Translating Agency: Re-Writing the Narratives of Organizational Communication

• In Event: On the Various Ways of Studying Agency in Organizational Communication: A Roundtable Discussion

Abstract

“Can the subaltern speak?” When Gayatri Spivak (1988) asked this question a quarter of a century ago, she raised complex issues about agency in “master” narratives and histories that continue to resonate at the intersection of postcolonial thought and organizational communication today. While the silencing of Othered voices in “master” narratives is always problematic, contemporary acts of “giving” voice (a further negation of original agency), can be equally so. In this essay, we discuss the concept of agency using three postcolonial commitments in organizational communication: (1) disrupting organizing spaces; (2) rethinking organizing practices; and (3) reconfiguring organizing forms of knowledge. In particular, we propose that the postcolonial notion of translation, with its attending focus on conditions of discursive emergence, can expand the range of organizing metaphors and language to include those from a variety of cultures, nations, and locales, creating new meanings, and reconceptualizing agency in hybridized spaces.

Authors

• Kirsten Broadfoot, U of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus

• Debashish Munshi, U of Waikato