The word “involuntary” connotes a negative adjective, associated with something being imposed not by choice or free will. From an organizational communication perspective, involuntary membership arrangements denote “how individuals experience and navigate organizational affiliations that are imposed against their will” (Peterson & McNamee, 2016, p. 193). For involuntary members like prisoners, it seems far-fetched to assume that constructions of incarceration will be anything but negative. However, it may be possible for involuntary members to describe their organizational experiences as affirming, productive, and supportive. This research sets out to extend the work of Peterson and McNamee by placing involuntary membership on a value-laden spectrum to understand how positive constructions of involuntary membership can emerge in spite of the largely negative messages articulated by participants in their foundational piece.
In the following section, I provide contextualization to understanding involuntary membership from a positive organizational communication perspective. First, I review Peterson and McNamee’s (2016) concept of involuntary membership and build the argument surrounding the negative connotations that emerged in their original conceptualization. Next, I introduce positive organizational communication (POC) scholarship as a framework for understanding the processes, messages, and behaviors that can emerge across all types of organizational memberships, including involuntary members. I conclude by justifying the need to reexamine involuntary membership from a POC perspective and introduce the methodology of the project, which includes revisiting incarcerated populations.
Rationale
Involuntary Membership
In 2016, Peterson and McNamee created a spectrum of organizational membership through their creation of involuntary membership to describe membership negotiations that do not involve agency, choice, or free will from the member. Until this seminal piece, communication scholars studying organizational membership held the implicit assumption that memberships were part of a voluntary arrangement. In response to the assumptions of volition underlying in organizational communication literature, Peterson and McNamee (2016) pioneered the concept of involuntary membership to address “a relationship between an individual and a group, community, or organization that is compulsory or mandatory in nature and typically enforced against individual will or choice” (p. 194). To help contextualize the concept, the authors engaged in a study to understand how incarcerated individuals communicatively construct involuntary membership and ultimately found five emerging facets, including physical environment, mobility, relationships, engagement, and body.
Throughout Peterson and McNamee’s (2016) explication of each facet of involuntary membership, it became clear that members relied heavily on negative constructions when articulating their experiences. Physical space, for example, manifested in confinement to cells, sleepless nights, and a lack of belongings. Prisoners shared that their relationships were often forced upon them, leading them to become hostile and sometimes even threatening. The interviews also revealed the bodily control exerted over prisoners in ways that don’t allow them to maintain their health (e.g. food rationing had an impact on a diabetic prisoner’s ability to control his insulin), safety (e.g. being fearful of being assaulted while taking a shower), and dignity (e.g. experiencing mandatory strip searches, or as one prisoner referred to it, the “hokey pokey dance”). Ultimately, the data that emerged surrounding constructions of involuntary membership were based heavily on negative experiences and descriptions of hostility, danger, and fear.
Regardless of whether membership is voluntary or involuntary, it is unlikely that organizational stakeholders would be content knowing that members’ constructions of their experiences within the organization were deeply negative. Unfortunately, prisons and jails have adopted a reputation of being cruel and inhumane spaces where people are exposed to violence, corruption, and sexual assault. Many times, incarceration facilities are overcrowded and understaffed, leaving prison staff guards to be severely emotionally detached, relationally withdrawn, and victims of burnout (Tracy, 2004). These qualities naturally leave prison staff with little incentive or energy o produce a positive living space for the imprisoned. Therefore, it becomes curious when incarcerated members use enthusiastic, affirming, supportive language when they discuss their experience as members of a prison. Communication scholars have coined this act of organizational members drawing on positive language as positive organizational communication (POC) scholarship, discussed further in the following section.
Positive Organizational Communication Scholarship (POCS)
Only two decades ago, communication scholars began developing a new area of study known positive organizational communication (POC) scholarship to identify and study positive communication phenomena. Lutgen-Sandvik (2017) defines POC scholarship as “the scientific pursuit to understand the various forces – processes, human traits, organizational functions, motivations, goals, effects, and outcomes – that contribute to positivity in organizational contexts” (p. 1). In their book Positive Organizational Scholarship, pioneers of the field Cameron, Dutton, and Quinn (2003) provide a strong framework for which communication scholars have relied heavily on, within which they identify positive organizational scholarship as a way to study “outcomes, processes, and attributes of organizations and their members” (p. 4). Borrowed and applied from the psychology and management disciplines, communication scholars have helped adapt POC scholarship to understand how enriching, favorable, and generative forces can help us better understand and study how organizational members create meaning.
