Constituting the Blue-Collar Organization

Abstract

By privileging interpretation and discourse, organizational (communication) research has tended to privilege white-collar work settings prone to generate talk and text. In doing so, it has overlooked factories and manufacturers, even though these were the original contexts where management research emerged. To be able to account for blue-collar work, which remains a sizeable proportion of our economies, organizational communication research needs to re-visit how it deals with materiality. With this in mind, this chapter presents one such case which produced a finely nuanced explanation of how different material and spatial configurations across a transect of distinctive workspaces in a factory defined the meaning of ideational elements used in blue-collar workers’ interpretive discourses. These concepts anchored these factory workers to the materiality of their workspaces and how collaborative action was organized. The study is used here to illustrate how workers’ communication and workspace materiality co-constitute organizing and to suggest that a holistic understanding of how communication constitutes organizations benefits from incorporating consideration of sociomateriality and sensemaking.