Dialogic Democracy and Organization, Web Lecture, pg. 4

As the web lecture Democracy and Dialogue states dialogic democracy is well-suited to organizations because dialogue requires collaboration-participants must work together to create meaningful communication. Communicators depend on each other to clearly articulate their thoughts and actively listen to what others have to say. In addition, dialogue means that organization members learn together, encouraging a cooperative approach to problem solving and decision making (Hammond, Anderson, & Cissna, 2003) (p. 4).

This type of dialogue democracy took place every time I went through an implementation of a new system at a customer site. A committee is formed with the customer usually made up of members that represent the stakeholders for the implementation and use of the new system. As a member of this committee, I would listen intently to the customer’s needs, desires and current processes and functionality of the current system(s) our product is replacing. Since each member is representing a different functioning group within the company, the committee or organization would learn each other’s needs, desires and how their organization utilizes the current system especially process wise. Each member must actively participate to come up with a baseline and solution for implementing the new system and phasing out the old that satisfies all parties involved.

Mindless Communication, Ch. 11, pg. 344

Sadly to say, I am guilty of the mindless communication on a regular basis as described on page 344. The phatic communication example is almost verbatim to conversations I have had with parents at my daughter’s school when we pick up the kids. Unless either one of us is willing to spend the time to stand and share more intimate details of our lives, the conversation tends to be the very polite, mindless, phatic communication. For me, sometimes the small talk is due to being rushed and wanting to at least acknowledge the individual in a somewhat passing conversation. Other times, the kids just want to go and there isn’t time to have real conversations. The other excuse, for the lack of a better word, is that you sometimes wonder when someone asks you how you are if they really want to know. Especially, if you follow up with an explanation of how your life is going. In the workplace, this type of conversation happened a lot between coworkers but usually in the beginning when you are getting to know one another and feeling out the person to see if they really want to have more meaningful conversations.

Differentiation, Ch. 10, pg. 312

Once I read the example of the physician that recognizes that there is no medical care offered on weekends in the community and decides to address that need, it made me think about what I believe is becoming a new trend. This trend I speak of is a way for physicians to differentiate themselves from other traditional physicians. What I have noticed that more doctors are starting to offer is “concierge” –style practices as quoted in the MedScape Today’s article titled Boutique Doctors Cater to Patients' Needs. These boutique doctors offer special services such as being available at all hours for medical advice, prescriptions or same day appointments at an added extra cost out of pocket to the patient above the insurance cost. This allows for the doctors to have fewer patients to focus on. My husband’s primary doctor changed his practice to a boutique one. Although, my husband liked his doctor, he didn’t feel it was worth the thousands of dollars extra to keep him as his primary physician. Therefore, he was forced to change doctors. Soon after my husband received the announcement of his doctor’s change in practice, I received a letter from my primary doctor offering similar services. However, she is still keeping half of her practice traditional with no added cost. Fortunately, for me she kept part of the practice traditional because I did not have to make the choice of changing physicians. I like having a physician whom I’ve built a rapport with.

Expectancy Theory, Ch. 9, p. 291

The expectancy theory is one of the four best-known theories of employee motivation (p. 289). Expectancy theory makes three assumptions about employee behavior as stated on page 291:
1. Employees perceive a relationship between a specific work behavior and some form of payoff or reward; that is, the behavior is viewed as instrumental to obtaining the reward.
2. Each reward or positive outcome is associated with a value (or valence, in the language of the theory) that reflects how much the individual wants the reward.
3. Employees develop expectations about their ability to perform the desired behavior successfully.
When working in sales and consulting positions in the past, it was very clear that if you made your quota whether it was selling a product or your consulting services, you would be rewarded with a commission check and extra monetary bonuses. The communication of this type of work behavior was always established with goals set between the management and employee through a type of contract that was both communicated verbally and in written form. Usually, these goals were set for the level of the position you held and the team or department you worked for.
At one company, each month the president even communicated with the whole company the status of company level revenue goals and individual quota goals obtainment. He would send out a company-wide group voicemail stating where we were at with meeting the projected company revenue goals for that quarter and who brought in the largest sales and consulting dollars that month and where they were at with meeting their quota. This was another way of motivating the employees each month to achieve their quota to earn not only their monetary reward but the reward of recognition by upper management and fellow employees. Furthermore, if you made 100% of your yearly quota and more, you were eligible for the President’s Club. The President’s Club was an all expense paid trip to a vacation resort for you and a guest. I wonder if those days of the dotcom budgets and rewards are gone with today’s economy.

