How organizations incorporate insights from stakeholder communication : The role of media and modal affordances

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How Organizations Incorporate

Insights from Stakeholder

Communication

The Role of Media and Modal Affordances

Thomas Cyron

Jönköping University

Jönköping International Business School JIBS Dissertation Series No. 144 • 2021

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Jönköping University

Jönköping International Business School JIBS Dissertation Series No. 144 • 2021

How Organizations Incorporate

Insights from Stakeholder

Communication

The Role of Media and Modal Affordances

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How Organizations Incorporate Insights from Stakeholder Communication The Role of Media and Modal Affordances

JIBS Dissertation Series No. 144

Jönköping International Business School, Jönköping University P.O. Box 1026

SE-551 11 Jönköping Tel. +46 36 10 10 00 www.ju.se

Printed by Stema Specialtryck AB 2021 ISSN 1403-0470 Trycksak 3041 0234 SVANENMÄRKET Trycksak 3041 0234 SVANENMÄRKET

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So many people telling me one way So many people telling me to stay Never had time to have my mind made up Caught in a motion that I don’t wanna stop

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Acknowledgments

Danke, Mama und Papa. Meine Kritikfähigkeit habe ich euch zu verdanken. Obwohl es eine halbe Ewigkeit brauchte mein loses Mundwerk einigermaßen zu bändigen, habt ihr nie den Glauben verloren, dass ich es irgendwann konstruktiv einsetzen werde. Mal sehen, ob es mir jetzt gelungen ist... (-;

I am deeply grateful to my supervisors at JIBS for their continuous encouragement and support. Leona, over the past years, you let me explore ideas wherever they would take me without ever prioritizing your own interest. You made me feel protected and looked after on my journeys through academia because whenever I got back from exploration, your door would literally stand open to my learnings, frustrations, passions, and worries. Whenever I faced obstacles and barriers, you advised me which ones to evade and helped me tackling others. Instead of saying “no,” you have taught me that some ideas require more persuasion than others. It has empowered my intuition and encouraged me to tread my own paths. I could not have imagined a better “Doktormutter.”

Massimo, without your advice concerning the advantages and disadvantages of academic careers, I hardly would have taken up a doctoral education after my Master’s studies. You continued listening to my questions ever since, offered useful counsel, and made everything happen to clear the path for me as much as possible. You have taught me the first baby steps on writing academic papers so that people would not get confused by the end of page one. Even though I continued to bombard you with new concepts and theories every year, I hope you can look at my work today and see that your early interventions show some effect. Beyond the workplace, I have also found a friend in you through the many meals we shared and the board game nights we played.

My gratitude also extends to my third doctoral supervisor, Prof. Dr. Per Davidsson, who continuously pushed me to focus on the essential things. I am sorry that your subliminal attempts to exorcise my “bent for philosophy” might not have come to full fruition, and I am afraid we will have to live with the status quo for a bit longer. In any case, thank you for hosting me for three wonderful months at QUT and for your incessant comments and guidance. You always went beyond showing me what makes a good paper and offered insights into what it takes to be a great scholar – you have indeed been and continue to be an academic guru for me.

Speaking of gurus, I would also like to thank two informal mentors, who were more than just an inspiration in many ways. Norbert, your mentorship over the

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past two years has taught me much about humbleness. Instead of just telling me what to improve, you showed me how. Your focus, skill, passion, and stoicism concerning academic work will continue serving me as an aspiration point for many years to come. Markus, although the number of Subway lunches has decreased over the past years (probably for the better of our health if we are being honest), our discussions about theory and philosophy have not. Whenever I shared some confusing ideas, you were willing and happy to go down the rabbit hole with me.

Two juries have reviewed previous versions of this manuscript, and their feedback critically shaped its content. Professor Dr. Dennis Schoeneborn, thank you for acting as my final seminar opponent, although you have only learned about my work previously through a 30-minute virtual call. Your feedback was spot on, extremely constructive, and I truly enjoyed the discussion. I also thank Prof. Dr. Leif Melin and Marta Caccamo, who acted as opponents in my research proposal seminar. Although my dissertation topic has changed on the surface, some core ideas have survived, and I am glad you encouraged them already at the beginning of my journey.

In the past five years, I had the luck to work with two passionate PhD Directors. Mikaela, thank you so much for the support, especially in the past year. It was great to know that if all would fail, I could still count on your support. Lucia, our discussions have always been intellectually stimulating, to say the least. You have also been great at offering career advice, some of which I only began understanding toward the end of my doctoral education. I am also grateful to the administrative support team. In particular, thank you, Susanne and Katarina, for taking care of so many formalities over the past years and fulfilling my special requests. Thank you also, Rose-Marie, Monica, and Tanja, for handling all the paperwork that comes with a doctoral education. And special thanks to Philippa for being such a great source of sarcastic joy and coming to my rescue with your last-minute copy edits.

