Acknowledging the infrasystem: A critical feminist analysis of systems theory

Public

Relations

ISSS: 0363.8111

Pamela J. Creedon

Review,

19(2):157-166

Copyright

0 1993 by JAI I’ress Inc.

All rights ofreproduction

in any form resewed.

Acknowledging the Infrasystem: A Critical Feminist Analysis of Systems Theory ABSTRACT: The article examines the absence of a critical feminist perspective in the application of systems theory as a unifying paradigm for public relations. The article contends that such a paradigm actually works in opposition to the potential for excellence in public relations management posited by Grunig and others because it uncritically accepts the gendered, racist, classist and heterosexist norms that support systems theory. The article suggests that systems theory fails to acknowledge the existence of a third system that supports the approaches used by organizations to achieve homeostasis, balance or symmetry. A third system, the infrasystem, constructs both suprasystem and subsystem interactions. The article concludes with a case analysis of the institution of sport to illustrate how the infrasystem functions to preserve a system of gender privilege. Pamela J. Creedon is an associate professor in the School of Journalism at Ohio State University.

Systems theory has gained widespread popularity as an overarching theory or paradigm of how public relations operates in an organization (e.g., Pavlik, 1987; Brody & Stone, 1989; Grunig SC Hunt, 1984). The purpose of this article is to provide a critical feminist perspective on the use of systems theory as a unieing paradigm for the field.

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Systems theory describes the interactions and interrelatedness of various components that make up the environment in which an organization functions. Systems theorists study how “organizations interact with and adapt to the environment in an effort to survive and grow” (Trujillo & Toth, 1987, p. 207). Research in the application of systems theory is multi-disciplinary, approaching the theory from ecological, philosophical, economic, mechanical and other organizational perspectives. Trujillo and Toth (1987) suggest that systems theory is based on the root metaphor of the organization as a “living organism.” Brody and Stone (1989) define systems as comprising subsystems and existing as part of suprasystems. Suprasystems consist of natural, technological, human, political, socioeconomic and market environments. Subsystems are internal organizational environments such as psychological, technical or political. They suggest that change “in any one of them is apt to require organizational adjustment or adaptation” (Brody & Stone, 1989, p. 24). Two other terms used in systems theory have been used by public relations scholars to describe functions of the field. They are resource dependence and domain similarity. Resource dependence theory describes the degree to which organizations are controlled by their relationships with external sources to obtain the resources necessary to accomplish an objective (Pfeffer & Salancik, 1978). Domain similarity theory describes the degree to which two different individuals, departments or organizations share the same skills, goals and tasks. Lauzen (1991), for example, explored both of these concepts as factors contributing to marketing imperialism within the domain of public relations. Kelly ( 1991) used resource dependence theory to examine the issue of autonomy in fund raising from a donor relations perspective. Systems are often characterized as either open or closed. Closed systems do not adjust or adapt to changes within their environments, while open systems actively engage in exchanges of information, energy and matter within their environments (Waltzlawick, Beavin, & Jackson, 1967). Public relations theorists suggest that the function of public relations in the open systems model is to maintain balance in suprasystem and subsystem communication outside and within the organization (Broom & Dozier, 1990; Cutlip, Center & Broom, 1985). According to Pavlik: Homeostasis, or maintaining balance between an organization and its publics, is often one of the primary functions of public relations. Open systems also change and adapt. Because they exist in a changing environment, they must do so to survive. Public relations often plays a key role in the adaptive behavior of an organization (1987, p. 127).

Cutlip, Center, and Broom (1985) suggest that public relations practitioners in open systems work “on behalf of their organizations and in the public interest, they are managers ofchange” (italics in original, p. 196). Grunig (1989) believes

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that maintaining balance and managing change are the fundamental roles of public relations. He defines the function as identifying an organization’s publics (internal and external) and managing the organization’s communication with them in either an asymmetrical or symmetrical manner. An asymmetrical public relations program essentially seeks to persuade a public to believe or behave in the manner that the organization desires. A two-way symmetrical program “uses communication to manage conflict and seek understanding with strategic publics” (Grunig, 199 1, p. 11). Excellent public relations departments model more of their communication behavior on the two-way symmetrical than on asymmetrical models (Grunig, 1991; Grunig & Grunig, 1990). Power control theory is used to describe why organizations practice public relations either symmetrically or asymmetrically (e.g. Grunig, 1991; Grunig & Grunig, 1990). This theory states that an organization’s dominant coalition or decision-makers determine the manner in which public relations will be practiced.