Team-based organizations, Ch. 8, p.23

In chapter 8 on page 235, the book introduces team-based organization as where in addition to their individual responsibilities they also serve as members of one or more working groups. A team-based organization is one that has restructured itself around interdependent decision-making groups, not individuals, as a means of improving work processes and providing better quality and service to customers. For years, companies have involved team-based organizations in implementing new processes and technology within the company to improve their time to market. As a consultant in implementing Product Lifecycle Management enterprise systems, team-based organizations were utilized in implementing these systems within the company. The groups my consulting team worked with at a customer site may include expert mechanical engineers within their department, configuration and document management employees, help desk representatives, database administrators and department managers for each organization the system will effect and most importantly, had contributed budget in implementing the system. These individuals that made up the team were considered the knowledge base and representatives for the stakeholders within the company since these system installations and rollouts affected the design, manufacturing and release of the products by the company. Their decisions impacted the product release and revenue.

Workplace Democracy, Ch. 8, p. 234

In chapter 8 on page 234, Deetz outlines four steps toward workplace democracy in which shared decision making among stakeholders is crucial.
1) Create a workplace in which every member thinks and acts like an owner.
2) The management of work must be reintegrated with the doing of work.
3) Quality information must be widely distributed.
4) Social structure should grow from the bottom rather than be reinforced from the top.
The fourth step resonates with me when I think of how social media networking is being used in the workplace and for that matter in the marketplace. Instead of the traditional top-down communication, social media networking is a bottom-up approach to communication. For instance, when I worked at IBM, the company utilized the software they developed and sold to consumers internally for employee communication. For instance, IBM’s Websphere Portal was utilized for the company’s intranet. Each employee had a profile based on what organization, department and job title they participated in. Based on that information, the end user’s main pages displayed the pertinent content and information for that employee profile at a company level. However, the employee can then further define their profile and add various functionalities based on their special interest or job specifications to have even more refined content displayed. This included access to newsgroups where communication or discussion threads were started, answered or discussed by various employees throughout the company. The types of subjects discussed ranged from technical questions about certain products to options on how certain company procedures could be modified. These discussions threads were monitored and sometimes distributed or directed to the appropriate people to change or knowledge experts to answer. This is the type of bottom-up affect a social media network has on workplace democracy.

Pervasive Communication Environment, Technology and Teams

Pervasive communication environment is described as allowing people multiple access points to access, create, and share information in an integrated communication structure with text, audio, video, and voice capabilities almost anywhere, at anytime, for any reason. The word pervasive deems very appropriate for the way mobile devices are being used in everyday life. One of the most recent phenomena’s is Twitter. Twitter is becoming more and more popular for all age groups to use not only for updating everyone of their followers on what they are doing but for consumer use also such as marketing and advertising for company products and services. The buck does not stop there! There are Twitter applications (apps) for distributing and collecting data through surveys. There are apps that send coupons to the end users at the time the person is walking through the doors of a retail store. There are apps that can help you save money such as FuelFrog that allows you to enter your mileage between fill ups, how much gas costs and how many gallons or liters you added to your tank as described on Mashable.com. The reporting of this information can give you insight on your driving habits and can help you decide on better ones to help save money. With so much new technologies being implemented, it makes one wonder what the pervasive communication environment will look like in 5 to 10 years.

Authenticity, ch. 7, p. 200

“Do what you love!” is a motto that describes what authenticity means in both your work and personal life. The book further describes authenticity as a trend that is being propelled by a growing desire for authenticity, or for being real and honest in how we live and work with others. Whereas earlier notions of identity referred to an individual’s ability to look inside oneself (or outside of one’s professional work) to find one’s real self, contemporary ideas of authenticity focus much more on the ethics and consistency of one’s behaviors.

When I first read the description of authenticity, two related instances come to mind that I have been experiencing in my professional, educational and personal life. The first instance relates to conversations that I have had with my friends, mainly women that have teenagers approaching high school graduation and sometimes those with children in junior high school. They talk about how their children benefit by being a part of some organization or team sport to help their child get accepted into the college of their choice. Therefore, the student’s GPA along with other professional or organizational affiliations will help them achieve their goal of being accepted into college and better yet, a full scholarship.

The second instance that comes to mind is the wave of social networking being used as a way to help get jobs, set perceptions as the industry leader, or expert in a specific field to gain market awareness, sales, etc. Most companies are adopting this way of marketing and advertising by tying a personality to the company image who is authentic and is a real person that not only shares expertise but themselves more personally than we have seen in the past, such as an executive, product expert and so on. I sometimes wonder though if this type of exposure can lead to security issues or even cause the reader to become skeptical of the author’s authenticity because maybe all they want to do is sell them something.