To the library team at Jönköping University: I honestly believe you are the best library team in the world. A thesis can barely happen without access to literature, and with you, I had access to almost all the literature in the world. You fulfilled my weirdest book requests and dealt with so many of my late returns without ever blocking my account. Daniel Gunnarsson deserves a special appreciation for drawing motivational memes on the book requests he handled.

My thesis also required empirical material besides literature. Thanks to the entire team at Miniatur Wunderland for creating this genuinely wonderful case and, in particular, Stephan Hertz, who allowed me to peek behind the curtain. Also, thanks to all “forumaniacs” for welcoming me into your unique community.

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In particular, writeln who introduced me to many others and took my fears. I also thank all the aspiring entrepreneurs who trusted me with their data. Especially Moritz, our discussions often made me reflect on my research and teaching practices.

Finally, I’d like to turn to Sarah, my greatest companion and an excellent source of inspiration and motivation in life. You dragged me out of a deep melancholia and ever since have become the weight that keeps my spirit in balance. We have endured this journey together, continually learning from each other during our discussions at the dinner table, while hiking, and sometimes even while ‘relaxing’ at the beach. Without you, the sad moments in the past five years would have been twice as depressing and the happy ones only half as much fun. I am grateful that we can build fond memories together in our private and professional roles every day. Thank you for all the comfort, insight, care, and love you gift me every day.

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Abstract

Organizations are increasingly opening up to external voices that might carry new insights and help organizations to find their place in society. But the context through which organizations communicate with their stakeholders shapes how communication unfolds. Traditionally, organizations communicated with their stakeholders through shareholder letters, town hall meetings, or printed advertisements. Nowadays, cyberspace has opened up communication in multiple ways. It affords fast and boundless two-way communication between organizations and stakeholders and among stakeholders, that can be both a blessing and a curse. In any case, changes in the communication landscape have affected all types of organizations—large corporations, small and medium-sized enterprises, and newly started ventures.

My research connects to ongoing discussions on how new media have shaped the landscape of organizations. Specifically, I explore how organizations incorporate insights from stakeholder communication from a practice-based view. This view allows me to magnify and understand better how the communication context shapes the interaction. My empirical research focuses on stakeholder communication in a single-case study of the world’s largest miniature model railway exhibition and three new venture ideation cases. I employ a mix of qualitative research methods, including digital data collection techniques.

A bricolage of the four papers included in this dissertation frames the insights under the assumption that communication constitutes organization. It allows me to conceptualize the incorporation of new insights from stakeholder communication as a co-authoring process. Specifically, I show that modes provide the meaning-making resources through which humans communicate organizations into being. Media act as vessels of modes and shape how stakeholders can interact with—and co-author—the modes.

My future research agenda focuses on two aspects. First, I suggest following more closely how new narratives that stakeholders offer during the co-authoring process subsequently travel through an organization. This question is particularly relevant in larger corporations where the newly proposed narratives have to travel more considerable distances between stakeholder communication practices and decision-making practices. Second, I suggest investigating stakeholder communication from a design perspective, that is, a study of the heuristics that managers and entrepreneurs employ before engaging in stakeholder communication.

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1 _Introduction

Stakeholder communication carries the potential to open up organizations to external voices. This opening up to external stakeholders is widely considered to be a distinctive feature of 21st-century organizations because it connects them with communities and society, increases the transparency of decision making, and surfaces new insights that can become incorporated into the organization (e.g., Alvarez et al., 2020; Scherer and Palazzo, 2011; Whittington, 2019). In this dissertation, I shed further light on the circumstances under which organizations incorporate insights from stakeholder communication through several qualitative studies in different contexts.

The five introductory chapters integrate the findings of these studies and frame them from a communicative perspective on the constitution of organization (Ashcraft et al., 2009; Cooren et al., 2011; Kuhn, 2008; Schoeneborn et al., 2019). This perspective is compatible with relational models of stakeholder communication that assume that organizations have an interest in meeting their stakeholders at eye level and engaging in a dialogue (e.g., Grunig, 1989; Kent and Taylor, 2002; Scherer and Palazzo, 2007). Relational models have become more relevant over the past decades not least because new communication technologies have enabled such exchanges (e.g., Castelló et al., 2013; Etter et al., 2019; Kent and Taylor, 1998) and societal trends have encouraged organizations to take a more political role in society (e.g., Palazzo and Scherer, 2006; Scherer and Palazzo, 2011).

