations of ethics in the call to action that
requires some response, Schrag comments
the criteria that are called upon in decisions induced by the existential doubt in a praxis-
rooted either/or are not antecedently defined and legislated in advance of the investigative
process. They are the progeny of the discernment and deliberation that accompanies the
contrastive comparisons at play in the lifeworld of human interactions. Criteria are as
much constituted by the events and process in the lifeworld as they are a judge of them,
attesting to a continuing dialectic of constitution and evaluation.
46
Schrag's point in this passage is that ethical criteria cannot be reduced to codified or readily
memorized decisional heuristics. The process of engaging in a fitting response requires an
openness to the (future) environmental impacts of decisions, both routine and momentous, and a
willingness to reflect actively upon the effects of prior decisions so that the criteria implemented
in the present reflect the lessons learned from the past.
Efforts to study decision-making in organizational communication have typically focused
retroactively on "what went wrong" with decision processes that ultimately resulted in
catastrophic situations. Using Schrag's ethics of a "fitting response," the research goal would be
22
develop models for helping employees/managers learn to expand their decisional criteria to
include effects for multiple-stakeholders. This process, of course, requires that decisional criteria
be expanded beyond the interests of techne and it requires that employees of all levels be
empowered to evaluate decision-processes and be made accountable for their effects. Deetz's
work is exemplary in its efforts to develop a model and process for organizational decision
making that fulfills these objectives.
47
However, the project has only begun and requires
considerably more work, the work of communication praxis.
In conclusion, this essay has attempted to demonstrate theoretically and empirically how
Schrag's ethics of a fitting response calls into being a subject who cares for those around her/him.
In an era instrumentalized by global conglomerates, there exists a pressing need for re-imagining
organizational theory, for transversing dualisms, for enhancing individual accountability, and for
centering marginalized others. Schrag's insights and transversals provide us a path for our
imaging and our praxes. The material viability of Schrag's philosophy has already been proven
through his praxis as a professor and as a colleague.
1
Calvin O. Schrag, Communicative Praxis and the Space of Subjectivity, (Bloomington, IN:
Indiana University Press, 1989), 75.
2
Calvin O. Schrag, The Self After Postmodernity, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995),
58.
3
Schrag, The Self After Postmodernity, 59.
4
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books,
1979).
5
Schrag, The Self After Postmodernity, 35.
6
Majia Nadesan, "Constructing Paperdolls: The Discourse of Personality Testing,"
Communication Theory, 7 (1997): 189-218.
23
7
See, for example, Judith H. Dobrzynski, "Want A Job? Take A Test," Arizona Republic, 4
September 1996, sec. A1, p. 8; or Daniel P. O'Meara, "Personality Tests Raise Questions of
Legality and Effectiveness," Human Resource Magazine, 39:1 (1994): 97-100.
8
Nikolas Rose, "Calculable Minds and Manageable Subjects," History of the Human
Sciences, 1:2 (1988): 179-200; and Nikolas Rose, Governing the Soul: The Shaping of the
Private Self, (London: Routledge, 1990).
9
Jean Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel E. Barnes, (New York: Pocket
Books, 1956).
10
Schrag, The Self After Postmodernity, 35.
11
Schrag, Communicative Praxis and the Space of Subjectivity, 18-19.
12
Majia Nadesan, "Constructing Paperdolls: The Discourse of Personality Testing," 189-218.
13
Majia Nadesan, "The Discourses of New Age Corporate Spiritualism and Evangelical
Capitalism," Management Communication Quarterly 13 (1999): 3-42.
14
Alan Briskin, The Stirring of Soul in the Workplace, (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1998).
15
T. E. Behr and Lao-Tzu, The Tao of Sales: The Easy Way to Sell in Tough Times, (San
Francisco: Element, 1997).
16
"Should Your Company Save Your Soul?," Fortune, 14 January 1991, vol 123 (1): 25-29.
17
Chris Lee and Ron Zemke, "The Search for Spirit in the Workplace," Training 30:6 (1993):
21-28.
18
Christopher Neck and J. F. Milliman, "Thought Self-Leadership: Finding Spiritual
Fulfillment in Organizational Life," Journal of Managerial Psychology 9 (1994): 10.
19
Eric Klein and John B. Izzo, Awakening Corporate Soul: Four Paths to Unleash the Power of
People at Work, (New York: Fairwinds Press, 1998), 24.
20
Andy Cohen, "The Guiding Light," Sales & Marketing Management 149:8 (1997): 46.
21
Neck and Milliman, "Thought Self-Leadership: Finding Spiritual Fulfillment in
Organizational Life," 10.
22
Tom McDonald, "Getting in the Spirit," Successful Meetings 46 :6 (1997): 22.
24
23
Klein and Izzo Awakening Corporate Soul: Four Paths to Unleash the Power of People at
Work, 8.
24
Klein and Izzo Awakening Corporate Soul: Four Paths to Unleash the Power of People at
Work, 46.
25
McDonald, "Getting in the Spirit," 22.
26
C. Mitchell, "New Age Training Programs: In Violation of Religious Discrimination Laws?,"
Labor Law Journal 41 (1990): 410.
27
Klein and Izzo, Awakening Corporate Soul: Four Paths to Unleash the Power of People at
Work, 31.
28
For exceptions see Philip H. Mirvis, "'Soul Work' in Organizations," Organization Science 8
(1997): 193-206; and the special issue of the Journal of Organizational Change Management 7
(1994).
29
This tendency to free the subject from facticity and responsibility haunts New Age Thought,
Humanistic Psychology (e.g., Maslow), as well as existential phenomenology. It is an ironic
legacy for thinkers who aimed to promote more reflexive individuals capable of participating
more directly in transforming their surroundings and communities. Despite this limitation, I
would argue, the quest for self-transformation is worthy. It must, however, be pursued
cautiously to avoid solipsism, narcissism, or instrumental appropriations.
30
Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam
(London: Athlone Press, 1987); and Gilles Deleuze, Negotiations 1972-1990, trans. Martin
Joughin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995).
31
Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, (London: Verso,
1985).
32
Schrag, Communicative Praxis and the Space of Subjectivity, 146.
33
Schrag, Communicative Praxis and the Space of Subjectivity, 152.
34
Schrag, Communicative Praxis and the Space of Subjectivity, 153.
35
Schrag, Communicative Praxis and the Space of Subjectivity, 155.
36
Schrag, The Self After Postmodernity, 59.
25
37
Schrag, The Self After Postmodernity, 59.
38
Schrag, The Self After Postmodernity, 36.
39
Schrag, The Self After Postmodernity, 87.
40
Schrag, The Self After Postmodernity, 92.
41
Schrag, The Self After Postmodernity, 100.
42
Munk, N. “New Organization Man,” Fortune 16 Mar. 1998, 50.
43
Angela Trethewey, "Disciplined Bodies: Women's Embodied Identities at Work,"
Organization Studies 20 (1999): 243-250.
44
Schrag, The Self After Postmodernity, 102.
45
Majia Holmer-Nadesan, "Organization, Identity and Space of Action," Organization Studies
16 (1996): 49-81.
46
Schrag, The Self After Postmodernity, 106-107.
47
Stanley Deetz, Democracy in an Age of Corporate Colonization, (Albany: State University of
New York Press, 1991).
