The structuration of campus-community partnership: activities, contradictions, and organizational change

In the United States, public universities must negotiate public responsibility with market interests, and are often under suspicion of being businesslike and detached from local community issues and concerns. Campus-community partnerships are gaining traction as a preferable way for public universities to bridge campus and community concerns. This dissertation is a qualitative case study of UPartner (UP), an organization that creates campus-community partnerships between a large public university and a community system identified by that university through a statistical analysis of zip codes that indicated underrepresentation at the university. In this dissertation, I explain my methodological perspective as an engaged advisor. Through in-depth interviews, participant observation, and historical research, I engaged with UP to understand how participants characterized their activities and strategized ways to change the university system. Using structuration theory as a framework, I explain how UP participants structure their activities and characterize the systems of campus and community. I discuss several discursive patterns and practices including Connection, Hopeland, Confusion, and Not Service/Outreach. I also discuss these patterns in light of their enabling and constraining qualities, and the extent to which they echo larger discourses concerning democracy and the market. I give particular focus to the activity of partnership, which is structured as Reciprocity, Sustainability, and Difficulty. Finally, I extend structurating activity theory's notion of contradictions to discuss several contradictions that UP participants encounter when trying to change the university system, including Deficit Discourses, The Marginalization of Community Based Research, and The Containment of UP. I explain each contradiction, and then show how UP participants attempt to overcome the contradiction through desired new discursive patterns.

THE STRUCTURATION OF CAMPUS-COMMUNITY PARTNERSHIP: ACTIVITIES, CONTRADICTIONS, AND ORGANIZATIONAL CHANGE by Georgi Ann Rausch A dissertation submitted to the faculty of The University of Utah in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of Communication The University of Utah August 2012 Copyright © Georgi Ann Rausch 2012 All Rights Reserved The Un iver s i t y o f Utah Graduate School STATEMENT OF DISSERTATION APPROVAL The dissertation of Georgi Ann Rausch has been approved by the following supervisory committee members: Ann Darling , Chair 5/1/2012 Date Approved Connie Bullis , Member 5/23/2012 Date Approved Heather Canary , Member 5/23/2012 Date Approved Shiv Ganesh , Member 5/1/2012 Date Approved Rosemarie Hunter , Member 5/1/2012 Date Approved Karen Paisley , Member 5/1/2012 Date Approved and by Robert K. Avery , Chair of the Department of Communication and by Charles A. Wight, Dean of The Graduate School. ABSTRACT In the United States, public universities must negotiate public responsibility with market interests, and are often under suspicion of being businesslike and detached from local community issues and concerns. Campus-community partnerships are gaining traction as a preferable way for public universities to bridge campus and community concerns. This dissertation is a qualitative case study of UPartner (UP), an organization that creates campus-community partnerships between a large public university and a community system identified by that university through a statistical analysis of zip codes that indicated underrepresentation at the university. In this dissertation, I explain my methodological perspective as an engaged advisor. Through in-depth interviews, participant observation, and historical research, I engaged with UP to understand how participants characterized their activities and strategized ways to change the university system. Using structuration theory as a framework, I explain how UP participants structure their activities and characterize the systems of campus and community. I discuss several discursive patterns and practices including Connection, Hopeland, Confusion, and Not Service/Outreach. I also discuss these patterns in light of their enabling and constraining qualities, and the extent to which they echo larger discourses concerning democracy and the market. I give particular focus to the activity of partnership, which is structured as Reciprocity, Sustainability, and Difficulty. Finally, I extend structurating activity theory's notion of contradictions to discuss several contradictions that UP participants encounter when trying to change the university system, including Deficit Discourses, The Marginalization of Community Based Research, and The Containment of UP. I explain each contradiction, and then show how UP participants attempt to overcome the contradiction through desired new discursive patterns. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT ..................................................................................................................... iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ............................................................................................. vii Chapters ONE: INTRODUCTION.....................................................................................................1 Background of the Study........................................................................................................ 4 Key Theoretical and Practical Concerns .............................................................................. 13 Organization of Dissertation Chapters ................................................................................. 17 TWO: REVIEW OF RELEVANT LITERATURE...........................................................19 Major Postulates of Structuration Theory ............................................................................ 19 Structuration and Traditions of Organizational Communication ......................................... 35 Conclusion........................................................................................................................... 47 THREE: METHODS.........................................................................................................49 Case Study Approach ........................................................................................................... 50 Engaged Communication Research and Engaged Advising ................................................ 59 The Case of "UPartner" (UP) ............................................................................................... 64 Data Collection..................................................................................................................... 71 Data Analysis ....................................................................................................................... 74 Conclusion........................................................................................................................... 79 FOUR: THE STRUCTURATION OF UPARTNER'S ACTIVITIES..............................81 Structuring the Activities of UPartner.................................................................................. 83 Structural Properties of UPartner ....................................................................................... 117 Conclusion......................................................................................................................... 122 FIVE: THE STRUCTURATION OF PARTNERSHIP ..................................................124 Structuring Partnership....................................................................................................... 127 Community Resources and Partnership ............................................................................. 161 Structural Properties of Partnership ................................................................................... 168 Conclusion......................................................................................................................... 173 SIX: CONTRADICTIONS, RESOLUTIONS, AND STRUCTURAL CHANGE.........175 Deficit Discourses .............................................................................................................. 179 The Marginalization of Community Based Research (CBR)............................................. 193 The Containment of UP...................................................................................................... 203 Conclusion......................................................................................................................... 211 SEVEN: CONCLUSION.................................................................................................214 The Structuration of UP's Activities .................................................................................. 215 Contradictions and Desires................................................................................................. 226 Theoretical Opportunities and Key Contributions ............................................................. 229 Methodological Contributions............................................................................................ 235 Descriptive Advice for UP ................................................................................................. 237 Desired New Directions ..................................................................................................... 242 Parting with Partnership ..................................................................................................... 244 Appendices A: INTERVIEW QUESTIONS.......................................................................................246 B: INTERVIEW PARTICIPANTS .................................................................................247 C: VISION AND PLANNING DOCUMENTS..............................................................248 D: PARTICIPANT OBSERVATION.............................................................................253 REFERENCES ................................................................................................................254 vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Much like those involved in the research you are about to read, my career is marked by many important partnerships. These brief acknowledgements thank those who have contributed to this project, and the larger project of getting me through graduate school. My thanks are not enough. I have incalculable respect and gratitude for those I am about to mention. I look forward to our future conversations, projects, and dreams. Thank you, Ann Darling, for inspiring me from the first time I heard you speak. Your guidance and support has seen me through very challenging years. You helped me without judgment, and spending time with you was one of the best parts of my Ph.D. experience. Thank you, Shiv Ganesh, for being my friend and supporter since my first day of graduate school in Missoula. Your offer to serve on my committee from New Zealand is only one example of how much you have helped me without any official recognition or reward. I am grateful for your close readings, challenges, and support of my ideas. Thank you, Connie Bullis, for your thoughtful reading, questions, encouragement, and spirit of teamwork on and off campus. Thank you, Heather Canary, for your support and your ability to reframe ideas in inspiring ways. Thank you, Karen Paisley, for being a vibrant and enthusiastic teacher who got me excited about experiential education. You are a role model of joyful scholarship. And thank you, Rosey Hunter, for inspiring me and assuring me in the research process. Thank you Len Hawes, April Kedrowicz, Marouf Hasian, and Edna Rogers for being mentors and teaching inspirations and sharing your support and your valuable time. Thank you to all of the participants who made this research possible. Conversations with you were often unexpected and insightful beyond any expectation. I am so grateful to have chosen such an inspirational organization to study where I could revel in so many assets and successes. Thank you to the Marriner S. Eccles Research Fellowship for funding this research for an entire academic year. The break from teaching to focus on this dissertation was one of the best things to happen to me in my professional career. Thank you to my extraordinary cast of friends that I love so much. Jeff Rose, you are a model of perseverance and you have laughed with me and worked with me day after day. Erin Ortiz and Becca Gill, you are my mentors and trail blazers and sources of excellent advice. James Fortney, we were fast friends, and I am so thankful for you and all our stories, ideas, and laughs. Rosie Russo, thank you for all your careful listening and support. Maria Blevins and Shireen Ghorbani, thank you for arriving right on time to inspire me and help me put this research into perspective. Last but most, thank you Mom, Dad, Kate, and the two best B's in the world. viii CHAPTER ONE INTRODUCTION In the United States (U.S.), each state has a system of public higher education that is partially funded by that state's government, the federal government, and U.S. taxpayers. However, the names "public university" or "state university" can be somewhat misleading, because these universities are not entirely publicly funded; they are funded from a wide variety of revenue streams such as student tuition, sports teams, and donations from private and corporate donors. In short, public universities are complex organizations with a large number of stakeholder groups, and are an ongoing source of national interest and debate. Over the last 25 years, citizens, academics, politicians, and journalists have criticized public universities for neglecting public interests in favor of corporate interests (Aronowitz, 2000; Giroux, 2009; Washburn, 2005). As a result, public universities are sometimes characterized as businesses, where students become consumers and corporations control the product. However, there are advocates who resist this troubling characterization and work to keep public universities more publicly responsive. The tension between market and democratic interests in public universities is important to understand, and provides an opportunity to investigate how those within such institutions navigate conflicting ideologies. Practically, it is also important to understand this tension as public funding for education declines. 