I contribute to this literature in two ways. First, this thesis sheds light on the processes by which organizations develop insights with their stakeholders and how such insights become incorporated into the organization. I conceptualize stakeholder communication as a co-authoring process whereby, under some circumstances, new insights can emerge from conversations between organizational members and stakeholders as well as among stakeholders. In comparison with similar ideas concerning an organization’s “outer appearance” (Albu and Etter, 2016; Castelló et al., 2016; Etter et al., 2019; Schoeneborn and Scherer, 2012), I also consider how such emerging insights from stakeholder communication can change the more “inner” workings of an organization. Second, I offer a more nuanced appreciation of the material context through which stakeholder communication takes place by adopting a practice-based ontology (Schatzki, 1996, 2005). It allows me to show that materiality not only provides

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the means by which organizations can manifest to a greater or lesser degree (Cooren, 2020a; Taylor et al., 1996; Taylor and Van Every, 2000) but also shapes how people can interact with those manifestations during communicative practices. These two layers are represented by the modes and media of communication, respectively, which influence how stakeholders can participate in the co-authoring of organizational manifestations and thus make their voice not only heard but also acknowledged.

1.1 _{Problematizing stakeholder communication}

theory

These contributions address two shortcomings in the current theories of stakeholder communication. First, the current literature has struggled to open the black box of how organizations incorporate feedback from stakeholder communication. The past literature has emphasized that by and large communication flows primarily in one direction: from the organization to its stakeholders (Grunig and Grunig, 1992; Kent and Taylor, 2002). Such models have prioritized the organizations’ interest and focused on how organizations can coordinate “all forms of communication so that its contents convey the same corporate image or ‘corporate identity’ of the organization and leave a consistent impression or ‘reputation’ with stakeholders” (Cornelissen, 2013, p. 3). More recent literature has acknowledged that communication can also flow in the opposite direction: from the stakeholder to the organization. Hereby, much of the research has focused on how such stakeholder feedback affects the organization’s identity and image (e.g., Dutton and Dukerich, 1991; Zavyalova et al., 2016), reputation (e.g., Etter et al., 2019; Lange et al., 2011; Ravasi et al., 2018; Rindova

et al., 2005), social performance (e.g., Cundill et al., 2018; Nason et al., 2018), or

legitimacy (e.g., Castelló et al., 2016; Ehrnström-Fuentes, 2016; Palazzo and Scherer, 2006) and debated whether such a thing as an organizational reputation has an effect on the market evaluation and social evaluation of an organization (Barnett et al., 2020; Blevins and Ragozzino, 2019; Deephouse, 2000; Kovács et

al., 2013).

Such bidirectional or even dialogic views provide the baseline for understanding how stakeholder communication can influence organizations. However, by focusing on intermediary concepts, such as reputation or legitimacy, this literature typically has not focused on how organizations can incorporate insights from stakeholder communication more directly. Growing movements in management practice, such as open innovation (e.g., Dahlander et al., 2009; Zobel

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and Hagedoorn, 2018) or open strategy (e.g., Birkinshaw, 2017; Hautz et al., 2017; Whittington, 2015, 2019), support the idea that organizations seek direct insights from stakeholders that can guide future decisions and actions. Communicating with stakeholders is thus a link to the “outside world” and a means of understanding an organization’s position in the competitive market. From a bird’s eye view, what counts as a competitive advantage emerges from communication between organizations and stakeholders as they construct the meaning of value in the market (Rindova and Fombrun, 1999). Each time an organization involves its stakeholders in a conversation, insights might emerge about how the stakeholders evaluate the past decisions and actions taken by the organization (Morsing and Schultz, 2006). Nevertheless, the processes by which organizations gather such insights and how these insights become incorporated into organizational decisions and actions are not well understood.

Second, certain contexts of stakeholder communication are currently underrepresented in the empirical settings of stakeholder communication. One

organizational context that the literature has emphasized is large corporations

with dedicated communication departments, the purpose of which is to align communication internally and externally (Cornelissen, 2013). However, small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) or new ventures also communicate with their stakeholders on a frequent basis. The ways in which they communicate with stakeholders might differ from those in large corporations. For example, SMEs might lack dedicated communication departments, so key decision makers communicate directly with stakeholders without employees acting as intermediaries (Wickert et al., 2016). Such nuances have so far received little scholarly attention.

