„NICOLAE BĂLCESCU”

LAND FORCES MILITARY ACADEMY

CROSS-CULTURAL COMMUNICATION PROJECT

Communication between cultures-postmodern theories

Made by:CORPORAL CADET BORDEI ADRIANA

Sibiu
- 2019 –
 POSTMODERN THEORIES

Postmodernism represents the complex relationships of power, knowledge, and discourse

created in the struggle between social groups. Additionally, postmodernism is intertwined with
several other perspectives that challenge the conduct of business as usual. This term is used to
describe the historical period that has, presumably, succeeded modernity.
Postmodernism, in turn, describes a series of breaks and continuities between modern and
contemporary conditions. It has some of this characteristics: the disintegration of colonial
systems historically ruled by imperial nation-states, and the subsequent dispersal of people,
traditions, information, and commodities at accelerated rates across geopolitical boundaries, the
decline of industrial capitalism and the rise of a transnational, information-age economy, the rise
of global media systems whose continuous operations collapse traditional boundaries of space
and time and the rise of new creative and artistic practices. Postmodernism is, maddeningly, both
urgent and playful. It uses the strategies of blankness, irony, and reflexivity to heighten our
awareness of paradox, ambiguity, uncertainty, emergence, and difference.
Postmodernist Theories:
Intensive discussion of postmodernism in organizational studies flowered shortly after the field’s
adoption of interpretivism (e.g., as the “organizational culture” movement) during the 1980s.
 Organizations Are (Inter-)Texts
Postmodernists take discourse to be central and primary to all organizational processes.
They view all human understandings and relationships to be constituted and mediated by
language. This has led them to adopt the metaphor of (inter-)text to study organizational
communication. Historically, interpretivists have invoked this metaphor to study
organizational culture as-if the symbolic document of a structured life-world, and its
communicative reproduction. This metaphor has legitimated the use of hermeneutic
methods to unravel the nature and significance of communication by focusing on its
modes of production and interpretation. In this process, they draw upon cultural
ideologies that prescribe the use of particular norms, values, and beliefs as resources for
sensemaking and expression. As a result, organizational communication can be viewed as
intertextual. Postmodernists use this metaphor to conceptualize organizations as fluid
entities that are situated within a broader cultural “economy” of textual interaction.
 Organizational Cultures and Identities Are Fragmented and De-centered
Postmodernists argue that organizations are marked by irony, ambiguity, contradiction,
and paradoxes that oppress their members by prematurely foreclosing options for (self-)
understanding and action. As a result, postmodernists adopt the image of fragmentation to
characterize some organizational cultures and identities. By taking fragmentation
seriously, we are better able to appreciate the skillful efforts (the artfulness) of
organizational members as they coordinate their actions and create shared meaning—
however fleeting these accomplishments may be. Postmodernists use a related term, de-
centered, to challenge modernist theories of identity and agency. These theories generally
assume that individuals are the original source of their intentions and actions, that they
exercise these capacities through free will, and that identity is co-extensive with the
material body. Alternately, postmodernists—particularly those affiliated with the theory
of poststructuralism— argue that human experience (including that of the self and the
body) is never direct, pure, or immediate. Instead, it is always-already structured by
language. This is because the structure of language (e.g., syntax and semantics) creates a
cultural technology that is utilized by institutions to shape the processes of human
development.
 Organizational Knowledge, Power, and Discourse Are Inseparable; Their Relations
Should Be Deconstructed
Against the organizational nexus of power-knowledge-discourse, postmodernists pose
the technology of deconstruction. This term formally describes the literary-critical
process of disassembling a text and uncovering its tensions, contradictions, absences, and
paradoxes. In this view, meaning is not contained in the superficial content of the text,
but dispersed throughout various relationships activated by its component signs. The goal
of deconstruction is to reveal arbitrary patterns of language use and to open the text to
alternative interpretations that are otherwise hidden by dominant meanings.
 Organizational Communication Involves Complex Relations of Power and Resistance
Postmodernists view organizations as sites of intersection between two modes of
power. The first mode involves strategic systems that seek control over bodies, thoughts,
and voices to ensure their conformity and productivity. The other mode emerges in
relation to the first. In this process, they seek to open up the indeterminacy of meaning
 and action that is foreclosed by organizations in their quest for certainty, progress, and
control.
 Knowledge of Organizational Communication Is Representational; as a Result,
Communication Should Be Reflexive
Postmodernism rejects so-called “reference” theories of language that assume symbols
have naturally corresponding and preexisting objects. Instead, it focuses on how
knowledge is produced as an effect of discourse’s ability to constitute relationships. As a
result, postmodernists encourage audiences of these representations to continuously
reflect on—and potentially challenge— the means by which their knowledge is
constituted through specific conventions of writing, speech, and performance.
In conclusion, postmodernism’s radical critique creates a condition in which “anything
goes,” and therefore no interpretation should assume priority over an alternative. Crucial
activities of judgment and evaluation are, as a result, paralyzed by postmodern analysis.
In my opinion, postmodern theory reminds us that meaning is never universal, total,
neutral, or permanent. It questions how particular meanings are produced in the situated,
arbitrary, and interested fixing of relations between signifiers, as well as how those
configurations might be changed. Indeed, by abandoning our unreflective faith in abstract
sources of certainty, we may turn anew to each other and gain a renewed appreciation for
our interdependency in the ongoing production of meaning—one turn at a time.
There are some similarities between postmodern theories and critical theories. Both attack
the academic division of labour which establishes fixed boundaries between regions of
social reality, and both utilize supradisciplinary discourses. Both carry out sharp critiques
of modernity and its forms of social domination and rationalization. Both combine social
theory, philosophy, cultural critique, and political concerns in their theories and, unlike
more academic theories, some versions of both attempt to orient theory toward practice,
and discourse toward politics. But the postmodern theories generally reject the
rationalism, the lust for categorical distinctions and systematization, and the global takes
on history and society. On the whole, postmodern theories want to go much further than
critical theories in overthrowing traditional philosophy and social theory and in beginning
a new with novel theoretical and political perspectives.