Patrice M Buzzanell
Biographic Data
| ID | 103861 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Patrice M Buzzanell |
| GIVEN NAMES | Patrice M |
| FAMILY NAME | Buzzanell |
| SIGNATURE | BUZZANELL P M |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of South Florida |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-0058-7676 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 55 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 256 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 55 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1994 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
Disenfranchised Grief and Communicative Resilience
The communicative constitution of calling
Precarious employment, artificial intelligence (AI), and disengagement are eroding work’s role as a reliable source of meaning—namely, that one’s work is or should be one’s calling. Although psychological research typically frames calling as stable, beneficial, and individual; communication theory reveals it as collectively co-authored, relationally sustained, and thus inherently fragile and open to disruption. This tension raises the question of…
“There’s Going to be a Tipping Point Where I’m Not Gonna Be Able to Work”
Throughout their career, people living with autoimmune diseases must navigate workplace precarity amidst ongoing disruptions to health and wellbeing. Informed by the communication theory of resilience (CTR), we conduct semi-structured, narrative interviews with 25 individuals living with autoimmune diseases to examine their career-related disruptions and communicative resilience enactments. Data analysis reveals two major themes: (1) disability a…
Navigating (Dis)empowerment
Research has shown a dramatic increase of eating disorders (EDs) among young people during disruptive times. Understanding the role of communication in impeding or enacting resilience not only helps those with EDs develop better strategies for coping and changing their lives but can also inform effective interventions at familial, community, and system levels. Guided by the communication theory of resilience (CTR), our study explores how college …
International Graduate Student Parenthood
Guided by the Intersectional Theory of Closeting (ITC), our study analyzed in-depth interviews of how international graduate student-parents (IGSPs) negotiate their new parental identity, which was considered as deviating from the ideal graduate student norms at a U.S. public research university. Findings revealed that IGSPs enacted various closeting configurations— fully closeting, involuntary uncloseting, and coming out of the closet— to concea…
Paradoxical career sensemaking among emerging adults
Emerging adults, who are late millennials and Gen Z members, question the worth of higher education, especially in preparation for volatile labor markets, careers, and other precarities. We analyzed emerging adults’ sensemaking about this education–career–precarity mix through the constitutive lens of paradox using the applied tensional approach. We identified two main paradoxes centering around feelings of education and career security and vulne…
Graduate students’ resilience and resistance
Given intensified calls to attend to mental health in academia, we sought to understand how graduate students in the communication discipline anticipate, respond to, and resist institutional stressors via their resilience processes. Drawing on interviews with 50 graduate students, we examined how graduate students’ resilience communication processes enacted adaptive-transformative possibilities for resistance across micro, meso, and macro organiz…
Performative Facework During Graduate School
It was amazing and magical, but it was not a vacation at all.”
