Public Secrets as a Phenomenon in Organizational Communication: How Public Knowledge Fails to Become Organizational Action

There seem to be two realms in our waking time: work and life. However, work is often juxtaposed against life, which is found in anything but work. Organizational work has become nothing more than the necessary evil, the means for a livelihood. Work has ubiquitously become the enemy of life. What culprit has dichotomized work and life? Public secrets!Empirically based, this book explores and testifies why the phenomenon of public secrets may have transformed our organizational life into a big lie to which we are all forced to subscribe-against private consciousness. Public secrets represent the communication phenomenon where public knowledge, though tacitly acknowledged and widely espoused, is never incorporated into organizational actions and daily routines. As a consequence, employees are not living their organizational life with their heads and hearts, but with our heels. "Employment with heels" is the biggest "un-economics" against time-it costs, wastes, and debilitates; it makes work the arch-enemy of life.

Xin-An Lu holds a Ph.D. in Organizational Communication and Leadership and teaches at Shippensburg University of Pennsylvania. His publications include poems and journal articles on management, information technology, visual rhetoric, and oppression against women. He has an interest in studying the "un-economics" in modern organizational life.