Extra Credit Blog

What did you think about the blog assignment? Should I keep it, modify it, or get rid of it? Did you like writing papers in this format rather than the traditional way? Anything you would change, expand or reduce about the class?

• Overall, I enjoyed the blog assignment. I am always open to trying new things and I thought that doing this compared to writing papers was much more exciting and entertaining. I also thought that because we had to go in depth with the answers - talking to a new audience who didn't know the concepts that we were studying - I learned a lot more about the concepts and can talk about them a lot better than I would be able to otherwise because I am more familiar with them. I also enjoyed using my creative side like we were able to do with Intercultural Comm and the topical dictionaries.
  
• I definitely think that you should keep the blog posts. However, the only adjustment that I would make, for your sake as well as ours, is to either shorten the questions down and do them every other week, or only have a few more in depth ones throughout the semester.
• I definitely like writing on a blog compared to writing a paper the traditional way. I think that the main reason is because I get to be more creative. Also, we all have to write papers in the traditional format for most of our other classes, thus it is nice to have a change from the norm
• I really enjoyed the class overall. I liked the topics that we covered and I definitely enjoyed the more discussion format. It was nice to hear what everyone had to say as well as hear new experiences from all different levels. I honestly wouldn't make any changes expect what I suggested for the blogs.

Thanks Dr. Berdayes!

Ques 8 Part II: Gender

As I mentioned before, I also believe that gender is a huge issue at AMG. This is because the environment of AMG, and car companies in general, consists of mainly “manly” characteristics. While I was working as an intern this summer, there were only 6 female interns compared to the 17 male interns. It was very intimidating at times and there were several instances were I doubted my ability to function in a car company atmosphere because I am a woman. I can tell however, that this is a feeling that not only the female interns felt, however.

Identity is defined as how individuals position themselves in the world through language and action. Alvesson and Wilmott, describe several specific practices that organizations use to “make” members’ identities, including:
1. Defining the person directly: Those who are described as midlevel managers, as opposed to senior-level managers, have their leadership capacities curtailed, by definition.
2. Defining a person by defining others: Many organizational members create positive identities by contrasting their positions with the positions of others.
3. Providing a specific vocabulary of motives: Organizations often explicitly describe the motivations that drive their ideal employees.
4. Explicating morals and values: Organizational cultures routinely offer employees an explicit set of guiding values such as innovation, customer service, or efficiency that they may use to craft and/or regulate their identities at work.
5. Knowledge and skills: Having access to specific knowledge or the skills necessary to execute a specific process or practice enables organizational members to define themselves in particular ways.
6. Group categorization and affiliation: When organizations foster feelings of “us” and, often less explicitly, “them,” they generate feelings of community, belonging, and loyalty.
7. Hierarchical location: One of the central ways that we answer the question “Who am I?” is by figuring out the superiority/subordination dynamics between ourselves and others. Those relations are often both symbolically and materially reinforced in organizations.
8. Establishing and clarifying a distinct set of rules of the game: Organizational communication creates and naturalizes rules and taken-for-granted ways of doing and being.
9. Defining the context: Organizational leaders often define the environment in which employees operate. When globalization, excessive competition, and rapid and unpredictable change are said to mark the environment, then organizations tend to value those who are adaptable, aggressive and entrepreneurial.

Gender is a “socialized but relatively fixed identity…organized around biological sex and which fosters fairly predictable styles, therefore are outgrowths of gendered socialization and are made manifest in organizational contexts. Sociologist Deborah Tannen’s book You Just Don’t Understand: Women and Men in Conversation provides a comprehensive view of how gendered identities, learned in childhood, drive men and women’s conversational styles. Men treat conversations as a hierarchically ordered space in which they can demonstrate and vie for status; women treat conversations as a web-like space in which they can demonstrate and vie for connections.

Men seek status by engaging in raport talk, a style of speaking that emphasizes:
• demonstrations of knowledge, skill and ability
• instrumentality
• conversational command
• direct and assertive expressions
• abstract terms over personal experience Women use conversations to build relationships using rapport talk. Rapport talk emphasizes:
• demonstrating equality through matching experiences
• providing support responsiveness
• conversational maintenance
• tentativeness
• personal, concrete details

Tannen claims that when women share their troubles with a conversational partner, they often hope to hear messages of support, reciprocity and connection. When sharing their stories with other women, they often receive precisely those messages, however, when sharing problems with male conversational partners, women often receive solutions and directives. Similarly, when men engage in troubles talk with women, they are often disappointed with women’s tendencies to immediately match troubles.

