Debunking Eurocentrism in Organizational Communication Theory: Marginality and Liquidities in Postcolonial Contexts

Abstract

This article centers marginal organizational actors—the disenfranchised of the Global South—to remedy their theoretical erasure and disrupt the Anglo-American grand narrative of organizational communication. This task is urgent amidst discussions of decolonization and whiteness in the discipline. We reengage Western theory on liquidity, hereby conceptualized as shape-shifting and adaptive organizing, moving like a liquid at the margins. We draw on fieldworks in Nigeria and Liberia to unearth three properties of liquidity in postcolonial contexts: motion, solvency, and permeability. Motion refers to movement, solvency refers to the ability to dissolve into one's surroundings, and permeability refers to organizing that infiltrates life and vice versa. This article bears three theoretical contributions. First, it provides a blueprint to dislodge Eurocentric biases (Anglo-American) in organizational communication theory. Second, it models what decolonizing theory may look like. Finally, it provides more complex, nuanced, and inclusive theoretical accounts of liquidities in global landscapes.

Envisioning More Equitable and Just Futures: Feminist Organizational Communication in Theory and Praxis

“…Scholars have critiqued the field’s racism, straightness, ableism, and misogyny. For instance, Cruz and Sodeke (2020) not only identify the persistent Anglo-American frames of organizational communication but also provide a “template for dislodging Eurocentrism through a systematic unearthing of cultural assumptions . .…”

(Re)moving blinders: Communication-as-constitutive theorizing as provocation to practice-based organization scholarship

“…A second is a verb (organizing), where attention turns to iterations of coordination and control located in the conduct of activity. The third is an adverb (organizationality), which highlights ephemeral, liquid, and partial coordinated action that scholars frequently ignore because it occurs outside formal established systems (Cruz and Sodeke, 2020; Dobusch and Schoeneborn, 2015). The noun promises an answer to the question of what an organization is ; the verb to the question of how organizing is accomplished ; the adjective to the question of when and where flows of activity look organizational by degrees .…”

Reflections on Feminist Organizational Communication

“…The nearly three decades since “Gaining a Voice” was published have seen new insights and shifts from margins to center that have changed organizational communication. Organizational communication scholars critique whiteness, Western-centrism, heteronormativity, feminisms, and other considerations (e.g., Cruz, 2015; Cruz & Sodeke, 2020) from dilemmic, tensional, and paradoxical approaches to materialities and discourses (e.g., D’Enbeau, 2017; Harris, 2015; Putnam & Ashcraft, 2017) to transnational feminist advocacy online (e.g., D’Enbeau, 2011; Linabary, 2017). Scholarship appears as diverse representations of experiences (e.g., poetry, code-switching passages, autoethnographies, performances, photovoice; Cruz et al, 2020; Dar, 2019; Gist-Mackey & Kingsford, 2020).…”