2 In order to keep the public interest in public universities central, some campuses are turning to creative solutions to increase community involvement. The belief is that, if universities increase their number of successful projects with the community, it will be a sign of successful civic engagement (Bringle & Hatcher, 2002). Currently, public universities have several models for working with the community. One of the most well known models is service learning. Service learning advocates have consistently encouraged campus involvement with their surrounding communities. However, because service learning methods dichotomize university members as benefactors and community members as recipients, the method has been criticized as charity or as perpetuating privilege (Artz, 2001; Butin, 2005; Endres & Gould, 2009). In recent years, another model of engagement has developed called "campus-community partnerships." Such partnerships are designed as interactive and dynamic, and attempt to depart from unidirectional models such as service learning (Dempsey, 2009). Campus-community partnerships engage community members in reciprocal ways to ensure that participants all have equal voice: "The central challenge is to frame social development issues in a way that allows a'll partners to achieve their goals - this reciprocal benefit through the partnership" (Hunter, Munro, Dunn, & Olson, 2010, p. 305). In recent years, campus-community partnerships have become a celebrated model. Holland (2005) summarizes community engagement work and highlights partnerships: I believe it is a sign of our advanced state of understanding that the most intensely examined issues around the field of engagement over the last year or two tend to fall into two broad categories: 1) how to institutionalize engagement (which includes issues of measurement, rewards/recognition, infrastructure, faculty development etc.), and 2) how to create effective community-campus partnerships. Partnership issues are especially prominent and have gained attention in the following ways: Many recent campus-based workshops have emerged with the intent of improving engagement and partnership programs; "partnerships" is the 3 theme of the 2005 Western Regional Campus Compact Conference; Trinity College has created an annual in-depth training institute on partnerships for community-campus teams; California Campus Compact held a special summit on partnership issues in Fall 2004 and is now launching several campus-community dialogues. (2005, p. 10) It is apparent that the concept of campus-community partnerships has gained notable traction in higher education. In this dissertation, I seek to understand this growing practice. This research project is a case study of an organization called UPartner (UP) that attempted to promote the public good in public higher education and work toward systemic change in a large western public university in the United States. UP wanted to catalyze community involvement and keep community interests central to teaching, research, and service in higher education. UP's activities were multifaceted, but in particular they focused on the work of campus-community partnership. The bulk of the organization's work was done collaboratively in partnership with local communities. Because of their commitment to collaboration and innovations through partnership, UP has been widely acclaimed and nationally awarded as successful. In 2011, it celebrated its tenth anniversary and ended its 10 year strategic planning cycle. In preparation for their next 10 years, I collaborated with the organization on research that would be meaningful to their planning process and also afford the opportunity to extend theory. In the remainder of this introductory chapter, I provide a more detailed background of the problems that motivated the research by explaining the public university context in the United States. Then, I discuss the specific work of campus-community partnerships. Next, I preview how this study can add to research using 4 structuration theory in several productive ways that are significant to the field of organizational communication. Finally, I explain each dissertation chapter's content and purpose. Background of the Study Current State of Public Universities in the United States The organization featured in this case study was a small part of a large western public university in the United States (U.S.). Public universities play a crucial role in U.S. democratic and economic systems. These universities were initially created through the 1862 Morrill Land-Grant Acts: each state in the nation was given land that they were allowed to sell to fund the creation of universities. Since those initial land-grant institutions, each state's university system has grown, and several states have additional public universities that are not land-grant universities. These public universities are often referred to as "state universities," because of initial funding from the state, and because there are no federal universities except for military institutions of higher education (e.g. West Point). Public universities are granted nonprofit (501c(3)) tax status, and are currently funded by a variety of revenue streams including funding from the state and federal government, taxpayers, students (through tuition), sports teams, and charitable donations. Because of these differing revenue streams, public universities are complex, play many different roles, and serve many different stakeholder groups. The purpose of public higher education is continually debated, and current research often discusses the tension between two dominant opinions: (1) public universities should serve the interests of the state and democracy and (2) public universities should stimulate the market economy 5 (Bok, 2003; Giroux, 2009; Ostrander, 2004; Price, 2008). These debates are complex, and most argue that the two purposes need to be creatively and productively combined (e.g., Bok, 2003). However, the central concern in this debate over public higher education is that democratic and market concerns are not always ideologically compatible, and are at times antagonistic. Thus, public universities make interesting cases for the study of communication, given that they are situated at the intersecting interests of democracy and the market. The conflicts between democracy and market can be seen in all three central activities of universities: research, teaching, and service. As for research, many U.S. citizens look to public university knowledge as credible and ethically responsive to citizen concerns (Washburn, 2005). These universities are allowed a great deal of autonomy in return for the "crucial role they play in certifying knowledge (Brown, 2011)." Taxpayers can feel an ownership in university research outcomes. For example, in genetics research done at Texas A&M University (TAMU), the faculty were educated in public universities, the research was federally funded, and the project drew on the reputation of TAMU (Slaughter & Rhoades, 2004). Thus, when a corporation tried to take controlling interest in further research, it caused a public controversy (Slaughter & Rhoades, 2004). This shows the central conflict: university and community stakeholders may not want corporations taking their knowledge for financial gain, but corporations are willing to give large financial grants to these nonprofit educational institutions in order to continue research. It is often unclear how much the university or the corporation should benefit. Such conflicts and negotiations are ongoing, with universities constantly negotiating research boundaries. 6 The conflicts between democratic and market interests can also be seen in teaching at public universities. Some educational theorists argue that a key role of public education is to train students to be future U.S. citizens. Former Harvard President Derek Bok writes: Not only will college graduates continue to vote more frequently; since they are better informed than those with less education, their influence on the outcome will be greater. As in the past, they will likewise make up the vast majority of all public officials, elected or appointed. All these factors make their preparation for enlightened citizenship especially important to the nation. (Bok, 2003, p. 177) In other words, higher education can prepare students to be "enlightened" citizens who can use critical thinking skills to make informed decisions in elections and as leaders. Democratic principles are fashioned as the most important goal of higher education, a goal that is being thwarted by market rationality (Giroux, 2009). Because schools are social institutions, Dewey (1916, 1997), arguably the most important 20th century public intellectual on pedagogy and citizenship, argued that students should democratically take part in creating their own institution, learning democratic process and the skills for social reform. However, in recent years, critics have argued that universities are feeling greater pressure to teach corporate business skills rather than citizenship. Aronowitz (2000) argues that the public university is merely training future workers in the knowledge economy as opposed to providing them with a liberal education. This follows a popular critique of the university as a business, and students as consumers of skills. McMillan and Cheney (1996) investigated the popularity of the "student as consumer" metaphor and argued that it had several disadvantages for teaching: Specifically, we argue that this metaphor (a) suggests undue distance between the student and the educational process, (b) highlights the promotional activities of professors and promotes the entertainment model of classroom learning; (c) inappropriately compartmentalizes the classroom experience as a product rather 7 than a process; and (d) reinforces individualism at the expense of the community. (p.1) Furthermore, a germane finding of the authors' study is to show how the social construction of student as consumer can obscure important public concerns, such as community building (McMillan & Cheney, 1996). Finally, there is concern among academics that public interest is weakening in terms of service responsibilities. While employees of private universities do not have such obligations, employees of public universities are important civil servants. Because all taxpayers support public universities, all taxpayers should be able to access resources of these universities such as in public lectures and events. Internationally, U.S. public universities are often seen as a democratizing force, and a model of access and excellence (Baiocchi, Heller, & Silva, 2011). However, public funding is not the only revenue stream for public universities, and is actually on the decline. On the rise are funding streams from private interests that some argue may turn into a tide (Aronowitz, 2000). Therefore, it is important to consider what will happen to the "public good" in public universities when the public dollars dissipate. To summarize, in all these three areas of interest - research, teaching, and service - there is growing concern that public universities are becoming corporatized and subsequently detached from citizen concerns (Bok, 2003; Ostrander, 2004). Critics are skeptical that public universities can be relevant to all citizens and not just wealthy and corporate citizens (Giroux, 2009). In short, many argue that market forces are corrupting public education, yet public education administrators continue to aggressively encourage market interest (Aronowitz, 2000; Bok, 2003; Brown, 2011; Slaughter & Rhoades, 2004; Tuchman, 2009; Washburn, 2005). The debate continues about the ethical and practical 8 implications of market forces in the public university, and where to draw appropriate boundaries of involvement. Few, if any, believe that market influence will go away. Some believe it will become stronger (Aronowitz, 2000; Bok, 2003). However, there is resistance to market influence, and this research follows one organization that opposed marketization. Campus-community partnerships align with advocates who want to keep the "public" in public universities central. The organization I studied, UPartner (UP), was critical of their current university system and believed that change was necessary. However, changing public higher education means challenging policies and practices that have been in place for decades. In other words, this means confronting patterns and practices that have become routinized and naturalized over time and are difficult to interrupt. Public universities, through this process of routinization, can become powerful, complex and closed institutions where change can be difficult, slow, and hard to steer. Despite this difficulty, several initiatives such as service learning, critical pedagogy, and campus-community partnerships are attempting to change current public university systems to be more inclusive and responsive to local community concerns. This study takes an in-depth look at the work of UP and how UP attempted to create change through campus-community partnership. In the next section, I provide a brief background and history of this relatively new practice. Current Conceptions of Campus-Community Partnership Although there are many different ways for university campuses and communities to engage with each other, this study focused specifically on the educational innovation of "campus-community partnership." This model has roots in traditions such as community organizing and community engagement. The concerns of campus- 9 community partnerships are similar to the concerns of engaged organizational communication scholars (Barge & Shockley-Zalabak, 2008; Cheney, Wilhelmsson, & Zorn, 2002; Simpson & Seibold, 2008). In other words, campus-community partnerships, although relatively new in practice (less than 15 years old), are the latest in a succession of attempts to make education and research more inclusive, and see community members as holders and creators of knowledge. In this section, I offer definitions of partnership that have surfaced in recent research. Because campus-community partnership models are relatively new, research is only beginning to show their unique value. In current conceptions of partnership, organizing is typically collaborative, and under-resourced and marginalized communities are included in the decision making process (Dempsey, 2009). In other words, partnership purposely involves the lower levels of traditional organizational hierarchies in decision-making processes. In many cases, these stakeholders (such as community members) are not formally acknowledged as part of the university system. They do not appear on a university's organizational chart. Partnerships are seen as interdependent and mutually beneficial for both campus and community (Miller & Hafner, 2008). Community member voices are just as important as the voices of professors and administrators. For example, if university administrators created a top-down policy mandate, such as a study abroad requirement, community stakeholders could react with suspicion because they were not involved in the process of creating the policy. Campus-community partnerships are different because they work toward inclusive change and policymaking that involves university and community members. Community members might suggest a "study locally" requirement instead of a study abroad requirement. 