Organizational Discourse Research Articles

¿A qué se refieren las organizaciones chilenas cuando dicen ser transparentes?

El concepto de transparencia se instaló en el discurso social y organizacional en Chile en un contexto de bajos niveles de confianza institucional. El artículo identifica el significado que este tiene para las organizaciones chilenas, mediante entrevistas semiestructuradas a 11 directores de organizaciones públicas y privadas. Hay una concentración de esfuerzos por instrumentalizar el concepto desde lo legal, lo que se plasma en las estrategias comunicacionales. Sin embargo, este estudio plantea la dimensión relacional como aporte a su conceptualización desde la perspectiva comunicacional.

The discursive construction of organizational legitimacy in higher education: Multimodal discourse analysis on Chinese business schools

Applying a Multimodal Discourse Analysis framework, this study focuses on university websites to explore how organizational legitimacy is constructed through discursive strategies. Our findings show that under authoritative administrative logic and market logic, universities construct two organizational identities: policy followers and product/service suppliers, and use exemplification and authorization strategies respectively through visual discourse to legitimate the identities. To avoid potential conflicts between the legitimacy claims associated with these two identities, universities apply a decoupling strategy to isolate the two identities, along with both explicit and implicit expressions, through the intertextuality between visual and verbal discourses. The constitutive characteristics of universities’ website discourse reveal the complexity of Chinese institutional context in higher education field and the constitutive influence of the institutional background on organizational discourse and legitimation strategies.

Ideological Categories in the Discourses of World Health Organization on Covid-19

On 31 December 2019, WHO received information from National Health Commission concerning the outbreak of Covid-19 which was identified by the Chinese authorities. The WHO depends to a great extent on its announcements and instructions on Chinese authorities’ declaration. Consequently, positive and negative announcements and strategies are adopted in dealing with this pandemic. This causes a great extent of fear and confusion for people around the world despite all the efforts that WHO to pass this crucial period successfully and safely. The present study is one of the first studies that seeks to offer critical discourse analysis, description, interpretation, and explanation of ideological categories of institutional discourse, and more specifically of WHO on Covid-19 by using Van Dijk’s Three-Dimensional Model of Ideology (2004). It is found that WHO focuses on certain ideological categories such as repetition, actor description, authority, hyperbole, burden, evidentiality, and number game more than other categories. It is also found that these ideological categories should be based on scientific, psychological, cognitive, social, and cultural perspectives and not just numbers, authority, hyperbole, etc. because they are used to persuade different people around the world with different cultures and they may affect those people lives positively or negatively.

Empowerment at Work?: Examining Employment-Based Economic Empowerment Initiatives for Survivors of Commercial Sexual Exploitation.

Many organizations serving survivors of commercial sexual exploitation (CSE) have begun economic empowerment programs, providing financial literacy education, vocational training, and/or employment opportunities for survivors. Yet, very little research has examined these programs, especially those that employ survivors. This project draws on a qualitative, multi-method study of 15 organizations that serve and employ CSE survivors to examine how economic empowerment is constructed through organizational discourse and practices, what tensions emerge in these processes, and how organizational actors frame and respond to them. The findings outline the components of "economic empowerment" and explicate the key tensions of authority-autonomy and compassion-accountability.

Framing home injury: opportunities and barriers to regulating for safer rental housing in Aotearoa/New Zealand

Like many countries in the OECD, Aotearoa NZ does not comprehensively regulate or enforce the safety of rental housing, despite evidence that the significant scale of home injury can be reduced through cost-effective home modifications. We examine the framing of home injury in media, political, and organisational discourse to identify barriers to creating and enforcing laws for safer rental homes. We find progress in addressing safety via rental housing regulations is stymied, in part, by institutional arrangements that favour the framing of home injury as a product of individual behaviour and culpability rather than environmental risk, and the prioritisation of education and awareness-raising over regulatory and systemic interventions framed politically, as overreaching ‘nanny state’ policies. We propose opportunities to address the incidence of injury and inequities in outcomes and argue that effective regulation and enforcement will address the inherent power inequities in the rental sector between owner and occupier, which can influence the presence of injury hazards.

