Sine Nørholm Just

The collaborative paradigm: towards an invitational and participatory concept of online communication:

During the wave of uprisings that swept over the Middle East in the first months of 2011, Facebook was identified as being instrumental to the success of the protesters (Giglio, 2011); the upheaval following the Iranian presidential election in 2009 was named a Twitter revolution (Keller, 2010); and during the 2008 presidential campaign in the US, 55 percent of the voting-age population used the internet to connect to the political process (Smith, 2009). In other words, online communication has become a central form of political communication. Similarly, commercial communication is going online; in 2008 internet sales represented 9.8 percent of the value of all sales of UK non-financial sector businesses – the value of these sales being £222.9bn, an increase of 36.6 percent compared to 2007 (Office of National Statistics, 2008). Even friendships and professional networking are moving online; more than 600 million people are friends on Facebook (Carlson, 2011) and over 100 million professionals network are using LinkedIn (Parr, 2011). The internet, in little more than 10 years, has gone from a static showcase to a bustling town square, due to a wave of innovation in internet communication technology that makes interactions between clients and servers more dynamic, webpage displays and applications more engaging, interactive and participative, and user-to-user interactions more direct (Harrison and Barthel, 2009). Technologies like AJAX and XML have enabled users to construct, share and link their own media and information products, regardless of their technical expertise, and

Creating organizational cultures: Re‐conceptualizing the relations between rhetorical strategies and material practices

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to re‐conceptualize the relations between rhetorical strategies and material practices in the processes whereby leaders create or change organizational cultures.Design/methodology/approach – The authors compare and contrast two broad perspectives on cultural change in organizations. The first perspective is informed by modern social science, and focuses primarily on material practices. The second perspective is rooted in classical rhetoric, and concentrates on discursive strategies.Findings – It is found that both perspectives hold pertinent but partial insights. The authors propose an integrated perspective in which material practices and rhetorical strategies are seen as two analytical sides of the same ontological coin. This enables a fuller and more detailed explanation of how organizational cultures are created or changed. A brief illustration is provided of the merits of this approach by revisiting the case of Enron.Originality/value – The paper constitutes an ...

Regularities of diversity discourse: Address, categorization, and invitation

Managerial discourses on diversity invoke goals of inclusion and emancipation of suppressed individuals and groups as well as objectives of creating benefits for organizations and society. Partially due to this two-fold emphasis, diversity discourses may, however, be as restricting as they are liberating to the subjects of which they speak. In this article we suggest that utterances pertaining to diversity discourse should be understood as constitutive rhetoric marked by three discursive regularities: Address, categorization, and invitation. These regularities underlie and restrain the multiple discursive practices of the developing field of diversity management, and as researchers and practitioners alike continue to explore and enhance this field it is important to understand - and seek to broaden - its conditions of possibility. Emphasizing the conceptual discussion of discursive regularities and their articulation, we illustrate the claim that different discursive practices may reproduce common limitations by exploring contributions to Danish diversity discourse.

In the Wake of New Media: Connecting the Who with the How of Strategizing Communication

ABSTRACT In this article we argue that although there has been an intensified exploration of how organizations strategize within the field of strategic communication, there seems to be a key component missing, namely questioning who these organizations are and become in the process of strategizing. Strategic communication implicitly, perhaps even unintentionally, continues to rely on a classical understanding of organizations as “social units (or human groupings) deliberately constructed and reconstructed to seek specific goals” (Etzioni, 1964, p. 3). Assuming rather than exploring who the organization is, we argue, hinders a full explanation of how strategic communication works. Aiming to tackle this issue, we first present three ways in which the classical understanding of organizations is being theoretically challenged by organization studies and empirically challenged by new media, arguing that organizations are networked, sociomaterial, and contingent processes of meaning formation. Then we examine how the reconceptualization of the organization influences the concept of strategic communication, advocating that strategies should be seen as collaborative and networked flows (the how) of shared decision making by both human and nonhuman actors (the who). Finally, we discuss how this affects the notion of strategic action, and hence, strategic communication, asking what strategic action is and who performs it.