10 Because of this egalitarianism, campus-community partnerships are gaining traction as a preferable way for public universities to democratically bridge campus and community concerns. Several notable nonprofit organizations such as the Kellogg Foundation and Campus Compact have encouraged such partnerships as crucial to the reinvigoration of the democratic mission of universities (Kezar, Chambers, & Burkhardt, 2005). Public universities realize that partnerships can enrich institutions of higher education while also advancing social and economic justice (Hunter, Munro, Dunn, & Olson, 2010). In this way, they are a critical project that has broader activist goals. The ideal goals of partnership are to restructure power relationships in order to elevate community interests in every traditional realm of higher education: teaching, research, and service. Consider this draft vision statement of the partnership I worked with: "Through collaborative partnerships that address systemic barriers to educational success, we create educational opportunities and access to higher education for community members, enriched university research and teaching opportunities, and an enhanced quality of life for all involved. (Board meeting document, 2011) This problem-solution statement constructs "barriers" in the current university system and then offers partnership solutions. By involving community interests, research, teaching, and even life become "enriched" and "enhanced." Burbank and Hunter (2008) write, "Within these partnerships, stakeholders work jointly to identify common issues worthy of investigation, with the goal of greater social justice and institutional reform for those within a community" (p.48). Again, institutional reform is an explicit part of the agenda. Partnerships desire results such as a community member team teaching a class with a tenure track professor, community members co-publishing with graduate students, and 11 the inclusion of community based research in retention, promotion, and tenure (RPT) policies. A caveat in defining campus-community partnerships is that, because they are a relatively new practice, they can be confused with service learning. As you will read in this research, to speak of service in the context of partnership is controversial because partnerships see community members as equal holders and creators of knowledge. When I was in early conversations with the director of UP, my writing suggested that partnership could be seen as evolving from early service learning models. The connection between the two made the director nervous, as seen in this email correspondence: "You discuss the service-learning literature as one of the frameworks. (We are) not closely linked to the service-learning framework, we are much more closely aligned with community partnership, community capacity building, community engagement, community organizing and public scholarship" (Personal Correspondence, 2010). In this exchange, the director clarified that service-learning frameworks are not appropriate when discussing partnerships, and offered several other frameworks. All of the suggestions (engagement, public scholarship, capacity building) stressed the importance of a more critical and equal relationship. In the context of bureaucratic public universities, partnership work can be uncomfortable because it threatens the status quo and can be unpredictable. Radically restructuring research, teaching, and service means that participants involved in partnership could encounter resistance and face those "barriers" to change that UP targets. Dempsey (2009) argues, "Campus-community partnerships are characterized by inequalities of power that impede collaboration and introduce conflicts" (p.2). For 12 example, professors who have spent many years earning their degrees may not want to share their classrooms or research, and academic departments may not want to change RPT rules. Partnership involves navigating such challenges and also tackling critical cultural differences, which create significant challenges for effective communication and shared goals (Bringle & Hatcher, 2002). For example, when a university nursing school develops a partnership with a refugee center, it could be tempting for professors to come in and direct the agenda and take charge. It may be difficult to collaborate in reciprocal ways with community members of different cultures, especially with several languages spoken. In sum, current conceptions of campus-community partnership are aligned with the mission of public universities promoting the public good. Partnership is currently defined in collaborative ways, and stresses interdependence. Partnerships (like UP) often have an explicitly activist agenda, which involves changing the traditional realms of research, teaching, and service to invite more collaboration and interdependence with community stakeholders. Because public universities have a history of bureaucratic practice and top-down policy solutions, partnerships can be a radical shift and thereby invoke resistance. Next, I discuss how the overall goal of partnership is the critical project of creating organizational change, and how communication can be of importance to partnership work. I explain how a communication centered approach to partnership adds to knowledge about the day to day activities of partnership, and the possibilities for systemic transformation that can be both theoretically and practically useful. 13 Key Theoretical and Practical Concerns Apprehending how participants in a campus-community partnership discuss and construct their activities and attempt to create change in a public university system requires a close, critical look at current communication patterns. Because campus-community partnership is a relatively new practice, and partnership is growing in popularity, it is important to understand how organizational participants discursively frame the purposes and activities of the organization in situ. The discursive patterns produced and reproduced in an organization shape and guide its work in specific arrangements and relationships. It is especially important to understand the work of UP in terms of larger conversations about democracy and market influence in public higher education. Foundational knowledge about this organization can begin to build theory and also assist similar organizations in practical efforts such as advocacy and education. Connecting everyday patterns and practices to larger societal discourses is a particular strength of structuration theory (Giddens, 1984), which provides the framework for this study. Giddens (1984) argues that individuals draw upon rules and resources (structures) in daily interactions, and because such structures are often repetitive, it becomes possible to discern similar social practices across time and space. These practices create and reinforce the boundaries of social collectives, or systems. Furthermore, structural properties of social systems are both the means and the ends that they create. This is called a duality of structure, a social praxis whereby members of a social collectivity repeat familiar patterns and practices that continue to bind them together (Cohen, 1989). Because communication features so prominently in the theory, Banks and Riley (1993) proposed it as ontology for organizational communication 14 studies. The theory has been widely affirmed by communication scholars as a communicative account of social structure. Structures shape relationships, guide action, and both enable and constrain future possibilities (Giddens, 1984). An understanding of the structuration of an organization's work, such as the work of UP, offers important insight as to how organizational participants construct their actions and purposes through ongoing discourse (Kirby & Krone, 2002). In other words, although you could read a pamphlet regarding the "promoted" activities of UP, this research argues instead that the activities of participants are a communicative and structurational process that guides action. In this study, I offer foundational descriptive explanation of how UP participants structured their activities. Furthermore, because partnership seeks to address larger tensions concerning democratic and market forces, a key contribution of this case is also to understand how partnership is structured in terms of larger societal systems. Partnerships need to pay careful attention to systemic issues, and take societal structures into account as they challenge institutional and individual practices (Miller & Hafner, 2008). Harter et al. (2005) argue that structuration theory is particularly useful for calling attention to how institutional practices are imbued with values and establish certain identities as preferable among other choices. By understanding how campus-community partnership is structured, those institutional values and preferences will surface, allowing for exploration of the constraints and possibilities of partnership work and revealing how macro level systems influence everyday communication patterns. Finally, structuration theory is a useful framework for critiquing power imbalances that are targeted in the process of organizational change. Again, partnership 15 work has broader activist goals of institutional transformation, and targets socio-historical power imbalances. Giddens argues that, over time, new structures will replace old ones, and systems will transform. However, such change processes are often complex and slow. It is more likely for people to continue to repeat structures than to continuously change them. In other words, "We become attached to the familiar, even to the point of reproducing aspects of life that are otherwise unpleasant" (Cassell, 1993, p. 14). For example, the structuration of professors as having expert knowledge and leading university classes has been reproduced so often that it may seem natural, and its consistent reproduction provides stability in many ways. But, when that reproduction is interrupted, a new way of communicating can replace the old and inspire organizational change. While the first main concern of this study is to understand campus-community partnership and its structuration in more detail, the second concern is to explain how partnerships attempt to create systemic change. Giddens (1984) argues that humans are competent agents who have the capability to make changes by making different structural choices. H.E. Canary (2010a) writes, "Although Giddens argues that much of social action is very much routine, agency implies that individuals are nevertheless in control of and knowledgeable about their actions" (p.30). This agency allows for possibilities for alternative choices, and individuals that are discursively conscious can defy dominant ideologies in many ways (Harter, Berquist, Titsworth, Novak, & Brokaw, 2005). Therefore, it is important to understand how UP participants strategized changing discursive patterns and practices in one public university system. In short, I seek first to understand how participants communicate about their current activities, and then to 16 explain their plans to create institutional change through leveraging new ways of communicating. Therefore, while the first concern of this study is largely interpretive in its desire to understand campus-community partnership, the second concern of this study is a critical analysis of power between campus and community systems, and a discussion of how power imbalances were targeted for transformation. Poole and McPhee (2005) argue that few have used structuration theory in critical scholarship even through it is an important tool for deconstructing power and identifying opportunities for structural and systemic transformation. As I elaborate in Chapter Two, critical approaches in organizational communication are concerned with power as central to organizational life, and theorize issues of control, domination, and resistance (Ganesh, 2008). Mumby (2008) noted that critical approaches view organizing as a political process taking place amid competing interests. This study positioned democracy and market rationality as two such competing interests. Furthermore, Mumby (2008) argues that, critical research employs an emancipatory logic that believes that individuals can create social change through self-reflection and the possibility of alternative organizing processes. Likewise, this research uses a structurational framework to analyze the possibility of alternative organizing processes in order for partnership to work toward social change. In addition to the theoretical extensions of this project, I offer practical strategies that might benefit the campus-community partnership involved in this study. Ideally, this research will assist the organization I studied in identifying areas where they might focus strategic planning, and provide practical suggestions for their operation. It is also my hope that this research will benefit the communities that I worked with and assist in 17 creating stronger partnerships. The findings of this project might also serve as a foundation for other institutional partnerships. Others may adapt or transfer this study's suggestions to their own situation based on the differences between their organization and UP, the organization I studied. In the next section, I lay out the organization of this dissertation. Organization of Dissertation Chapters This dissertation is organized to provide a background of past research and methodological choices and then offer original research followed by analysis. Chapter Two offers a literature review where I explain the major postulates of structuration theory (Giddens, 1984), and how communication scholars have appropriated it in several research traditions. I discuss the opportunities and drawbacks to these appropriations. I then focus on several opportunities to extend theory. First, I argue that the use of structuration in organizational communication research is often not critical, although the theory is well suited for critical analysis. Second, I argue that organizational communication change research favors the investigation of planned top-down change initiatives and this study offers a unique understanding of collaborative change strategies. And finally, current research does not often address educational organizations and their unique roles in our society, and this research offers an important understanding of the public higher education context. In light of these opportunities, I situate my research, and my specific research questions. Chapter Three outlines the methodology I used for this research, providing an explanation of the qualitative case study approach from an engaged advisor perspective using multiple strategies for data collection. In this chapter, I also give a general 18 background and description of the case and its context. Then, I provide further rationale for my research questions that were co-created with UP. Finally, I explain each of the three specific methods I employed to gather data: interviewing, participant observation, and historical research. Within each method, there are specific details about the process including (a) the participants, (b) the data collection, and (c) the process of data analysis. I also offer an explanation of my role as the researcher and how my perspective is implicated in the research. In Chapters Four, Five, and Six, I present my data analysis. Chapters Four and Five are similarly organized and create the foundations of this study. I discuss the structuration of UPartner's activities, bracketing the important work of "partnership" into its own chapter. These chapters also consider structural properties of the social systems of democracy and the market. Chapter Six is organized differently, wherein I present three contradictions that UP faced in their work to change the structures of the public university system. I discuss each contradiction, what it means, and then explain several desired new discourses that participants believed could create change. In this way, Chapters Four and Five create a foundation of structuration, and Chapter Six looks at contradictions and strategies for change. Finally, Chapter Seven provides a conclusion to the research, and summarizes the study's findings, broadening the focus back to the larger contexts in which this project was situated. I return to the absences in the literature that I highlighted in the beginning of this dissertation, and discuss how this case contributed to the literature. In the spirit of my methodology, I offer descriptive advice to UP and finally, I review my implications for future research and a brief personal reflection. CHAPTER TWO REVIEW OF RELEVANT LITERATURE In this literature review, I outline the major postulates of structuration theory (Giddens, 1984). Then, I focus on the application of the theory in several strands of organizational communication inquiry, and explain how this study extends the application of structuration theory to the deconstruction of power and can be a powerful tool for strategizing transformations in organizations where there are obvious and dysfunctional power imbalances. I also argue that this research project offers an extension of structuration theory in terms of organizational change. Finally, this study extends the application of structuration theory to an educational context, which is significant in the negotiation of power and privilege, and inscribes preferred ideologies while also silencing others. Major Postulates of Structuration Theory Structuration theory (Giddens, 1979, 1984) is a lengthy, detailed, and systemic theory. In particular, a structuration approach answers numerous calls for systemic inquiry in organizational communication research (Banks & Riley, 1993; Golden, Kirby, & Jorgensen, 2006) because it highlights discourse involving rules and resources on multiple levels of social systems (Giddens, 1984). Poole and McPhee (2005) argue that structuration theory offers an understanding of how multiple levels of analysis, such as 20 societal, organizational, group, and individual communication, relate to one another. For example, it can help a researcher to understand how market ideologies are connected to discourse in an organization ("Students are paying tuition and deserve to get the best product possible") and even help illustrate the ideology's and organization's relationship to interpersonal discourse ("Why are you skipping class? You paid for it!"). The theory of structuration is comprehensive and unfolds in two major works, Central Problems in Social Theory (Giddens, 1979) and The Constitution of Society (Giddens, 1984). Giddens (1984) writes that the core of structuration theory lies in the three concepts of: (1) structure, (2) system, and (3) duality of structure. In this section, I first discuss these guiding concepts, how they relate to partnership, and how they shaped my first research question. Next, I discuss the concepts of agency and power, and discuss structural contradictions. I explain how the concepts relate to a focus on transformation and how they shaped my second research question. In the following two sections, although I describe how theory leads the formulation of my research questions, I want to stress that the questions were first and foremost guided by my collaboration with UPartner, and my desire to produce engaged research that would be practically meaningful to the organization. As I will discuss in Chapter Three, the decision to apply structuration was a secondary concern to developing research questions from engagement, in the spirit of engaged communication scholarship (Barge & Shockley-Zalabak, 2008; Cheney, 2008; Cheney et al., 2002; Simpson & Seibold, 2008). However, as I collaborated with UPartner regarding their interests, I realized that structuration was a useful theoretical framework that could provide practical insight. 