Building pathways between transdisciplinarity and transformation: Lessons from practice

The notion of “transformation” has moved from academic discussion and is now part of the discourse of public and private organizations. Here, we offer a systematic examination of how combining transformation and transdisciplinary approaches can support the transformation to sustainability.In recent years, the notion of “transformation” has moved from academia to the strategic agendas of public and private organizations. Within this discourse, both transdisciplinarity and co-production are often mentioned as means to enable transformation, particularly in debates about risks and opportunities in transformative science and problem-solving. However, there has been little systematic examination of the potential in combining these approaches to contribute more effectively in the transformation to sustainability. Building on an autoethnographic analysis of two projects in transformation and transdisciplinarity, we identify pathways to strengthen collaboration between these approaches: 1. moving from transdisciplinarity “for” transformation to transdisciplinarity “as” transformation and 2. identifying concrete spaces for conceptual and methodological cross-fertilization between these approaches. We discuss the challenges and elaborate recommendations for these pathways and conclude by offering a few insights on how communities can together foster effective sustainability solutions to societal challenges.

Context awareness in the electronic format of dialogue

Modern dialogical speech is undergoing a major transformation due to the use of electronic communication format, which introduces its own changes in the context of communication. Dialogical speech is characterized by a high dependence on the context. In electronically mediated communication, the situation of communication is no longer the same for the communicators: they are in different places, experiencing different stimuli and communication interference, despite the fact that the communicators continue to maintain a dialogue and exchange replicas. Accordingly, the concept of context needs to be supplemented and reinterpreted in connection with the new conditions of its occurrence that is electronic space. The aim of the study is to find the qualitatively essential components for successful mediated communication, which depend on the context of the communication situation. One strategy for achieving successful communication is to remove possible barriers in communication. For this purpose, the detailing of the context of communication, its influence on the effectiveness of communication is carried out, and the concept of semiotic field of dialogue is developed. Under the semiotic field of dialogue we understand the information, which affects the communicants understanding of each other: the references, the presuppositions of the addressee, the presuppositions of the addressor. The material of the study was dialogic communication within the framework of organizational communication. The specific nature of the discourse of corporations and organizations creates its own unique context that is described in the article. The author has identified several groups of interference in the electronic format of dialogical speech, such as physical interference, informational interference, semantic interference and psychological interference.

For a postfoundational method to news discourse analysis

The construction of news is not haphazard. It is institutional in the sense it is a fundamental part of the content media organizations churn out in accordance with certain standards, styles, rules, and rituals. As such, organizational discourse, whether news or any other genre, according to Fairhurst (Citation2009, p. 1608), would represent “a constellation of perspectives united by the view that language does not mirror reality, but constitutes it”. Thus news discourses organizations employ are a “structured collection of texts embodied in the practices of talking and writing (as well as a wide variety of visual representations and cultural artefacts) that bring organizationally related objects into being as these texts are produced, disseminated and consumed”. Phillips et al. (Citation2004, p. 636) assert that the unravelling of social reality of an organization entails “the systematic study of texts—including their production, dissemination, and consumption—in order to explore the relationship between discourse and social reality.” This paper is an inquiry into the news discourse of a global, multilingual broadcaster with the aim of presenting a method on how to investigate news from a postfoundational discourse analysis perspective (henceforth PDA). Despite its popularity as a discourse analysis tool, PDA still “suffers from a quite considerable methodological deficit”. The paper demonstrates that the deficit PDA suffers from can be overcome with recourse to other approaches, specifically critical realist discourse studies (RDS). The following section presents an outline of the major tenets of PDA and then it shows how its combination with RDS can help remedy some of its shortcomings.

ISLAM NUSANTARA: AMBIGUITY, CULTURAL STRATEGY OR ORIGINALITY

Islam Nusantara is a new term in Indonesia. The opposing group views it as a form of Islamic division, and the pro group considers it a strategy for Islamic da'wah with a slogan of moderation and a cultural approach. Islam Nusantara is defined as Islam that is friendly, inclusive, dynamic, and friendly with a diverse cultural, sub-cultural and religious environment. From this meaning, the question arises from this ambiguity: "does the Islam brought by the Prophet not have the characteristics mentioned above, so it needs a discourse on Islam Nusantara? Or did it just happen because of the problem of syncretism and local cultural infiltration? It is a fundamental question that needs to be cleared. This study uses a social and historical approach to analyze the origin, meaning, and purpose of Islam Nusantara from the perspective of Indonesian society. Islam Nusantara is not a new issue. The identity of Islam has been popular since Islamization. The researcher concludes that the terminology of Nusantara Islam has political and theological content. That is the discourse of certain Islamic rulers and organizations dealing with the current epidemic of radicalism and extremism in religion. Originality is the primordial value of Islam that is not bound by time and place; inclusive, dynamic, and moderate. At the same time, the cultural strategy is a dialogue effort between Islam and time and place. Islam Nusantara needed to develop and change according to the demands of the times.

