Altered practice ←→ altered stories ←→ altered lives: three considerations for translating organizational communication scholarship into practice

摘要

I have a confession to make. I originally entered academia with the desire to (a) escape long hours at work and (b) help organizations change for the better. I still have hopes for realizing one of those goals. Here I offer three unabashedly normative considerations for translating organizational communication scholarship to practice. They include identifying a problem, incorporating participant voices, and presenting research to practitioners. By engaging in these practices scholars can, I believe, create alternative organizational stories and in doing so create space for organizational action and change. None of the practices is complex or new. Nevertheless, their simplicity belies the consistent and mindful effort required to enact them. These practices largely emanate from my own interpretive investigations of emotion labor in total institutional settings (e.g., Tracy, 2000, 2001; Tracy & Tracy, 1998). However, the core ideas are designed to be applicable to scholars using various methodologies in various contexts.