Organizational Talk Research Articles

What makes nonprofit organizations (NPOs) talk transparently about their connections with businesses on Twitter? Insights from nonprofit-business network portfolios and resource dependencies

Drawing on network portfolio literature and resource dependence theory, this study investigates how a nonprofit’s N2B partnership portfolio configurations (i.e., size and industry diversification), reliance on individual donations, and reliance on government grants influence the nonprofit’s transparency in disclosing N2B partnerships on Twitter. We manually coded the level of transparency reflected in 911 tweets sent by 81 leading COVID-19 NPOs mentioning 501 companies from March 1 to July 19, 2020. Social network analysis and regression models were performed to answer the research inquiries. Findings indicate that maintaining a large number of business connections is associated with lowered transparency in N2B communication on Twitter, whereas keeping diverse connections with different business industries relates to increased transparency in N2B communication. NPOs with a stronger reliance on government grants signaled more transparency in N2B parentships on Twitter, but the reliance on individual donations did not influence N2B transparency signaling.

Data as Strategy: How Platforms Solve Problems and Ecosystems can Transform the Industry

Many organizations talk about the power of data but too few really understand the full potential. Utilizing a strategic framework that redefines the roles of collaboration and innovation, ses how one organization built competitive differentiators by expanding upon the concept of a data analytics platform to create a data operating system and beyond enterprise analytics to facilitating an ecosystem.

Influence of Organizational Resources on Performance of Financial Services Associations in Makueni and Kitui Counties of Kenya

Many organizations talk of strategic formulation whereby they develop strategies and put them into practice. However, many organizations fail to actualize these strategies due to a lack of proper implementation strategy. Many firms face challenges in strategic implementation due to a lack of resources. This study sought to examine the influence of organizational resources on the performance of financial services associations (FSAs) in Makueni and Kitui Counties of Kenya. This study followed a cross-section survey method to collect primary data by using questionnaires that were administered online and through the drop-and-pick method. The study found that FSAs in Kitui and Makueni counties utilized internal resources more in strategy implementation. Practices on resource allocation included technology, financial resources, and human resources. The study revealed an Exp(B) of 0.107 which was associated with a p-value of 0.001. The study concluded that the use of internal resources over external resources significantly increased the odds of high performance of FSAs in Kitui and Makueni counties. The study recommends Financial Service Associations (FSAs) in Kitui and Makueni counties utilize internal resources, including management expertise and financial strength, to capitalize on opportunities for improved performance. Additionally, FSAs should diversify revenue streams by introducing new products, prioritizing hiring and retaining skilled employees, investing in robust information security, adopting cutting-edge technology, and strategically allocating resources to optimize performance and cope with emerging demands during strategy implementation. The study emphasizes the importance of leveraging internal capabilities and proactive resource management for the success of FSAs.

The “major mea culpa:” Journalistic Discursive Techniques When Professional Norms are Broken

ABSTRACT The “corrections statement” is sufficient for media organizations to address small mistakes. When larger missteps occur, however, more substantive work is needed not only to correct the record, but also to protect the organization’s claim to an authentic journalistic identity. This study analyzes 30 of what it terms “major mea culpa” statements to explore how media organizations talk about their significant professional errors and the tools they use to maintain their journalistic identities when such errors occur. Using content analysis to explore the major themes of journalistic process and journalistic principle, this study concludes that the discursive techniques central to “major mea culpas” seek to assert and affirm journalistic identity when actions may suggest that an organization no longer reflects the ideals of the profession.