21 Structure, System, and the Duality of Structure The first of Gidden's (1984) three core principles, structure, refers to the rules and resources that knowledgeable human agents instantiate in their everyday practices. Giddens concept of structure is often confusing because it is not the same as general understandings of a structure, such as a building on campus. In structuration theory, structures are not concrete, tangible, or codified - they are language and resources in use, and are constantly changing. There is no such thing as a permanent structure, and the only external evidence of a structure is the instantiation of a social practice (Giddens, 1984). Structures also exist as memory traces, eluding observation. Depending on the situation, I draw upon my memory traces and resources to guide my communication. Therefore, it is more accurate to say that the way we communicate follows discursive patterns and practices (Harter et al., 2005), is inextricably tied to resources, and has structural principles that are either reproduced or changed in every interaction (Giddens, 1984). For example, in university courses in the U.S., one pattern is that professors typically run classrooms and not community residents. The professor has powerful resources such as advanced degrees and the ability to sanction students and assign grades, which are connected to material realities such as scholarships. Community residents who want to earn a degree must take classes where this power relationship has been patterned over centuries. The pattern follows the structural principles of education systems. The majority of faculty members in higher education embody a normative model of teaching and learning, and 83% of all faculty members across disciplinary borders report using lecture as the primary model in college classrooms (Butin, 2006). 22 Again, a structure is comprised of two inseparable parts. "Rules" constitute meaning and also sanction social conduct; they act as conversational norms and social practices and cannot be conceptualized apart from "resources" (Giddens, 1984). Banks & Riley (1993) write, "Resources are the capabilities of agents to generate command over other persons' social conditions (called authoritative resources) and to generate command over material entities (allocative resources)" (p. 173). While allocative resources are material and often financial, Poole and McPhee (2005) write that authoritative resources are nonmaterial, pointing to skills or knowledge. Giddens (1984) offers three major comparisons between allocative and authoritative resources: 1. allocative resources are "material features of the environment" while authoritative resources are "organization of social time-space," 2. allocative resources are "means of material production/reproduction" while authoritative resources are "production/reproduction of the body," and 3. allocative resources are "produced goods" while authoritative resources are "organization of life chances" (p. 258). Therefore, the combination of rules connected to resources structures a professor's work. In higher education, the activities of students, professors, and administrators are routinized, and their ability to garner resources creates a social hierarchy through interaction. Poole and McPhee (2005) note that, "Organizations present us with a ready-made stock of structures and other employees who are willing to show us how they figure in organizational practices (p.178)." Tenured employees with significant resources (e.g. salaries, leadership positions, office space) can work to reinforce the rules of the organizational environment and help to create an even more rigid structure. Older professors who know the rules and often have more resources tell 23 newer ones "the way things are," or how to reproduce the structures they need to be successful in the system. Giddens (1984) points out a key aspect of structures: "Structure is not to be equated with constraint but is always both constraining and enabling" (p.25). Therefore, while structures can help organizational members be successful, they can simultaneously create limits to innovation and creativity. While is it helpful to know "how things are done" at a new workplace, those structures can then also constrain alternative choices. Giddens (1984) argues that there are three main types of constraint: material constraint, negative sanctions, and structural constraint. Material constraints are the physical limits of the material world and human body, negative sanctions are punitive responses between agents, and structural constraint means the contextual limits of a situation. These three types of constraint show that structures are neither wholly enabling nor constraining but are more complex blends. In regard to the second concept of system, Giddens (1984) writes, "The social systems in which structure is recursively implicated, on the contrary, comprise the situated activities of human agents, reproduced across time and space" (p.25). The addition of a time and space element and the implication of a multiplicity of activities make this concept more complex. The system of a public university involves numerous structures that have been patterned and naturalized over time. In this way, the structures organize - they are mechanisms constituting and reinforcing the boundaries of the organizational system. Again, such systems are not fixed nor material, they are produced and reproduced in social practices and patterns and are flexible and malleable even when they appear to be immutable. In other words, they can be reproduced or transformed. 24 In this research, participants discussed how UP worked mainly in two systemic contexts: campus/university (the terms were used interchangeably, and I also use them as such in my analysis) and community, which corresponded to the construct of "campus-community partnership." It may seem problematic to essentialize "campus," "university," or "community" because of the great amount of nuance within and between each system. Furthermore, there were multiple communities and multiple higher education organizations in the city that I studied. However, in this study, participants drew upon these terms and invoked these two larger social systems. Therefore, as Dempsey (2009) argued, "The campus/community divide is useful to the extent that it makes evident the divergent goals and multiple, sometimes conflicting, accountabilities of each participant" (p.23). In this research, the divide was frequently invoked as an important way for participants to orient themselves in order to then generate ideas for systemic change. Giddens (1984) argues that social systems stand out because they are (1) clustered, (2) are often associated with specific locales or territories, (3) have normative elements that include legitimacy occupation of the locale, and (4) their members have some sort of common identity. The "university" and "community" of this project fit this definition. Both systems were clustered, often distinguished by their east/west physical locales (the university was concentrated in an eastern physical location and UP communities were defined by a group of western zip codes which physically adjoin each other), there were struggles over legitimate occupation of both locales (as I will show in my analysis), and there were some common identity markers of "university" people and "community" people. 25 In structuration theory, daily interactions are guided by a rich structural history that we carry with us in memory traces and reproduce in social practices. The more structures are repeated, the more they become sedimented and naturalized in our memories. For example, I have been attending public universities for 11 years. The fact that I can anticipate and participate in such a system gives me ontological security, a sense of safety and reduction of anxiety (Giddens, 1984). When I think about other public universities I might visit or work at in the future, I will know what to expect and how to prepare myself to be successful. Thus, while systems can be seen as confining and controlling to those who are unfamiliar, they can also be comforting to those who know how to reproduce important structures. Because I understand the structures of public higher education well, I feel more secure and ready to succeed. If those structures changed, I could become uneasy and feel less secure. In other words, those who benefit from the security of structures could, in the interest of remaining comfortable, create resistance to systemic change. In addition to structure and system, the final core element of structuration theory is the duality of structure, which means that structures both produce and reproduce social systems and practices (Giddens, 1984). With every communicative choice, we either reproduce patterns, or produce new ones. Cohen (1989) equates this to a social praxis of everyday life, as numerous members of a group or social collectivity embed an awareness of such praxis deep within their memory. For example, as I will elaborate on in my analysis, UP participants made jokes about the university as an "ivory tower." To elaborate, "Long has academe been described as the "ivory tower," an isolated, formidable structure constructed by the work of individual members, simultaneously 26 uniting those within and dividing them from those without" (Broadfoot et al., 2008, p. 325). This metaphor invokes larger discourses of socioeconomic class, race, and traditional patterns of academic production where professors need to be isolated from the rest of society. Giddens calls these larger discourses "structural properties" because they draw upon institutional patterns reproduced over space and time. Examples of structural properties that communication researchers have discussed include meritocracy and masculinity in everyday communication about workplace benefits (Kirby & Krone, 2002), and "Mayberry" and "Not in My Backyard" discourses in everyday communication about homeless youth (Harter et al., 2005). Thus, a productive aspect of the duality of structure is that it acknowledges both everyday talk (structures) and also larger social influences (structural properties) on the choices that people make. Giddens (1984) explains the duality of structure in more detail by arguing that there are three dimensions of structure: norms (legitimation), codes of meaning (signification), and the domination dimension of structure, what H.E. Canary (2010a) calls, "authoritative and allocative resources that coordinate human and material aspects of activity (p.29)." Banks and Riley (1993) explain that the dimensions capture relations among concrete present action and systemic modes of discourse, interrelating communication in the here and now to institutional level discourse. These three dimensions of structure connect to everyday interaction through modalities: Specifically, norms serve as the modality that facilitates the recursive relationship of action and the legitimation dimension of structure. Interpretative schemes facilitate connections between action and the structural dimension of signification. Finally, facility (involving authority and resource allocation) facilitates the structure-action relationship within the domination dimension. (H. E. Canary, 2010a, p. 30) 27 The concept of modalities is useful because they explain the forms of knowing that mediate between everyday interaction and structural properties of social systems (Banks & Riley, 1993). They are the "central dimensions of the duality of structure in interaction" (Giddens, 1979, p.81). Although Giddens (1984) explains these as distinct, he notes that they are only distinct for analytical purposes, and invoking such dimensions will suspend analysis in a particular space and time. In this study, in order to guide foundational understanding of an organization that worked toward campus-community partnership, I wanted to understand the structuration of the organization's activities in this particular space and time as they concluded their ten year strategic plan and were in the process of creating a new one. The focus on activities of organizational participants has both practical and theoretical significance. As a result of engaging with the organization on their interests, as I will explain further in the next chapter, the organization was interested in how participants were making sense of the work of UNP. In other words, when participants discussed what UNP was doing, what were the common activities that they discussed? This question could help the organization see commonalities among participants, understand what was working, and determine what they could work on in their next strategic planning cycle. In short, it could help the organization's members to understand their own activities, and their own communication better (McPhee & Zaug, 2001). Furthermore, drawing on Giddens, McPhee and Zaug (2001) argue that there are four "flows," or constitutive communication processes, that constitute organization. Researching how participants talk about their work can reveal evidence of such flows. The desire to understand how participants discuss the activities of UP directly relates to 28 the flow of activity coordination (McPhee & Zaug, 2001). In activity coordination, participants communicate about their manifest purposes and how they are working toward them, as opposed to formal structure that dictates what work should entail: For example, members can coordinate on how not to do work, or coordination