Communication scholars have relied on the framework of POC to understand various communicative phenomena, including emotion in the workplace (Fineman, 2008; Tracy, 2008), the impact that employee engagement has on organizational success (Bakker & Schaufeli, 2008), and how compassionate communication in the workplace fosters a healthier well-being (Miller, 2007). Specifically, researchers have relied on POC to understand workplace emotions such as fulfillment, vitality, compassion, and exhilaration (Bernstern, 2003). POC scholars have also expanded and explicated this framework further to understand concepts of supportiveness, inclusivity, collaboration, and respect among organizational members (Browning, Morris, & Kee, 2011). Ultimately, this area of research has spanned across organizational contexts to understand how we can understand the positive communicative phenomenon that help humans to flourish within organizations.
Since its inception, POC scholarship has drawn much critique, primarily surrounding what it means to label something as “positive” (Fineman, 2005; 2006). Scholars have noted the oversimplification that comes with labeling something strictly as “positive” and have argued for the awareness of the complexity of communication, which is almost never universally good. However, attempts have been made to re-contextualize POC scholarship to capture more nuanced understandings of the implications of “positivity” in organizations (Fineman, 2006). POC scholarship attempts to go beyond traditional areas of study in organizational communication that tend to have more negative associations, such as workplace bullying (Lutgen-Sandvik, 2006) and employee burnout (Tracy, 2009), to understand how particular organizational members are flourishing in the midst of their bullied and burnt out counterparts. Yet, critiques see this attempt at creating a “balance” between positive and negative as a camouflage to the exploitations and discriminations that are likely occurring beyond “surface-level” flourishing (Wong, 2009).
Thus far, POC scholars have focused solely on what positive communication looks like among voluntary organizational members. It is no surprise that POC scholars have shied away from understanding positive organizational concepts among involuntary members, since these memberships are typically tethered to situations that are far from positive. In their foundational piece, Peterson and McNamee (2016) address the primary contexts where involuntary memberships arise, naming “the military (e.g., stop-loss), education (e.g., boarding schools), and deviant groups (e.g., cults, gangs)” (p. 193). In addition to these contexts, involuntary membership research is relevant within Goffman’s (1961) pivotal work, where he displays the negative realities of asylums, where involuntary members can become captive to total institutions. However, what does it mean when involuntary members prevail in the midst of their unfortunate circumstances. What can we learn by involuntary members who are flourishing within the organization that they are being involuntarily tethered to?
Scholars have yet to examine the implications of understanding involuntary membership from a POC scholarship perspective. Specifically, no research has been pursued in an attempt to understand how our nation’s largest known group of involuntary members – prisoners – can flourish while serving their sentence behind bars. Therefore, this piece attempts to understand how the concepts behind positive organizational communication emerge in constructions of involuntary membership. This research is ultimately guided by the following research question:
How do involuntary members construct their organizational membership in positive ways?
In 2016, an incentive-based housing (IBH) unit was created to offer imprisoned women at a detention center in the southwest of the United States the opportunity to engage in intensive programming and, in turn, receive privileges for their engagement. The housing unit was established by the Captain of the prison, whose goal was to establish a space where incarcerated women could invest in themselves and support one another within a healthy community, all while serving their sentence and preparing to reenter society. A primary philosophy of this housing unit is to be a normative environment to women remain acclimated to what life is like on the “outside.” Rather than using handcuffs and prison guard escorts, women are provided with agency to choose which programs they participate in and are free to walk to and from these meetings so long as they engage in multiple programming opportunities every day.
Data Collection
This research centers around the experiences of 12 women living in this incentive-based housing unit. Upon receiving IRB approval, I created a sign-up sheet and asked one of the IBH counselors to ask if any of the 32 women currently housed in IBH would be willing to participate in an interview about their experiences living in the housing unit. 12 members signed-up to participate, with women ranging between 23 and 46 years of age. Pseudonyms were used to ensure anonymity and confidentiality. The interviews ranged from 20 minutes to 90 minutes and yielded 376 minutes of audio recording and 143 pages of double-spaced transcriptions.
Data Analysis
The research question emerged after noticing a counterintuitive pattern of positive constructions of being incarcerated. Therefore, with this research question in mind, I read through each transcription using Peterson and McNamee’s (2016) framework for constructions of involuntary membership to better understand how their five facets were explicated in a positive light. These facets include: physical environment, mobility, relationships, engagement, and body. After reading through transcripts multiple times with each of these categories in mind, patterns emerged within each facet that demonstrated how women living in IBH constructed their time in prison optimistically. Specifically, I focused my coding around words that connote positive experience, such as “blessed”, “supported”, and “community”. The following section explores how the involuntary members from this data set articulated positive constructions of involuntary membership.
Findings
Interview data with prisoners revealed positive communicative constructions of incarceration across all five facets of involuntary membership according to Peterson and McNamee (2016), including (a) physical environment, (b) mobility, (c) relationships, (d) engagement, and (e) body. Although it seems counterintuitive for involuntary members to share positive feelings about the experience of incarceration, women from IBH exuded optimism, enthusiasm, and hope. Each facet is explored further below.