Furthermore, recent stakeholder communication research has emphasized the

communication context of electronic media (e.g. Barnett et al., 2020; Etter et al.,

2019). This focus is well justified because electronic media afford new means of communication (Leonardi and Vaast, 2017; McFarland and Ployhart, 2015) and allow organizations to obtain rapid feedback on their ideas, communicate their development to a broader audience at a lower cost, gather new insights, obtain resources, and ultimately discuss the value that they offer (Fisher, 2019; Gulbrandsen et al., 2020). Such online interactions do not simply replace what previously happened offline but expand the types of interactions. However, not all stakeholder communication happens online, via marketing campaigns, or letters to the shareholders. Especially in the context of SMEs and new ventures, decision makers have to communicate with their stakeholders in many different ways, including offline, face-to-face communication. Although research has acknowledged that insights might also emerge in analogue settings (e.g., Dutton

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and Dukerich, 1991; Sloan and Oliver, 2013), the explicit theorizing on how the communication context shapes stakeholder interactions currently remains biased toward electronic media.

1.2 _{Formulating the research aims and questions}

Following the above problematization, the aim of my thesis is twofold. First, the aim is to understand and conceptualize stakeholder communication as bidirectional and dynamic, where insights emerge from communication between an organization and its stakeholders as well as among its stakeholders that might prompt the organization to adjust its future decisions and actions. Second, the aim is to develop a model that accounts for the diversity of stakeholder communication in different organizational and communication contexts. The above-mentioned limitations of the current literature thus prompt an examination of the following questions:

• Q1: How do organizations incorporate insights from stakeholder communication?

• Q2: How does the context shape organizations’ incorporating of insights from stakeholder communication (in particular the organizational and communication contexts)?

Empirically addressing these questions requires to overcome methodological challenges. In particular, I aim to address the physical limitations of common qualitative data collection strategies such as interviews and observations to capture stakeholder communication and subsequent changes to organizations in different organizational and communication contexts. For that reason, I add the following methodological question:

• Q3: How is it possible to study interactions between organizations and stakeholders across different contexts?

The four papers included in this dissertation each focus on one of the research questions. Paper 1 investigates how stakeholders and managers construct the social performance (Nason et al., 2018) of an SME in social media and when such constructions shape the organization’s future social initiatives (mainly Q1). Paper 2 then zooms out from the construction of social performance and investigates how the same SME uses different communication platforms to build a firm-hosted

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online community. It answers the question of how stakeholder interactions can differ depending on the context as conceptualized in the features and affordances of communication platforms (mainly Q2). Paper 3 follows a similar trajectory by answering how idea representations shape stakeholder communication and the subsequent incorporation of newly gained insights in three cases of new venture ideation (Q1 and Q2). Finally, Paper 4 outlines the approaches that I adopt to meet the methodological challenges involved in the study of stakeholder interactions across physical and digital contexts (Q3). It describes various digital data sources, most of which I use in my empirical research, and offers suggestions on how to combine them with analogue data sources for three types of qualitative, practice-based studies.

1.3 _{Redressing knowledge in a theoretical bricolage}

Each paper uses a different theoretical framework: the one that best reflects its data and emerging contribution. I step back from the theoretical framework of each paper in the following introductory chapters and develop a bricolage for the conception of new organizational theory, which describes the “assembly of different knowledge elements that are readily available to the researcher” (Boxenbaum and Rouleau, 2011, p. 281). The empirical Papers 1–3 serve as such available knowledge elements because they share a common focus on stakeholder communication while highlighting different aspects of the phenomenon to address the above-mentioned shortcomings in the prior literature. The goal is to develop a joint contribution by reflecting across the empirical papers. Figure 1 below depicts the logic and structure of this thesis.

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Figure 1. Logic and structure of the dissertation.

Accordingly, I introduce the theories that frame my bricolage in Chapters 2 and 3. I build on relational and dialogic models of stakeholder communication that balance the interests of stakeholders and organizations (e.g., Kent and Taylor, 2002; Morsing and Schultz, 2006; Scherer and Palazzo, 2007) and that organizations can use in “bargaining, negotiating, and strategies of conflict resolution to bring about symbiotic changes in the ideas, attitudes, and behaviors of both the organization and its publics” (Grunig, 1989, p. 29). I argue, however, that such a conception of stakeholder communication is insufficient to unlock the black box of how organizations incorporate feedback because what an organization does is still conceptually distinct from what an organization says (cf., Schoeneborn et al., 2020).

For that reason, I add that communication is not separate from but constitutive of organization (Ashcraft et al., 2009; Cooren et al., 2011; Schoeneborn et al., 2019). Following ideas about the communicative constitution of organization (CCO), I conceptualize organizations as networks of communicative events among organizational members (Blaschke et al., 2012) and between the organization and its external stakeholders (Kuhn, 2008; Taylor, 2011). Put differently, an organization emerges with and through communication, which

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“stakeholder communication” on the other side. Instead, it acknowledges that boundaries are permeable and that communication among intra-organizational members as well as external stakeholders contributes to the constitution of organization (Kuhn, 2008; Schoeneborn and Scherer, 2012; Schoeneborn and Trittin, 2013).