may be in abeyance as members seek power over one another or external advantage for themselves from the system. Nonetheless, what seems inescapable is that members presume that they are working not just on related tasks but within a common social unit with an existence that goes beyond the work interdependence itself (McPhee & Zaug, 2001, p. 1). Therefore, a focus on how participants structure their activity also allows important insight to the constitution of organization, and important local understanding about the work of partnership. It also allows for an analysis of how such structures can be both enabling and constraining to organizational participants. In light of this, the first research question of this study is: RQ1(a): How do UP participants characterize the organization's activities? RQ1(b): What kinds of rules and resources do participants draw on, reproduce, and want to transform? In the next section, I continue an explanation of structuration theory, highlighting several concepts that assist in the understanding of partnership's concern with organizational change, and leading to my second research question. Agency and Power The second overarching concern of this study was a critical concern with how campus-community partnerships strategized how to overcome systemic barriers in higher education and create change. In this section, I discuss several features of structuration theory that inform a critical analysis, including a discussion of agency and power. Critical analyses are centrally concerned with power and resistance and the development 29 of alternative practices to address and challenge power imbalances (Mumby, 2008). Later in this chapter, I explain critical analysis further and review how critical scholars have used structuration theory, culminating in the argument that this study can augment that conversation. However, by way of introduction, I first explain two structuration concepts that are particularly interesting in a critical project, and in the context of campus-community partnership. These three concepts lead to my second and final research question. First, the notion of agency is central to a critical project using structuration theory. Giddens' development of the theory rose out of a dissatisfaction with functionalist determinism that marginalizes agency and postmodern voluntarism, which overemphasizes agency. Giddens (1979) instead desired a vision of agency as intervention into a potentially malleable world, related to praxis. He argued that humans are competent actors with "practical consciousness" who, if prompted, can nearly always identify their intentions, if not their inherent motivations (Giddens, 1984). Cohen (1989) noted that, "Social practices do not reproduce themselves, social agents do, and it must be borne in mind that from the standpoint of structuration theory social agents always are seen to retain the capability to act otherwise than they do" (p.45). This feature of structuration theory - to act otherwise and intervene in the world - opens the possibility for structures and systems to be transformed. For example, this possibility is commonly invoked when communication educators teach students that they can attempt to "interrupt" hegemonic communication patterns, acknowledging that students have agency and that there is an underlying structure to be interrupted. 30 Structures, however, can be difficult to interrupt. Through their repetition and history, they can become so sedimented that they seem natural and permanent. The structure of professors leading a class can feel incontrovertible or even indelible, causing significant barriers to change. I may think, "That's just the way universities are," instead of recognizing that, "That's just the way university structures have been reproduced throughout history to the point where I can't remember why." Furthermore, as I mentioned earlier, those naturalized structures serve to comfort many individuals and maintain power. Mumby (1987) writes that, "In the context of organizations, power is most successfully exercised by those who can structure their interests into the organizational framework itself" (p.119). This creates a situation where powerful interests are continually reproducing structures that serve them (Mumby, 1987). Indeed, because of this concretization of structure and resistance to change, Giddens (1984) has been generally criticized for being too optimistic about personal agency and ability to create change (Poole & McPhee, 2005). Conrad (1993) argued that he "excessively deemphasizes material and other constraints on human action" (p.199). However, Giddens (1984) acknowledged the possible constraints on personal choice in the form of material constraint, threats of punishment, and structural constraint due to minimal structural possibilities. For example, I may want to give all UP participants college credit for helping me with this study, but I may not have the resources to do that (material constraint), I could get in trouble with my department chair (threat of punishment), or perhaps there is not a way in the university system to allocate the credit to community members that are not enrolled (minimal structural possibilities). In other words, I may not have enough resources to create change. 31 Power in structuration theory is a relational process, and is instantiated in action through the duality of structure (Giddens, 1979). He writes, "… understood as transformative capacity, power is intrinsically related to human agency. The ‘could have done otherwise' of action is a necessary element of the theory of power" (p.92). He goes on to note that power is a transformative capacity because it involves the ability of an agent to gain compliance with others and create dependence (Giddens, 1979). Agents exercise power through the mobilization of resources, which are the media through which power is exercised and through which structures of domination are reproduced (Giddens, 1979). For example, the significant resources of faculty members at universities often exercise power over students and reproduce superior-subordinate relationships. However, students always maintain agency: Power within social systems which enjoy some continuity over time and space presumes regularized relations of autonomy and dependence between actors or collectivities in contexts of social interaction. But all forms of dependence offer some resources whereby those who are subordinate can influence the activities of their superiors. This is what I call the dialectic of control in social systems. (Giddens, 1984, p.16) In this study, the public university is positioned as an institution that has enjoyed continuity over space and time, creating relationships of autonomy and dependence. However, campus-community partnerships want to change such patterns, and bring the voices of traditionally subordinated stakeholders (i.e., community members) to bear in influencing the activities of superiors (i.e., administrators). In other words, partnerships are an interesting type of organizing that highlights the dialectic of control and focusing on contradictions offers a useful way to consider how power differences are negotiated. 32 Contradiction A final concept in structuration theory that facilitates a critical orientation is the notion of contradictions. Giddens (1979) defines structural contradiction as "an opposition or disjunction of structural principles of social systems, where those principles operate in terms of each other but at the same time contravene one another" (p.141, author's emphasis). Here, Giddens uses the example of private capital accumulation and public government, apropos in this research. H.E. Canary (2010a) explains structural contradiction and this simultaneous acceptance and rejection of structural principles in more specific terms regarding public policy: That is, individuals and organizations depend on regulations and controls provided by public policies, while at the same time these individuals and organizations reject being completely controlled by policy and strive for autonomy in how policies will be interpreted and implemented. (p.35) Here, Canary (2010a) points to the long enduring structural contradiction of control versus autonomy. This explanation of control versus autonomy in regard to public policy bears similarity to the work of campus-community partnership, which depends on a relationship with a campus, yet rejects being completely controlled by university structures and desires to have leverage in changing university structures. Giddens conceptualization of structural contradiction helps understand macro scale tensions such as public versus private and control versus autonomy. H. E. Canary (2010) extended the structurational view of contradictions in her development of Structurating Activity Theory (SAT). By pairing structuration with cultural-historical activity theory, Canary (2010) directed attention to more specific systemic contradictions that occur both within and between activity systems. In SAT, there are four types of contradictions. First, primary contradictions are similar to Giddens (1984) concept of 33 structural contradictions, and exist due to oppositional elements within system features (H.E. Canary, 2010b). H.E. Canary (2010b) gives the example of students in educational systems, because students simultaneously create revenue while also generating costs. Next, secondary contradictions occur when a new element is introduced in a system and causes tension between system elements to the extent where system elements and practices have to transform (H.E. Canary, 2010b). This type of contradiction could occur if departments introduced a requirement for a faculty member to teach one course on community based research (CBR) per year. While faculty may have already felt the need for this type of course, the new requirement would highlight latent tensions about CBR and require transformation of the system. Thus, in primary and secondary contradictions, tensions exist within a system, and can be managed, ignored, or resolved through some transformation of system elements. The next two types of contradictions introduce further complexity. Tertiary contradictions relate to completely different ways of viewing the object, or goal, of an activity system (H.E. Canary, 2010b). These type of contradictions cannot be resolved by status quo system resources and practices - they require transformation in order to be resolved (H.E. Canary, 2010b). For example, this type of contradiction could be seen in tenure processes, where university members often judge success as academic publication. If tenure requirements changed the definition of success to require the inclusion of community members in research, teaching, and service, then faculty activities would have to transform in order to resolve the contradiction. Faculty could not maintain the status quo without risking their jobs. 34 Finally, quaternary contradictions emerge between activity systems when one system's goals are hindered by another system's goals (H.E. Canary, 2010b). In other words, this type of contradiction emerges when systems interact. Quaternary contradictions abound in campus-community partnerships, such as when two systems like the UP community and the university attempt to come together and work together. While the goals of the two systems are often complementary, UP's expressed desire to address "systemic barriers" in higher education foreshadows significant contradictions between systems and system goals. One of the key features of contradiction in SAT is the assertion that, "Contradictions are generative mechanisms for the communicative construction of policy knowledge as individuals interact to resolve contradictions in the policy process" (H. E. Canary, 2010a, p. 36). However, contradictions can also stymie development and change in policy processes (H. E. Canary, 2010b). In this research, I examine how the frame of system contradictions may also extend to understanding how participants in campus-community partnerships experience and grapple with contradictions in their efforts. Furthermore, when faced with contradictions, how do partnership participants resolve contradictions to create a more favorable balance of power? This leads to my second and final research question: RQ2(a): What contradictions do UP participants encounter in their work? RQ2(b): How do participants plan to leverage power and resolve contradictions? While my research questions were informed by engagement and structuration theory, several other strands of inquiry informed this study. In the next section, I discuss the appropriation of structuration theory in organizational communication, with a focus on interpretive applications of the theory, particularly in studies of organizational change. 35 Then, I discuss critical applications and opportunities for critical extensions of the theory in cases such as educational institutions. Structuration and Traditions of Organizational Communication As mentioned in the introduction, communication features so prominently in structuration theory, Banks and Riley (1993) proposed it as a center point for organizational communication studies. Structuration research has a strong tradition in organizational communication beginning even before Banks and Riley's (1993) argument that it should be the ontology for our discipline's research. Structuration theory, as explained in the previous section, was an attempt to reconcile two conflicting conceptions of agency. Therefore, structurationist research cannot be faithfully applied to functionalist nor postmodern inquiry. For example, creating a survey instrument that identifies structures would reveal a fundamental misunderstanding of Giddens concept, because structure is never fixed, but is created and recreated through social practices. Postmodern inquiry would also be an inappropriate pairing with structuration theory because it eschews the idea that there are distinct structural foundations of organizational life (Ganesh, 2008). Therefore, structurationist inquiry in organizational communication is most aligned with interpretive and critical applications (Poole & McPhee, 2005). Several notable scholars have offered reviews of structurational inquiry in organizational communication (Banks & Riley, 1993; Poole & McPhee, 2005). In this review, I seek to highlight the strengths and opportunities of interpretive and critical appropriations of the theory. 36 Interpretive Applications of Structuration Theory in Organizational Communication Interpretive research programs using structuration have employed the theory to gain understanding and work toward description of a wide range of communicative phenomena such as identification processes (Scott, Corman, & Cheney, 1998), argumentation in groups (D.J. Canary, Brossman, & Seibold, 1987), attributes of formal structure (McPhee, 1985), and organizational culture (Riley, 1983; Witmer, 1997). Two major traditions of organizational communication inquiry taking an interpretive approach that are of particular interest to this study are decision making research and research on organizational change. Research using structuration theory examined decision making processes first in face to face encounters. Poole, Seibold and McPhee (1985) argued that group decision making was a structurational process. Instead of viewing decisions as being made based on the use of fixed rules and roles in a group, structuration inquiry suggested that a decision making process be seen as the choice, in every interaction, to reproduce the structure or change the process through a new communication choice. This line of inquiry includes empirical investigation of arguments in group decision making (D.J. Canary et al., 1987; Meyers & Brashers, 1998), group decision making on juries (Sunwolf & Seibold, 1998), and group decision making in the semi-conductor industry (Browning & Beyer, 1998). Another important strand of interpretive organizational communication research that is germane to this case study is research using structuration theory to explain organizational change efforts. In using the theory toward this purpose, it is important to understand how change efforts purposely attempted to change structures and systems. 