Communicative View of Displacement: An Autoethnographic Study of Organizational Experiences

Abstract

"Communication..(a) practical metadiscourse..has the potential to develop into a truly reflective discourse that engages communication theory with practice" (Craig, 1999) – on this theoretical underpinning has this dissertation anchored, in its attempt to make sense of personal organizational experiences and extending the understanding to a communicative view of organizational displacement. This dissertation leaned on the goal of a reconstructed communication theory: the "dialogical-dialectic" coherence (Craig, 1999) which in this study was exhibited thru autoethnography. Additionally, as an organizational study, it advances the view that '” communication produces the organization”': "Not only do we self-organize in communication; the facility of language also both enables and constrains us to re-produce organizational forms over time" (Taylor, 2005). The research method, autoethnography, promisingly located agreement of the Critical Tradition (discursive reflection as means towards consciousness-raising and emancipation) of communicative theorizing with three other traditions: the phenomenological (making sense of lived experience); socio-psychological (privileging the reflection of beliefs, feelings, personality); and the socio-cultural (an attempt at producing social order). The autoethnographic method has shown to be a bold and painstaking, yet fulfilling and liberating qualitative research process freely traversed in this study, using an organized frame of analysis: immersion to details of experience; reflection; and modeling or turning gained meanings of experience into useful understanding and even, emancipation. This study concerned with organizational experiences that spanned more than a decade of regular employment, to a period of organizational movements: a transfer and a failure to return to the station, unemployment, re-employment, and displacement. It meant to address the research questions: (1) What does it mean to be a member of the organization?: (2) How do I view organizational movements?; and (3) What are the material consequences of organizational displacement? Various forms of communication emerged from the organizational experiences, such as interpersonal, spatial (communicated by organizational movements), self-reflexive; and intrapersonal (an I-Thou relationship), producing themes and meanings that developed into six thematic constructs on organizational displacement, that: (a) naivety as an organizational member coupled with an estrangement to an unfamiliar lifeworld have become the (unsuspected roots) of an unstable position in the organization; (b) vulnerability to this organizational action is attributed to the organizational member self (self-induced) rather than by the organization; (c) it is expressed in experiences of antagonism/conflict of perspectives, and resistance that suppress or limit a worker's communicational as well as performance engagements; (d) organizational movements are necessitated events of disconnections in order for the organizational member to become more resilient and more connected to her being part of an Organization; (e) organizational displacement is not tied to the physical organization, but happens in the organizational member self, as s/he is brought towards personal mastery that guides towards her defined placeness in the organization; and (f) that its material consequences are: a liberation and awareness of the organizational self; recognition of the presence of institutions 'outside organization that help the displaced; and an alternative view of displacement [based from six (6) thematic constructs on organizational displacement produced] from the traditional perspective of it as a negative experience into an emancipating, [transforming] organizational experience. Results of this study are interpreted that addressed the research questions and constituted this autoethnography's alternative views to organizational displacement, privileging the perspectives of an organizational member who has gone thru various movements in the organization, as follows: (1) To be a member of an organization requires foreknowledge about this lifeworld (or at least mentors). It also means bridging the estrangement by truly being part of the Organization: working alongside or in connection to it [whether about the organizational or personal matters]; (2) Organizational movements are viewed to give excitement to organizational life; produce organizational antagonism/ conflicting perspectives and eye-opening spaces to unaddressed issues (e.g. oppression) that can lead to beginnings of resistance and limiting of organizational engagement; serve as necessitated disconnection to be a more resilient organizational member; and as a journey towards personal mastery which turns out to be my (actually sought for) "sense of placeness" in the Organization; and (3) Organizational displacement constitutes a new understanding as the very essence of its material consequence: an exigency that means the loss of material position in the organization but towards emancipation and true placeness of the organizational member as part of the organization. This work has been rewarding to this auto ethnographer, and hopefully to its readers and communities concerned with the organization and with communication as a discipline, and to that part of society represented by the voice: those organizational members struggling through a 'journey of darkness' in a displacement story such as mine. It encourages the unmuting of voice and the journey towards confronting empirical ambiguities such as the experience of displacement in a truly reflective way that aspires towards a kind of understanding that can liberate the self-thru knowing what may otherwise be unknown if left uncommunicated.