Getting insights from critical scholarship on human resource communication ‘out there’: proposing a transformational chimera

The field of HR communication research is vast, so for the sake of this presentation my point of departure will be organizational socialization research. The ur-point of departure of organizational socialization research is Schein’s seminal 1964 paper on how to “break in the college graduate”, i.e., how to socialize the college graduate to a job in business and industry. Even if the imagery later changed to ‘people processing’, the one-sidedness of who must adapt to whom has proven formative for field. Although recent research seems to call for mutualism between organizational member and organization when advocating a “person-organization fit” (e.g., Chatman, 1991), it is the organizational member, who must fit the organization – not vice versa. In communication theoretical terms, both process and ideology of organizational socialization is one of transmission, i.e., not one of transaction let alone co-constitution (e.g., Kastberg, 2020); and the aim of the process is “assimilation” (Graybill et al., 2013) or “isomorphism” (DiMaggio & Powell, 1983).
 
Critical scholarship does not “[…] argue that processes such as […] identification are by definition problematic […] the concern is with the extent to which the assumptions upon which identification are based is […] freely arrived at” (Mumby & Kuhn, 2019: 52); and the critical approach claims that assimilation as a result of “vigorous socialization” (Chatman, 1991) is not “freely arrived at”. It is not that critical insights re manipulation, oppression, power asymmetries etc., are novel per se, the Frankfort School has propagated this for close to a century by now. What is lacking, then, is not critical research on HR communication; but it stands to reason that critical scholarship has not succeeded, to any significant extent, to impact on mainstream HR communication theory let alone practices.
 
In line with the aim of this panel, I propose the contours of transformational devise aiming at stimulating exactly that kind of impact. Chimera-like, it is composed of three unlike parts: an ideology of ‘critical pragmatism’, a “boundary object” (Star & Griesemer, 1989), and an ‘agora’.