democracy and organizational communication

The About Us page of the Department of Communication Studies website includes this:

The B.A. and M.A. programs focus on four primary areas or cornerstones: democracy, diversity, technology, and globalization.

• Democracy - affirms the balance of individual freedom and socio-political consensus shaped through dialogue, argument, and persuasion between individuals and groups.
• Diversity - explores the variety and complexity of communication efforts to shape beliefs, values, and perceptions in different communities and cultures.
• Technology - interrogates the implications of human communication in a mediated world.
• Globalization - recognizes the interconnectedness, integration, fragmentation, and conflict within human societies and cultures in global contexts.

All faculty (at least tenure-track) claim they cover these concepts in their classes, but sometimes I wonder if we really do. And in spite of the lofty definitions, I wonder how the terms are put into practice. For example, how democratic is the department? Who is included in departmental decisions and who is not?

In the small group communication text my spouse and I are writing, we discuss five models of democracy: procedural, competitive, participatory, deliberative, and dialogic. So just in that sense, democracy is more complex than the department's definition. In addition, the emphasis on consensus ignores the necessity of conflict and the reality of power in any democratic system, issues Deetz addresses in his work. But as Cheney et al. point out, "Democracy, thus, is a 'god term'--an unquestioned good--for many societies" (p. 215).

Certainly in the U.S., democracy plays a central role in the nation's collective identity. And it certainly plays such a role in the department's identity. Because of democracy's status as a god term, however, we fail to interrogate what we mean by democracy for our students and in practice for department decisions. For example, major departmental policy decisions seldom involve lecturers and never involve students. Who gets to participate in the department's democracy? The U.S., founded on democratic principles, has not always allowed everyone to participate. And restrictions on voting exist today. Because democracy is an unquestioned good, closely examining democratic processes in organizations is all that more important.

~ Professor Cyborg