Power and ideology impact how various aspects of one’s social identity are valued. Within most organizational settings, “members tend to enact dominant norms and communication styles during everyday interactions. As a result, organization members may negatively judge persons who do not meet (or do not seem to meet) expectations related to white, middle-class values and attitudes.” While organizations have traditionally favored masculinity, issues of class, race and age and ability impact how individual men as able to enact a valued identity at work. Negotiating multiple identities simultaneously is an ongoing project for most individuals. That negotiation process often takes on heightened importance for some organizational members, particularly for those who are other than the assumed norm.

Overall, the women at AMG general definitely take on more manly features, actions and even ways of talk. My boss was a prime example of this. Although she was a very strong woman (as I mentioned she was only one of two women who held managerial positions within the offices at SPLO), she made herself strong by taking on more masculine qualities in order to adapt better with her environment.

Although I do give her credit for putting herself in a position like this, I believe that overall it may be hurting her feminine qualities. For instance, she very rarely wore female style clothing. She adorned herself in blazers, trouser pants and had her hair cut very short and stiff. Her personality was also on the rough and tough side and she didn’t seem to take trouble from anybody. I think that in order to better herself in the AMG general atmosphere, she shouldn’t have lost sight of what and who she really was. This goes for all of the women who hold managerial positions. I believe that this can better AMG general because in turn, it may soften the rough and tough attitude of AMG and the Hummer and open itself up to a vast new consumer audience.

What is AMG?

The organization that I have spent sufficient time at is AM General, the makers of the Hummer and HUMVEE vehicles. For the past two summers, I have worked 40-hour weeks at SPLO (Service Parts and Logistics Operations). SPLO is a branch of the AM General family that has a warehouse which supports an inventory of over 30,000 part numbers and on-hand inventory of over 15,000 parts. The Field Service Representatives are the customer’s direct link to AM General. They provide up-to-date technical expertise and hands on training to customers all over the world. The SPLO facility is also the location of the training program which helps improve vehicle performance and extends the vehicle’s service life.

While at SPLO, I worked specifically with the RECAP program. As a program that was only on its second year when I first joined in, I was able to make serious contributions to the various different test runs of the project. The RECAP program deals with refurbishing HUMVEES that have certain unusable parts. Unlike the RESET program that they are attempting to also start, the RECAP program takes apart the trucks but then puts them back together with the same parts, replacing the unusable ones at the same time.

Since the RECAP program was brand new, there was only one person working on it directly. Denise Richards was my boss for the past two summers and having her direct me as well as teach me about how such a powerful vehicle manufacturer can work was very insightful. It was not just insightful due to the fact that I learned to use several new systems like SAP, an inventory program used all over the world, it was also insightful because Denise was only one of two women holding a higher level position. Another very interesting thing about SPLO, and AM General as a whole, was the fact that they were a very structured, traditional and hierarchical company. I believe that in some ways, this is very harmful to not only AM General, but also all other companies that go by those particular standards. Thus, the two things that I would change most about AM General are the lack of females holding managerial positions and the strict hierarchical system throughout the company.

Ques 8 Part I: Hieracrchy

From the eighteenth century to the early twentieth century, organizations functioned much like empires. Today, we can still see the close relationships between homes and factories in some regions, and we can also see how wealth and status allow a family to move farther away from the site of production. Thus, social control is effectively produced in part by the relationship between the location of industry and neighborhoods.

Benjamin Franklin (1706-90) popularized some early notions of empire and pragmatism in his Poor Richard’s Almanac. It is primarily a collection of parables and quotations that elevate hard work (called “industry”), independence (the accumulation of wealth on individual, corporate, and national levels), and the virtues of planning, organizing and controlling one’s life through work.

Frederick the Great (1712-86), King of Prussia, organized his armies on the principles of mechanics: ranks, uniforms, regulations, task specialization, standard equipment, command language, and drill instruction.

Eli Whitney’s (1765-1825) groundbreaking demonstration of mass production in 1801 was based on the production of guns, whose purpose was to maintain order and extend the power of empires.

Adam Smith (1723-90), a philosopher of economics and politics, published Wealth of Nations in 1776, which praised the divisions of labor evident in factory production.