Using contrapuntal analysis to explore interviews with 25 women in the U.S., we contribute to understandings of maternity leave as an ideologically laden and contested experience through multilevel (micro-meso-macro) themes within centripetal-dominant and centrifugal-marginalized discourses. The centripetal discourse of Maternity Leave as a Manageable Transition (MLMT) animated leaves as restful vacations, relational experiences, and predictable …
The rubber band is already broken”
We critically explore the resilience discourse of the website for the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the lead agency for resilience in the Palestinian context, through engagement with the local Palestinian concept of sumud and neoliberal and postcolonial lenses. Our critical analysis of the UNDP resilience discourse identifies three main problems: the linguistic localization of resilience, the claim of Palestinians' responsibility f…
Not just rebellious, it's revolutionary
A longitudinal analysis of involuntary job loss and communication resilience processes during the Covid-19 pandemic
This longitudinal study explored associations between communication resilience processes, job-search self-efficacy, and well-being for a sample of US adults who involuntarily lost their jobs during the second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. Based on the communication theory of resilience (CTR), we tested four possible models regarding how the enactment of resilience processes would be associated with job-search self-efficacy and well-being over ti…
Memorable Messages as Anticipatory Resilience
Memorable messages oftentimes are associated with hope, can foster anticipatory resilience prior to the experience of disruptive events, and can buffer the negative impact of adverse experiences on mental health. However, associations among memorable messages, engagement in resilience processes, and mental health have not been examined. Drawing from the communication theory of resilience (CTR), analyses of data from 262 Chinese adults suggested t…
Caring for Patients without Personal Protective Equipment (PPE)
Guided by communication theory of resilience (CTR), we analyze 453 narrative accounts by Reddit user healthcare workers (HCWs) of their experiences with COVID-19-related personal protective equipment (PPE) shortages between March and May 2020. Via thematic analysis and sensitized by CTR concepts, we examine PPE shortages as a disruptive trigger event that catalyzes the enactment of resilience processes. Findings problematize PPE shortages as mate…
Constituting affective identities
The present study examined how identity is affectively organized online in an online men’s rights community, responding to calls to explore how sites like Reddit serve as spaces that host and support varied misogynist language and communities. We utilized scholarship of affective organizing and communicative constitution of organizations to study the identity construction through the social and communicative processes that facilitate and limit on…
Family Communication Patterns Predict Anticipatory Resilience and the Enactment of Resilience Processes
The communication theory of resilience (CTR; Buzzanell, 2010 Buzzanell, P. M. (2010). Resilience: Talking, resisting, and imagining new normalcies into being. The Journal of Communication, 60(1), 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1460-2466.2009.01469.x[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar], 2019 Buzzanell, P. M. (2019). Communication theory of resilience in everyday talk, interactions, and network structures. In S. R. Wilson & S. W. Smit…
“Well, I’m going to have a baby”
This study explores how 92 women disclosed their pregnancies in the workplace. Examining workplace pregnancy disclosure broadly rather than taking a dyadic approach (e.g. employee to supervisor) highlighted tensions and outcomes associated with simultaneously navigating disclosures to multiple colleagues and supervisors. Data analysis revealed four themes: (b) timing safely, (c) diffusing selectively, (d) controlling gatherings, and (e) crafting …
Student understandings of career and gainful employment
U.S. policymakers designed the Gainful Employment Rule (GE) and College Scorecard (CS) to make college decision-making, the outcome of major choice, and long-term economic cost/benefits of student loans readily transparent. Yet, focus group d/Discourse indicate that such interventions fail to meet these ethical objectives but also undermine student educational progress and well-being. Using structurating activity theory and critical discourse ana…
Development and validation of a culturally adapted measure of communication resilience processes for Chinese contexts
Developing and Validating the Communication Resilience Processes Scale
According to the communication theory of resilience (CTR; P. M. Buzzanell, 2010), people reintegrate from disruptive events and construct a new normal through five interrelated processes: (a) crafting normalcy; (b) affirming identity anchors; (c) maintaining/using communication networks; (d) constructing alternative logics; and (e) foregrounding productive action while backgrounding negative emotions. Enacting these processes creates tensions bet…
Emplotting anticipatory resilience
This work extended the communication theory of resilience by examining how individuals construct anticipatory resilience through narratives of disruptive life events. Guided by postmodern antenarrative theory, we analyzed the emplotment of 25 individuals’ narratives of disruptive events to understand how participants make sense of these events and prospectively craft resilience as storied logics of the future. The findings challenged extant resil…
Communication and resilience
This special issue of the Journal of Applied Communication Research is focused on communication and resilience. The issue contains seven articles that consider communicative aspects of individual, family, organizational, community, and national resilience. Included articles examine: resilience and relational load among families of dual earning couples; parental emotion coaching and adolescent resilience in families of harmful and non-harmful alco…
Enacting everyday feminist collaborations
We trace back our own multi‐year teaching and writing collaboration in academia to theorize feminist collaboration. Drawing from feminist theories and our autoethnographic reflections, we surface three metaphorical processes that constitute feminist collaboration. We consider feminist collaboration as: (i) reflexive becoming , that is, feminist collaborators constantly make sense of what counts as feminist as the group and context evolve; (ii) pr…
Organizing resilience as adaptive-transformational tensions
In organizational communication, resilience encompasses the processes by which individuals and organizations reintegrate and foster productive change during and after career setbacks, material and ...
