Dispositional reflections

Abstract

In this dissertation, I explicate how scholars implicate themselves in the subfield of organizational communication studies by engaging in antinomic language-games which make the conduct of research (and textwork in particular) possible. My analysis suggests that the studied scholars enact these games to understand a more or less common object of knowledge, but also to constitute a more or less identifiable position in this given social space. Reflection on the ontological complicity between these position and subfield occurs uncommonly, however. I illustrate, in turn, that this lack of reflexivity hinders discussion about the way academic research practices induce breaks with the social realities which these scholars are trying to understand. In light of this argument, and based predominantly on a translation and extension of Pierre Bourdieu’s ideas, this dissertation thus illustrates how the language-games of scholars in organizational communication studies sustain a limited practice of reflexivity and considers its effects on their production of knowledge.