Furthermore, I acknowledge the role of materiality in stakeholder communication. I point out that the CCO literature has, thus far, largely focused on how organizations materialize through “texts” that can take the shape of written or spoken language, pictures, artwork, buildings, and so on (Cooren, 2006; Taylor, 1999; Taylor et al., 1996). What I add is a more nuanced analysis of the communication context in which I distinguish the media (McLuhan, 1964; McLuhan and Fiore, 1967) of communication from the modes (Kress, 2010). I define media as “the physical means by which communication is created, transmitted, or stored” (Yates and Orlikowski, 1992, p. 319) and a mode as “a socially shaped and culturally given semiotic resource for making meaning” (Kress, 2010, p. 79). The practice ontology that I adopt for my research helps me to capture such nuances because it remains sensitive to the material arrangements in which communication is embedded (see Chapter 3).

In Chapter 5, I then present a bricolage of knowledge by revisiting the findings of each empirical paper and redress them in the light of the above theoretical framework. Concerning Q1, this allows me to draw a process in which the incorporation of stakeholder feedback begins when stakeholders are invited to co-author organizational texts (cf., Albu and Etter, 2016; Kuhn, 2008). Accordingly, I conceptualize the incorporation of new insights as changes to organizational texts that mirror the alternative narratives that the stakeholders offer during conversations with the organization and its members. I show, furthermore, that not all alternative narratives offered during stakeholder communication carry the same potential to penetrate organizational boundaries and proliferate in communication practices that are more central to the organization. Concerning Q2, this approach allows me to show how media and modes shape the context of stakeholder communication in the form of different affordances, meaning possibilities of action concerning stakeholder communication (Evans et al., 2017; Gulbrandsen et al., 2020; Leonardi and Vaast, 2017).

The resulting model of stakeholder communication stresses how media and modes shape the nature of stakeholder communication. More specifically, I point out that modes afford different semiotic resources, whereas media afford different interaction possibilities with the exchanged semiotic resources. In relation to the aforementioned questions, the model sheds light on how organizations incorporate insights from stakeholder communication. It also helps to provide an

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understanding of the circumstances under which stakeholder communication elicits changes in an organization’s decisions and actions and the scope of such changes. It finally helps in understanding the phenomenon of stakeholder communication across different contexts, thus offering a more universal and yet context-sensitive alternative to past conceptualizations.

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2 _{Stakeholder communication: A}

constitutive view

Knowledge about stakeholder communication can be split up into multiple streams of literature, each using its own terminology and concepts that represent the diverse managerial practices involved in stakeholder communication. These knowledge pockets include but are not limited to research on public relations; organizational communication; marketing, strategic, and corporate communication; organizational identity, image, and reputation; stakeholder management, governance, and dialogue; and corporate social responsibility (CSR) communication.

Even though a review of each and every argument in these diverse bodies of literature would distract from the core messages of this thesis, my contributions can only emerge from a comparison and positioning of my ideas vis-à-vis previous arguments. Following other authors (e.g., Cornelissen, Christensen, et

al., 2012; Morsing and Schultz, 2006; Schoeneborn et al., 2020), I distance myself

from functional models of stakeholder communication and associate with relational views. I then move on to present the notion of communication as constitutive of organization (CCO), which I find to be the most suitable for studying empirically and understanding how organizations can incorporate insights from and through stakeholder communication.

Following the Montreal School of CCO (e.g., Cooren, 1999; Taylor et al., 1996; Taylor and Van Every, 2000), I also acknowledge the role of materiality in the communicative constitution of organization. However, my view on materiality differs from that of the Montreal School by distinguishing the affordances of

modes and media in the communicative constitution of organization. This

nuanced distinction allows me to describe better later on how the material context of communication shapes the process by which organizations incorporate insights from their stakeholders.

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2.1 _{Stakeholder communication literature: From}

functional to relational views

2.1.1 Functional models of stakeholder communication

The literature and theories of stakeholder communication have long been dominated by functional views that show three characteristics: first, a transmission view of communication with a particular emphasis on how information flows in either of two directions, from the organization to the stakeholders or vice versa; second, a priority of organizational interests over those of stakeholders; and third, the reactive and symbolic nature of organizational change.