NGO Organizing for Environmental Sustainability in Brazil
Through our case study of a Brazilian not-for-profit focused on sustainability initiatives, we expand knowledge about communicative labor in different Brazilian organizational environments, especially in the third (nonprofit/nongovernmental) sector. Based on a case study for which thematic analyses of in-depth interviews with the entire nongovernmental organization (NGO), including its board and staff, were conducted, we found three communicative…
Communicative tensions of meaningful work
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 factors that were both enabling and constraining, stemming from various organizational, professional and p…
Bait and switch or double-edged sword? The (sometimes) failed promises of calling
How people talk about their work and careers matters. Desiring meaningful work, people increasingly describe work and careers as a calling. Such callings may be secular or sacred. Popular ways of talking about calling often create problematic, rather than positive, career and life outcomes. In this article, we examine five common, historically influenced assumptions underlying contemporary talk about secular and sacred callings: necessity; agency…
Reframing the glass ceiling as a socially constructed process
Traditional definitions of the glass ceiling perpetuate gender‐biased organizational practices and quick‐fix solutions. By creating an illusion of opportunity for women, they prevent critical assessment of contemporary organizational practices and of gendered communication. This article engages in feminist research as praxis first by discussing how current organizational practices fail to alter power imbalances. To create awareness of unjust orga…
It's `give and take
To examine maternity leave as a gendered conflict management process, we analyzed a sample of interviews (from a larger data set of 102 interviews) with 26 women who reported feeling discouraged ( n = 15) or encouraged ( n = 11) about their employment status and career opportunities at the times of their leaves. Whereas these two groups of women converged on perceptions of a) incompatible (individual and organizational) goals and b) increased str…
Memorable Messages of Hard Times
We take a communicative and life course theory approach to understanding how resilience is constructed in families. Drawing upon interviews with 20 fathers, 16 mothers, and 23 children who dealt with financial hardship during the 1980s recession, we analyze the messages families communicated about finances when their children were young and how these messages contributed to the development of short- and long-term resiliencies. The family talk and…
Breaking the Myth of Indian Call Centers
This article provides a postcolonial critique of power-resistance dialectics among outsourced call center workers in India. A constructivist grounded theory analysis of focus group and interview data with 65 participants reveals how microresistance intersects with global capitalism in ways that both accommodate and rupture Western discourses. These discursive and material intersectionalities are made visible through employees' processes of (1) ap…
They Allowed”
This study expands applications of Burkean pentadic mapping from traditional rhetorical texts, such as speeches and written documents, to interview discourses. This methodological adaptation assists scholars in understanding openings and closings, that is, opportunities and constraints, in discourses in a variety of communication areas. In particular, pentadic mapping is a way of discovering discursive paths for empowerment and transformation. Th…
The ethics of conscious capitalism
Given corporate scandals, organizational crises, and accounting irregularities (e.g. Citigroup, BP oil spill, Enron, Arthur Andersen), leadership ethics has grown in relevance. The current study takes a discursive approach to engage in a multimethod case study of a consulting and leadership development firm that takes Conscious Capitalism as the impetus for, and target of, leader development. Using constructivist grounded theory and critical disc…
Selling (Out) Feminism
Feminist mainstreaming has made feminist ideology one choice among many causes in a competitive marketplace. To stay competitive, feminist organizations must manage the dual goals of advocacy and financial viability. This study explores how an independent media business that publishes a feminist popular culture magazine and sponsors community events navigates ideology–viability tensions. This analysis articulates two discursive strategies employe…
Stories of Caregiving
The article analyzes contemporary discourses and practices of caregiving and mothering. Using a case study of one employed mother as a starting point, the authors engage in writing-stories that combine the analyses of their e-mail and face-to-face conversations from the last couple of years with various journal entries and interdisciplinary research. The article concludes with a final section that articulates how caregiving discourses cut across …
