Toward a fluid, shape-shifting methodology in organizational communication inquiry: African feminist organizational communication historiography

Abstract

ABSTRACT Since W. Charles Redding’s call to maintain a sense of history in the subfield of organizational communication, our approach has largely been focused on institutionalizing and legitimizing organizational communication through static development narratives of the subfield’s emergence in the 1940s and 1950s, and key developments in topical interests in subsequent decades. While this is not unique to organizational communication, it makes it difficult to see the various ways history, as an organizing practice, is implicated in the constitution of a field. In this article, I suggest a shift toward fluid, shape-shifting practices of history as one way organizational communication can move toward a more open and inclusive practice—vital for coming to terms with history as a colonial structure and progressing in our own decolonial project. Toward this end, I propose African feminist organizational communication historiography as a novel approach for writing origin narratives, introducing theories, and legitimizing organizational forms that have been rendered alternative in organizational communication scholarship.