SYSTEMS THEORY AND CRITICAL FEMINIST THEORY of systems Pearson ( 1990) h as warned that the application theory to public relations “may simply provide the profession with a highly technical, and sometimes obfuscating and mystifying language, with which to talk about organizational goals without subjecting these to critical analysis” (p. 232). Research to date on the application of systems theory in public relations has not explored in any detail the patterns of privilege reflected in-or exercised by-the dominant coalition or the limitations of the symmetrical interaction construct of systems theory, which is characterized by the minimization of difference (Watzlawick, Beavin & Jackson, 1967).’ Murphy (1991) has argued that symmetrical behavior may in fact support existing patterns of privilege. “In its purest form, then, symmetry tends to discourage innovation and encourage custom and tradition, even when both sides in a conflict would prefer to break with the status quo” (Murphy, 1991, p. 124). From a critical feminist perspective, custom, tradition and status quo are code words for patriarchal privilege. Pearson ( 1990) and Fine (in press) categorize systems theory as a functionalist approach to organizational communication. Among other things this means that the core of systems theory possesses a managerial bias and is grounded in logical positivism. Logical positivism has been extensively criticized in feminist research for its division between theory and practice, between researcher and the “object” of the research (e.g., Jaggar, 1989; Hess & Ferree, 1987; Stacy & Thorne, 1985). In her comprehensive review of the organizational communication literature, Fine (in press) concluded that the functionalist approach of systems theory fails to incorporate a critical perspective, specifically a feminist perspective. Because men’s

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experience has historically defined normative behavior in organizations, studies comparing male and female communication use category systems derived from male experience to evaluate female communication against male norms (Fine, in press). The thesis of this article is that a central weakness of systems theory is its uncritical acceptance of suprasystem and subsystem analyses as providing an adequate explanation of how an organization exists in its environment. To be complete, systems theory needs to explicitly acknowledge the existence of a third system that directs and underlies the approaches taken by organizations to achieve a steady state, balance or symmetry. The third system is the inj+asystem or foundation of institutional values or norms that determine an organization’s response to changes in its environment.

THE

INFRASYSTEM

OF

ORGANIZATIONS

The infrasystem concept is a derivative of both deconstructive and feminist theory. It is deconstructive because it views organizational culture as flexible and diverse, rather than immutable or universal. It is also feminist because it charges that the construction of organizational norms and values is male-defined. By examining the infrasystem of an organization, assumptions about gender, race, class and sexuality can be deconstructed by systems theorists attempting to explain organizational behavior. Although some may argue that the concept of an infrasystem implicitly exists in both suprasystem and subsystem constructs of general systems theory, this article argues that implicit or “silent” understanding is not enough. The infrasystem must be explicitly acknowledged, analyzed and voiced to be known. Without explicit acknowledgement of the infrasystem in systems theory, it is all too easy to assume that programs of equal opportunity, equity, or symmetrical communication are structured without regard to preserving the system of privilege. Adding an infrasystem analysis does not allow systems theorists to ignore gender, race, class and sexuality as fundamental organizing principles. The premise of this critical analysis of systems theory is that to transform social systems we need first to acknowledge their colossal unseen dimensions. Unless we do so, the rhetoric surrounding equality and equity is incomplete because it protects hidden assumptions and patterns of dominance embedded in the system.

THE

INFRASYSTEM

IN

SPORT

The institution of sport provides an excellent setting for a case analysis of the gendered dimension of the infrasystem.2 The beauty of using sport as a microcosm of the infrasystem is that is has long been openly acknowl-

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edged as a bastion of male hegemony and misogynist traditions. Birrell (1990), site for the reproduction of for example, describes sport “as an institutional relations of privilege and oppression, of dominance and subordination, structured along gender, race and class lines” (p. 1%). An increasing number of feminist scholars now believe sport can serve as an ideal laboratory setting in which to study gender oppression, victimization, power and domination.3 Thus, an analysis of sport is ideal for the purposes of this article because it allows us easy access to an understanding of the institutionalized nature of gender privilege, which is one dimension of the infrasystem. Even today the communication by and about gender from sport institutions is relatively easy to decipher, direct and often unfettered. White and Vagi (1990) explain that if “one were to undertake a psychological or sociological study of masculinity in Western society, there is perhaps no more well-equipped laboratory than the sport arena. Here we commonly observe males exhibiting traditionally masculine qualities of physical power, strength, and violence within a milieu that rejects feminine values” (p. 67-78). There are two dimensions to the gendered infrasystem in sport. The first is a hierarchy based on male power; the second is a construction of difference based on the assumption of male as superior. Hierarchies make power relationships visible. The hierarchy of male power in sport can be examined through three primary strategies used to preserve it: domination, exclusion/tokenism (physical and economic) and objectivism (male as norm). A second dimension of the infrasystem constructs difference as female inferiority. Sociological theory has shown that the primary strategy used by dominant groups to maintain their power is differentiating the subordinate group and defining it as deserving inferior treatment (Reskin, 1988). The construction of female as inferior in sport is accomplished by three primary strategies: trivialization/ objectification, marginalization and symbolic annihilation. It is not always easy or necessary to distinguish between individual strategies of gender hierarchy and difference. Sometimes they overlap or blend, seeming to exist as primordial norms. Although space will not allow a detailed analysis of each strategy in this article, a case study of how one sport organization accommodated change without acknowledging the gendered infrasystem will be illustrative.