The relation between multiculturalism, interculturalism and cosmopolitanism in UK diversity politics

ABSTRACT This article assesses whether multiculturalism, interculturalism and cosmopolitanism find themselves in tension or, rather, coexist in UK politics. This is done through the analysis of recent policy and civil society documents, complemented with semi-structured interviews with race equality organizations. Results suggest a complementary relationship between these normative perspectives, with interculturalism and multiculturalism jointly shaping the central government’s policy as well as the discourse of civil society organizations. As for cosmopolitanism, it manifests itself primarily in civil society’s support for a more humane system for asylum seekers, as well as in the endorsement of EU intervention in the governance of cultural diversity.

A 20-20 Culture Communication Template Tool for Multinational Management

The article deals with intercultural business communication challenges that complicate discourses in multinational organizations. The article explores the cultural incompatibility problems with their corresponding cultural dimensions extracted from the seminal theories of intercultural management to identify training needs for multinational managers. The fulcrum of this work rests on the salient value orientations that lead to communication collapses when managers from different countries fail to accomplish optimal cultural attunement in their narratives and script their conversations with ethnocentric biases. To counter these debilitating stressful intercultural conversations, the author presents an innovative training solution of a “20-20 culture-communication template tool” for coaching managers for effective production of ethno-relative dialogues across diverse geo-cultural economies. This culture tool uses a 20-point culture questionnaire format with the complementary application apparatus of 20 culture sensitivity programs that organizations can undertake for a quick tutoring of multinational managers for forging successful intercultural coalitions in plural work spaces.

Bridging organisational discourse and practice change: exploring sustainable procurement portfolios for Australian beef

PurposePrivate retail and brand-driven sustainable procurement standards are influencing global agri-food markets, shifting trade and export priorities and reshaping food supply chains. Using the case of Australian beef, the authors construct and evaluate three procurement activity “portfolios” and evaluate how these activity sets pull towards or against diverse organisational goals and/or science-based sustainability objectives.Design/methodology/approachA review of the academic and practitioner literature identified three key pillars for sustainable Australian beef procurement: animal welfare, environmental management and climate change (i.e. emissions). A subset of sustainable beef production activities (n = 100) was identified through this review plus semi-structured interviews with Australian beef retailers and industry bodies. This activity set was filtered (n = 40) and scored by a panel of science experts via a series of workshops and an additional survey. Using these data, the authors use a k-means cluster analysis (k = 3) to consider the strong or weak contributions of each activity portfolio towards typical sustainable beef goals.FindingsA portfolio-based view of sustainable procurement puts the trade-offs between activities and the need for clear sustainability prioritisation into sharp focus. The authors find that individual strategies may be singularly more or less impactful, complex or popular, but when combined as a suite of activities enacted towards a particular goal or set of goals, essential for success. The authors find that obtaining balance across sustainable beef pillars versus within specific pillars can narrow the optimal set of activities that can succeed against multiple sustainability goals.Practical implicationsFor procurement managers, the balance between clear focus and multidimensional progress is a difficult challenge. It requires the bold identification and articulation of an organisation’s interlocking corporate, industry or environmental objectives and flexibility on the strategies, tools and resources required. The authors posit that shifting away from a focus on rigid metrics may be useful in breaking the impasse on meaningful action.Social implicationsUsing a set of known activities and strategies that a procurement manager might draw from in operationalising sustainability goals, the authors cluster activities into three discrete activity portfolios. Each portfolio requires differing levels of effort, implementation complexity and potential for within-pillar and cross-pillar impact (i.e. co-benefits). Assessing the evidence and potential for cross-pillar impacts of individual strategies is a complex undertaking, indicative of the systems and tangled interactions that characterise sustainability science more broadly.Originality/valueBy assessing how the procurement function can be leveraged and operationalised towards sustainability goals through a lens of optimal portfolio management, the authors provide a way forward for the procurement managers working within large retailers and agri-food businesses to progress towards multiple sustainability pillars simultaneously.

Intermunicipal consortium for sustainable development and innovation of the state of Paraíba from the perspective of environmental democracy: an analysis of the organizational discourse

The objective of the present article is to identify the presence of elements of environmental democracy, access to information, and public participation, from the organizational discourse of an inter-municipal public consortium. To this end, it is proceeded by the qualitative approach, descriptive and documental research, on the reality of the organizational discourses of the Intermunicipal Consortium for Sustainable Development and Innovation of the State of Paraíba (CONDESPB). It was observed that the Intermunicipal Consortium, from the perspective of the guidelines of environmental democracy, presented incipient access to information, made by limited channels such as the website, and the access to public participation is non-existent, indirectly giving itself by electoral representation, being contrary to what the parameters of environmental democracy advocates in these two pillars, requiring the expansion of systems and information channels and the direct inclusion of the public and interest groups in environmental deliberations so that the practices of environmental democracy in CONDESPB are minimally instrumental only in the pillar of access to information.

