The Paradox of Empowerment: Suspended Power and the Possibility of Resistance

About the Author RONALD F. WENDT is Assistant Professor of Communication at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His research interests include leadership, power relations, organizational paradox, and social movements. Professor Wendt’s work appears in a number of scholarly journals, including The Quarterly Journal of Speech, Communication Studies, and Management Communication Quarterly. Product Description Wendt provides a collection of critical stories examining the power and politics of organizational life. He looks at workers in frustrating situations and explores a new type of power that is simultaneously beneficial and detrimental. The talk, language, and discourse that constitute the micro-paradoxes of work life are investigated.Starting with the concept of corporate hegemony, Wendt looks at its language, provides stories illustrating hegemony, and helps the reader envision how hegemony carries over to other social realms like higher education. After exploring the possibility of counter-hegemonic resistance, including tactical storytelling, Wendt sets forth a new theory of suspended power. While he shows there is no clear answer or response to the politics of corporate hegemony because it is a persistent dilemma, he points the reader to the uses of critical theory to understand and adjust to contemporary power dynamics. Of particular interest to scholars and students involved with communication, management, and cultural studies. Review “Ron Wendt has written a very smart, entirely engaging, and at many turns, surprising and creative account of the subtle but pervasive power of communication double binds within the contexts of supposed empowerment’ in everyday organizational life. Combining his considerable skills as a critical theorist with first-rate ethnographic accounts, he provides readers with a wide-ranging tour of hegemonic structures understood as inherent parts of existing communication and capitalist systems. Wendt’s vision incorporates the timeless wisdom of Zen into our understanding of these relations. I recommend this book to anyone interested in organizational studies, critical theory, and communication.”-H. L. Goodall, Jr. Professor and Head, Department of Communication University of North Carolina at Greensboro