A Study in Communication

2010 marked an important start for UNP as they embarked on a new strategic planning cycle for the organization. I am a doctoral student from the discipline of Communication Studies, and study Organizational Communication, therefore it was an excellent opportunity for research about organizational structure and change. From a communication studies perspective, how people talk about their work has a significant relationship to how they act. For example, if you talk about the UNP office as welcoming, then you will enjoy visiting the UNP staff there. If students talk about the university as an exciting place to be, they will want to attend.

At the staff retreat, we discussed ideas for how my perspective could help benefit UNP, and our conversations resulted in a threefold frame for studying communication: 1) How do UNP participants talk about the organization? 2) In particular, how do they talk about partnership? and 3) How will UNP participants talk differently in order to change the university system?

Over the past year, it has been fascinating to interview 25 participants and attend all the advisory board meetings of the 2010-2011 academic year. I also attended several UNP events, and gathered historical data about the organization. From all of my transcripts and data, I returned to the three questions, and am currently in the midst of completing my analysis.

In order to give you an example of some of my findings, there are three important ways that UNP participants talk about partnership: reciprocity, sustainability, and difficulty. In terms of reciprocity, participants talked about ideal forms of reciprocity, relational reciprocity and qualified reciprocity, where they talked about how it was important to make sure that everyone in a partnership was benefitting. For example, one participant said that partnership is, “defined by the reciprocity, not by one group or the other group defining the roles of the partner.”

Talking about partnership as sustainability involved discussions about creating partnerships that will last for a long time because they are integral to the community. For example, for one participant, sustainability meant that, “you are coming together around a common goal and you are dedicated, long term, to communicating and working together about how you can build off of each other’s skills and resources to achieve that goal.”

Finally, participants talked about how partnership was difficult because it often changed, and often led to difficult conversations about topics such as race, privilege, and skepticism about the university. One quote about difficult conversations in partnership was, “When everybody first comes to the table, they have the idea that I want this, I need this, and that needs to take a shift and change into we need this. We want this. Only then will it be a partnership.”

These three themes about partnership are only a brief representation of all of the rich data from UNP participants that will be included in the dissertation. Overall, it has been inspiring to work with the organization and all of its many intelligent and thoughtful members who are working to create successful partnerships and to create an inspiring university that is deeply connected to its communities