As Karl Marx (1818-83) would demonstrate in the mid nineteenth century, division of labor was essential to organizing corporations and societies along class lines.

Overall, effective communication in the nineteenth century meant giving orders and emphasized the downward transmission of information. The top-down flow of information in hierarchies also led to the emergence of domination narratives, which ascribed particular readings of how truth, power and control were constituted in everyday conversation.

Whereas the South supported a racial hierarchy, the increasingly industrial North favored one governed by social class. For white slaveholders in the South, slavery was justified on economic and moral grounds. They believed they had a right to a cheap source of labor to farm their lands and that their accumulation of wealth was at the heart of Calvinist moral advancement. Thus, any slave attempt to challenge white authority was viewed as a challenge to the moral order.

One feature of societal dialogue, resistance to domination, helps us understand organizational dialogue. Resistance to domination is defined as any action on the part of oppressed individuals to lessen the constraints placed on them by those in power.

James Scott (1990) points out how the accounts of the powerless can function as hidden transcripts of the other side of the story. Hidden transcripts include themes and arguments that are well known by members of the oppressed group but kept out of the public eye for fear of reprisal from those in power.

In addition to slave narratives, other forms of resistance to dominations came with the slave songs, ditties, and dirges that would later become known as “the blues.” This, in turn, would lead to two other musical forms of resistance to domination: rock and roll and rap music.

The rise of the modern factory during the industrial period was an extension of a social (and racial) class structure that sought to stabilize power relations among people by controlling the means of production and consumption in society. The organization of work and communication in the early factories was highly influenced by the then-emerging concepts of division of labor and hierarchy. Division of labor refers to the separation of tasks into discrete units; hierarchy refers to the vertical arrangement of power and authority that distinguishes managers from employees.

With science came much more than a highly ordered method of explaining phenomena: From explanation emerged the ability to predict, and from the ability to predict came the potential to control. Thus, the underlying theme of the classical management approach to organization is the scientific rationalization of control.

Frederick Taylor (1865-1915) was a pioneer in the development of scientific management. His book The Principles of Scientific Management (1913) is based on the assumption that management is a true science resting on clearly defined laws, rules, and principles. Taylor’s goal was to transform the nature of both work and management. He hoped that cooperation between managers and employees would bring a new era of industrial peace.

Instead of industrial peace, scientific management led to increased conflict because it reinforced hierarchical distinctions and further objectified the already downtrodden worker. Even so, Taylor’s work ushered in a new focus on the relationship between managers and employees as a key to organizational productivity, and remains a bedrock principle of contemporary theory.

More specifically, Taylor’s model ushered in a systematic approach to the division of labor that has gone far beyond the design of work for which it was originally developed. In short, scientific management assumed that some employees are better suited to “thinking” work and some to “doing” work, thus laying the groundwork for the class-based distinction between white-collar and blue-collar employees that we know today.

Similar to Taylor’s scientific management theory, AMG is a very hierarchical company. There are definite distinct lines dividing each of the separate positions by title, office spaces and privileges. For instance, my Uncle is a senior buyer, thus he has the privilege to take out a Hummer basically whenever he wants to. Also, AMG follow very traditional management rules and can almost be deemed “old fashioned.” They simply do not grow with the new advances in our business society. Instead, they stick to their old ways because they know that they work.

I believe that AMG can become a better company if they take more risks and break out of the traditional scientific management role. I think that by being so restricted and strict with their management rules, dress and overall actions that they defer their employees from creativity. Those who work in the warehouses and factory do not have any way to relate with those who work in upper management or the offices. This is a huge hindrance because many of the managers work with those in the warehouses and factories on a daily basis. Overall, I believe that if the company blurred the traditional lines that they put between certain positions and possibly make an attempt to develop with the new technology and societal advances that they will have both happier employees as well as increase their success rate.

Mindless versus Mindful Communication

In order to understand what we have learned throughout our organizational communication course, I find it key to review several important points in the final chapter of the book. Chapter 11 talks about how our communication needs to be mindful throughout our lives. Each conversation that we have does have an impact on the listener and the way we present ourselves within our communication can make or break a situation. Overall, when communicating throughout life, especially in the workplace, the best thing a person can do is focus on the main characteristics that all employers are looking for.