In her New York Times bestseller, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, Michelle Alexander writes:
The genius of the current caste system, and what most distinguishes it from its predecessors, is that it appears voluntary. People choose to commit crimes, and that's why they are locked up or locked out, we are told. This feature makes the politics of responsibility particularly tempting, as it appears the system can be avoided with good behavior. But herein lies the trap. All people make mistakes. All of us are sinners. All of us are criminals. All of us violate the law at some point in our lives. (p. 215, emphasis added)
This quote captures many the essence of the aims of this research. There is an illusion of voluntary admittance into the criminal justice system that helps prison advocates justify their support for punishment. A further illusion is that, once people become involuntary members of incarceration, that their experience will be filled only with negativity and unconstructiveness. Through this study, we can broaden our understanding of involuntary membership to further examine how involuntary members positively construct their organizational experience. Specifically, this study helps us to see a brighter side of incarceration. Importantly, these findings have theoretical and practical implications discussed in the subsequent sections.
Theoretical Implications
This research makes important theoretical contributions to our conceptualization of involuntary membership. As of now, our understanding of involuntary membership is limited and is largely associated with only negative constructions of membership. However, the present study allows us to create a value-laden spectrum to understand how concepts rooted in positive organizational communication (POC) scholarship can arise among involuntary member’s constructions of their experiences. Although counterintuitive, these findings provide future scholars interested in involuntary membership to be more open-minded in the assumptions held about the experiences of involuntary members. This project is theoretically useful by shattering the associations that might have been built from future research attaching only negative experiences with being due to the involuntary nature of memberships.
Additionally, by revisiting a similar population of incarcerated people, this study theoretically expands what we have known to be true about the quality of life among prisoners. Rather than reproducing the understanding that prisoners are faced with poor living conditions and limited chance to be productive, this project sheds light on the hope and possibility that can come with a normative housing unit. The conceptualization of community became extremely prevalent across all interviews, which is a word that is associated with positive meanings and as a comforting place filled with understanding and supportive people (Bauman, 2001). The women from this research reflect this description and describe a community of care (Gamo, 2013). Theoretically, this study is helpful with linking these positive associations with what has been assumed to be a negative experience.
Practical Implications
In praxis, this study offers a glimpse into how a positive, normative prison housing unit can function to support prisoners better themselves and others while serving their sentence. For scholars who are invested in social justice and find themselves working within prison walls, I hope this research can encourage organizational stakeholders to rethinking their housing unit philosophies to becoming more supportive and community-based. Furthermore, engagement (i.e. prison programing) was noted as being a substantial reason for the women’s progress and happiness, with many of them noting that attending classes that require self-evaluation is hard work, but that they are thankful for the opportunity to become more self-aware and confident as they prepare to reenter society. Therefore, instructional communication scholars should consider expanding their scope into prison classrooms. By studying (and teaching) these courses, communication scholars can make a significant difference in prisoners’ lives.
Limitations and Directions for Future Research
This research is not without limitations. Although I do not intend to disempower the voices that are represented in this research, it is difficult make broad claims based around 12 participants. Furthermore, it is important to note that gender may be part of the reason for the discrepancies across the women from this piece and the men interviewed in Peterson and McNamee’s (2016) data. It may very well be that men had more negative constructions of involuntary membership because this population is associated with more violent and hostile tendencies behind bars. Therefore, their experiences could have been associated more with negative memories. Finally, it should be noted that many of the women from these interviews made note of their negative experiences in cell living, which may account for the difference in the prisoners’ constructions.
Future scholars interested in pursuing involuntary membership should begin to explore what the implications are for membership within other involuntary settings. For example, exploring constructions of involuntary memberships to gangs might yield different facets of membership than children attending boarding school against their will. Furthermore, scholars might be interested in approaching future research from a positive deviance perspective (Lapping et al., 2002). The theory of positive deviance posits that outliers exist within every population who are able to thrive despite a lack of resources or support. Positive deviance theorists ultimately seek to identify these “deviants” and learn from their successes in order to help others who are failing within their under-resourced population. The women of IBH could be framed as “deviants” in this respect as prisoners who are flipping the script on what we assume to be true about the experiences of incarceration.
We should always be wary as scholars to make value-laden assumptions about seemingly inherent organizational concepts. Critics of POC scholarship have vocalized fears that positive communication scholarship is oversimplifying constructs and making assumptions that things can be inherently good. However, it is equally important to apply this philosophy to other assumptions, such as the voluntary nature of membership and the way those memberships are constructed. Ultimately, this piece theoretically extends what we assume to be true about involuntary membership by taking a POC lens. Moving forward, scholars should continue to ask bold questions about the assumptions being made across scholarship in hopes of shattering them.