Experiencing the Streets: Materiality and Symbolicity

• In Event: Organizations, Work, and the Social Construction of Socio-Economic Class

Abstract

As a number of communication scholars (Ashcraft & Mumby, 2004; Cloud, 1994; McKerrow, 1998; Cheney & Cloud; 2006) have argued, the absence of material realities in communicative analyses limits the potential of communication research to be meaningful to both academic disciplines and people’s lived realities. This essay utilizes multiple methodologies to explore the dynamics of symbolic and extra-symbolic forces surrounding members of an organization that serves homeless persons. StreetWise, a social change organization in Chicago, IL, publishes a newspaper by the same name and employs people without homes or those at-risk. Building off of previous research (Novak, 2008) which argued the structure and function of StreetWise’s work utilizes democratic values and builds community life, this study explores material, corporeal and spatial elements of communication and how they dovetail as well as the discursive. Impacted by macro-social discourses (e.g., class, race, mobility), materiality/symbolicity remains an important communicative dynamic which impacts organizations/organizing in multiple ways.
References
Ashcraft, K. L., & Mumby, D. K. (2004). Reworking gender: A feminist communicology of organization. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Cheney, G., & Cloud, D. (2006). Doing democracy, engaging the material. Employee participation and labor activity in an age of market globalization. Management Communication Quarterly, 19, 501-540.
Cloud, D. (1994). The materiality of discourse as oxymoron: A challenge to critical rhetoric. Western Journal of Communication, 58, 141-163.
McKerrow, R. E. (1998). Corporeality and cultural rhetoric: A site for rhetoric’s future. Southern Communication Journal, 63, 315-328.

Author

• David Novak, Clemson University