Ventriloquial reflexivity: Exploring the communicative relationality of the ‘I’ and the ‘it’

Can an exploration of managers’ real-time organizational talk make way for a profoundly revised theory of reflexivity? Indeed, our analysis of the reflexivity literature reveals four significant points of contestation – the subject/object distinction, temporality, representation and agency – all of which revolve around the interplay of an ‘I’ (at least one reflexive agent) and an ‘it’ (something to be reflexive about). The focus of this inquiry lies in how the ‘I’ and the ‘it’ are constituted communicatively and what generates, sustains and animates them in interaction. Such interactions are sourced from a post-experience master programme for practising managers, thus providing naturally occurring data amendable to a ventriloquial analysis. We identify and demonstrate three types of reflexive moments: conflating, bifurcating and animating. We subsequently theorize these as instances of ventriloquial reflexivity, using the terms conflating, bifurcating and animating to express the different moments in which speakers co-orient to the communicative constitution of the ‘I’ and the ‘it’. Ventriloquial reflexivity allows us to explore reflexivity as an interactional and situated accomplishment, thus further pointing to how reflexive practices can be understood and enhanced.

Gendered Power at Work: Constituting Moral Worth in a Hyper-Masculine Organizational Culture

How do powerful women in a hyper-masculine organization talk about power? To answer this question, we should explore both cultural contents and gendered politics that inform women’s discourse about social power. This article investigates how women morally evaluate their own and others’ power. Based on in-depth interviews with 34 women serving in senior military positions, I argue that they achieve a sense of self-worth and professional subjectivity through moral work. This symbolic work involves three main discursive strategies regrading power: (1) Drawing symbolic moral boundaries between themselves and the morally ‘degenerate’ military environment; (2) Using ‘performances of authenticity’ to constitute their moral worth; and (3) (Non-)apology to counter the accusation implicit in the social expectation that they must apologize for their power as women. These strategies allow these women to talk about power in moral terms, bring power closer to themselves, and at the same time claim moral subjectivity. By morally justifying the use of military power, they make the internalized ‘brass ceiling’ transparent. Thus, I argue that although women are agentic in constituting their worth, this is not necessarily done by way of ‘resistance’, but rather through discursive maneuvering that relies on the same oppressive discursive patterns designed to restrict their power. Accordingly, their efforts to constitute their selves and ‘do power’ are carried out within, rather than outside, the gendered moral logic of the organizational culture.

Small-Group Student Talk Before Individual Writing in Tertiary English Writing Classrooms in China: Nature and Insights.

When exploring the nature of small-group student talk in English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) individual writing in terms of what students are talking about, previous studies have mainly linked it to students’ writing and focused more on students’ written texts than their talk. Consequently, the analyses have largely been text-oriented rather than talk-oriented and have failed to reveal a complete picture of such talk and the socially negotiated nature of the interaction. To fill up the literature gap, we designed a study to investigate the nature of prewriting small-group student talk in Chinese tertiary EFL writing classrooms. Specifically, we examined what students were talking about when engaging in argumentative writing tasks prior to individual writing. Eight hours of audio recordings of student talk from eight small groups in two classes (N = 48) were collected during their prewriting small-group discussions. They were analyzed and interpreted in six categories: Content talk, language talk, task-management talk, organization talk, affective talk, and phatic talk. Major findings show that small-group student talk: (1) enabled students to generate content, language, and organization for their proceeding individual writing; (2) provided them with opportunities to facilitate collaborative linguistic problem-solving and the deliberate use of the first language (L1) for requesting and clarifying information; (3) allowed them to organize the group and scaffold each other collectively to manage the ongoing process of the task; and (4) assisted them to share their emotions and maintain group harmony at a surface level but did not help generate direct positive or negative affective expressions. Pedagogical insights into L2 writing instruction are also discussed.

Artificial Intelligence in Media:Journalists’Perceptions and Organizational Talk

Artificial Intelligence’s cost-efficient nature and speed of operation has naturally prompted many media organizations to consider its broader application in the media industry. But it has also prompted concern among human journalists that they will be marginalized and ultimately replaced by AI. This study employs qualitative methods to explore the perceptions of media practitioners working in Chinese media context in relation to the impact of AI on media employment, and attempts to shed light on how talk/discourse about AI is shaping perceptions at the individual (micro) level and institutional communication at the organizational (meso) level.

