14 Power & Privilege

organizational power negotiated with individual power to create an enmeshed privileges that we see

(Garza 2020)

• Hashtag is just a show for public solidarity without real substantive changes
• we must shed light on marginalized groups, not only celebrity voices
• shouldn’t normalize the #MeToo, but it should serve to put discomfort on perpetrators.

(Gan 2020)

• Since university employees are constantly silent, they feel that they are belittle, and their efforts are futile.
• Just like Plato’s story of the cave, the perceived reality are only reflection of manipulated images of the truth, university with organizational power only see what they want to see. If it allows voices of its employees to be heard, the reality could be different or even improved.

(DEnbeau and Kunkel 2013)

• two paradoxes in practice:

  • paradox of consistency: expected consistency between organizational philosophy and practice, but this alignment inhibits empowerment.

    • Solution:

      • distinction between meaningful and non-meaningful work

      • distinction between work and non-work.

  • paradox of transparency: “employees’ desire for clarity of empowerment meanings in client interactions, goals,a nd outcomes.”

    • Solutions: staff has alternative meanings of empowerment.

(Kantola 2014)

• Mediatization of corporate management

• Media has become tools of power of corporate power within flexible capitalism.

• Mediatization of power:

  • mediatization has 4 processes (Schulz 2004):

    • extension: communication extends the communication capacities of the CEO

    • substitution: replace the controlling hierarchies of supervision

    • amalgamation: amalgamated with the exercise of power in corporate capitalism

    • accommodation: to media by planning their communication strategies.

  • media prospers under the structures of power

  • mediatization of CEOs:

    • changes in the media

    • changes in corporate capitalism

• Media Logic in Corporate Life

  • media has gained CEO’s coverage in the early twentieth century (Kantola 2014, 31)

• Mediatization theory: media shapes and frames the processes and discourse (conversation) of political communication and the society.

• industrial capitalism to flexible post-Fordist capitalism

  • But others called from managerial capitalism to investor capitalism. (see Khurana).

• Mediatization and celebritization are intertwined

• CEOs use affective appeal to get affective power of the populace.

  • They use celebrity-making tactics.

The web-of-power-exploring communication and social class

• Social class is about power

• Power (Mumby, 1998):

  • Systems rationality perspective: struggle over scarce resources’ distribution

  • Interpretive perspective; centered in communication (how people socially constructed shared meanings).

  • Critical perspective: power = domination where ruling class dominates the working class.

  • Post-modern perspectives: power = fragmented and individual. And the focus is on discourse.

    • Poststructuralism: modified vision of postmodernism, where society is structured through discourse.

  • Feminism: patriarchy is power.

  • Power can also be viewed in relation to social class, age, race, gender, sexuality, and ability

• Social class:

  • physically unmarked, but communicatively marked

  • inherently unstable in meaning, but also stable as the same populations remain in the same social class strata

  • represents ongoing struggle

  • the web-of-power is weaved into social class

  • Social class talk:

    • text class (transcend body impediment) vs body class