Collaboratively constructed contradictory accounts: online organizational narratives

Based on a mixed-method case study of online communication about the Danish pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk, this article argues that online communication plays out as a centrifugal narration process with centripetal consequences. Through a content analysis of communication about Novo Nordisk, three dominant online meaning constructions that present themselves as narratives are identified and their convergence into one overarching meta-narrative is identified. The meta-narrative of Novo Nordisk as the ruthlessly profit-seeking socially responsible heavenly work place is made up of the three interrelated, yet disparate tales about Novo Nordisk as (1) a socially responsible organization, engaged in society at large; (2) an organization primarily concerned with fulfilling its own objectives – profit maximization; and (3) a great and employee-centred workplace. The article then discusses the theoretical and methodological implications of the empirical findings. It is argued that although the findings are ...

‘I wasn’t originally a banker, but…’ – Bridging individual experiences and organizational expectations in accounts of ‘alternative career paths’

Even as Danish banks are seeking to diversify in terms of the people they bring in and the careers they offer, existing employees who have taken ‘alternative career paths’ are expected to account for the ways in which they relate to the still powerful norm of ‘the banker’. Relying on the theoretical assumption that subject positions are established and performed through creative reiterations of existing norms, this paper explores how personal experiences are related to organizational expectations. The theoretical argument is that Judith Butler’s conceptualization of performativity may contribute to the theoretical and analytical exploration of discursive and rhetorical processes of identity formation. Analysis of the ways in which nine ‘untraditional bankers’ account for themselves shows two main performative strategies: normalization and differentiation. However, the informants do not just reproduce existing norms, but also use strategies of bridging to create new conditions of possibility.Even as Danish banks are seeking to diversify in terms of the people they bring in and the careers they offer, existing employees who have taken ‘alternative career paths’ are expected to account for the ways in which they relate to the still powerful norm of ‘the banker’. Relying on the theoretical assumption that subject positions are established and performed through creative reiterations of existing norms, this paper explores how personal experiences are related to organizational expectations. The theoretical argument is that Judith Butler’s conceptualization of performativity may contribute to the theoretical and analytical exploration of discursive and rhetorical processes of identity formation. Analysis of the ways in which nine ‘untraditional bankers’ account for themselves shows two main performative strategies: normalization and differentiation. However, the informants do not just reproduce existing norms, but also use strategies of bridging to create new conditions of possibility.

Disastrous Dialogue: Plastic Productions of Agency–Meaning Relationships

In 2010 the Danish artist Søren Thilo Funder was in Cairo to produce the art film Disastrous Dialogue. As Funder set to work he had a foreboding about how politically charged the piece might be. When he cut the film, however, events had exceeded his most fateful premonitions, reshaping the interpretative context completely. The changes in Egyptian society, thus, altered the possible meaning–agency relations of the finished work. Through a close reading and a conceptually guided criticism of the text–context relationships of Disastrous Dialogue we explore interrelations of meaning and agency through the lens of the concept of plasticity. This leads us to propose a plastic understanding of agency as both formed by and formative of meaningful relationships—and able to creatively destruct and, thereby, transform configurations of meaning.

This is not a pipe: Rationality and affect in European public debate

There is a deep discrepancy between political actors’ official calls for public debate in and on the European Union and the debates in which European publics actually partake. Top-down invitations to debate in the deliberative mode leave the citizens cold, and political actors are unable or unwilling to listen to, let alone engage with, emotionally guided bottom-up participation. Using an illustrative case of a Danish public debate over an alleged ban on liquorice pipes, this article argues that the disconnect between invitation and participation may be explained by the fact that representatives of (national and European) political institutions tend to rely on a simplified version of deliberative democracy. This implies privileging rational truth claims at the expense of emotional truthfulness. Connecting invitation and participation, it is argued, requires a reconciliation of rationality and affect within the deliberative paradigm that may enable the conceptualization and practice of public debate as affective rationality.

Framing financial culture – rhetorical struggles over the meaning of “Liborgate”

Purpose – The meaning of scandals like “Liborgate” is not given beforehand; it is constructed in the course of framing contests. The purpose of this paper is to provide a nuanced framework for understanding such framing contests by re-conceptualizing them as rhetorical struggles. Design/methodology/approach – A conceptual framework that combines modern framing theory, and classical stasis theory is applied to the rhetorical struggles over the meaning of “Liborgate.” Findings – While rhetorical struggles over “Liborgate” overtly center on the issue of who is to blame, an analysis of the argumentative relations between competing frames leads to the conclusion that this political “blame game” is related to struggles over how to define the scandal, how to conceptualize its causes, and policy recommendations. Banks may have lost the battle of “Liborgate,” but the war over the meaning of financial culture is far from over. Originality/value – The paper is theoretically and methodologically original in its combi...