Power, Ch. 6, p.168

As expressed in the text, power is based on the assumption that it is something a person or group possesses and can exercise through actions. The book gives five examples of social power, following the assumption that person A has power over person B when A has control over some outcomes of B wants: 1) reward power, 2) coercive power, 3) referent power, 4) expert power, and 5) legitimate power. At IBM, where I worked for five years, there were employees called principals. These were technical individuals that have reached high level status in the area of their expertise. They have gone through the process of being tested, critiqued and accepted by the discipline’s experts through a rigorous process. The social power of the expert power is regarded high at IBM through the principal job description and implementation. Therefore, I was trained by those principals and mentored when needed during customer engagements. I am grateful to those individuals that supported me in my career growth and have due respect for their knowledge of the business and application of the technology.

Rituals, ch.5, p.129

In every one of my jobs throughout my career there was some form of rituals within the organization that I work for. There were always performance evaluations that reinforced the organization and company’s goals and values. The last large corporation I worked at had an annual sales conference where employees attended workshops and various sessions all day on with new product release information, team building exercises and hands-on technology classes. However, every night there was some type of party event for every one attending, your department or sales group. Another ritual one of the company’s I worked for was a type of reward to the top selling sales people called “President’s Club”. For those sales representatives, sales engineers and consultants that obtained over 100% of their quota, the company hosted an elaborate trip at a resort. This same company had another ritual that I have yet to see at any other company I worked for. The company would require every new employee to stand up in front of a large group of their peers and sing their school’s fight song. Their philosophy was that they only hired the best and with that came some pretty big egos. This form of public humiliation was to bring everyone to the same playing field. I couldn’t remember my fight song, so I sang Sweet Home Chicago, a blues song. I kind of enjoyed it.

Artifacts – ch.5, p.129

When I was in college studying for my BS in Computer Engineering degree back in the early 90’s, I took a part-time position at a company that made audio recording devices for use in professional recording studios. I was a test engineer on the manufacturing floor in a small warehouse. There was no room for decorating your area on the floor but in the office area where all the engineers were, they were plenty of room in their cubicles to display artifacts and show a sense of culture in the organization. The founders of the company were very much the creative type. They encouraged the displays of oneself however one chose to. I’ll never forgot this one guy’s cubicle that had netting draped from the ceiling with various toys and other funky items hanging from it. Inside the cubicle were posters, hand drawings, more toys and just stuff everywhere. When entering the space, you kind of felt like you were entering a dark hole that was his creative chamber. The darkness was created by netting along with the hanging items blocking the lighting from above. The glow of the computer screen seemed to be the main lighting in his area. The space definitely fit his personality; quirky, mysterious and a creative genius.

Metaphors & Culture - Workplace surveillance

Workplace surveillance is described as instruments of domination in the web lecture Metaphors and Culture. It states that new communication technologies allow organizations to monitor employee computers from the moment those computers are booted up to the moment they’re shutdown. Also, cell phones and pagers provide another avenue for organizations to monitor employee behavior and keep employees linked to the organization. This is seen by critical theorists as being intrusive and causes employees’ social and mental stress. From my work experience, I disagree on this point. I found that having a company supplied computer, cellphone, pager, and other communication technology available to me allowed me the freedom to work anywhere. Furthermore, it allowed me access to communication with other employees instantly or at least more quickly for answers to questions that may arise. Since most of my career has either been professional consulting services implementing enterprise systems or sales engineer selling complex software applications, it made me more efficient in my job to have this mobile access. Even though, I knew my company was monitoring my every move whether that be my emails or websites that I am hitting, it did not take a toll on my inner being or add stress to my life because the access and technology, or company supplied tools, helped me be more successful in my job.

Interdependence, Ch.4, page 107

One of the essential qualities of a system is interdependence which refers both to the wholeness of the system and its environment and to the interrelationships of individuals within the system as described on page 107. An example is given of a student’s refusal to acknowledge the legitimacy of a particular instructor would have a negative effect on the student’s performance in the course but only a minimal effect on the instructor because of the lopsided nature of the student-teacher relationship. I can relate to this statement because I experienced the nature of loosing respect for a teacher. This particular professor had asked students to come to an event she was hosting at the college for a political women’s organization. The students that came that Saturday morning were asked to serve refreshments and clean up for extra credit points in her class. At another event she hosted at her house, the students again were asked to go to her house to serve refreshments for extra credit in her class. This time when the students showed up they were given duties to clean her house such as scrubbing the toilet. This type of behavior kept transpiring in the class. I saw this as abuse of her authority and lost respect for her as an instructor. Therefore, I knew I would be miserable staying in the class and in turn would probably do poorly. So, I dropped the class and took the same course at another college that I transferred to the following year which by the way, I did very well in. I liked the second professor.