While many people believe that communication is mostly a conscious activity, studies have demonstrated that this is not the case. Unlike having thoughts, thinking implies a willingness to listen and be open to beliefs beyond what one already knows. Thinking is crucial in true collaboration and innovation, and is the essence of authentic dialogue.

Three new metaphors – “discourse,” “voice,” and “performance” – are at the forefront of organizational thinking.
Discourse invites us to examine organizations as texts, and to bring to such examinations the well-developed logic of literary and conversation analyses. Thinking of what we say and do in a literary way open up new possibilities for finding creative solutions to age-old organizational challenges.
Voice invites us to consider who has the right to speak in organizations and what a “chorus of diverse voices” or “singing solo” may mean in relations to the logics of power and suppression at work.
Performance asks us to consider dramatic enactment as a new way of thinking about coordinated activities, storytelling, collaborative practices and identity work in organizations.

Overall, a mindful approach to organizational communication enables us to understand talk “as a mental and relational activity that is both purposeful and strategic.” Elaine Langer (1998) found that when we become more conscious of our communication, we become more mindful and that when we become more mindful we will likely become more ethical as well.

Integrity is a mindful state of acting purposefully to fulfill the promise and commitments you make to others. It is a term that we associate with women and men who consciously make choices about treating others fairly and equitably, and who understand that in today’s turbulent business and social environment those who lead have obligations to those who follow them as well as to the bottom line and stockholders.

Whether your position inside or outside the company involves communicating with customers, clients, patrons, donors, bosses, employees, and/or peers, there is no doubt that interpersonal integrity and relational mindfulness form the core communication competencies in the workplace.

Gender differences

Option #3
Recently, we have been discussing the gender aspect of organizational life. Discuss some ways in which gender is acted out within organizations. You can use our readings for examples of how gender appears in everyday organizational performances, such as costuming, forms of talk, as well as other practices. Close by discussing to what extent you think organizations are gendered – is there any part of an organization that isn’t shaped by assumptions about gender? Use chapter seven and our readings by Deborah Tannen and Rosabeth Moss Kanter to answer this question. (See previous post for answer).

Here is an interesting video on gender roles in society in general

Gender in Organizational Communication

Organizations are primary sources of meaning in contemporary life. Through our attempts to coordinate our activities with others, we come to understand both who we are and who we might become. Thus, organizational meaning-making processes tend to create, emphasize, and value “differences that make a difference” as they are constructed around issues of race, sexuality, class, age and gender.

Before industrialization, notions of the self were largely fixed and mainly unitary; an individual’s self-definition came largely from his or her craft, locale and family and did not vary much throughout the course of life. In contrast, classical management theories regarded the individual as an inhuman cog in a complex machine, a state accomplished through the bureaucratic separation of the personal and public self. In recent years, powerful organizations have lost a great deal of their ability to control what individuals can become, thus allowing for a broader range of employee identities.

Interestingly, many young people are seeking to reintegrate their work selves with their personal selves, producing a greater continuity of identity across public and private contexts. This trend is propelled by a growing desire for authenticity or being real and honest is how we live and work with others. Whereas earlier notions of identity referred to an individual’s ability to look inside oneself to find one’s real self, contemporary ideas of authenticity focus much more on the ethics and consistency of one’s behaviors. In other words, we must reveal our true selves not only in personal relationships and during our personal time, but also through our choices of professional and organizational affiliation. Overall, there is not a clear, consistent or consensual model available.

The proliferations of multiple possible identities makes it even more critical that we select some “horizons of significance” toward which to orient ourselves. Not all identities however are equally welcome in the world of work. For many reasons, organizational members use identity markers to create and highlight differences between people, and then use these marked differences as reasons for treating them differently.

