Toward a fluid, shape-shifting methodology in organizational communication inquiry: African feminist organizational communication historiography

ABSTRACT

Since W. Charles Redding’s call to maintain a sense of history in the subfield of organizational communication, our approach has largely been focused on institutionalizing and legitimizing organizational communication through static development narratives of the subfield’s emergence in the 1940s and 1950s, and key developments in topical interests in subsequent decades. While this is not unique to organizational communication, it makes it difficult to see the various ways history, as an organizing practice, is implicated in the constitution of a field. In this article, I suggest a shift toward fluid, shape-shifting practices of history as one way organizational communication can move toward a more open and inclusive practice—vital for coming to terms with history as a colonial structure and progressing in our own decolonial project. Toward this end, I propose African feminist organizational communication historiography as a novel approach for writing origin narratives, introducing theories, and legitimizing organizational forms that have been rendered alternative in organizational communication scholarship.

KEYWORDS:

• African feminist organizational communication historiography
• organizational communication history
• African feminist theory

Acknowledgements

I wish to express my gratitude to the Guest Editors, the Editor, and the anonymous reviewers for their feedback, support, and guidance throughout the writing and editing process. I would also like to express my sincerest gratitude to my parents and grandparents, whose stories, lived experiences, and wisdom contributed greatly to this research.

Notes

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6 For example, see Patrice M. Buzzanell and Cynthia Stohl, “The Redding Tradition of Organizational Communication Scholarship: W. Charles Redding and His Legacy,” Communication Studies 50, no. 4 (1999): 324–36; Charles Conrad and Michael Sollitto, “History of Organizational Communication,” in The International Encyclopedia of Organizational Communication (Wiley, 2017), 1–32, doi https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118955567.wbieoc097; Scott C. D’Urso, Jeremy P. Fyke, and David H. Torres, “Exploring Organizational Communication (Micro) History through Network Connections,” Review of Communication 14, no. 2 (2014): 89–106.

7 Dennis K. Mumby and Timothy R. Kuhn, “Fordism and Organizational Communication,” in Organizational Communication: A Critical Introduction, 2nd ed. (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2019), 59–90.

8 Craig Prichard, “Challenging Academic Imperialism: Some Tactics for Constructing an Organizational Communication of the Elsewhere,” Management Communication Quarterly 19, no. 2 (2005): 270–78.

9 Ibid., 273.

10 Joëlle M. Cruz, “Reimagining Feminist Organizing in Global Times: Lessons from African Feminist Communication,” Women & Language 38, no. 1 (2015): 23–41.

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14 Prichard, “Challenging Academic Imperialism.”

15 Redding, “Stumbling toward Identity.”

16 Conrad and Sollitto, “History of Organizational Communication.”

17 For example, see Mumby and Kuhn, “Fordism and Organizational Communication”; Steven R. Barley and Gideon Kunda, “Design and Devotion: Surges of Rational and Normative Ideologies of Control in Managerial Discourse,” Administrative Science Quarterly 37, no. 3 (1992): 363–99; Kyle Bruce and Chris Nyland, “Elton Mayo and the Deification of Human Relations,” Organization Studies 32, no. 3 (2011): 383–405.

18 Mumby and Kuhn, “Fordism and Organizational Communication.”

19 Timothy Kuhn, “Developing a Communicative Imagination under Contemporary Capitalism: The Domain of Organizational Communication as a Mode of Explanation,” Management Communication Quarterly 31, no. 1 (2017): 116–22.

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25 Cruz, “Reimagining Feminist Organizing in Global Times.”

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27 Cruz, “Reimagining Feminist Organizing in Global Times.”

28 Ibid., 26.

29 Cruz, “Reimagining Feminist Organizing in Global Times.” See also Oyèrónkẹ Oyěwùmí, The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997).

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32 Presley, Kikuyu Women, the Mau Mau Rebellion, and Social Change in Kenya.

33 Dennis Schoeneborn, Timothy R. Kuhn, and Dan Kärreman, “The Communicative Constitution of Organization, Organizing, and Organizationality,” Organization Studies 40, no. 4 (2018): 487.

34 Karen Lee Ashcraft, “Empowering ‘Professional’ Relationships: Organizational Communication Meets Feminist Practice,” Management Communication Quarterly 13, no. 3 (2000): 347–92; Udvardy, “Theorizing Past and Present Women’s Organizations in Kenya.”