37 While experimental research designs could look at whether or not a change happened, structuration research is more useful in explicating the change process through a focus on language choice. This strand is theoretically and practically compelling, as change processes can be complex and dynamic, and can create significant emotional and financial strains on organizational participants. Organizational communication scholars have investigated some large-scale change attempts to change the entire "story" of an organization. Sherblom, Keränen, and Withers (2002) offered an account of an "externally pressured, unplanned change" in the game warden system in Maine. These change efforts focused on a public relations overhaul, improving the image of game wardens and changing hiring practices so that they became a more ethnically and culturally diverse agency. They found on several levels - interagency, internal hierarchy, relationships with the public, and relationships of game wardens to each other - that there were related conflicts symptomatic of deeper institutional tensions over the change. The Sherblom et al. (2002) study recognized that structures that were historically sedimented required more attention. For example, the traditional view of a game warden was "a way of life" (Sherblom et al., 2002, p. 150): The more traditional wardens we observed know their territory and the people who live and recreate there. They are experts having a great deal of practical knowledge about the physical terrain and the lives of people in the area as well as about the wildlife. (Sherblom et al., 2002, p. 151) However, with the new changes in the game warden system, wardens were required to take on new responsibilities such as drug enforcement, and they went from being independent experts to part of a bureaucracy that they had little part in shaping. The authors found that the game wardens' rules had changed without changing resources such 38 as help or weapons, causing significant tension and unrest. Older, more experienced wardens began asking for assignments at isolated locations where the changes were slower to be implemented. Many wardens retired, and as a result the tension between the old and new warden system endured. The relevance of these findings to a study of university change is striking. Here too there are traditional views of the professoriate (Boyer, 1990), and partnership is also asking for radical changes from a historically sedimented and government related organization. However, by contrast, partnership works collaboratively to create change. Another study using structuration to investigate organizational change is Goodier and Eisenberg's (2006) account of a healthcare organization whose leaders decided to significantly change the organization to an "avowedly spiritual" organization. Leaders participated in an offsite workshop to learn how to effect this change, and then came back to the organization and implemented their top-down change. The authors focused on how organizational members came to tell a new story of work and create new spiritual structures (Goodier & Eisenberg, 2006). By changing communication patterns that shaped and framed their work, the leaders of the organization were largely successful in their change efforts (Goodier & Eisenberg, 2006). However, in their analysis, the authors voiced some concern about whether employees believed in the changes, or merely performed spirituality to please the leadership. This caveat draws attention to the fact that employees were not involved in strategizing the change; therefore, the researchers did not have complete trust in the change outcomes. Again, by contrast, this study offers an account of a collaborative process. Jian (2007) investigated planned top-down organizational change in an 39 international financial group, and found that employees felt shocked, betrayed, and thought they were treated unfairly. Employees needed to create their own new story of work and change their own working structures. However, this process was suppressed, avoided, or rejected by their supervisors. The author offered this recommendation: To facilitate system integration and manage tensions, senior managers should be able to create opportunities of employee participation in change initiation, attend to critical communication events by emphasizing dialogue and negotiation, and participate themselves in change implementation among local employee groups. Such two-way participation will foster shared interpretive schemes and transform tensions into constructive energy. (Jian, 2007, p. 25) In this quote, the author acknowledged the power of collaborative work to change structures and lead to constructive transformation. He highlighted participation, dialogue, negotiation, and shared schemes. In this study, change efforts of partnership participants may differ from forced compliance as in Jian's case. These studies offer a beginning, yet they all focus on change that was external or top-down and initiated by those who controlled significant resources. This dissertation project adds to the conversation by focusing on organizational change efforts that were based on a partnership model. In this study, change was a collaborative process, with ideas generated by lower levels in a hierarchy, and not mandated by external stakeholders or enforced by those in positions of organizational power. Furthermore, this study looked at change initiated by those without significant material resources and without the ability to force compliance. This focus will allow me to understand how those in lower power positions leverage, through social patterns and practices, different resources to gain power. Interpretive studies using structuration have created several important research programs such as the investigation of decision making and organizational change. 40 However, early interpretive research using structuration theory was criticized as having a shallow engagement with explanatory mechanisms, what Banks and Riley (1993) termed the "en passant problem" (p.179, author's emphasis). Communication scholars were challenged to use structuration as an ontology, and to create more contextual theories of communication (Banks & Riley, 1993). Several research programs have emerged in this attempt. One very popular attempt is DeSanctis and Poole's (DeSanctis & Poole, 1994; Poole & DeSanctis, 1990) Adaptive Structuration Theory (AST), which built on Giddens' (1984) work, and has made a significant disciplinary and interdisciplinary impact. AST offers insight into communicative processes in decision making practices in an increasingly virtual society. The goal of AST is to first conceptually separate structures built into technology and the structures found in human action, and then determine the interplay between both. For example, DeSanctis, Poole and Dickson (2000) studied how groups appropriated decision-making features of a technology into their human interactions. A drawback of AST research is that the level of analysis can be so detailed that macro level societal forces that are such a key component of Giddens' theory are sometimes shortchanged. Several other attempts to solve the en passant problem have been to pair structuration with another mid-level theoretical construct in order to arrive at more specificity. For example, Norton's (2007) work on public participation blends structuration with environmental public participation theorizing in order to build a mid-theoretical terrain. In addition, H.E. Canary's interpretive work on the structuration of policy (H. E. Canary, 2010a; H. E. Canary & McPhee, 2009) pairs structuration with cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT) in order to create structurating activity theory 41 (SAT). This combination overcomes the critique that structuration does not adequately consider the ways that resources influence system actions and transformations (H.E. Canary, 2010). As discussed earlier, this project extends SAT's concept of contradictions as generative mechanisms foreshadowing organizational change. This project seeks interpretive understanding in its first research question, but also has a critical orientation, as explicated in the second research question. In the next section, I discuss why taking a critical approach will extend work on structuration in organizational communication inquiry. Critical Applications of Structuration Theory in Organizational Communication While most structuration studies in organizational communication have taken an interpretive approach, a few studies have illustrated the theory's critical possibilities (Harter et al., 2005; Kirby & Krone, 2002; D.K. Mumby, 1993). Poole and McPhee (2005) argue that, "Although we agree that more recent developments in Giddens's ST pay too little attention to inequities and dominance, the original foundations of ST provide a good framework for critical inquiry" (p.192). Deetz (2005) offers this summary of critical inquiry: Fundamentally, critical work encourages the exploration of alternative communication practices that allow greater democracy and more creative and productive cooperation among stakeholders through reconsidering organizational governance and decision-making processes. (p. 85) As I have outlined in the concepts of agency, power, and structural contradictions, structuration is well equipped to guide a critical analysis. Also central to critical inquiry is the critique of domination and how people actively participate in their own subjugation 42 (Deetz, 2005). Domination is not irresistible, and dominant ideologies can be defied (Harter et al., 2005). Despite its potential, only a few studies have investigated the value of critical applications of structuration theory. The abundance of interpretive accounts using structuration has created the impression among some critical and postmodern critics that the theory is too politically moderate (Corman, 2008). Corman (2008) argues: Giddens is a bona fide critical theorist. His books published prior to The Constitution of Society show that his perspective is more than adequately equipped for pursuing a critical agenda. At the same time he maintains that agents (to a greater or lesser extent, based on circumstances) have the power to act in ways other than that dictated by structure, and that even deeply sedimented structures are changeable through the accumulation of small actions, the influence of unintended consequences of action, and so on, casting doubt on the criticism that structuration is too conservative. Therefore, it is important to locate the large accumulation of interpretive approaches on a spectrum of possibility, and continue to expand the spectrum to critical applications. This study adds to critical applications of structuration theory and takes advantage of useful theoretical concepts that dissect power imbalances. Practically, neglect of the critical dimensions of the theory is significant because current interpretive research such as network applications of structuration and AST (DeSanctis & Poole, 1994), has offered immense practical benefit for management - making technology more efficient and profitable, creating powerful software products, and offering important public relations tools. In the critical spirit, the theory's power should also be leveraged by the traditionally underrepresented and under resourced groups in our society to make change. There are a few notable examples of critical inquiry using structuration. Riley's (1983) study of political culture was one of the first to introduce structuration to organizational communication inquiry and take a critical perspective. However, the 43 study, while investigating office politics, and commenting on sexist structural properties, does not discuss alternative strategies for creating change. Another early appropriation of the theory is Mumby's (1987) account of narratives as symbolic forms that express organizational ideology and power. This account is another important step in critical theorizing, but because of its lack of applied empirical work, it also does not highlight structurational processes or suggest strategies for transformation. Two more recent organizational communication studies offer important critical applications of structuration that inform this study. One example is Harter, Berquist, Titsworth, Novak, and Brokaw's (2005) investigation of how homelessness is structured through discourses of invisibility. In their study, community members argued that homelessness was not a problem in their neighborhoods, and therefore they did not need shelters built there. This tendency to deny the problem through "not in my backyard," or NIMBY, structures served to erase homeless youth from the conversation (Harter et al., 2005). On the other hand, homeless youth identified themselves as having "street smarts" (or resources) for escaping arrest and punishment, and took pride in these abilities (Harter et al., 2005). However, their street smarts kept them hidden, and therefore community members were able to continue to repeat NIMBY structures and deny they existed. The authors characterize this situation: "Through discursive defenses of space, communities at best make invisible (thus avoiding discussion of) homelessness and at worst embrace symbols of domination and exclusion" (Harter et al., 2005, p. 323). To work toward transformation in their study, several nonprofits working in the area identified rhetorical impediments to transformation and actively strategized how to discursively interrupt structured patterns of invisibility (Harter et al., 2005). Their 44 change attempts involved changing the conversations about homelessness to include counter-narratives of homeless life and recognition of street smarts as a source of knowledge that could benefit school systems. Furthermore, nonprofits attempted to change the conversations by exposing the privilege of domiciled community members, and exposing NIMBY discourse as unethical and political, which they hoped would elicit guilt from those who perpetuated such patterns (Harter et al., 2005). This study has interesting parallels to partnership, because of the significant power imbalances that were addressed. Furthermore, much like homeless advocates valorize "street smarts," partnerships also valorize what could be seen as "community smarts," and see community members as possessing and creating knowledge. Another study that bears a critical orientation towards structuration theory is Kirby and Krone's (2002) research that focused on the practice of employees taking family leave. They found that although an organization created a policy of allowing employees to take family leave, few actually used the benefit because of communicative structures in the organization that served to shame or blame others for creating more work for those left behind. In particular, they examined how family leave was not seen as a legitimate choice for many men. The authors shared quotes such as "Someone wanted paternity leave, and everybody laughed. I mean, they thought that was funny," and "I wanted to take two weeks [of paternity leave] and the supervisor was saying, "No, I don't think, you know, that's probably not a very good idea" (Kirby & Krone, 2002, p. 50). Although there was a formal policy that men could take paternity leave, these quotes show how, through interpersonal exchanges, coworkers structured this leave as a joke or as an inconvenience. These ways of structuring the