Different Transitions into Working Motherhood
Little is known about how diverse women perceive, talk about, and enact their transitions into working motherhood in ways that reflect (and are shaped by) their social identities. While we do not mean to imply that these 16 Asian, Hispanic, and African American women are representative of the variety of women who self-categorize themselves in these particular identity groups, we do want to display the ways in which their discourses about their tr…
Telecommuting as viewed through cultural lenses
Prior telecommuting research has focused both on teleworkers without comparison to other employee groups and on pragmatic implications of this work arrangement across organizations. In contrast, this investigation situated telecommuting as a socially constructed process and practice within the context of a specific hybrid (federal agency and private sector) organizational culture. We used Martin's (1992) three cultural lenses as a framework for a…
Not just rebellious, it's revolutionary
Family and Workplace Conflict Examining Metaphorical Conflict Schemas and Expressions Across Context and Sex
This investigation examined 620 metaphorical conflict expressions generated by 169 participants who either were employed full-time or had previous work experience. First-order metaphorical (schema) analyses indicated that participants predominately used “conflict is impotence” schemas. No sex differences emerged in either schemas or in second-order (linguistic) analyses of metaphorical expressions. However, participants reported different schemas…
Enacting everyday feminist collaborations
We trace back our own multi‐year teaching and writing collaboration in academia to theorize feminist collaboration. Drawing from feminist theories and our autoethnographic reflections, we surface three metaphorical processes that constitute feminist collaboration. We consider feminist collaboration as: (i) reflexive becoming , that is, feminist collaborators constantly make sense of what counts as feminist as the group and context evolve; (ii) pr…
From the Mouths of Babes
Families' communication with young children about work and careers has not been the focus of much systematic investigation. We contribute to family communication scholarship both by providing an overview of career socialization research involving children, and by presenting findings from a multinational (China, Lebanon, Belgium, and the United States) investigation of 800 children's discursive, cultural, and material socialization. Using a ground…
Emplotting anticipatory resilience
This work extended the communication theory of resilience by examining how individuals construct anticipatory resilience through narratives of disruptive life events. Guided by postmodern antenarrative theory, we analyzed the emplotment of 25 individuals’ narratives of disruptive events to understand how participants make sense of these events and prospectively craft resilience as storied logics of the future. The findings challenged extant resil…
Standpoints of Maternity Leave
Our standpoint analysis of 21 women in pink-collar occupations displays how these workers both adhere to and challenge maternity leave discourses by rhetorically positioning their leaves as time off and (dis)ability. They both acknowledge the advantages of and resist discourses of time and (dis)ability by constructing complicated, contradictory, and ironic knowledge that such language both secures their leaves and revokes their images as competen…
Intimate, ambivalent and erotic mentoring
Mentoring centers on the development of another person through career, psychosocial and role modeling support. As popular cultural portrayals and gendered critiques of mentoring show, not all can be categorized as rational, instrumental and positive. There often are unconscious forces that drive particular mentoring arrangements and offer entrée points into mentorship analyses that contrast with rational approaches. Popular culture images provide…
Constrained and Constructed Choices in Career
Choice is foundational to contemporary careers. Yet, it often is constrained and contested in imperceptible ways. We reposition Ciulla’s (2000) four reasons for work—meaningful work, leisure, money, and security—as discursive frames whereby people make career choices, craft their choice-legitimizing stories, and overemphasize the rhetoric of individual choice. These frames attend to, as well as underplay, profound discursive and material differen…
Constructing a feminist organization’s identity in a competitive marketplace
