Following the discursive turn, qualitative scholars have played a significant role in organizational communication. In her methodological survey, Stephens (2017) found that approximately two thirds of the articles published from 2001 to 2015 in Management Communication Quarterly

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Nonprofit organizational sustainability is increasingly framed in terms of fiscal expediency. This framing of sustainability has led nonprofit organizations to increasingly adopt for-profit innovations, at times at the expense of core organizational values or nonprofit mission. Drawing on ethnographic field methods and semi-structured interviews, I examine how one anarchist-run homeless shelter resists and challenges current trends in nonprofit sustainability. I argue that by drawing on a personalist organizing model, this shelter offers a refutation of the necessity of adopting business-like organizing practices to maintain organizational sustainability. The findings from this paper highlight how this organization has used personal connections and anarchist organizing practices over more than 30 years to continue organizational operations in a shifting market economy. The results have implications for how nonprofit sustainability may be accomplished, and more broadly offers an alternative to the idealized marketized nonprofit organization.

The marketization of nonprofit organizations is often taken for granted as an inevitable fact. Drawing on the institutional logics and discursive resources perspective, I examine the organizing practices of two shelters that serve homeless women in the same area. In my analysis, I argue that a Discursive approach to institutional logics has much to offer in examining differences between nonprofit organizations as these organizations enact their organizational mission. Using comparative ethnographic methods, I examine how each organization sought to enact a social welfare institutional logic, and how that enactment resulted in more normative or alternative organizing practices. At one organization the social welfare institutional logic was translated into getting clients ‘back on track’ while at the other shelter it was translated as practicing ‘hospitality’. I argue that these translations served as primary discursive resources that both enabled preferred organizational practices and productively maintained tensions between conflicting Discourses.

The ideas of this forum germinated at the Organizational Communication Division’s pre-conference at the 106th annual convention of the National Communication Association (NCA) in 2020. A group of scholar-teachers, committed to addressing various critical social issues, came together to challenge dominant ideas, paradigms, and structures within and beyond organizational communication. We engaged with decolonization and social justice as an ongoing project that cultivates scholarship, pedagogy, and public engagement. Our discussions left us with a sense of urgency and inspiration to work substantively toward thinking differently about organizational communication. Our goal in this forum is to present the collective as a sharp provocation to decenter the spaces of theorizing and pedagogical practices in organizational communication and beyond.