Corruption, Bribery, African Concepts of God, and the Gospel

Corruption and bribery have become a disastrous problem in SubSaharan Africa. A survey of the regular reports of Transparency International reveals how this societal ill has reached pandemic proportions. Although several governments and organizations talk a lot about corruption and appoint special commissions to investigate it, there is a widespread perception that so far only a few branches of the huge tree of corruption and bribery have been lopped off and very little has been done to root out corruption from society. To get to the root of the issue, this article endeavors to compare the ethical implications of African traditional religious concepts of God with God’s self-revelation and to apply this comparison to corruption and bribery. KEYWORDS:

Moral Voice: Talking About Ethics at Work

There are a number of reasons that individuals find it challenging to engage in discussion about ethics and values in the workplace environment, yet engagement regarding values is critically important for organizations. Effective organizations talk about and enact their values. This note discusses some of the key barriers to exercising “moral voice” in the workplace environment and offers suggestions for individuals and managers regarding how to foster such open discussion and how to minimize moral muteness. Excerpt UVA-E-0411 Rev. Jan. 5, 2016 Moral Voice: Talking About Ethics at Work Organizational learning and functioning depend on the willingness of employees to give voice to their ideas, opinions, and concerns. When expressed constructively, employee voice helps groups learn, make better decisions, and identify and address problems. Yet the default tendency for employees in many organizations is simply to remain silent; speaking up at work is perceived to be risky. High-performing organizations seek to overcome this workplace silence and find ways to encourage and listen to feedback from a diverse range of employees and individuals who might have a tendency to be overlooked or lost—the less powerful, the disenfranchised, and those who due to personality might simply be less inclined to speak up. Employee voice is a vital part of organizational functioning, because the ideas raised by employees can be a valuable source of innovation and a powerful impetus for change. Employee voice is especially important when it concerns matters of ethics and values, because moral voice highlights opportunities for organizations to better meet the needs of their stakeholders—opportunities that might otherwise fade into the background of a business narrative dominated by immediate competitive pressures. Moral voice is also a powerful deterrent to unethical workplace behavior. For instance, research demonstrates that employee tips are the single most effective mechanism for detecting and deterring corporate misconduct and uncovering more fraudulent behavior than audits, technology controls, and management reviews combined. Finally, moral voice can enhance workers' ability to engage with or question—and therefore better connect with—the purpose and values of an organization. For all of these reasons, ethics and values are among the most important topics for open discussion within organizations. Despite the many benefits of moral voice for effective organizational functioning, the process of speaking up about ethical matters can be difficult for both employees and their managers. Why is it so difficult to talk about moral issues at work? And why do managers tend to shy away from fostering and engaging in discussions related to ethics and values? Even more importantly, how can leaders overcome these challenges to encourage more effective conversations about ethics in the workplace? . . .

The non-sense of organizational morality

Purpose– Companies’ corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities tend to be regarded with suspicion: Taking managerial decision about engaging in CSR or communicating, this decision does not constitute the actual execution of this decision itself. A gulf can exist between deciding, speaking and doing. In fact, this gap between speaking and doing has longed fuelled the discussion about the risks, benefits and pitfalls of CSR, mainly for one reason: It remains unknown what happens to CSR concepts when they are transformed from formal decisions at the top of the hierarchy to concrete action in the rest of the organization. This paper explores this internal transformation process by combining the macro- and micro-levels of observation.Design/methodology/approach– From a macro-perspective, the authors use Nils Brunsson’s notion of organizational hypocrisy to elucidate the societal conditions of the intraorganizational enforcement of CSR. Second, the authors combine this framework with Karl Weick’s organizational sensemaking approach to understand better how employee generate meaning and actions from contradictory expectations on the micro-level of the organization. By combining these two streams of theory, the authors provide a clear understanding of the internal sensemaking mechanisms brought about by contradicting societal norms. This approach and its usefulness is illustrated by means of an empirical case study.Findings– The paper illustrates the characteristics of the unavoidable difference between organizational talk and action, the contradictions employees face on the shop floor when executing CSR and the challenges CSR execution has to overcome.Research limitations/implications– Given the combination of theoretical and empirical reflection, the paper remains explorative.Practical implications– The moral dilemmas of employees become much clearer, as much as the organizational hypocrisy which CSR drives companies into. That can help managers to better deal with employees’ and the public’s reaction to own CSR efforts.Originality/value– Combining Nils Brunsson (hypocrisy) with Karl Weick (sensemaking) in the context of CSR has not been undertaken. Accordingly, the insights are unique.