Concerning the first characteristic, functional models depict communication as the transmission of information between individuals (cf., Axley, 1984). Transmission models conceptualize communication as an exchange of information whereby senders encode meaning in messages and transmit them to recipients, who in turn have to decode (i.e., interpret) them and their meaning. Here, knowledge and understanding and hence also organizational images and reputations remain the property of the individuals involved in the communication. In that sense, functional views also commonly favor an asymmetric interest in stakeholder communication, in which the interests of the organization are prioritized over the interests of the public (cf., Grunig, 1984; Grunig and Hunt, 1984). As Grunig (1989, pp. 18–19, own emphasis added) described, the asymmetric interest is apparent in the “manipulation of public behavior for the benefit of the manipulated publics as well as the sponsoring organizations.” The targets of such manipulation are the organizational images and reputations that are believed to exist in the minds of stakeholders.

The manipulation of stakeholder cognition in line with the organization’s interest is achieved via impression management. It assumes that organizations identify distinct groups of stakeholders and manage their expectations by transmitting consistent, univocal information that corresponds best to the stakeholder groups’ expectations (cf., Christensen and Cornelissen, 2011; Cornelissen and Harris, 2001). This involves either multiple functional departments, such as marketing communication and public relations, or an integrated functional department of organizational communication or corporate communication (Cornelissen and Lock, 2000). Similar notions can also be found in models of CSR communication in which the aim is to portray an image of ‘the good corporation’ to outsiders without necessarily aiming to gain any insights

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from the interactions with external audiences in return (cf., Morsing and Schultz, 2006; Schoeneborn et al., 2020).

Symbolic management strategies offer organizations the tools to manage their outer shell (Schnackenberg et al., 2019), thus emphasizing symbolic changes of organizations over substantive ones. For example, research on organizational reputation was long dominated by a focus on stability over change (Lange et al., 2011; Ravasi et al., 2018). Even though functional models account for information moving in both directions, such as in two-way asymmetric models, the information flowing from stakeholders is considered to be primarily a means of finding out how organizations can manipulate their outer impression even better (Grunig, 1984; Grunig and Hunt, 1984). Organizations are said to focus primarily on the most pressing and salient stakeholder demands (Mitchell et al., 1997) in a passive or reactive manner instead of entering into conversations with stakeholders with the upfront idea of changing in response to them.

2.1.2 Relational models of stakeholder communication

In contrast to functional models, relational models deviate from the notion that stakeholder communication is only about managing the impressions of an organization on its surface. Instead, relational models tie together the assumption that communication can flow in both directions without emphasizing one direction over another and that the interests between an organization and its stakeholders are balanced. In that sense, organizations have an interest in and to some extent even a responsibility for seeking insights from stakeholders more proactively.

In the public relations literature, two-way symmetric notions of stakeholder communication have developed as normative models in response to the public relations practice prevalent at that time (Grunig, 1989; Grunig and Grunig, 1992). The core idea is to evoke communication in which the interests of the stakeholders and the organization are balanced: “The major purpose of communication is to facilitate understanding among people and such other systems as organizations, publics, or societies. Persuasion of one person or system by another is less desirable” (Grunig, 1989, p. 38). Put differently, organizations meet their stakeholders at eye level. Meeting stakeholders at eye level does not imply win– win situations that satisfy all the interests of all the parties involved. Instead, symmetric models are best understood as a mixed-motive gamble that involves both cooperation and competition and retains the distinct viewpoints and interests of organizations and stakeholders while seeking an equilibrium that both sides accept for the time being (Grunig and Grunig, 1992; Murphy, 1991).

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Symmetric models offer a (supposedly) ethically superior alternative to asymmetric models of stakeholder communication by grounding the argument in discourse ethics and interest group liberalism (Grunig, 1989; Pearson, 1989). As Cornelissen and Lock (2000, p. 240) described, the symmetric model “ties in neatly with the humanist notion of an ideal speech situation, where each side – organizations and publics – has an equal part in the communication process.” It thus also relates closely to the idea of stakeholder communication as a dialogue in which all parties share “a willingness to try to reach mutually satisfying positions” (Kent and Taylor, 1998, p. 325, 2002). In effect, an organization is not only interested in the symbolic management of its image or reputation, that is, a change in the perceptions of its stakeholders; instead, “the company as well as its stakeholders will change as a result of engaging in a symmetric communication model” (Morsing and Schultz, 2006, p. 328). The way in which an organization can achieve such mutual exchange is by shifting from the logic of persuasion to the logic of relationship management (Hutton, 1999).

Although symmetrical models of stakeholder communication developed as normative ideas with limited empirical support for implementation in practice (Grunig and Grunig, 1992), the situation is different today. Several trends suggest that such models are not just supposedly superior but indeed better suited for meeting the moral demands of contemporary societies. Therefore, a renewed interest in relational and dialogic views of stakeholder communication can answer recent calls for incorporating stakeholder perspectives better into organizational and strategic management theory (e.g., Alvarez et al., 2020; Barney, 2018). Two trends stand out from the literature on stakeholder communication: first, the pluralization of society and the associated politicization of corporations; and second, the invention of new communication technology, in particular social media.