THE GENDERED TITLE IX

INFRASYSTEM

AND

As we know from power-control theory, those who have power in an organization-the dominant coalition-determine its ideology. It follows then that organizational ideology can be discerned by examining the dominant coalition. This section of the article examines the changes that have taken place in the dominant coalition controlling women’s intercollegiate sport in the U.S. and the

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ideological and pragmatic effect of this change. It starts with a very brief history of the development of women’s involvement in U.S. intercollegiate sport. It took the founding of women’s colleges to open the gymnasium door to women. Both Vassar and Wellesley pioneered in this effort and by 1875 women’s sport was a part of their regular curricula (Oglesby, 1978). By the 192Os, leaders of women’s physical education articulated their ideology as “the greatest good to the greatest number.” The Association of Directors of Physical Education for Women was also formed and it denounced Olympic competition and intercollegiate athletics for women as “leading to commercialization and professionalism” (Oglesby, 1978, p. 11). Even into the 195Os, female physical educators continued to oppose highlycompetitive, exclusionary athletics which favored the elite athlete. During this period women’s sports moved slowly from play days to sports days to varsity sports, while women physical educators attempted to keep the movement in step with their ideology: “A sport for every girl and every girl in a sport.” Fueled by a vision of equal opportunity in the 196Os, some leaders of women’s physical education and a number of female athletes began to argue for the establishment of a framework for interscholastic and intercollegiate competition. In 1971 the Association of Intercollegiate Athletics for Women (AIAW) was created to develop the framework for an athletic model grounded in education. In 1972 Congress passed Title IX of the Higher Education Amendments Act, which mandated equal opportunity for women in all programs receiving federal funding. Hailed for its potential to break down the door keeping women from equal participation in athletics, the law affected approximately 16,000 public school systems and 2,700 post-secondary institutions (East, 1978). However, the outcome of two decades of implementing Title IX provides a dramatic example of what happens when separate organizations are required by law to provide equal opportunity and they are resource dependent and domain similar.4 More importantly, institutional responses to Title IX demonstrate a likely outcome of adaptive organizational behavior when the existence of the infrasystem is not explicitly acknowledged. Ultimately, the result of the “adaptive” behavior was that the male system, the National Collegiate Athletic Association, established itself as the norm and became the dominant model for intercollegiate athletics. AIAW, the female system, sued but lost an anti-trust lawsuit to determine how equal opportunity would be defined on college playing fields and it ceased to exist in 1982. Losing the lawsuit was the icing on the cake since the AIAW did not have the economic clout that it needed to convince those who had the power to decide its fate, essentially college presidents and boards of trustees, who were overwhelmingly white males, of its value. Economic incentives offered by the NCAA to the institutions in exchange for exclusive control ofwomen’s athletics included; free membership, reimbursed travel and television coverage. What did this NCAA victory produce?5 By 1990, the NCAA takeover had gutted women from leadership roles in women’s sport. Whereas, under the AIAW

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structure, 90 percent of the athletic directors for women’s sports were women, under the NCAA structure, men headed 84 percent of all women’s intercollegiate athletic programs and coached 52.7% of all women’s intercollegiate sports (Acosta & Carpenter, 1990). After more than a decade of NCAA control, issues of salary and funding equity have also been exacerbated. At the top of the salary hierarchy are men coaching men, followed by men coaching women, followed by women coaching women (Kane & Stangl, 1991). In other areas of funding, men receive 70 percent of the money available for athletic scholarships, 77 percent of the operating money and 83 percent of the recruiting money spent by colleges that play “big time” sports (Lederman, 1992). Most recently budget cuts in higher education have brought about a growing number of Title IX compliance lawsuits. 6 Generally, the lawsuits deal with either unequal participation opportunities or unfair cutbacks in women’s programs.

