This article examines the role of leadership in mobilizing collective resistance in the workplace. Given the scarcity of dialogue between critical scholars and leadership studies, relatively little consideration is given to the role of leadership in resisting and potentially transforming structures of domination. The article describes some of the reasons why these areas of research have produced so little mutual work. We then make the argument that theories of leadership can be useful to the study of resistance by providing a grounded approach to theorizing agency, highlighting the role of mobilization and influence in change, and emphasizing participant attributions. In doing so, leadership studies gain important insights about the influence of deep structure power issues on perceptions of leaders, as well as material and symbolic limits on mobilization. The article adopts a dialectical perspective as a way of understanding issues of resistance leadership, and then discusses how existing literatures, read with this dialectical approach, can be brought to bear on significant questions concerning the practices of resistance leadership.

This article provides a systematic description of various positions on dialogue and their implications for understanding activism and social change. It describes three orientations toward dialogue-collaboration, co-optation, and agonism-which are differentiated by assumptions regarding the pervasiveness of dialogue, the role of difference, and conceptions of power. We argue for a multivocal, agonistic perspective on dialogue that centers issues of power and conflict in activism. Such a perspective illuminates a broad range of activist tactics for social change instead of privileging consensus-oriented methods. These approaches are illustrated with two ethnographic case studies that highlight the importance of lay theories of activism and dialogue.Political upheaval and conflict across the world in 2011 from New York and Wisconsin to Syria and Egypt, underscored the tremendous global need for democratic social change in the wake of a slew of crises arising from political repression, corporate corruption, and rapid environmental degradation. The proliferation of research centers on civic discourse, democracy, participation, and voice in a range of universities such as Arizona, Kansas State, Southern California, Stanford, Texas, and Washington, among others demonstrates that communication scholarship has much pragmatic value in offering visions of how such change can take place and how democracy across the world can be deepened and woven into everyday communication practices. Indeed, theoretical concerns with democratic change have arguably been at the heart of much communication inquiry in the past century, and scholars have crafted a diverse range of perspectives on communication processes and mechanisms through which individuals, communities, and organizations procure and enact democratic change.Throughout, however, we find that scholars have relied on dialogue and activism as significant tropes to understand specific communication processes involved in such change. There are many ways in which communication scholars have positioned these two concepts with and against each other, so our purpose in this article is to clarify 66 Communication Theory 22 (2012) 66-91

This article argues that "health activism" as a concept has been overlooked as an important element of health communication and situates the concept in relation to key areas of research in the field, including health citizenship and community organizing. The author presents theoretical frameworks for comparing and contrasting health-related social action based on issue focus and political orientation that facilitate communication-based contributions to multidisciplinary research. This contribution is discussed in more detail by theorizing communicative processes associated with health activism. It is then argued that the study of health activism can benefit from adopting critical perspectives that focus on issues of power and conflict and on multisectoral views of health that examine activist efforts related to a broad array of the determinants of health, including political, economic, and environmental issues.

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This article examines workplace health promotion (WHP) from a critical perspective. Based on a 2-year ethnographic case study of the development of the Associate Recreation Center (ARC) at an automobile manufacturing plant, the study investigates the interrelationships between health promotion discourse and managerial ideology, and the corresponding implications for employees perceptions of health, the healthy body, and personal identity. Analysis suggests that the field of WHP draws on dominant social discourses of health that embody managerialist values. This initiative encouraged employees to adopt managerial-values of self-denial and self-control as the central components of health, producing self-disciplining bodies and hegemonic judgments of self and other.

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As the number of workplace health initiatives grows, so does the variety of programming. This study examines a fitness apparel company's attempts to promote a fitness culture through a particular brand of "extreme" fitness known as CrossFit. CrossFit is an intense fitness regimen that has generated controversy with a cult-like reputation. We looked at the evangelical promotion of CrossFit as a new corporate wellness initiative. Based on interviews and participant observations, we used a critical-interpretive lens to understand employee reactions to the extreme wellness initiative. The evangelical introduction of this program by management led to high rates of participation, influencing employee perceptions of health, fitness, and identity. Yet, we also found that employee resistance emerged, which helped to mark the limits of this managerial intervention in workplace fitness. Ultimately, the study advocates for more co-construction of workplace wellness initiatives.