leave then created an informal sense 45 of ridicule and shame for those who decided to take paternity leave. Kirby and Krone's (2002) research demonstrates how documents that were created in top-down efforts (such as employee handbooks and mandates) subsequently took on a life of their own. It also shows the unique power of co-workers, who may or may not have significant resources but instead employ concertive control and leverage their resources to control others. In addition, the authors provide insight to societal discourses in the United States surrounding masculinity that trickle down into the workplace and effect benefit utilization (Kirby & Krone, 2002). This research about family leave is a powerful example that suggests that if employees do not participate in creating new policies, they may use their authoritative resources to resist such change, even when the effort was meant to be socially just. The current study can add to this critical scholarship while focusing on a university system. Giddens is particularly interested in "total institutions" (Goffman, 1957) or those that have significant power and very sedimented and naturalized structures, such as schools. The public university context of this research is critically important and theoretically appealing. Although he admits that schools are not institutions of punishment and control like prisons, they should be carefully analyzed because they similarly delimit space and time arrangements (Giddens, 1984). This again begs the question as to the ideological purpose and function of those arrangements. In writing about the corporate colonization of democratic processes such as education, Deetz (1992) similarly argued, "The point is not to end education, but to more clearly understand on whose behalf it is carried out" (p. 28). School contexts are generally important to the field of organizational communication, yet underrepresented in the literature. Ashcraft 46 and Allen (2009) write that organizational communication scholars may have inadvertently surrendered the study of educational contexts to instructional communication scholars, and it is time we reclaim those opportunities. Structuration theory offers an opportunity to understand and critique these important organizational constructs. As previously discussed, public universities have been criticized for blurring the public and the corporate, and their democratic functions are under question (Deetz, 1992). Although the "ivory tower" is a metaphor, universities are often geographically separate, and the location of a university is an important consideration that has an impact on resources. Those living near a university can access its classes and programs much faster and more easily (requiring fewer resources) than those living far away. Once students attend a university, they are often expected to conform to university agendas of class times, and will often be expected to sit in particular arrangements in classrooms. On a typical first day, students receive a syllabus that plots the entire course of their semester. Instructors and administrators make these location, time, and planning decisions for students, frequently without their collaboration. Critical pedagogy scholars often criticize these practices as undemocratic (Dewey, 1997; Giroux, 1988; Shor & Freire, 1987). Like critical pedagogy, campus-community partnerships want to change how schools delimit time and space and operate according to sedimented rules and systems, and create a more egalitarian institution. However, this can create anxiety for those who are already comfortable with the status quo. For example, when a class is connected to community projects or research, rules and systems are interrupted and can disrupt ontological security. This happens in several ways: students and teachers leave 47 classrooms, they partner with and reciprocally learn from community members, they are physically active and not passive in class, their schedules are flexible, and unintended incidents and consequences abound. There are challenges and benefits to this process - partnership participants can feel nervous and unprepared and frustrated at a lack of predictability. However, the process can prepare students for future encounters with change, and teach them transformative tools to enact changes to university and community systems. When teaching, research, and service move toward a partnership model, and partnership patterns become a part of a department culture, new structures can emerge in an institution that some argue is overly rigid and sedimented (Boyer, 1990; Dewey, 1997). To understand this attempt at transformation, there are several interrelated questions: What structures need to be interrupted to accomplish change? What structures reproduce traditional patterns of inequity? How can a university system advocate for embracing "community," and yet reproduce traditional ways of work that perpetuate the notion of an "ivory tower"? The university/community divide is often perpetuated, with "community" seen as outside the borders of our campuses (Dempsey, 2009). Structuration theory can provide an important way to understand how such discourses are sustained through multileveled analysis. Conclusion In this review, I outlined the major postulates of structuration theory and their current employ in organizational communication literature. I presented the core concepts of the theory, along with several concepts that make it a useful choice for the deconstruction of power. I argued that the bulk of work in organizational communication 48 employs structuration in an interpretive manner while the present study is organized in alignment with both interpretive and critical goals. Furthermore, investigating change efforts that are collaborative can help understand more options than top-down planned change. Finally, educational institutions are important and complex sites of power negotiations, and this research can lead to important transformations in public university systems. In the next chapter, I explain the methodology for this study, and revisit this study's three central research questions. CHAPTER THREE METHODS This chapter provides an in-depth explanation of the methods used in this research. I begin the first section by discussing the guiding approach of case study. Next, I discuss the critical perspective of this case study, and explain how I brought principles of engaged communication research to bear on the project. In this multiperspectival blend, I position myself as an engaged advisor, and explain this positioning and how it adds to my research. Then, I introduce the case in detail, and provide an explanation of the multiple methods I used to gather the data. Finally, I discuss my techniques for analyzing the data. This chapter follows my own process of discovery, since the research questions that guide this study were co-created with UPartner (UP). Their concerns required a general understanding of the organization's activities and strategies, as well as specific understandings of particular communicative processes. After we determined the critical concerns of the study, I decided that structuration theory would be a useful lens, which was agreeable to the organization, and fulfilled the purpose of adding to my discipline's theoretical concerns (as discussed in Chapter Two). To show this process of discovery throughout the chapter, I explain the genesis of each question and how it was co-created through conversations with UP. I weave the two questions together, and explain both as I 50 progress through the chapter. Case Study Approach The overall approach to this research was to consider UP as a case study. While they were interested in theoretical knowledge, UP staff also desired practical outcomes from this research. In searching for a good approach to solving both theoretical and practical organizational problems, case studies have a long history in disciplines oriented toward theory/practice questions: business, education, nursing, and social work among others. Authors most frequently cited on case study research are in education (Merriam, 1988; Stake, 2008), organizational studies (Eisenhardt, 1989), and professional consulting (Yin, 2008). In all of these fields, there is a need for research outcomes to be practically useful as well as theoretically rich, and case study approaches have been proven to be successful in delivering such results. In organizational communication, case studies are often touted as an excellent way to apply theoretical knowledge to practice (Goodall, 1994; May, 2006). Authors define case studies in different ways, depending on their field and the particular aims of study. Stake (1995) defined case study as a choice of what is to be studied, or "the study of the particularity and complexity of a single case, coming to understand its activity within important circumstances" (p.xi). Merriam (1988) defined a case study as a research design used to systemically study a phenomenon. Eisenhardt (1989) writes that case study is a research strategy used to understand the dynamics present within one single setting. Finally, Yin (2008) is one of the few authors to consider case study as scientific, and defines case study as an empirical inquiry that is in-depth, real life, and binds a particular case to its context. Simons (2009) summarized this 51 debate: "In the literature on case study, different authors refer to case study as a method, a strategy, an approach, and not always consistently" (p.3). Despite this range of conflicting definitions, they have several commonalities that apply to my research and made the approach the best choice. First, case studies explicitly acknowledge that drawing research boundaries is difficult. A case study researcher is acutely aware that boundaries are fictive and socially constructed, and can be contracted and expanded as needed. Hepp (2008) argued that, "Rather the "case" builds a kind of center for describing further contextualizing forces, which themselves take part in articulating the case." Imagine using a website such as Google maps. Although you bind your search to one location, the tool allows you to look at that location from street level to global level. This is also possible in case studies - a case can be bound to a particular person, program, or organization, and then the author can add details that allow the reader to apprehend several levels of understanding and get a more holistic picture. This holistic quality of case study makes it an appropriate choice for apprehending an organization through structuration theory. The organization can be the site of origin, and as a researcher, I can look at both interpersonal level discourse and societal level discourse in my "zooming" functions. Organizational communication scholars negotiate seeing an organization as a "container," and yet also resisting containment. There are benefits to both views: acknowledging how an organization may be contained; yet also understanding how an organization resists containment. A case study approach allowed me to consider the benefits of both perceptions. Case studies are well suited to answer complex research questions, questions that implicate several levels of understanding such as my concern with systemic change. 52 Marshall and Rossman (2006) explain that case study is especially appropriate to use in research that examines society and culture and focuses its inquiry on groups or organizations. In education, the use of case studies developed as a way to understand curriculum innovation and evaluation in complex environments, a process that was not easy to apprehend with experimental variable analytic research (Simons, 2009). The work of campus-community partnership can be seen as echoing the work of curriculum innovation and taking it even further to departmental and organizational innovation. In organizational communication, case study can improve analytical and critical thinking around complex challenges (May, 2006). This ability to illuminate complex issues is an excellent fit for structuration theory, a complex theory that implicates several levels of understanding; UP is a complex organization, implicating several levels of hierarchy. Finally, case studies necessitate the use of multiple method combinations, and can include both qualitative and quantitative choices (Stake, 2008). There is no fixed way to methodologically approach a case study - the case study is flexible, open to co-creation, and subject to change, much like the work of partnership. This use of multiple methods allows for a deeper investigation of context and situation, an advantage given my particular research questions involving change attempts. To fully appreciate change attempts, it was important for me to employ a variety of strategies - interviewing participants, attending important events and board meetings, and reading organizational literature to get the best sense of the organization's structures and strategies. Furthermore, a case study with multiple methods allowed me to engage with participants over the course of an academic year, as I detail later in this chapter, and this longitudinal nature of case study complemented my inquiry into structuration processes. 53 Much like the choices of methodologies in a case study are flexible so is the choice of conceptual approach. Case studies can be social scientific, interpretive, critical, postmodern - they can be adapted to many different (and sometimes competing) perspectives. In the next section, I discuss how case study evolved from interpretive traditions, and several interpretive qualities of case study approaches are also seen in critical perspectives. Furthermore, I see this research as a critical case study that is informed by engaged communication research, and I situate myself as an engaged advisor. In the next sections, I explain this movement from interpretive to critical to engaged advising in more detail. The Interpretive Roots of Case Study Case study is rooted in naturalistic/interpretivist traditions that maintain that reality is best understood through careful attention and thick description using several qualitative methods (Merriam, 1988; Simons, 2009; Stake, 1995, 2008). In interpretivist case study traditions, the researcher's observations are partial and subjective, not meant to create a model for prediction or control. The overall goal of such inquiry is for the researcher to develop a thorough understanding of their subject of study. In terms of evaluation, the case study report should be able to recreate a situation that the readers can compare to their own experiences, often referred to as "transferability" (Stake, 2008). The goal of transferability is not to be confused with generalizability, whereas transferable knowledge can guide understanding of other cases, it does not claim to be a general argument for transformation or intervention (Stake, 2008). Because of its concern with thick description and understanding, interpretive work can provide a foundation from which to develop initial definitions of terms. For 54 example, my first research question about how the activities of UP are structured is largely interpretive. Campus-community partnerships in higher education are a relatively new way of organizing, and there is not a significant body of literature on the subject. Therefore, in this study, I add to the development of some initial definitions of the term. In other words, I do some foundational interpretive work such as understanding how participants described their activities and the concept of partnership. Hawes (1977) argued that communication scholars need foundational interpretive work in order to build strong theories and avoid unnecessary confusion. Although interpretive work aims for thick description, there is also an explicit acknowledgement that the description provided