In particular, postindustrial economies are experiencing an increasing pluralization of society, which is a “threefold process of individualization, devaluation of tradition, and globalization of society” (Palazzo and Scherer, 2006, p. 74). Globally active organizations are thus exposed to a multitude of national and cultural differences in norms and values. Furthermore, within nations with somewhat stable traditions, society is splitting up into smaller interest groups that each cherish their own values and norms. In such a situation, it is increasingly difficult for organizations to know how to behave legitimately (Palazzo and Scherer, 2006). In addition, the regulatory vacuum in global governance has driven organizations to take on roles as political actors that must engage in a dialogue with other public interest groups to gain moral legitimacy (Palazzo and Scherer, 2006; Scherer and Palazzo, 2007, 2011; see also Suchman, 1995).

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Furthermore, shifts in the dominant communication media continue to affect stakeholder communication and increase the relevance of symmetric models. Only a few decades ago, legacy media (e.g., newspapers and television) were all that mattered for organizational reputation. It was thought that news coverage would have an impact on the media reputation of an organization and that such a media reputation would directly influence the organizational reputation (Blevins and Ragozzino, 2019; Deephouse, 2000; Etter et al., 2019). Nowadays, the picture looks different. Electronic media have changed not only how communication unfolds within an organization (Leonardi and Barley, 2010; Leonardi and Vaast, 2017; Treem and Leonardi, 2013; Yates and Orlikowski, 1992) but also the way in which organizations communicate with their external stakeholders (Baptista et

al., 2017; Etter et al., 2019; Gulbrandsen et al., 2020; Kent, 2013).

Effectively, social media have shortened the distance between organizations and their stakeholders and provided organizations with access to their constituents’ multilayered life world. The broad difference between social media and face-to-face communication or even other types of digital media is hereby mainly one of time and space because “barriers of time and space are minimized, possibly even eliminated, in social media […] it is possible to communicate instantly, interactively, and asynchronously with others who are geographically distributed” (McFarland and Ployhart, 2015, p. 1656).

Such an opening of communication across spatial and temporal boundaries has had effects on several dimensions of stakeholder communication. For example, Etter et al. (2019) explained how the heterogeneity of stakeholders in social media has created a new media landscape in which organizations seem to navigate multiple organizational reputations at once. Ravasi et al. (2018, p. 590) summarized it accurately: “technologies have led to the proliferation of reputational narratives circulating in the public domain, intensified the speed at which reputational controversies unfold, and eroded the capacity of organizations to keep these controversies under control.” Social media also affect organizational legitimacy because they amplify the speed of societal pluralization and thus also open up dialogues and expose organizations to a polyphonic space in which they have to consider different voices and opinions (Ehrnström-Fuentes, 2016; Roulet and Clemente, 2018; Schultz et al., 2013); legitimacy in networked societies then depends on whether stakeholders find organizations to be “communicable” partners during conversations (Castelló et al., 2013), which organizations can achieve by engaging in non-hierarchical relationships with their stakeholders (Castelló et al., 2016; Veil et al., 2012).

The strength of these effects is still being debated, though. For example, it is unclear whether social media have truly become a relevant source and target of

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organizational reputation for all types of organizations, especially in comparison with legacy media (Blevins and Ragozzino, 2019; Ravasi et al., 2019). Furthermore, Barnett et al. (2020) pointed out that, even though social media have reduced the barriers to and the cost of communication and thus increased the potential for stakeholders to voice their opinions, the resulting mass of information might overwhelm stakeholders’ sensemaking. Instead of recognizing information on which they would otherwise act, stakeholders might no longer be able to see the wood for the trees. In response, Jimenez et al. (2020) emphasized that, although stakeholders might indeed miss information about companies with which they have no personal relationship, it is less likely that stakeholders will overlook information about local organizations in their community. This underlines that context matters for stakeholder communication.

Despite such continuing debates, the politicization of corporation, the invention of new media and many other cultural, organizational, and technological forces (cf., Whittington, 2019) have at least increased the relevance of a symmetric stakeholder communication model if not made it the dominant mode. These trends broadly suggest that it has become more important for organizations to engage with their stakeholders and build relationships from which they can gain new insights into their role in society. Beyond influencing an organization’s outer appearance in the form of its reputation or legitimacy, these new insights carry the potential to become incorporated into the organization in much more direct ways. As illustrated by the trend toward an open strategy, the goal is not only to be transparent toward internal and external stakeholders in a one-way fashion but also to be inclusive and crowd-source insights while formulating a strategy (Birkinshaw, 2017; Whittington, 2019).