35 Joëlle M. Cruz, “Dirty Work at the Intersections of Gender, Class, and Nation: Liberian Market Women in Post-Conflict Times,” Women’s Studies in Communication 38, no. 4 (2015): 421–39.

36 Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe 12, no. 2 (2008): 1–14.

37 Cruz, “Reimagining Feminist Organizing in Global Times.”

38 Stephen Belcher, “Oral Traditions as Sources,” in Oxford Research Encyclopedia of African History (2018): 1–19, doi https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190277734.013.363.

39 Lorelli S. Nowell, Jill M. Norris, Deborah E. White, and Nancy J. Moules, “Thematic Analysis: Striving to Meet the Trustworthiness Criteria,” International Journal of Qualitative Methods 16, no. 1 (2017): 2.

40 Cruz, “Reimagining Feminist Organizing in Global Times,” 29.

41 Peter O. Ndege, “Colonialism and Its Legacies in Kenya” (lecture, Fulbright–Hays Group Project Abroad Program, Moi University Main Campus, Eldoret, Kenya, July 5–August 6, 2009), 1, https://africanphilanthropy.issuelab.org/resources/19699/19699.pdf.

42 Presley, Kikuyu Women, the Mau Mau Rebellion, and Social Change in Kenya.

43 Claire C. Robertson, Trouble Showed the Way: Women, Men, and Trade in the Nairobi Area, 1890–1990 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997).

44 Louis Leakey, “The Economics of Kikuyu Tribal Life,” East African Economics Review 3, no. 1 (1956): 172.

45 Leakey, “The Economics of Kikuyu Tribal Life.”

46 Presley, Kikuyu Women, the Mau Mau Rebellion, and Social Change in Kenya, 21–22.

47 Presley, Kikuyu Women, the Mau Mau Rebellion, and Social Change in Kenya.

48 Robert J. Cummings, “Aspects of Human Porterage with Special Reference to the Akamba of Kenya, 1820–1920” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 1975), 170.

49 Ibid., 171.

50 Renee Guarriello Heath, “Rethinking Community Collaboration through a Dialogic Lens: Creativity, Democracy, and Diversity in Community Organizing,” Management Communication Quarterly 2, no. 11 (2007): 147.

51 Robertson, Trouble Showed the Way.

52 Ibid.; Cummings, “Aspects of Human Porterage with Special Reference to the Akamba of Kenya”; Presley, Kikuyu Women, the Mau Mau Rebellion, and Social Change in Kenya.

53 Robertson, Trouble Showed the Way, 70–71.

54 Cummings, “Aspects of Human Porterage with Special Reference to the Akamba of Kenya.”

55 Cruz, “Reimagining Feminist Organizing in Global Times.”

56 Obioma Nnaemeka, “Nego-Feminism: Theorizing, Practicing, and Pruning Africa’s Way,” Signs 29, no. 2 (2004): 378.

57 Presley, Kikuyu Women, the Mau Mau Rebellion, and Social Change in Kenya, 22–23.

58 Mary Njeru Kinyanjui, “Women Informal Garment Traders in Taveta Road, Nairobi: From the Margins to the Center,” African Studies Review 56, no. 3 (2013): 148. See also Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch, African Women: A Modern History, trans. Beth Gilliam Raps (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997).

59 Schoeneborn, Kuhn, and Kärreman, “The Communicative Constitution of Organization, Organizing, and Organizationality,” 487.

60 For example, see Kristen J. Broadfoot et al., “A Mosaic of Vision, Daydreams, and Memories: Diverse Inlays of Organizing and Communicating from around the Globe,” Management Communication Quarterly 22, no. 2 (2008): 322–50; Joëlle M. Cruz and Chigozirim Utah Sodeke, “Debunking Eurocentricism in Organizational Communication Theory: Marginality and Liquidities in Postcolonial Contexts,” Communication Theory 31, no. 3 (2020): 528–48; Jenna N. Hanchey and Brenda L. Berkelaar, “Context Matters: Examining Discourses of Career Success in Tanzania,” Management Communication Quarterly 29, no. 3 (2015): 411–39; Joëlle M. Cruz, “Memories of Trauma and Organizing: Market Women’s Susu Groups in Postconflict Liberia,” Organization 21, no. 4 (2014): 447–62; “Reimagining Feminist Organizing in Global Times”; “Invisibility and Visibility in Alternative Organizing.”