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Despite numerous appeals for orgaizational communication scholars to incorporte feminist theorizing into their work, few researchers have done so. In this essay, feminist standpoint theory is applied to an analysis of organizational socialization, an inherently communicative phenomenon. Speaking from her vantage point as an African-American faculty member at a predominantly Whitem research university, hte author recounts excerpts from her lived experiences to demonstrate the value of eliciting insight from an "outsider within." She concludes with implications for practice and research.
Many scholars advocate incorporating feminism into research on organizational communication (see, for example, Allen, 1995b; Ashcraft, 1994; Bullis, 1993; Buzzanell,1994,1995; Fine, 1993; Marshall, 1993; Mumby, 1993, 1996; Putnam,1990; Tompkins, 1997). Their stance stems from a belief that "gender organizes every aspect of our social and work lives including how we formally and informally communicate in organizational settings" (Buzzanell, 1995, p. 327). Therefore, until our investigations treat gender as "a defining, constitutive feature of the organizing process" (Mumby, 1996, p. 259), our understanding of organizational communication will continue to be limited and inadequate.
The use of feminist perspectives to conceptualize and study organizational communication can increase knowledge; identify missing concepts; develop new relationships among concepts; and build inclusive, more comprehensive theory (Buzzanell, 1994; Putnam, 1990). Such efforts will help researchers respond to the crisis of representation that underscores limitations of traditional forms of knowledge production (Mumby, 1996). Moreover, they can fulfill one of feminism's primary goals: to affect individual, organizational, and societal change.
In this essay, I contribute to the growing body of literature that accepts the invitation to conduct feminist studies of organizational communication. I present a case for using feminist standpoint theory to interrogate organizational socialization, the process by which a new employee enters and becomes integrated into an organizational setting. As I explain below, feminist standpoint theory represents a distinct aspect of contemporary feminist thought about theory of knowledge (Longino, 1993). I focus on socialization because it represents a pervasive, recurring aspect of organizational communication that merits deeper analyses, as numerous critics have noted (see, for example, Bullis, 1993; Cheney, 1991; Clair, 1996; Deetz, 1992; McPhee, 1986; Smith & Turner, 1995). Moreover, some scholars already have begun work that connects standpoint with socialization (see, for example, Allen, 1995b; Bullis, 1993; Englebrecht, 1994).