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Articles 1 - 5 of 5
Full-Text Articles in Organizational Communication
Workplace Dignity In A Total Institution: Examining The Experiences Of Foxconn’S Migrant Workforce, Kristen Lucas, Dongjing Kang, Zhou Li
Workplace Dignity In A Total Institution: Examining The Experiences Of Foxconn’S Migrant Workforce, Kristen Lucas, Dongjing Kang, Zhou Li
Kristen Lucas
In 2010, a cluster of suicides at the electronics manufacturing giant Foxconn Technology Group sparked worldwide outcry about working conditions at its factories in China. Within a few short months, 14 young migrant workers jumped to their deaths from buildings on the Foxconn campus, an all-encompassing compound where they had worked, eaten, and slept. Even though the language of workplace dignity was invoked in official responses from Foxconn and its business partner Apple, neither of these parties directly examined workers’ dignity in their ensuing audits. Based on our analysis of media accounts of life at Foxconn, we argue that its …
Socializing Messages In Blue-Collar Families: Communicative Pathways To Social Mobility And Reproduction, Kristen Lucas
Socializing Messages In Blue-Collar Families: Communicative Pathways To Social Mobility And Reproduction, Kristen Lucas
Kristen Lucas
This study explicitly links processes of anticipatory socialization to social mobility and reproduction. An examination of the socializing messages exchanged between blue-collar parents (n=41) and their children (n=25) demonstrate that family-based messages about work and career seldom occur in straightforward, unambiguous ways. Instead, messages take several paths (direct, indirect, ambient, and omission). Further, the content of messages communicated along these paths often is contradictory. That is, sons and daughters receive messages that both encourage and discourage social mobility. Ultimately, these individuals must negotiate the meanings of family-based anticipatory socialization communicated to them through a mix of messages.
The Working Class Promise: A Communicative Account Of Mobility-Based Ambivalences, Kristen Lucas
The Working Class Promise: A Communicative Account Of Mobility-Based Ambivalences, Kristen Lucas
Kristen Lucas
In-depth interviews with 62 people with working class ties (blue-collar workers and adult sons and daughters of blue-collar workers) reveal a social construction of working class that imbues it with four core, positively valenced values: strong work ethic, provider orientation, the dignity of all work and workers, and humility. This constellation of values is communicated through a ubiquitous macrolevel discourse—which I coin the Working Class Promise—that elevates working class to the highest position in the social class hierarchy and fosters a strong commitment to maintain a working class value system and identity. However, this social construction is only a partial …
Blue-Collar Discourses Of Workplace Dignity: Using Outgroup Comparisons To Construct Positive Identities, Kristen Lucas
Blue-Collar Discourses Of Workplace Dignity: Using Outgroup Comparisons To Construct Positive Identities, Kristen Lucas
Kristen Lucas
People generally possess a strong desire to construct positive, dignified work identities. However, this goal may be more challenging for some people, such as blue-collar workers, whose occupations may not offer qualities typically associated with workplace dignity. Interviews with 37 people from a blue-collar mining community reveal three central identity discourses about workplace dignity: All jobs are important and valuable; dignity is located in the quality of the job performed; and dignity emerges from the way people treat and are treated by others. Participants communicated these themes by backgrounding their own occupations and drawing comparisons between two outgroups, low-status, low-paid …
Creating And Responding To The Gen(D)Eralized Other: Women Miners’ Community-Constructed Identities, Kristen Lucas, Sarah J. Steimel
Creating And Responding To The Gen(D)Eralized Other: Women Miners’ Community-Constructed Identities, Kristen Lucas, Sarah J. Steimel
Kristen Lucas
An analysis of interviews with mining families reveals that gender identity construction is a collaborative process that draws upon broader community discourses. Male miners and non-mining women created a generalized other for women as "unfit to mine" (i.e., women are physically too weak to mine, are easy prey, and are ladies who do not belong in the mines). Female miners responded with gendered discourses that distanced themselves from and linked themselves to the generalized other.