Conceptions of gender and age in Swedish Victim Support

The aim of this article is to unpack how the categories ‘gender’ and ‘age’ are understood among Swedish Victim Support organizations. This is done through a study of how individuals who work in Swedish Victim Support organizations talk about victims as well as about their own role. In an analysis of 12 focus groups from Swedish Victim Support organizations, where one part was based on vignettes and the other part on open discussion, we focus on how the supporters understand gender and age. By working with three categorical pairs – victim and supporter, male and female as well as young and old – we show that gender is a dominant categorization in understanding both victims and victim supporters. Age seemed to have more importance in how women are understood, as female victims were described quite differently depending on age, and the ideal helper was described as a mature woman. Male helpers were regarded as a homogenous group and age did not matter. Conclusively, we found that, while gender as a category was important in the understanding of how people are perceived in Victim Support, the intersection of the categories of gender and age were important in supporting and enhancing this understanding. This article points at the importance of understanding how these specific categories work.

Cancer care in the UK: we need to be more ambitious.

part of Ciaran Devane* speaks to Francesca Lake, Managing Commissioning Editor: Ciaran Devane is the outgoing Chief Executive of Macmillan Cancer Support. Educated at University College Dublin (Ireland), he holds a degree in biochemical engineering. He also holds a Master’s degree in international policy from George Washington University (DC, USA). Ciaran is a trustee of the National Council for Voluntary Organisations sits on the advisory council of the Cicely Saunders Institute, an institute for research into palliative care (London, UK). Since January 2012, he has also been a Non-Executive Director of the National Health Service England.

Doing Leadership through Signswitching in theIndonesian Bureaucracy

In recent years the study of the relationship between talk and the doing of leadership has gained increasing attention from linguistic anthropologists and sociolinguists. Even so, as with much research on organizational talk, typically these studies focus on the micro analysis of situated talk in monolingualEnglish‐speaking settings. In this article I start to fill this gap by looking at how a boss moves between Indonesian and Javanese to do leadership. The empirical focus is on recordings of meetings made during five months of fieldwork in a government bureau in Semarang in 2003–2004. I show that whileIndonesian is used to do much transactional work,Javanese does both relational and transactional work, often in ways that differ from earlier accounts of Javanese usage. In interpreting this usage I draw upon work on reciprocity to suggest that the use of Javanese fragments—along with other leadership practices—help build a locally emergent system of reciprocity.

Resisting LGBT Rights Where “We Have Won”: Canada and Great Britain

Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and trans (LGBT) human rights are often assumed to travel from the core to the periphery, namely from the Global North to the Global South. However, these rights flows and resistances are more complex than a unidirectional model might suggest. Using a transnational perspective, we consider resistances to LGBT rights in places where LGBT rights are supposedly assured. In Canada and Great Britain, where various forms of equities legislation for LGBT people have been enacted, there is an increasing opposition to LGBT gains. The transnational circulation of these oppositional discourses can be seen in how Canadian and British organizations talk to, and about, each other and illustrate transnational networks that create resistances in the places where “we have won.” This questions a sole focus on resistances in places that do not have LGBT equalities legislation, usually those outside the Global North and associated with “less developed others.”

