My
Development as a Critical Theorist
My personal
biography is clearly represented in my critical scholarly work and interventions
in actual organizations. I grew up on a dairy farm in a small,
rural, isolated community in Indiana.
The emphasis there was on the community, family and church as central
institutions giving meaning and direction to life. The “simple
life” was a core moral theme, taking only what you needed, giving
back as much as you could. Decision-making guided by the health
of the community driven by consensus and the need to endlessly live
together was an everyday reality. Farm work is very lonely and
contemplative but also cooperative and collaborative. The extend illness
and finally death of my sister accentuated and deepened these cultural
properties and heightened my sense that the world was filled both with
injustices and beauty some of which you can do something about and some
not.
From such
a community, even casual external contact reminds you that you are “other,”
marginal, and outside the mainstream. You’re a “hick,”
you don’t speak well, dress well, your life is quaint, your community
sense is naive. While most of my peers stayed behind to either
decry, or in some cases to quickly embrace, the growing encroachment
of the newly structured secular world focused on consumption and white
middle-classness, I was much more unsettled and ambivalent. I
was in a “red” state caught at the very beginning of the
“cultural wars” to come.
College brought
a much larger world, a different kind of reflection and the realization
that there are lots of ways of being “other.” My feelings—awkwardness,
being scrutinized, not belonging, caught between, being in the wrong
battle rather than on the wrong side of it—were hardly unique.
Blacks, women, laborers, ethnic traditions, ecologists, individuals
with different sexual orientations, and native peoples throughout the
world suffered a variety of exclusions. Not only are specific
groups of people left out but so are parts of ourselves. While
the type and depth of others’ exclusion was far different and
much greater than mine (I could learn to “pass”), all shared
ways that their hopes, values and very sensibilities found little way
of expression or representation in the decisions and development of
the larger community. Their exclusion lead both to their disadvantage
and limited the development of the wider society.
Only in contact
with the various outsides does the seamlessness and even idealized nature
of my Hoosier farm story disappear. It is not only marginal, it
also marginalizes. My own endless uneasiness and confusions growing
up couldn’t find expression or even become organized as thoughts.
Feelings of being trapped; frustrations with reoccurring compromises;
the sequestering of the feminine; possible discussions of the communally
shared anger toward the “gover’ment” and the outside
society; the pain and fear of those I now know as gay friends—all
were pushed to the margins and rendered voiceless and invisible.
Critical theory
reminds us that self-reflection can not get to that; we must reach out
to others rather than in to ourselves to understand. All cultures
have a tendency to produce themselves as the culture, the
world as nature intended, but in contact with others we know each is
only a culture and begin to understand its oppressions.
College and
this growing awareness was the sixties to me. 1968, for me and
many others, was the first personal and general social sense that significant
groups of people, and aspects of each of us, lacked a voice. The
lack was not just of the opportunity to speak (this limitation was already
known), but we were becoming aware that the real restriction was on
our ability to form and represent our own experience in our own terms—a
much more radical idea. Freedom of speech was a necessary but
not sufficient condition; a politics of experience proceeded a politics
of expression; the personal was already political.
I was drawn
to political action and social philosophy, but lacked the conceptual
tools to understand very deeply. I was nineteen, life was simpler, I
was a pre-law/econ major, and the complexity and richness of the idea
of “voice” and the politics of experience was lost in a
world conveniently divided into oppressors and the oppressed. A more
complex exploration of the processes of social constitution was lost
to me in a world where an oppressed group’s opinion of how things
worked became fact, and all of everyday life’s difficulties were
simply attributed to some powerful person’s fault somewhere. I
reacted in the world, but could rarely act on it.
My graduate
work focused on phenomenology and hermeneutics, I suspect implicitly
to understand how social worlds come to be constructed as they are and
to understand more richly those worlds that are different from my own.
Though to be honest all this seems cleaner and clearer in retrospect.
More properly, it was fragmented and random. I bumped into great teachers;
I read things that showed me a world I have never considered; I got
hooked on books as well as action. I began to think about and act in
systems at a deeper, more complex level.
My philosophical
studies in graduate school, especially through the works of Husserl,
Heidegger, and Gadamer, provided a radically different way to understand
and explore the social construction of reality and fed a growing suspicion
that the dominant psychological conceptions of people and the nature
of their experience not only missed much but was finally oppressive.
The gradual development in these works of the “linguistic turn”
placed language and communication as core to any understanding of social
construction and political exclusion. Communication replaces consciousness
as the core human and political concern. And with this, communication
became a central mode of description and explanation of organizational
life rather than simply a phenomenon in it.
The application
to the study of organizations arises for me out of an awareness that
practices and decisions made inside organizations actively colonize
other potentially alternative meaning giving institutions like the family,
church, and community and the public political process. Furthermore,
these practices colonize our feelings and relations among the many parts
of our lives both in and outside of the workplace. This colonization
both produces and reproduces forms of domination and exclusion. And,
while organizational decisions are inevitable value-laden, they are
most often justified by single dimension logics (of profitability and
rational, value-free decision making), thus distorting choices and precluding
the creative accomplishment of different social interests. Our own lives
come to mirror that one-dimensionality. This was finally summarized
in my book, Democracy in an Age of Corporate Colonization (1992).
The attempt
was not to valorize other social institutions with their own forms of
domination and exclusion (their own mono-culturalisms) but to enable
other institutions a less colonized development and, hence, putting
them in a more balanced and dynamic relation with each other. Social
life is considered as an ongoing social construction that may be openly
developed, reflecting many different conflicting needs, or it can be
one-sided and skewed, reflecting dominant interests alone.
Neither I, nor
critical theory, have an easy vision of how we should develop, but critical
theory provides some understanding of how a wider variety of interests
might be brought into the process of choices and development.
In some sense critical theory seem obvious rather than radical. Once
we understand that our world, our cultural life, is a social construction
we should know who and to what ends it was constructed in this way and
have some choice in the matter.
Critical theory
as I express it is somewhat different from those who come to it from
class politics or labor processes. Critical theory is expressed different
by a white male farm kid than by a person of color, woman or child of
factory laborers. Our biographies as they are constituted by larger
social historical processes enable differences to be brought to the
larger discussion both limiting and helping enable a fuller discussion.
Compared to
other critical works, my focus is more on meaning and personal identities;
the micro-political processes by which these are formed is emphasized
over class politics and radical structural change; who is in power is
of less concern than the inclusion in processes by which decisions are
made; understanding the processes of exclusion is complemented by a
desire to make decisions together; and, concern with communication distortion
is emphasized over false consciousness as a key element of non-representative
and socially irresponsible decisions. The tenor is different.
I work more to figure out how to include diverse interests rather than
complain about the injustice of exclusion. I suspect that everyone coming
to critical theory has some degree of anger at social injustice and
some love of the potential in human sociality. I lean to the later.
Adapted From: Deetz, S. (2005). Critical theory. In
S. May and D. Mumby (eds.), Engaging organizational communication
theory: Multiple perspectives (pp. 85-11). Thousand
Oaks, CA:
Sage.
Stanley Deetz (Stan)