In the Name of “Endangered Nations” and “Unsovereign States”? Official Discourses of Radical Right Movement Parties and Social Movement Organizations in Poland and Germany

AbstractThe political landscape of the radical right has long been a major discussion point in the political and social sciences. By considering the variety of radical right organizations (movement parties and non-parliamentary organizations) and the particular national and transnational political and discursive opportunity structures, the paper aims at a comparative analysis of the main discursive frames present in political programs and manifestoes of radical right social movement organizations and movement parties in Poland (Konfederacja Wolność i Niepodległość and Obóz Narodowo-Radykalny) and Germany (Alternative für Deutschland and Identitäre Bewegung Deutschland). Moreover, based on approaches developed by Cas Mudde and Jens Rydgren, this article analyses how the features presumed essential to the radical right (nativism, authoritarianism and populism) are reflected and interconnected in the official discourses of the selected radical right organizations.

Temporal multimodality and performativity: Exploring politics of time in the discursive, communicative constitution of organization

This paper discusses the critical role of time in the discursive, communicative constitution of organization under neo-liberal capitalism and its normalization of uncertainty and change. Building on a review of extant time notions in studies of organizational discourse and communicative constitution of organization, we propose a critical approach to temporality inspired by feminist time notions, namely spacetimemattering and politics of time. In doing this, we develop a multimodal and performative concept of temporality that facilitates a double attention to the multiple communication modes of time and their performative powers in organizing work life. We explore the value of this conception of temporality through an empirical illustration, showing how multiple temporalities entangle, differentiate, and compete, and how one time construct may domesticate and devalue other times without, however, eliminating those, thus enabling ongoing, precarious struggles over organizing work practices and subjectivities. The paper expands the scope of temporality studies in organizations, nurturing critical theorizing of and insights into the multimodal performativity and politics of time at work in neo-liberal capitalism.

Talking about disappointments: Identification work through multiple discourses at a prestigious university

Disappointment is common in many organizations. Yet little is known about how individuals’ talk about their workplace disappointment shapes their identification with organizations. We conducted an analysis of 104 academics in a prestigious British university to make two contributions to our understanding of the discursive constitution of organizational identification (OID). First, we show how individuals used different types of disappointment-talk to narrate and respond to identification dilemmas in distinct ways. Our findings extend existing research by showing that discourses of emotion do not simply delimit agency but also enable individuals to resist and reject organizational discourses that attempt to anchor them to specific identity positions. Second, we identify a novel way in which individuals can configure the multiple discourses that can be in tension and generate disappointment – unravelling. Here, individuals draw upon one among the multiple discourses in conflict (in our case, prestige) to ‘unravel’ the knotting between the various discourses that constituted their OID dilemmas. We also consider the implications of our study for academic labour in universities.

From professional support to academic pathway – negotiating professional identity in a time of organisational change (case study of two middle managers at a UK university language centre)

In the past five years some UK Universities have introduced the Academic Education Pathway contracts (AEP), incorporating the elements of leadership, teaching and scholarship for recognition and promotion of professional services staff with teaching responsibilities. While colleagues have been encouraged to apply for the new contracts at the departmental level, the University policy guidelines have been conflicting and ambiguous. Many newly AEP transferred departmental middle managers have reported stress related to the application process, uncertainty about career progression, increased workload, and professional identity regulation largely due to the element of research added to the new role. The novelty of the AEP contract and the anecdotal evidence of the burden placed upon the individuals experiencing role incongruity has identified the gap in the knowledge of professional identity construction of UK University middle managers at a time of contractual organisational change. This study will investigate the previously unresearched area of University Language Centre managers with teaching responsibilities. Despite similarities in experiencing organisational change, the participants of the study make different identity claims aligning or resisting the dominant societal and organisational discourses, such as the discourse of New Managerialism, thus highlighting the nuanced and culturally specific approach to professional identity negotiation. The study is framed by the concepts of Educational Leadership, Middle Management and Organisational Change. While the findings may not be generalized beyond the context of this study, the implications can be significant for UK Higher Education policy makers.