is both partial and subjective. Interpretive research outcomes are often referred to as metaphorical "quilts" or "crystals" or "bricolage," what Denzin and Lincoln (2008) explain as "a pieced-together set of representations that is fitted to the specifics of a complex situation" (p.4). For example, in trying to fully understand partnership, I used a variety of methods to understand everything I could about the situation. But, I acknowledge that there could be no way to know everything about the situation (I cannot be everywhere at once, perhaps information is being withheld, etc.). This report will be subjective because I chose what to pay attention to; a different researcher could have asked different questions or had unique observations. Again, the goal of an interpretive project is to create a thorough description in order to understand. The researcher does not offer advice in their report of what has been seen and heard in detail. Because interpretive research seeks to understand and not advise, it allows the reader to make his or her own conclusions and choices. It attempts to avoid any political 55 affiliation, and is therefore perceived as a less biased form of qualitative inquiry. Stake (1995) considers interpretive case study as "non-interventive and empathic" (p.12). This empathy occurs if someone found a case study to be resonant with another case, again referred to as having "transferable" value. For instance, in reading about my understanding of UP, the reader may realize that UP is similar to their university's campus-community partnerships, and take steps to change, but in their own ways. In the next section, I argue that these tenets of interpretive research apply to my research, and I extended them to a critical perspective as an engaged advisor. Critical Viewpoints Interpretive research seeks to provide foundational, descriptive understanding from which to develop robust theories. This type of research has undeniable value that extends to the critical perspective and enhances its goals. In this section, I describe how I envisioned this case as a "critical case study" that echoes interpretive research in its thick description and understanding, but argues that there is a dominant reality and power imbalances that warrant critique. A critical perspective takes an active stance about organizational change (Deetz, 2005). Finally, I explain how recent conversations about engaged organizational communication research shaped what I envision as a new conceptualization of engaged advisor. Table 1 provides a comparative basis for my argument: Table 1 Comparison of Interpretive, Critical, and Engaged Advisor Methodological Perspectives 56 Perspective Interpretive Critical Engaged Advisor Research Purpose Description Emancipation Descriptive Advice Nature of reality Multiple realities Dominant reality, power imbalance Dominant reality, power imbalance Role of researcher Empathic Activist Collaborator Like interpretive case studies, critical perspectives also seek to fully understand and describe reality. However, this purpose is subordinate to the greater goal of emancipation. Instead of the multiple realities that are the hallmark of interpretive perspectives, critical researchers argue that there is a dominant material reality, and that it is oppressive and conflictual (Marshall & Rossman, 2006). Critical researchers are concerned with human beings and how they can transcend the constraints of an unequal society, which can be conceptualized in terms of class, race, gender, or other organizing forces (Creswell, 2009). For example, my introductory chapter introduced what I consider to be a problem: that market interests are dominating public universities to the detriment of community interests. This situation exists because market interests have a great deal of money and power in the United States. The purpose of description in critical research becomes a tool for emancipation, targeting this inequality and seeking to dissolve disempowering constraints. In this case, empowering community members to put greater pressure on public universities to make communities better places rather than make corporations wealthier. The critical perspective has a strong tradition in the field of organizational communication, as I reviewed in the previous chapter. In critical organizational communication studies, Mumby (1997) argued that organizations are, "principal sites of meaning and identity formation where relations of autonomy and dependence, power and 57 resistance, are continuously negotiated amongst competing interest groups (p.345)." Therefore, in terms of methodology, how social institutions transform to overcome the historical problems of domination is of key concern (Cresswell, 2009). This matches the concern of my research on several levels - the exploration of the structuration of partnership as well as the exploration of how partnership participants imagine new discursive patterns and practices that would change the public university system into a more participatory organization. Therefore, while the first research question of this study concerning how participants structure the activities of UP is largely interpretive, it leads to and relates with the second research questions and the overall critical concern of this study, which is how an organization that has a minority role and few resources in a public university seeks to create systemic change through the communicative practices and resources of its participants. Campus-community partnerships involve under-resourced groups working to have a greater stake in how a public university is structured. A critical perspective is most useful because partnership work is a critical project - it explicitly seeks to change the dominant system to be more participatory and socially just.1 And, UP participants and staff desired for me to take a critical perspective in this research. In several conversations at staff meetings and throughout the interviewing for this project, UP participants were very interested in dissecting power imbalances between the university and its surrounding communities. 1 The director of UP endorses critical race theory, which is centrally concerned with power imbalances and race. A review of critical race theory is beyond the scope of this project. I did not choose to use a critical race perspective in the current project nor a critical whiteness perspective. However, I believe that my critical perspective is compatible with such projects, and because my central concern was with organizational structure, a structuration lens was valuable. 58 Taking a critical perspective means that the researcher becomes an activist. As mentioned earlier, interpretive research is avowedly partial and subjective, and acknowledges that there are multiple realities, which allows the researcher to remain empathic yet detached (Stake, 2005). Because critical researchers believe in a material reality that is fundamentally imbalanced, their accounts are still partial and subjective, but their conclusions need to work toward creating a better balance. Critical researchers take a stance about what needs to change, and ideally take on an activist role to help change happen (Frey & Carragee, 2007). In this study, a critical researcher would intervene to offer tools to improve the work of UP and help them succeed in creating change. I would seek to empower the reader and promote transformation. Critical research hopes for reform, and believes it is possible (Deetz, 2005). However, although this research does take a critical perspective, through my experiences with UP, I offer the new perspective of engaged advisor. This perspective emerged from a desire for this project to blend a critical perspective with UP's brand of "partnership," as well as answer recent calls in organizational communication for engaged communication research. Deetz (2008) wrote that, "Engaged scholarship announces our willingness to be in the world rather than about the world" (p.290) and argued that scholars should pursue engaged research in order to develop new and better ways to discuss and respond to current problems. He observed that the discipline of Communication is using an "impoverished language" that results from lack of research that is truly connected to communities (Deetz, 2008). Inspired by conferences held in Aspen, Colorado, a group of communication scholars have pursued this scholarship of engagement, a unique brand of community-based research. In the next 59 section, I discuss how engaged scholarship informs the present project. Engaged Communication Research and Engaged Advising The concern with engaged research is not new nor is it particular to organizational communication. However, in 2002, scholars in our field started to pay closer attention to issues of engagement. Two important turning points that year were the first Aspen Conference on Engaging Communication in Practice and the publication of a special journal issue of Management Communication Quarterly (MCQ), a journal Krone (2005) calls one of organizational communication's "big four." The conference in Aspen was convened with the purpose of determining whether or not the work being done in organizational communication was meaningful to practitioners. MCQ focused on translating organizational communication research into practice, and by way of responding to this theme, Cheney, Wilhelmsson and Zorn (2002) advocated for engaged scholarship: moving beyond the idea of taking current work and adapting it for practice (a translation) to creating research with practitioners (an engagement). The year 2008 marked another turning point of another special issue of Journal of Applied Communication Research wherein Barge and Schockley-Zalabak (2008) characterized engaged scholarship as addressing a knowledge production problem versus a knowledge translation problem: by producing knowledge in tandem with practitioners and communities, scholars result in theoretical advances that are more robust and publications that are more practically meaningful. There is some debate over whether or not engaged scholarship is more ontological (Stohl, 2005), strategic (Cheney et al., 2002), or methodological (Barge & Shockley- Zalabak, 2008; Simpson & Seibold, 2008). However, in all these iterations, there are 60 three common features of engaged organizational communication scholarship. First, they all advocate for academics studying large, important social issues. Campus-community partnership seeks to infuse community involvement in research, teaching, and service because many communities are underrepresented at the university in the student body, faculty, and administration. Engaged researchers choose research topics as citizens in a larger society with a communal responsibility, seeking issues that are directly tied to large and practical social problems. This means that neither egocentric interests ("study what you love") nor corporate interests ("study what gets funded") guide research agendas, but rather larger community concerns guide which questions need to be answered. A second line of commonality in engagement is the need to stress researcher reflexivity. For example, Barge and Shockley-Zalabak (2008) explain that researchers need to be reflective about their assumptions. This is a hallmark of most qualitative inquiry, but particularly important when considering large social issues. The concern with being reflexive in engaged work means recognizing and interrogating how the researcher also contributes to and reproduces social problems. For example, in looking at detrimental power imbalances in a university system and arguing for partnership, it is important for me to recognize how I have benefitted from a lack of partnership, and from experiences where, as a White woman raised in a middle class family, I have felt comfortable in educational settings surrounded by people who have been similar to me. Finally, the third common feature of engaged research is that practitioners must be included in the development and design of the research. Simpson and Seibold (2008) want researchers to even execute the research together with practitioners. This creates a 61 different relationship between researchers and researched. Even though a researcher makes a choice to take a critical perspective, they could still remain detached from the organization with which they were working. A critical researcher's view could be didactic and even ma/paternalistic. In contrast, Seibold (2005) fashions engagement as an immersive process of working with and learning with stakeholders to mutually shape theory and consider reformulations. Engaged communication scholarship offers significant benefits. Barge and Shockley-Zalabak (2008) wrote: When we engage practitioners in our theory and research, we are more likely to ask and address important questions that are of interest to them and develop more robust analyses and theories that will have greater relevance and practical import to the public. (p.253) Deetz (2008) argued that engaged scholarship is co-generative theorizing, theorizing together in the spirit of generating and creating socially responsive knowledge. The result is a "recursive bridge" between the academy and practitioners, and ethically responsive research results (Simpson & Seibold, 2008). However, because of its lofty goals, engaged communication scholarship is not simple nor is it done quickly. All engaged work is aspirational, so like any other project, this one encountered some constraints that made thorough engagement difficult. In terms of the three commonalities of engagement that I discussed, I chose a practical social issue. Later in this chapter, I am also self-reflexive about my own privileges of race, class, and educational experiences, and I discuss how I involved the participants in the development and design of the research. However, instead of theorizing together with participants, I chose a theory that was common to my discipline. UP participants did not object to this theory, but I also did not involve them in the theorizing I did as a result of the study. And, 62 although I met regularly with the organization and felt confident about the research, the dissertation "rules" created disengagement - I needed to be the sole author, personally do most of the research, and I will most likely leave this community for a job soon after it is done. Therefore, because I cannot meet all the best practices of engaged research, but I blended some key elements into a critical study, I view my perspective as that of an engaged advisor which I define as a an approach to engaged communication scholarship where the researcher chooses large social issues, and works collaboratively with community stakeholders and practitioners in order to understand and critique detrimental power imbalances. An engaged advisor aims for thick description and understanding, yet also offers what I call "descriptive advice." "Descriptive advice" is advice from the researcher that offers suggestions to their collaborators for transforming power imbalances. This advice can draw upon previous theoretical work or approaches such as grounded theory or grounded practical theory (Craig & Tracy, 1995; Glaser & Strauss, 1967). The most notable feature of "descriptive advice" is that the advice is solicited from collaborators. Descriptive advice should be seen in contrast to unsolicited advice, wherein a critical scholar chooses an issue to study and offers recommendations to practitioners without being asked. For example, in a research project I worked with Veterans Upward Bound and had a difficult time getting the director to allow me to study them. As a result, when I went to offer my opinions to her, she was quite uninterested in my advice, and also defensive. I recognized that she considered my advice unsolicited, and it was perceived as an attac