Abstract

This paper looks critically at the condition of small group research and pedagogy. Both show
organizational scholars beholden to industry's small group interests. Small group writings and research focus nearly exclusively on decision-making skills and other task outcomes. We rarely find any attention and discussion to how organizations are increasingly using groups and teams to attain superior forms of order and control. I argue that our deep fixation with industry's small group interests masks the liberatory and emancipatory potentiality of small groups. I offer the beginnings of new direction for small group research that is committed to tapping this potentiality. To this end, I briefly discuss four propositions that attend to this emergent direction.

What we need, in short, is a whole new mentality for thehuman and social studies, one
which is both technically and morally adequate to the task. Will it come? The range and
the depth of the vested interests in the presentmentality suggest to me that, if it comes at
all, it willcome very, very slowly. Still, every journey starts with but one step.
(Thayer, 1983, p.91)

Organizations are increasingly using groups to attain superior forms of order and control so as to maximize productivity and profitability. Barker (1993) gives us compelling descriptions of an organization using groups to exercise higher levels of domination and exploitation. Stohl and Sotirin (1989) also give us an interesting account of an organization using groups to attain higher levels of concertive control so as to limit number of absences among employees. Indeed, what makes groups good platforms of order and control is the fact that the control is concertive and unobtrusive(Tompkins & Cheney, 1995). It mostly 'comes from the authority and power teammates exercise on each other as peer managers' (Barker, 1993, p. 432). Further 'Team members are relatively unaware of how the system they created actually controls their actions' (Barker, 1993, p. 433). The control thus appears as
natural and organic rather than unnatural and contrived.

Organizations profess that groups simply give workers and employees the greatest amount of creative control over the production process. Groups supposedly allow for the full maximizing of our creative potentiality. The end of many layers of supervisory and managerial positions is seen as a manifestation of the organization's intent to treat workers and employees as human beings. The move to a group approach to organizing is often packaged by organizations as progress, a new organizational civility, a new moral contract between labor and capital.

Industry's view of groups pervades much of the writings on small groups and teams. I can find no textbook that looks critically at how organizations are increasingly using groups to attain superior levels of domination and exploitation. In fact, as regards to research on groups and teams, critical inquiry is hard to find. The endless textbooks I have seen over the years are predominantly skillsbased.
Even in meetings to discuss small group pedagogy, I have found a pedagogical obsession with skills that organizations are presumably demanding of new employees. Technology is the new skill that is being peddled as increasingly many organizational groups and teams are technology mediated. Most textbooks enthusiastically discuss the many benefits that teams and groups offer, such as, again, higher levels of creativity, control, and participation. I often look at the endless small group textbooks on my bookshelves and remember Zavarzadeh and Morton's (1994) claim that the primary mission of our educational system is increasingly 'to develop the affective makeup of the labor force, to produce in the labor force the kind of (ideological) consciousness that situates the subject of labor in a manner
necessary for the reproduction and maintenance of existing social relations' (p. 142, italics in original).
The dominant focus in most textbooks is on decision-making and other task outcomes. This focus mirrors the research on groups and teams. Frey (1994) reports that most of the research on groups focus on decision-making. In my view, this kind of industry-driven research program limits and even distorts our understandings of group life. It limits our understandings of group life to groups found within industry (e.g., quality circles, project teams, quality-of-life committees, self-managing work groups). It also makes for the impression that all human beings do in groups is make decisions and perform various tasks.

This is an overly narrow description of group life. This research program masks the complexity and ambiguity that abound group life. In fact, the omission and downplaying of
writings and research that look critically at how many organizations use groups and teams to exact superior levels of order and control show organizational scholars and writers aiding and abetting the forces of domination and exploitation by giving us no means look differently at group life.
What I also find disturbing in writings and research on groups and teams is the omission of the human element. I am yet to find any text that even suggests any moral, existential, or even spiritual relation between groups and human beings. Organizational scholars and writers simply assume that human beings form groups to perform various tasks. Consequently, writings and research on groups and teams focus predominantly on the skills vital to successfully perform vario us tasks. Quality of group life is commonly measured by how groups perform various tasks.

In this paper I contend that foregrounding the human element expands our understandings of group life by committing us to look at groups as sites of human activity rather than merely sites of structures, tasks, and decision-making. In groups, human beings deal with all the hassles, contradictions, and confusions of life. We bring our hopes, fears, beliefs, values, and ambitions to bear on group life. The fact that groups are embedded within other groups further compounds the complexity of group life (Putnam & Stohl, 1990). In sum, group life is laden with all kinds of complexity, ambiguity, and anxiety. Groups heighten and intensify the forces of life. Omission of the human element makes for unsophisticated understandings and explanations of group life. Further, the omission of the human element makes for an omission of ethics. I can find no small group text that deals, even briefly, with ethics. We have no consideration of questions like: Upon what frameworks do human beings act? Upon what frameworks should human beings act? What are the origins of such frameworks? What is the theoretical foundation of such frameworks?

This paper addresses four propositions that attend to an emergent approach to look at group life. I aim to offer the beginnings of an emergent approach to look at the liberatory and emancipatory potentiality of group life. The propositions are:

• (A) Small groups are vital contexts in the construction and negotiation of the self.
• (B) Emphasis on the self centers the role of communication in small group theory and research.
• (C) The construction and negotiation of the self implicate multiple communication processes.
• (D) Attention to the construction and negotiation of the self deepens our understandings of the complexity and ambiguity of group life.

In sum, our neglect of the human
element depletes the richness of small group theory and minimizes the potentiality of small group research to the betterment of the human condition. In my view, the emergent approach found in this paper provides the richness that Frey (1994) seeks:
Although the dominant paradigm has generated muchinformation about small groups, there is a richness about groups that is missing from the literature, a richness that potentially can be rediscovered by employing an alternative paradigm and its practices. This richness, in turn, will hopefully renew our sense of purpose and urgency about small group research. (p. 552)

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