While EEOC guidelines for managing sexual harassment prescribe a strong sexual harassment policy and aggressive remedial action following complaints, a communication approach suggests a need for a more complex understanding of sexual harassment as diffused throughout an organizational culture. The present case study uses a sensemaking approach to explore the response of members of an academic department to an alumnus donor's serial sexual harassment of three of its members. Sensemaking proceeded through three phases: the phase of discovery, the debriefing phase, and the dispersal phase. Insights into the role of humor, white men, shared experiences, and responding to sexual harassment are discussed.

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Although workplace policies are written in neutral terms that give the appearance of rationality, research shows that policy meanings are in fact constructed and negotiated through discursive practices. Sexual harassment policies illustrate this phenomenon. Sexual harassment is a highly complex and fluid phenomenon that is dependent on context and culture for its meaning. Although sexual harassment policies tend to use language that appears to lie outside of the interpretive stream, these policies are in fact always subject to discursive interpretation. One particularly powerful form of discursive interpretation lies in the interplay between binary logics and binary language. This study explored the interplay between macro-level binary logics, mezzo-level sexual harassment policy and micro-level binary language during organizational members' discussions about their organization's sexual harassment policy. Our analysis of focus group and interview data revealed that participants discursively produced what we have termed a complex binary web that reshaped the meaning of the policy, such that usage of the policy contradicted organizational norms and values. Understanding sexual harassment policy discourse as constructed in a binary web reveals that rational assumptions underlying sexual harassment policy may be inconsistent with the lived experiences in organizational cultures.

This study examined the performances of social justice activists who were audiences of alternative media-media that are defined by their resistance to social and corporate power structures. Contemporary performance-oriented audience paradigms do not take into account power and ideology, which are integral to the content of alternative media. Through interviews with 27 social justice activists and qualitative analysis of the alternative media content that they used to gain information about social justice and corporations, we explored performances of alternative media audiences to develop a new performance-oriented audience paradigm. With the resulting data, we developed a resistance performance paradigm that accounts for (a) different critical worldviews and interactions of audiences with alternative media production within (b) intertwining ''theatres'' shaped by alternative media content, (c) which were coordinated by common visions and goals and separated by the differing themes in the alternative media content.

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A qualitative study using same-sex and mixed-sex focus groups and stimulated recall interviews was designed to identify and explore gendered constructions of power during discourse about sexual harassment. It was discovered that the men tended to construct power as hierarchically held by individuals with formal authority. Consequently, they tended to view sexual harassers as managers and supervisors. Women tended to view power as a negotiated process in which power was gained and lost through interactions. Consequently, the women tended to perceive all members of an organization as possible harassers. When these men and women were given an opportunity to discuss these issues during mixed gendered interactions, they failed to recognize the gendered constructions of power. Implications are discussed.