Feminist organizations today must maintain their distinctive organizational identities in a competitive marketplace in which feminism has become one choice amidst many social change causes. Alignment among organizational identity, stakeholder images, and organizational culture can give feminist organizations a competitive advantage. However, feminist theory and practice have surfaced alignment challenges that can undermine organizational success.…
Discourse, Gender, and the Meaning of Work Rearticulating Science, Technology, and Engineering Careers Through Communicative Lenses
In this chapter, we offer communicative perspectives and challenges related to gender representation and the gendered organizing and career processes in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) areas. We focus on the meaning of work in STEM and how these meanings are (re)created and communicated through d/Discourses. Using a discursive approach, new perspectives on the issue of the underrepresentation of women in STEM careers derive from…
An Organizational Communication Challenge to the Discourse of Work and Family Research
Using a discourse perspective, we articulate four problematics, (a) boundaries, (b) identity, (c) rationality, and (d) voice that underlie work-family theory, research, and practice. We situate existing interdisciplinary research within each problematic, showing how such research examines outcomes and effects rather than the process of constructing such outcomes. We supplement these studies with emerging communication research to illustrate new w…
Problematizing Classed Identities in Fatherhood
This article analyzes the discourse and practices of two men from different life circumstances punctuated by race, class, education, occupation, number of children, relational history, and familial background. The authors create a new data analytic technique, the integrative case study, that juxtaposes excerpts and analyses of these fathers' interview data in imagined conversational space through poststructuralist feminist lenses. The authors for…
Colonizing Family
There is a long tradition of applying managerial techniques and principles to more efficiently manage domestic and familial responsibilities. We argue that such appropriations of corporate practices, language, and thinking not only obscure distinctions between home and work but also integrate work values, patterns, and perspectives into everyday constructions of family life so thoroughly as to bring into question what a family is and what values,…
Gaining a Voice
Feminist organizational communication theorizing offers an analysis of how varied feminist approaches can provide unique insights into the consequences of traditional gender interactions in everyday organizing processes. Traditional societal and organizational themes of competition, cause-effect linear thinking, and separation/autonomy are juxtaposed with alternative themes focusing on community, integrative thinking, and connectedness. By explor…
Reframing the glass ceiling as a socially constructed process
Traditional definitions of the glass ceiling perpetuate gender‐biased organizational practices and quick‐fix solutions. By creating an illusion of opportunity for women, they prevent critical assessment of contemporary organizational practices and of gendered communication. This article engages in feminist research as praxis first by discussing how current organizational practices fail to alter power imbalances. To create awareness of unjust orga…
Family and Workplace Conflict Examining Metaphorical Conflict Schemas and Expressions Across Context and Sex
This investigation examined 620 metaphorical conflict expressions generated by 169 participants who either were employed full-time or had previous work experience. First-order metaphorical (schema) analyses indicated that participants predominately used “conflict is impotence” schemas. No sex differences emerged in either schemas or in second-order (linguistic) analyses of metaphorical expressions. However, participants reported different schemas…
Rethinking Organizational ampnumx0026; Managerial Communication from Feminist Perspectives Rethinking organizational ampnumx0026; managerial communication from feminist perspectives
This book reconsiders organizational and managerial communication theories, research, and practice from a feminist standpoint. It looks at theoretical analyses that reconceptualize and extend boundaries in our thinking about work and organizing processes; presents women's voices through interview excerpts, poems, diary entries, and stories and explores the ways in which these concrete details of ordinary lives represent missing facets of our orga…
"Commentary About Aimee M. Carrillo Rowe's "Locating Feminism's Subject
Journal Article Commentary About Aimee M. Carrillo Rowe's “Locating Feminism's Subject: The Paradox of White Femininity and the Struggle to Forge Feminist Alliances” Get access Patrice M. Buzzanell Patrice M. Buzzanell 1Patrice M. Buzzanell (PhD, Purdue University) is an associate professor in the Department of Communication at Purdue University. She is president of the Organization for the Study of Communication, Language, and Gender and editor …
