Regimenting Circulation: A Case Study of Mediatization in Corporate Communication

Abstract

Communication is necessary work and imagined want in corporations. Using firsthand data from a midsize corporation, this essay discusses the professional practices of corporate communication as a metadiscursive project of proleptically shaping the circulation of representations of the corporation. In corporate work, activities spoken of as “communication” are segmented and ritualized with respect to who the corporation seeks to engage in discursive and semiotic frameworks of participation and which communicative media it employs. The ways in which various communicative scenarios are imagined and framed in the design and use of corporate media are examined, as is the manner in which the boundary of the corporation’s communicative activity is drawn and (re)defined through metapragmatic regimentations of future participatory encounters. The expertise of corporate communication practitioners involves the ability to formulate the corporation as the mediatized center of the groups with which it communicates and to devise messages that target diverse groups as addressees.