The Systems Perspective/Approach, Ch.4

The system approach emphasizes the important difference between a disconnected set of parts versus a collection of parts that work together to create a functional whole. Just as the BMW as a whole makes it “the ultimate driving machine” so do teams such as work teams or sports teams. The book further states that functional whole is called a “system” and in a system the whole is more than the sum of its parts. This definition reminds me of a little league baseball team I was on in elementary school. Our team name was The Dodgers but everyone called us the “Bad News Dodgers” since we lost so many games. The name came from a movie that was popular at the time, The Bad News Bears (I know, I’m dating myself). Even though our team as a whole was bad at playing baseball we did have a star player on the team, Lisa Scott. She was one of the best players in our division and was tougher than most of the boys in the league. She would take a hit with a baseball and brush it off. I would have cried and did. So even though we had one of the best players on the team, as a whole we were lousy. I would say The Dodgers team’s systems approach was a disconnected set of parts. As a side note, the next year Lisa Scott went up a division in the little league and was a part of a winning team. You go girl!

Bureaucracy, Ch. 3, page 76-77

This particular subject, bureaucracy, hits home with me. When I first read this section, especially the characteristics of organizational bureaucracy on page 77, I thought of my first job with a company that had a union. With a union company there are distinct divisions of labor, with a hierarchy of offices and positions and a set of rules that govern employee performances. In a union company, there are hourly and salary employees with their job positions ranked with different salary levels. The employee’s salary is based on the position and salary level assigned to that position. The salary level has strict minimum and maximum salary an employee can achieve. Therefore, all employees holding the same position are paid about the same amount of money whether that one employee performs better than another, keeping the treatment for the most part equal at each level. For hourly employees, the only way to make more money is by working overtime, more than 40 hours a week. One of the problems with this system is that some employees take advantage of the rules that regulate the employee performances. From personal experience, I witnessed a fellow employee who clearly should have been fired for low performance, missed worked days and alcohol and drug abuse on the job. However, because of the strict union rules, his manager had to go through the process of writing him up for each instance to document that he gave this person every chance to turn himself around. In the long run, the employee did get help for his alcohol and drug problem which is a good thing but at the expense of other employees having to pick up the slack. This is partially why some people believe unions only protect the bad workers rather than the good.

Resistance to domination and hidden transcripts

Reading about the two subjects on resistance to domination and hidden transcripts starting on page 68, reminded me of a book I read last spring for a Mass Communication class called The Race Beat by Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff. The book is about various accounts of the civil rights movement and how the press influenced that movement. The most heart wrenching part of the book is the details given about a young African American boy, Emmett Till, who was brutally beaten to death by white men because he whistled at a white woman. The men were eventually acquitted. This crime brought both the black and white reporters for the first time together sometimes even in the same room to write about what was happening in the trial and the Civil Rights Movement front. Back then in the 1950s through the late 1960s, black newspapers were distributed secretly, especially in the south because of the fear of repercussions from those in power. However, the writings during the Emmett Till trial were distributed along with photographs of the brutality published for all the public to see even in the North that lead to more support for change in the government for civil rights among all of the United States people. To me, this reasonates the subjects, resistance to domination and hidden transcripts, described in the book.

Work & Education Story

Currently, I am enrolled at SJSU pursuing a M.S. in Mass Communications with emphasis in Advertising/PR within the Journalism and Mass Communication Graduate School. My goal is to understand how to communicate product value at a global level and gain knowledge of international business. My thesis project is concentrated in the area of marketing communications and advertising utilizing social media principles and Web 2.0 technology.

A year ago, I graduated with a BA in Design Studies with emphasis in Graphic Design at SJSU in May 2008, where I not only studied design concepts but strengthened my writing skills as well. Also, I hold an AS in Electronics Engineering and credits towards a BS in Computer Engineering.

Currently, I am self-employed consulting with small businesses providing brand identity, web design, flash animation and other various marketing collateral support. However, majority of my work experience is technical sales, software implementaion, training and support.

To further explain, I have over fourteen years experience in the e-business industry promoting, selling and implementing enterprise applications and middleware software. I have a strong aptitude towards technology, in particular, web-based products and have worked with a variety of tools to implement such applications. Also, I utilize Adobe products on a daily basis such as Illustrator, Photoshop, Dreamweaver, InDesign, Acrobat and Flash as a technical marketing consultant for various projects over the last six years in the workforce.