Gauging Openness to Written Communication Change

This study gauges workers’ degree of openness to significant changes in the organization, style, and design of a written report by analyzing metaphors that emerge from their talk about their report-reading and decision-making tasks. Workers at two work sites—in Maryland and in Washington DC—responded to two typical work reports: one written in the style currently in use and another in a fundamentally different style exhibiting features that make documents easy to read and understand. The dominant metaphor that the Maryland workers used was “the whole-man” approach, which represented the workers’ flexible approach toward work tasks that resulted in their willingness to accept the fundamentally different report. In contrast, Washington DC workers used the metaphors “paint by the numbers” and “stay within the lines” when describing their work. These metaphors suggest the workers’ adherence to organizational routines and uncomfortableness with change that caused them not only to reject the new reports but also to have strong emotional reactions toward them. These results indicate that assessing organizational talk, particularly the metaphors people use, is a useful tool in gauging workers’ perceptions about and degree of openness toward communication change.

‘We are in Complete Agreement’: The Diversity Issue, Disagreement and Change in the European Women's Lobby

This article analyses how leading members of a social movement organization talk about a controversial topic and looks at how the leaders relate to internal disagreement. By using the issue of women's diversity as point of departure, the article shows how European Women's Lobby (EWL) leaders engage in boundary making vis-à-vis multidimensional equality claims. The interviewed leaders identify women's issues as a majority issue and contrast them with minority issues and women's diversity. It is suggested that the arguments applied by the EWL leaders are similar to those historically articulated when issues such as women's emancipation were marginalized within the traditional class-based labour movement. The presence of diverging opinions among the leaders with regard to how this controversial issue should be framed is subsequently used as an empirical illustration of the dynamism in movement claims. The conclusion of the article suggests that multidimensional equality claims are controversial and disputed within the organization, but that differences in opinion among the leaders coexist and form part of a continuously on-going framing process.

Conversational identity work in everyday interaction

Increasing numbers of studies are identifying ‘identity work’ in research participants’ efforts to establish, maintain, deny or change the identity positions being ascribed to self and other. However, as authors variously emphasize how far identity is negotiated between people, on the one hand, and how far it is determined by prevailing discourses and local ideational notions of who people are, on the other, we are arguably no closer to understanding how identity work gets done in everyday organizational talk. To address this issue we present a conceptualisation of identity work that contrasts these two aspects. Through an analysis of talk in a mundane, everyday, meeting we identify and illustrate five prevalent identity work forms. Taken together, these forms and the conceptualisation represent an important first-step towards developing a more nuanced understanding of the different ways in which people's identities are engaged in, reproduced through, and altered by their participation in their everyday routine organizing practices.

Stereotypes and the discursive accomplishment of intergroup differentiation

This article analyzes how employees in a global business organization talk about their colleagues in other countries. Employees were asked to discuss their work practices in focus group settings, and give examples of how they experience ‘the other’. Using Discursive Psychology and Politeness Theory as the analytic approaches, the article analyzes pieces of discourse to disclose social psychological phenomena such as group identity, intergroup differentiation, and stereotypes. The analyses show that talking about ‘the other’ is potentially face-threatening, and mitigating discourse features are used repeatedly to soften the criticism. We also see how uncovering stereotypes is a mutual accomplishment in the group, and how group members gradually move from relatively innocent to blatantly negative outgroup stereotypes. The analyses also show that participants engage in meta-reflections on the nature of stereotypes, which may serve as another mitigating device, and that talk about ‘the other’ is used to create intergroup differentiation. Finally, the article discusses the implications of these findings for cross-cultural communication and work practices in organizations.

From Refugee to Good Citizen: A Discourse Analysis of Volunteering

This paper is concerned with how refugees who work as volunteers with a refugee organization talk about themselves and their work. A Foucauldian Discourse Analytic approach is employed in order to explore how participants construct themselves as both refugees and volunteers, the discourses they draw on, and how this impacts on the possible ways-of-being open to refugees. The findings indicate a meta discourse of good citizen; volunteering was constructed as a technology of self, a way of transforming the refugee into a ‘good citizen’. Volunteering was also seen as a way of preparing for entry into the labour market and a means of self-improvement.