Multimodality, Meaning, and Institutions

Markus A. Höllerer|Thibault Daudigeos|Dennis Jancsary

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9781787433328

06 December 2017

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06 December 2017

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The insight that institutions, and the communicative practices that create, sustain, and challenge them, are multimodal accomplishments has garnered increasing attention from scholars in organization and management research over the last decade. Traditional understanding of social knowledge and meaning as being constituted primarily through verbal discourse has been challenged and extended by work that has promoted the centrality of visual, material, and other sign systems (e.g., audio, gestures, layout) for constructing social reality.

While some discursive approaches to organizations and institutions have acknowledged the existence and relevance of modes other than the verbal for some time, systematic research on multimodality has remained rather sparse. In particular, the interaction and orchestration of multiple modes remains terra incognita with considerable empirical, methodological, and theoretical stakes.

Together, 54A and 54B of Research in the Sociology of Organizations investigate these issues with innovative research that focuses on the relationship between different modes in the emergence, diffusion, maintenance, and challenge of social meanings and institutions. Individual contributions demonstrate the potential of multimodal approaches to rejuvenate and extend the study of institutions, they revisit research on classic phenomena in organization theory through a multimodal lens, and advance the design of relevant and rigorous methods of analysis for the study of multimodal communicative practices.

Part One: Multimodal Perspectives On Institutional Persistence and Change 1, Multimodal Construction of a Rational Myth: Industrialization of The French Building Sector in The Period from 1945 To 1970; Eva Boxenbaum, Thibault Daudigeos, Jean-Charles Pillet and Sylvain Colombero 2, Cru, Glue, and Status: How Wine Labels Helped Ennoble Bordeaux; Grégoire Croidieu, Birthe Soppe and Walter W. Powell 3, Where History, Visuality and Identity Meet: Institutional Paths to Visual Diversity Among Organizations; Achim Oberg, Gili S. Drori and Giuseppe Delmestri 4, Dirty Oil or Ethical Oil? Visual Rhetoric in Legitimation Struggles; Lianne M. Lefsrud, Heather Graves and Nelson Phillips

Part Two: The Multimodal Construction of Identities 5, Companies On the Runway: Fashion Companies’ Multimodal Presentation of Their Organizational Identity in Job Advertisements; Bernadette Bullinger 6, Message in A Bottle: Multiple Modes and Multiple Media in Market Identity Claims; Bernard Forgues and Tristan May 7, The Architecture of City Identities: A Multimodal Study of Barcelona and Boston; Candace Jones and Silviya Svejenova
Afterword: Multimodality in Organization Studies; Theo Van Leeuwen

Contributed by business and management researchers from North America, Europe, Israel, and Australia, the eight articles in this volume explore the relationship between different modes of communication in the emergence, diffusion, maintenance, and challenge of social meanings and institutions, focusing on organizations and industries. They examine the use of multiple modes of communication to socially construct the rational myth of industrialization in the French construction sector after World War II, and the roles of visual and verbal communication in this process; the institutional persistence of a tradition in the Bordeaux wine community in France and the role of community organizations; the visual identity of universities through logos to create visual identities; how organizational actors use images to define a contested industry, namely the use of words and images to reframe the Canadian oil sands industry; fashion companies’ multimodal presentation, through visuals and verbal text, of their organizational identity in job advertisements; how identity elements are referenced in verbal and visual modes of meaning making and how they interrelate with each other and channels of communication, through the example of whisky distilleries; and the identity and meaning created by different groups of professionals to construct city identity.
- Annotation ©2018

Markus A. Höllerer is Professor of Public Management and Governance at Vienna University of Economics and Business, Austria, and is also Senior Scholar in Organization Theory at UNSW Sydney Business School, Australia

Thibault Daudigeos is Professor of Organization Studies at Grenoble School of Management, France, and Head of the Alternative Forms of Markets and Organizations (AFMO) Research Team.

Dennis Jancsary is Assistant Professor at the Institute for Organization Studies at Vienna University of Economics and Business, Austria.