This document summarizes Stanley Deetz's critical theory approach to organizations. It discusses how organizations can ensure financial health while also increasing diverse human interests. It views organizations as both financial and political institutions and examines how communication practices can distort decision-making. It also discusses how corporate language exercises discursive control and excludes more than it includes, focusing on constituting reality rather than reflecting it. Finally, it outlines four approaches to decision-making - strategy, consent, involvement, and participation - analyzing how each includes or excludes voices in the process.

1. Critical Theory Approach to Organizations Of Stanley Deetz

2. Basic Approach Explore ways to ensure financial health of institutions while also increasing the representation of diverse human interests Regard institutions as political as well as financial institutions Show how communication practices often distort decision-making within institutions

3. Corporate colonization of everyday life Intrusive presence of big corporations Concentration of power in few corporate hands Media preoccupation with corporate health as against other indices of social health Decrease in quality of life

4. Information versus Communication Information is really in formation, constitutive of reality more than it is reflective of reality Corporate information is really political process Focusing on language leads us to consider how meanings are created and WHOSE meanings are embedded in the use of language Language is not neutral, it is political Corporate language is discursive control, it excludes more than it includes

5. 4 Approaches to decision-making: (1) STRATEGY Values control above all else Eliminates employee voices Prizes managerial over stockholder control Money/bottom line thinking dominates, but sometimes dominates at the service of managerial control Fear of public conflict

6. 4 Approaches: (2) CONSENT Corporations demand the overriding loyalty of employees or their consent Consent is secured through managerial control of workplace language, information, forms, symbols, rituals and stories

7. 4 Approaches: (3) INVOLVEMENT Involvement includes suggestion boxes, employee consultation, corporate democracy But real democracy requires an open forum of free expression for all those affected by decisions, and some participation in the final decisions. The right to expression is good, but the right to be informed and to have an effect is just as important.

8. 4 Approaches (4): PARTICIPATION joint, open decisions in the workplace - stakeholder democracy involving investors, workers, suppliers, host communities, and greater society and world community