Telecommuting as viewed through cultural lenses
Prior telecommuting research has focused both on teleworkers without comparison to other employee groups and on pragmatic implications of this work arrangement across organizations. In contrast, this investigation situated telecommuting as a socially constructed process and practice within the context of a specific hybrid (federal agency and private sector) organizational culture. We used Martin's (1992) three cultural lenses as a framework for a…
An Organizational Communication Challenge to the Discourse of Work and Family Research
Using a discourse perspective, we articulate four problematics, (a) boundaries, (b) identity, (c) rationality, and (d) voice that underlie work-family theory, research, and practice. We situate existing interdisciplinary research within each problematic, showing how such research examines outcomes and effects rather than the process of constructing such outcomes. We supplement these studies with emerging communication research to illustrate new w…
Different Transitions into Working Motherhood
Little is known about how diverse women perceive, talk about, and enact their transitions into working motherhood in ways that reflect (and are shaped by) their social identities. While we do not mean to imply that these 16 Asian, Hispanic, and African American women are representative of the variety of women who self-categorize themselves in these particular identity groups, we do want to display the ways in which their discourses about their tr…
Colonizing Family
There is a long tradition of applying managerial techniques and principles to more efficiently manage domestic and familial responsibilities. We argue that such appropriations of corporate practices, language, and thinking not only obscure distinctions between home and work but also integrate work values, patterns, and perspectives into everyday constructions of family life so thoroughly as to bring into question what a family is and what values,…
It's `give and take
To examine maternity leave as a gendered conflict management process, we analyzed a sample of interviews (from a larger data set of 102 interviews) with 26 women who reported feeling discouraged ( n = 15) or encouraged ( n = 11) about their employment status and career opportunities at the times of their leaves. Whereas these two groups of women converged on perceptions of a) incompatible (individual and organizational) goals and b) increased str…
Necessary Fictions
They Allowed”
This study expands applications of Burkean pentadic mapping from traditional rhetorical texts, such as speeches and written documents, to interview discourses. This methodological adaptation assists scholars in understanding openings and closings, that is, opportunities and constraints, in discourses in a variety of communication areas. In particular, pentadic mapping is a way of discovering discursive paths for empowerment and transformation. Th…
Distinctive Qualities in Communication Research
FOREWORD Robert Craig CHAPTER ONE An Introduction to Some Distinctive Qualities in Communication Research Patrice Buzzanell & Donal Carbaugh CHAPTER TWO Distinctive Qualities in Communication Research: A Dialogic Approach to Interpersonal/Family Communication Leslie A. Baxter CHAPTER THREE The Promise of Communication in Large-Scale, Community-Based Research Michael Hecht CHAPTER FOUR Politically Attentive Relational Constructionism (PARC): Makin…
Routledge Handbook of Applied Communication Research
Introduction (Kenneth N. Cissna, Lawrence R. Frey). Part I: Foundations of Applied Communication Research. 1. The Development of Applied Communication Research (Kenneth N. Cissna, William F. Eadie, Mark Hickson, III). 2. Across Applied Divides: Great Debates of Applied Communication Scholarship (Lawrence R. Frey, SunWolf). 3. Practical Theory in Applied Communication Scholarship (J. Kevin Barge, Robert T. Craig). Part II: Methods of Applied Commu…
Discourse, Gender, and the Meaning of Work Rearticulating Science, Technology, and Engineering Careers Through Communicative Lenses
In this chapter, we offer communicative perspectives and challenges related to gender representation and the gendered organizing and career processes in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) areas. We focus on the meaning of work in STEM and how these meanings are (re)created and communicated through d/Discourses. Using a discursive approach, new perspectives on the issue of the underrepresentation of women in STEM careers derive from…
Stories of Caregiving
