For many of you the term theory is likely to send you running for cover. Theories typically seem abstract and largely inapplicable to everyday life. However, theories are actually indispensable to everyday life, and we would be unable to get along without them.

At an everyday level, we operate with implicit or commonsense theories that enable us to navigate the world. We do not typically subject these theories to careful reflection, except in instances where they fail us in some way. For example, many people operate with the implicit theory that success is an individual thing; achievement is due to individual abilities and hard work. This theory may be partly true, but it overlooks the fact that everyone is positioned in societies and social structures that both enable and constrain their opportunities and shape their worldviews.

Implicit theories tend to maintain taken for granted, commonsense understandings of the world. Commonsense thinking is often uncritical, reflecting tradition and reproducing the status quo. Part of the challenge of good theory, then, is to help people develop their critical communication capacities so that they can question commonsense thinking and interrogate our “direct” experience of the world.

We never really have direct access to the world around us because it is shaped by communication processes that are both the medium and expression of different institutional structures, including class, education, mass and social media, organizations, religion, family, and so forth. What we think of as direct experience is heavily rooted in and mediated by those structures and institutions of power, which are difficult to transform. Challenge your understandings of work through the development of a critical approach to communication.