Make Petrobras Great Again: Analyzing Identification Work After a Corruption Scandal

Abstract

This paper uses a work lens to examine a multinational company’s purposeful actions to communicate the expansion of an ethics and compliance program after a massive corruption scandal. It draws on the notion of communication as symbolic management, which offers a window into program implementation, to analyze what we call identification work—the top-down, sensegiving process through which organizational leaders construct a collective sense of self and present it to organizational members and external stakeholders to restore their organization’s legitimacy. Identification work makes extensive use of various discursive resources to reduce uncertainty as well as to evoke social, relational, and personal identification. This paper also mobilizes the concept of ventriloquism to explain the constitutive power of communication and how the company gives voice to key human and non-human actors such as regulators, civil society organizations, the media, and its ethics and compliance program. We have found that the company’s ethics and compliance program is at the center of its newly-constructed sense of self, which is presented to both organizational members and external stakeholders as human-like, assuming a heroic quality strongly supported by symbols.