Apocalyptic representation of COVID-19: A corpus-assisted discourse analysis of the World Health Organization's discourse practices

This study examines the interdiscursive representation of the coronavirus disease by the World Health Organization from the outbreak of the virus in January 2020 to the announcement of a successful vaccine in November 2020. The aim is to find out whether the agency has delivered apocalyptic language that increased anxiety and stress among the public leading to a weak human immune system, or contributed to creating global cooperation and placing emergency measures to fight the virus. I have adopted a discourse analysis approach, with the aid of NVivo qualitative software and corpus linguistic tools, for the analysis of a purpose-built corpus of the WHO Director-General’s speeches, focusing on referential, predication, perspectivation, intensifying, mitigation and argumentation strategies. The result of the analysis revealed that the WHO discourse referred to COVID-19 as an eccentric virus, qualified and intensified by the agency as a threat to humanity. The WHO adopted a subjective point of view, showing active involvement in the discursive representation of the virus and argumentatively asking people to unite until a vaccine is invented.

From a land ‘down under’: the potential role of responsible innovation as practice during the bottom-up development of mission arenas in Australia

ABSTRACT This perspective paper integrates theories of responsible innovation (RI) with the nascent development of the concept of mission-oriented innovation to address wicked socio-institutional challenges. Theoretically, steering a Mission-oriented Innovation System (MIS) and associated ‘mission arena' toward activities that create virtuous cycles of RI practice will lead to cumulative impacts on the evolution of innovation system cultures. We explore this claim using nascent future-oriented ‘missions' developing within the competitive industry setting of Australian agri-food research and development ventures and aligned training exercises (short courses) in RI practice. This example highlights attempts to stimulate the practice of RI from the bottom up through the Australian (national) innovation system, as agri-food ‘missions’ come to be. Such reporting provides a conceptual grounding to foster a cycle (see graphical abstract) of relevance for comparison to other ex-ante MIS as mission-orientation is popularized as a potential solution to intractable and urgent problems throughout the developed world. A mission-oriented innovation cycle where clockwise from left: 1) people and organizations with ‘responsible innovation’ potential contribute as actors to an innovation system (technological, sectoral, regional, national or mission-oriented) that works to… 2) determine and prioritize a ‘challenge’ (‘grand societal’ or more mundane) then. 3) develops a ‘mission/s’ to overcome the ‘challenge’ leading to… 4) results of mission-oriented activities (that are either successful or not given the mission aims) over a given timeframe, circling back to… 5) the cumulative learning and development of language, discourse and practice (or not) of people, organizations, and innovation systems because of the mission-oriented innovation investment.

Employee sensemaking of CSR: on micro-discourses of corporate social responsibility

PurposeRecently, scholars are pushing for an internal corporate social responsibility (CSR) view through employee perspectives regarding CSR efforts, particularly in considering how organizations can act responsibly toward internal stakeholders (May, 2011). Thus, research has begun taking a “micro-turn” in analyzing CSR (Aguinis and Glavas, 2012), focused on individual analysis of such practices within organizations. The purpose of this study is to uncover the organizational sensemaking of CSR by an important yet less understood stakeholder group, employees.Design/methodology/approachThis study takes a primarily qualitative, micro-approach via interviews (n = 42) to understanding the internal sensemaking of various organizations' CSR efforts from the perspective of employees. Organizational discourse analysis is utilized.FindingsAt the individual level, findings from over 40 one-on-one interviews highlighted how this stakeholder group rationalizes, perceives and identifies with their employers' socially responsible efforts. Findings uncover both macro- and micro-level understandings of CSR, as well as the reality of CSR within particular organizations from an operational standpoint.Research limitations/implicationsThis study provides important theoretical and methodological implications, particularly in its explicitly interpretive and qualitative approach. Specifically, this work contributes to the micro-foundations and limited internal view of CSR by interviewing over 40 employees.Practical implicationsThis study provides important pragmatic implications, particularly when considering how CSR is communicated to (internal) stakeholders. Additionally, CSR must be seen as strategic and embedded in core business practices, rather than a one-off campaign.Social implicationsOn a societal level, there is an expectation that corporations take care of their employees in terms of emotional and physical well-being, equity, work–life balance, among others. This study suggests a move to more inward-facing CSR practices—specifically those benefiting internal members.Originality/valueThis work contributes to research on the micro-foundations and limited internal view of CSR and provides important pragmatic implications. Specifically, the use of interviews of employees in gaining access to an important stakeholder group is a significant contribution to CSR scholarship.