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A Fantasy Theme Analysis of Good News Fellowship Church: A Rhetorical Case Study of Organizational Commitment Processes
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Authors
Edwards, Alan
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Type
Thesis
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Volume Title
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University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point, College of Fine Arts and Communication
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Abstract
Description
INTRODUCTION:
The importance of value and belief systems in
organizations has been emphasized of late through the
introduction and popularity of organizational culture studies.
While organizations were once thought of as "rational"
systems, guided by economic and rational management
principles, organizational analysts are beginning to recognize
that even profit-motivated organizations and the human
behavior exhibited within them are oftentimes quite
"irrational" in nature. As organizational culture studies are
beginning to discover, organizational members' sense-making
"logics" are, at times, quite "illogical." Organizations are
beginning to be viewed from a more interpretivist standpoint
with the focus of analysis being on the dynamic systems of
symbolization working within the organization and
organizational participants' attributions of meaning to those
symbols. Because of these new understandings, the importance
of value and belief systems - usually thought of as emotion laden
and unpredictable human experiences - is being realized
in organizational communication studies and, specifically, in
this fantasy theme analysis of Good News Fellowship Church in
Stevens Point, Wisconsin.
This interpretive focus on human symbolism, values, and
belief systems is both the theoretical and methodological
grounding of this fantasy theme analysis of Good News
Fellowship Church. A church organization was chosen as the
subject of the case study because religious organizing
presents a unique, albeit useful, juxtaposition of belief
systems, i.e. the illogical, with organizational pragmatics,
i.e. the logical. Throughout this study, it is argued that by
identifying the symbolic make-up of Good News Fellowship
Church's social reality and placing those symbols in
rhetorical context, one can discover much about the commitment
process bonding individuals to the church movement. By using
Bormann's fantasy theme methodology to analyze the richly
dramatic rhetoric of Good News Fellowship church, one can not
only better understand the human appeal of Good News
Fellowship church vision, but can, at the same time, better
our understanding of the elusive concept known as
organizational commitment. Accomplishing such a task
demonstrates fantasy theme analysis's potential both in terms
of its niche as a prominent communication perspective and,
more specifically, its rhetorical application to
organizational communication phenomena such as organizational
commitment.