REVISIONARY

SYSTEMS THEORY

What lessons can Title IX teach us about systems theory? Pragmatically and ideologically, we have found direct evidence of the infrasystem of gender hierarchy {male as the norm) functioning to control the outcome of adaptive behavior. From the NCAA perspective, after a decade “under the NCAA umbrella,” women’s intercollegiate athletics are growing. And, as one recent NCAA publication, revealingly titled “Continuing the Ascent,” put it, “it’s a positive catch-22. As women become more competitive, the game gets better. As the game gets better it will breed more competitive female athletes” (Smale, 1990). From a critical feminist perspective, however, an ideology designed to breed more competitive female athletes does not sound much like “a sport for every girl and every girl in a sport. ” After a decade of NCAA control, women athletes are being led, trained and coached by male mentors and male role models. Simply put, women’s sport is being developed in the image of male sport7 Should systems theory become the unifying paradigm in public relations? If the lessons we learn from the adaptive behavior of the NCAA in response to Title IX are taken seriously, the answer must be no. The uncritical acceptance of gendered, as well as racist, classist and heterosexist norms in systems theory position it in opposition to the potential for excellence in public relations management (Grunig, 1991). Yet, systems theory provides a way of seeing the problems involved in developing a viable paradigm. To the extent that systems theory can be reconfigured by public relations theorists, it could provide a basis for the development of a revisionary paradigm.* This paradigm would acknowledge, as systems theory does very well, that individuals and organizations are interactive entities and that their experiences and behaviors can best be understood in context of their environments.

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However, the re-visioned paradigm would need to go beyond, well beyond, the limits of the suprasystem and subsystem analyses of systems theory. The new paradigm would seek to break the artificial boundaries of the public and private sphere, home and work, and go beyond any simple vision of equal opportunity or access. It would include all sets of social relations and incorporate a research perspective that explicitly acknowledges the role of the infrasystem in reproducing the gendered, racist, classist and heterosexist behaviors and norms of organizations. Feminists have suggested that by explicitly acknowledging and deconstructing the gendered infrasystem of the current sport model we can produce a new model of sport, capable of representing diverse meanings. Variously termed the Partnership Model (Nelson, 1991) or the Co-Essence Model (Highlen, 1991), it emphasizes respect for disparate ability levels and positive interpersonal relationships with self-esteem at the core. In it, competition is “understood from its Latin source, competere: ‘to seek together”’ (Nelson, 1991, p. 9). Although such re-vision is a tall order, public relations may be uniquely positioned to fill it. Perhaps, because public relations aspires to be the organizational function that manages communication between an organization and its publics (Grunig 8 Hunt, 1984), it could reach its goal by re-visioning systems theory and then operationalizing it to transform organizations. A better descriptor for an excellence model may be that of dissymmetry in which the goal is to value various symmetries, rather than to achieve homeostasis by minimizing differences. Ifwe embrace the concept ofdissymmetry as symmetry in different directions, rather than as a lack of symmetry, we may be able to build a flexible, encompassing paradigm for the field in which the goal of achieving mutual understanding can truly mean valuing diversity. Acknowledgments: I want to thank Kelly Reid for her comments on this article and for helping me find an appropriate term (infrasystem) to describe the underlying system of gender norms that supports systems theory. Also thanks to Elizabeth Toth for her comments.

NOTES 1.

2. 3.

4.

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The excellence model in public relations includes, “equal opportunity for men and women” as one of the characteristics of excellence (Grunig, 1991). However, from a critical feminist viewpoint, equal opportunity does not force organizations to change their value system, rather it allows them to co-opt the values ofwomen and minorities. I use the term sport to define sport as cultural institution and sports to mean activities or games that are only one component of the institution of sport. Ironically, feminist scholarship ignored sport until fairly recently. This was in part because of the overt sexism in sport and in part because sport was not seen as a serious arena for scholarship. In a 1984 Supreme Court decision, Title IX was narrowed to require compliance only for specific programs at a college or university receiving federal funds. In 1987,

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Congress passed the Civil Rights Restoration Act, which made compliance with Title IX a broad mandate again. It is important to acknowledge that women’s participation in interscholastic and intercollegiate sports has grown dramatically in the past 20 years. Arguably, growth at the intercollegiate level primarily benefits elite athletes. In 1991, at the urging of the National Association for CoLLeBe Women Athletic Directors, the NCAA completed a gender equity study. The findings revealed gross inequities in funding and participation ratios, prompting the NCAA to create a task force to come up with recommendations (Ditota, 1992). Further, a Supreme Court ruling in February, 1992, that schools in violation of Title IX can be required to pay damages in cases of intentional discrimination, may have put new teeth in Title IX (McConnell, 1992). The existence of a male (NCAA) and female (AIAW) system with different ideologies for sport is not intended to provide an argument for an essentialist for dualistic definition of gender difference. Rather, it is intended to reflect the fact that multiple realities exist. Adrienne Rich (1979) defined re-vision as “the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction-[it] is for women more than a chapter in cultural history; it is an act of survival. Until we can understand the assumptions in which we are drenched we cannot know ourselves” (p. 35.).

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