Karen Ashcraft

Karen Ashcraft is an American communication scholar and professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Her area of research is in social justice and organizational studies. She looks at identity in the workplace and organizational structures. Specifically she studies issues of diversity, hybrid organizations, gender and power. Being an organizational communication scholar, she sees discourse as central to understanding our human condition as well as how communication amounts to organizing. She examines discourse through a lens of a feminist communicology model to look at the critical role that communication has in one's identity creation.

Academia She completed her dissertation and received her PhD in 1998 at the University of Colorado at Boulder. She was an associate professor and taught at the University of Utah. She returned to the University of Colorado at Boulder to teach in 2009 and where she remains today as a professor. She is a feminist communication scholar who studies objects in a wider political, cultural, and economic context. Her research has primarily covered gender, power, professional identity, and alternative organizational forms. With a major focus on her work on feminism in organization communication she is able to delve into areas of underrepresented gender groups.

Research The majority of Ashcraft's work takes place within professional organizations. A frequent area in which she researches are the effects communication differences is gender identity. Her work explores communication through a critical and feminist lens. When looking in the setting of a professional organization the structure of it is significant to the way it runs and its outcomes. While Ashcraft explores issues of diversity, identity, gender, power, and discourse; the organizational setting that she observes plays a pivotal role in her findings.

Gendered organizations The bureaucracy structure has been utilized over years and at times been seen to be reasonable and helpful, but alternative structures that call on different aspects can also be helpful. Since bureaucracy has historically been known to be an expression that favors a male ideology, feminist have been known to advocate collectivism. Traditionally bureaucracies have been hierarchical in authority, having impersonal relations, and biased notions of objectivity and rationality. Through feminist organizations egalitarian tendencies are more sought out and collectivism displays a way to pursue empowerment by seeking to be harmonious in both private and public spheres. Feminist Organizations are a resource that no one had truly delved into in the past. Ashcraft displays how if included within management then research can create random alliances and uncover alternative viewpoints that may counter current ideologies. She advocates that the process of interaction will elicit the audience to see a new perspective. A fresh set of lenses can definitely help insiders and outsiders understand that larger context and may pair then with better understanding.

Ashcraft, along with Dennis Mumby, discusses speaking of organizational systems and behaviors as gendered but it is also important to be thinking about race. Too often do we focus meticulously on gendered ways of organizing and we consistently ignore how we are essentially raced. When looking at diversity there are many misunderstandings and aspects that are left out that tie into the way we see diversity in the workplace. Ashcraft, along with Brenda J. Allen, highlight five consequences of the ways that we are inclined to express and silence race while preserving the normative power of organized Whiteness.

The first message is that “race tends to be depicted as separate, singular that is relevant only under certain circumstances”.