Alvesson and Wilmott, describe several specific practices that organizations use to “make” members’ identities, including:
1. Defining the person directly: Those who are described as midlevel managers, as opposed to senior-level managers, have their leadership capacities curtailed, by definition.
2. Defining a person by defining others: Many organizational members create positive identities by contrasting their positions with the positions of others.
3. Providing a specific vocabulary of motives: Organizations often explicitly describe the motivations that drive their ideal employees.
4. Explicating morals and values: Organizational cultures routinely offer employees an explicit set of guiding values such as innovation, customer service, or efficiency that they may use to craft and/or regulate their identities at work.
5. Knowledge and skills: Having access to specific knowledge or the skills necessary to execute a specific process or practice enables organizational members to define themselves in particular ways.
6. Group categorization and affiliation: When organizations foster feelings of “us” and, often less explicitly, “them,” they generate feelings of community, belonging, and loyalty.
7. Hierarchical location: One of the central ways that we answer the question “Who am I?” is by figuring out the superiority/subordination dynamics between ourselves and others. Those relations are often both symbolically and materially reinforced in organizations.
8. Establishing and clarifying a distinct set of rules of the game: Organizational communication creates and naturalizes rules and taken-for-granted ways of doing and being.
9. Defining the context: Organizational leaders often define the environment in which employees operate. When globalization, excessive competition, and rapid and unpredictable change are said to mark the environment, then organizations tend to value those who are adaptable, aggressive and entrepreneurial.

A focus on gender as a difference that makes a difference organizational life points to the complexities of identity construction. One of the key reasons that feminist organizational communication scholars have been interested in the question of identity at work is because of the marginalization women have experienced historically in public organizational life, particularly through wages, access, and mobility inequities. Feminist research takes on a variety of forms and is influenced by several different traditions.

Whereas liberal feminists are most interested in changing government and company policies to level the playing field for women in organizations, radical feminists might be more interested in dismantling those very organizations and replacing them with feminist-inspired, nonhierarchical structures. Feminist scholarship on identity, particularly in the context of organizations, is united by the assumption that the socially constructed split between the public sphere of work and the private sphere of home has led to significant symbolic and material consequences for both men and women.

The public/private split has resulted in several implications for men and women in contemporary organizational life, including the
• exclusion and control of women in the public sphere;
• denial of women’s domestic work as legitimate and values labor;
• devaluation of feminized labor in the public sphere • reduction of men’s participation in domestic work and family life;
• construction of work/family conflicts as a private problem rather than a public or social issue. One direct outgrowth of their interest in this divide is focused attention on work/family conflict or, more recently work/life conflict.

The term work/life conflict refers to the simultaneous influence of work on members’ lives away from work – at home, at leisure, and in families and communities – and the influence of personal life responsibilities and aspirations on members’ experiences at work. Karen Ashcraft (2004), a leading feminist organizational communication scholar, outlines four approaches or “frames” that are particularly relevant to questions regarding the public/private spheres, work/life balance and gender concerns. Work/life identities are ongoing accomplishments that are continually informed and constructed by discourses of gender, power, and organization. Yet, each frame adopts a different way of considering the relationships among communication, gendered identity and the organization. Each frame also constructs the “problem” of gender in a particular way, and in doing so, also suggests a potential solution to the “woman question” at work.

Frame 1: Gender Differences at Work
The first frame assumes that gender is a “socialized but relatively fixed identity…organized around biological sex and which fosters fairly predictable styles, therefore are outgrowths of gendered socialization and are made manifest in organizational contexts. Sociologist Deborah Tannen’s book You Just Don’t Understand: Women and Men in Conversation provides a comprehensive view of how gendered identities, learned in childhood, drive men and women’s conversational styles. Men treat conversations as a hierarchically ordered space in which they can demonstrate and vie for status; women treat conversations as a web-like space in which they can demonstrate and vie for connections.

Men seek status by engaging in report talk, a style of speaking that emphasizes:
• demonstrations of knowledge, skill and ability
• instrumentality
• conversational command
• direct and assertive expressions
• abstract terms over personal experience Women use conversations to build relationships using rapport talk. Rapport talk emphasizes:
• demonstrating equality through matching experiences
• providing support responsiveness
• conversational maintenance
• tentativeness
• personal, concrete details

Tannen claims that when women share their troubles with a conversational partner, they often hope to hear messages of support, reciprocity and connection. When sharing their stories with other women, they often receive precisely those messages, however, when sharing problems with male conversational partners, women often receive solutions and directives. Similarly, when men engage in troubles talk with women, they are often disappointed with women’s tendencies to immediately match troubles. While much of the early research treated women’s communication style as a deficit or a liability at work, some scholars attempted to demonstrate the utility, perhaps even the superiority of women’s ways of knowing, being and leading.