The article analyzes contemporary discourses and practices of caregiving and mothering. Using a case study of one employed mother as a starting point, the authors engage in writing-stories that combine the analyses of their e-mail and face-to-face conversations from the last couple of years with various journal entries and interdisciplinary research. The article concludes with a final section that articulates how caregiving discourses cut across …
Resilience
Human resilience is the ability to “bounce back” or reintegrate after difficult life experiences. I argue that, rather than an individual phenomenon that someone either possesses or does not, resilience is developed, sustained, and grown through discourse, interaction, and material considerations. There are several communicative processes involved. These include: (a) crafting normalcy, (b) affirming identity anchors, (c) maintaining and using com…
Problematizing Classed Identities in Fatherhood
This article analyzes the discourse and practices of two men from different life circumstances punctuated by race, class, education, occupation, number of children, relational history, and familial background. The authors create a new data analytic technique, the integrative case study, that juxtaposes excerpts and analyses of these fathers' interview data in imagined conversational space through poststructuralist feminist lenses. The authors for…
From the Mouths of Babes
Families' communication with young children about work and careers has not been the focus of much systematic investigation. We contribute to family communication scholarship both by providing an overview of career socialization research involving children, and by presenting findings from a multinational (China, Lebanon, Belgium, and the United States) investigation of 800 children's discursive, cultural, and material socialization. Using a ground…
Selling (Out) Feminism
Feminist mainstreaming has made feminist ideology one choice among many causes in a competitive marketplace. To stay competitive, feminist organizations must manage the dual goals of advocacy and financial viability. This study explores how an independent media business that publishes a feminist popular culture magazine and sponsors community events navigates ideology–viability tensions. This analysis articulates two discursive strategies employe…
Memorable Messages of Hard Times
We take a communicative and life course theory approach to understanding how resilience is constructed in families. Drawing upon interviews with 20 fathers, 16 mothers, and 23 children who dealt with financial hardship during the 1980s recession, we analyze the messages families communicated about finances when their children were young and how these messages contributed to the development of short- and long-term resiliencies. The family talk and…
Constrained and Constructed Choices in Career
Choice is foundational to contemporary careers. Yet, it often is constrained and contested in imperceptible ways. We reposition Ciulla’s (2000) four reasons for work—meaningful work, leisure, money, and security—as discursive frames whereby people make career choices, craft their choice-legitimizing stories, and overemphasize the rhetoric of individual choice. These frames attend to, as well as underplay, profound discursive and material differen…
Breaking the Myth of Indian Call Centers
This article provides a postcolonial critique of power-resistance dialectics among outsourced call center workers in India. A constructivist grounded theory analysis of focus group and interview data with 65 participants reveals how microresistance intersects with global capitalism in ways that both accommodate and rupture Western discourses. These discursive and material intersectionalities are made visible through employees' processes of (1) ap…
The ethics of conscious capitalism
Given corporate scandals, organizational crises, and accounting irregularities (e.g. Citigroup, BP oil spill, Enron, Arthur Andersen), leadership ethics has grown in relevance. The current study takes a discursive approach to engage in a multimethod case study of a consulting and leadership development firm that takes Conscious Capitalism as the impetus for, and target of, leader development. Using constructivist grounded theory and critical disc…
Constructing a feminist organization’s identity in a competitive marketplace
Feminist organizations today must maintain their distinctive organizational identities in a competitive marketplace in which feminism has become one choice amidst many social change causes. Alignment among organizational identity, stakeholder images, and organizational culture can give feminist organizations a competitive advantage. However, feminist theory and practice have surfaced alignment challenges that can undermine organizational success.…
Sociology (45 works) · Psychology (34 works) · Political science (31 works) · Social Psychology (29 works) · Gender Studies (20 works) · Gender Diversity and Inequality (19 works) · Public relations (19 works) · Social science (18 works) · Gender Studies (15 works) · Social Psychology (15 works)