CALL FOR PAPERS – DOSSIER 38 - Dialogic relations, vulnerabilities and resistances in the internal environment of organizations

Communication processes developed in the internal environments of organizations are spaces for exchange, sharing, dialogue and also agonistic negotiations, instituted and updated in the interaction among leaders, managers, employees, whether based on the organization's processes and strategies, or for meet institutional or management demands. The constant process of construction and deconstruction of bonds that shape the established relational processes shows marks of subjective and collective diversity, increasing the challenges faced with the intensification of moral conflicts and ethical dilemmas.

The interactional dynamics that shape the arrangements of relationships in organizations' internal environments are also a reflection of the redimensioning of contemporary transformations and work relationships, implying other practices of professional training, ordering and controlling of employment relationships and business ethics. In addition, it is important to highlight the organizational culture, power relations, disputes of multiple forces and meanings between different actors that permeate these relationships. It is precisely this understanding of communication that is established in organizations' internal environments that indicates how their flows are crossed and tensioned by different logics and rationales, which can define a dynamic communicative process that articulates the discursive situation, the interlocutors, the discourses triggered by them and their symbolic interactions. Management and control dispositive (aimed at achieving success and credibility goals) coexist agonistically with relational arrangements, which focus on dialogue and strategy as a practice to promote approaches and interfaces between managers and employees.

Communication should be a source of strengthening identities and bonds between those who experience the internal environment of organizations, but it is permeated at the same time by multiple oppression, suffering and subjection. The experience of symbolic violence and dehumanization in work context can be expressed in silencing, in verbal, moral and sexual harassment, in the brutality that crosses race, class and gender, revealing how institutions create systems of differentiation that build and position people as from within or without, worthy or unworthy, appreciable or worthless. Such mechanisms for appraising differences establish, deepen or redefine vulnerabilities, whether of a moral, physical, semantic, financial, social, economic, gender or intersectional dimension.

Different theoretical and methodological perspectives to think about the phenomenon of communication are thus present in the internal environment of organizations, as well as the frequency of risk, mobility in organizational relationships, threats imposed by the neoliberal perspective enhancing violence and brutalism in management systems. The complex and dynamic internal processes are not linear, despite the organization's intention to build stability, de-characterize differences, well delimited identity spaces and strategic positions. However, actors find gaps, fissures, breaks and intervals to face the challenges imposed by power and defined by closed organizational structures.

The communicational aspects of interactions in organizational internal environments reveal an aesthetic and political power linked to the reflexive dynamics of destabilizing roles and representations imposed through the invention of self-narratives, accounts of oneself and testimonies that promote affections and affectations, ways of sharing, listening, understanding and seeking collective experiments oriented towards moral values. From this perspective, any dialogical dynamic in internal organizational contexts should not aim to unify subjects in a kind of great and harmonically 'orchestra', but to articulate them in networks of negotiation, conflict and dissent capable of exposing asymmetries and oppressions, displacing ideological frames that continue to the naturalization of injustices. Dialogical relationships are not a quick remedy to alleviate institutional problems, but they can help unveil the moral inequalities in which subjects live in organizational environments.

Pandemic events brought many displacements and changes such as social confinement, the imposition of remote and hybrid work, the lack of physical presence of managers, the compulsory home office shared with private life, the excessive use of digital technologies, modifying organizational internal space of communication, interfering on affective relationships and on ways of working and dealing with conflicts and illnesses. This reality is directly reflected in the internal processes of interlocution, which now need to consider all these aspects that impact the behavior and dynamics of internal communication in a context marked by other disputes, power relations and attempts to maintain the bonds that articulate a possible common.

In this dossier, Organicom Journal seeks to bring together studies and research that mobilize epistemological, theoretical, empirical and methodological aspects to understand communication in internal organizational environments in this scenario of conflicts and the different approaches to communicational dynamics that constantly redefine contexts, practices and experiences. They can also highlight interaction processes that are defined in the territorialities, affections and vulnerabilities issued from the tensions between organization and internal actors. Thus, we emphasize the importance of articles that address and discuss the following themes in tune with the dossier proposal:

 

• Internal Communication: trends, reflexive positions and techniques
• Culture, memory, territorializations and rituals
• Communication in internal organizational environments, power relations and resistance practices
• The production of heterotopic and utopian spaces in scenarios of political dystopia, environmental crisis and pandemic isolation
• Discursive constructions of identity and difference in the internal environment of organizations
• Dilemmas imposed on diversity management practices
• Discursive arrangements and disputes over meaning in the internally shared communication space
• Silences, oppression, moral conflicts, traumas and contradictions within organizations
• Vulnerabilities, affects and minority tactics of self-definition and self-realization
• Thresholds between control and lack of control in the face of the deepening of inequalities and crises
• Work and the management dynamics of its contemporary practices

 

Invited editors:

Ângela Marques (PPGCOM/UFMG)

Ivone de Lourdes Oliveira (PPGCOM-Puc-Minas)