Further, in contrast to traditional models, narratives by and about women tend to value:
• fluid boundaries between personal life and work life
• relational aspects of work
• a balanced lifestyle
• a nurturing approach to co-workers
• a network of relationships within and outside the organization
• a service orientation to clients
• work as a means of developing personal identity

Frame 2: Gender Identity as Organizational Performance
Treating gender as a fixed biological or learned source of communication behavior overlooks the ways individuals create their gendered identities through communication in everyday interactions. Karen Ashcraft’s second frame foregrounds gender as an ongoing accomplishment, as an identity that is accomplished through “doing” rather than “being.” Feminist scholar Judith Butler suggests that we do gender in an through everyday performances or micropractices that are carried out to the organizational stage. Micropractices refer to the moment-to-moment behaviors, actions and communication messages that we use to bring ourselves into being in everyday life. Overall, gender is not an essential or “natural” or fixed aspect of our identity, “but practices learnt and enacted in appropriate occasions.”

Frame 2 suggests that gender is an aspect of our identity that is negotiated and renegotiated anew each day, across a variety of contexts. Thus, how a person performs masculinity or femininity will change depending on the context. One of the main questions is why do organizational members go to such lengths to perform “appropriate” gender identities? The answer is that successful gendered performance is richly rewarded. Those who fail to perform their gender correctly are routinely punished. There are severe penalties for failing to enact or perform an appropriate organizational gender, including lack of upward mobility and less access to employment. Employees who embody a preferred gender identity and are more attractive than their counterparts are more likely to receive job offers and higher starting salaries.

Another current inquiry that points to the performed character of identity is emotion labor. Emotion labor refers to a “type of work wherein employees are paid to create a ‘package’ of emotions.” Emotion labor can be damaging over time as employees become estranged from there “real” feelings after performing “fake” commodified, instrumental and organizationally controlled feelings. Moreover, extensive emotion labor has been linked with increased stress and burnout.

Frame 3: Gendered Organizations
The assumption is that organizational forms or structures, “like gender identity – are constantly in process, brought to life, sustained and transformed by interaction among new members. Simultaneously, organization guides interaction, predisposing and rewarding members to practice in particular ways.” Here, gender is a fundamental feature of organizations that influences identities in a variety of taken-for-granted ways. In a foundational essay, sociologist Joan Acker argued that far from being “neutral” backdrops, organizations are themselves gendered structures that reflect and reproduce patriarchy or the systematic privileging of masculinity. To say that an organization is gendered means that “advantage and disadvantage, exploitation and control, action and emotion, meaning and identity, are patterned through and in terms of a distinction between males and female, masculine and feminine.”

The gendered organization emerges out of at least five processes, including:
• The social construction of divisions of labor, positions, and types of work along gendered lines, The types of work that women and men do are often differentiated in organizations such that women assume support roles and men assume leadership roles.
• The social construction of symbols and images that reinforce gender divisions. Images of leadership often rest on a masculine model.
• The mundane communication interactions between men and women, men and men and women and women often reproduce gender divisions in ways that reinforce men’s powerful position. Women’s speech is often presumed to be ill suited to organizational life.
• The ways in which individual actors often take up identities that reinforce the three processes described above. Career choices, style of dress, interaction patterns and everyday performances result in gendered identities.
• Gender is, then, a fundamental element in “organizational logic” or a “gendered substructure that is reproduced daily in practical work activities.”

Frame 4: Gendered Narratives in Popular Culture
Frame 4 directs our attention outside the organizational context to the broad social discourses that shape both gendered organizational forms. This frame "shifts attention from communication in organizations to communication about organization or how a larger society portrays and debates its institutions and the very notion of work" and workers.

The assumption is that social texts that exist outside the organization, such as those found in popular culture, reveal and reproduce cultural understandings about the nature of work, life and identity. In other words, the meanings we assign to ourselves, our work and our organizations are significantly influenced by the texts - films, books, television shows, news reports, magazines, fashion and even scholarship - we consume in our everyday lives.

Through these processes, organizational structures, jobs and even bodies are gendered in specific ways. For women, embodying the “ideal” worker is difficult, as that which is associated with the private sphere and domesticity is excluded from organizational logic. Thus, women’s bodies – female sexuality, their ability to procreate and their pregnancy, breast-feeding, and child care, menstruation and mythic emotionality are suspect, stigmatized and used as grounds for control and exclusion.

information taken from Organizational Communication: Balancing Creativity and Constraint by Eric Eisenberg, H.L. Goodall Jr. and Angela Trethewey