However, despite the apparent relevance of relational stakeholder communication models, they are less potent for understanding how such insights become incorporated into the organization. As long as we keep a distinction between “organization” and “stakeholder communication,” the process by which organizations can change in response to conversations or dialogues with stakeholders will remain a black box filled with conceptual leaps (cf., Klag and Langley, 2012). We therefore require a model of communication that moves beyond the distinction between “organization” and “communication.”

As I argue on the following pages, seeing communication as constitutive of organization offers a point of departure from which to address the current conceptual leaps. It dissolves the boundaries between “organization” and “communication” by acknowledging the performative role of communication in which “saying” becomes a form of “doing” (Schoeneborn et al., 2020; Schultz et

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happens at the boundaries of an organization but is also central to its constitution. To use Cooren’s (2012, 2020a, 2020b) analogy, external stakeholders can become so-called ventriloquists who talk an organization into being.

2.2 _{A constitutive extension of relational}

communication models

As an extension to the above relational view, constitutive models of communication take a step further and argue that communication is the site and surface of organizations (Taylor and Van Every, 2000). These models were largely inspired by theories of “distributed cognition” (Hutchins, 1995) or the “group mind” (Weick and Roberts, 1993), which argue that communication is not merely a mechanistic exchange of meaning between individuals but rather a process by which all involved individuals interactively construct a shared basis of knowledge. Put differently, communication is the “ongoing, situated, and embodied process whereby human and non-human agencies interpenetrate ideation and materiality toward meanings that are tangible and axial to organizational existence and organizing phenomena” (Ashcraft et al., 2009, p. 34). The resulting knowledge of such processes is not owned by any of the involved parties but is their joint property because it is situated in the communication and the resulting texts, which are stabilized and accessible (Taylor and Van Every, 2000). These shared understandings can in turn define the realities of situations as they happen (Ashcraft et al., 2009).

One of the major questions is therefore how such a “thing” as an organization can emerge from local and ephemeral conversations to become a somewhat lasting and stable entity (Cooren and Fairhurst, 2009; Taylor and Van Every, 2000). Put differently, how is it possible to connect unique micro-instances of communication with ordinary and patterned macro-structures (Cooren and Fairhurst, 2009)?

To answer this question, constitutive models suggest that organizations are networks of communication practices (Ashcraft et al., 2009; Putnam and Nicotera, 2009; Taylor, 2011) and consider “communication as the process through which human and nonhuman figures collide to ‘(re)con-figure’ organizational existence” (Ashcraft et al., 2009, p. 37). This does not imply that organizations only exist through communication practices as they also involve exchanges of tangible resources, infrastructure, architecture and so forth (Ashcraft

et al., 2009). Ideas, emotions, and rules might also guide the enactment of

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organizations would not come into existence without communication. People need to co-construct the meaning of what can be considered as a resource (Rindova and Fombrun, 1999), managers need to display emotion in communication (Samra-Fredericks, 2004), ideas need to manifest in some form of communication before they can become part of an organization (Stigliani and Ravasi, 2012), and so on. In other words, “communication is the mechanism whereby the material and ideational co-mingle and transform accordingly. In communication, symbol becomes material; material becomes symbol; and neither stay the same as a result” (Ashcraft et al., 2009, p. 34).

Within this network of communication practices, some stand out as more relevant than others to the constitution of organization. The four-flows model (McPhee and Zaug, 2000) has therefore become a useful orientation for CCO scholars concerning where to focus their investigations (Putnam and McPhee, 2009). The four flows are membership negotiation, activity coordination, organizational self-structuring, and institutional positioning. Communication with the aim of membership negotiation is crucial for setting the boundaries of an organization in terms of who belongs to its in-group and who does not. Activity coordination refers to communication that concerns the solving of practical work issues under the current circumstances. Closely related, the communication concerning organizational self-structuring concerns the internal relations, norms and social entities. In contrast to activity coordination, it is less concerned with the day-to-day work problems and more concerned with establishing the organization as a stable and self-sustaining entity. Finally, institutional positioning concerns communication outside the organization to its external stakeholders.

CCO scholars are, however, not unified in their views and methodological approaches regarding how these four flows explain the constitution of organization (Putnam and McPhee, 2009). Following the nature of my first research aim and question, I side with Taylor (2009), who promoted a bottom-up process in which activity coordination and membership negotiation form the basis of organizational constitution followed by organizational self-structuring and its interaction with the external environment. Taylor hereby represented a school of thought that is commonly described as the “Montreal School,” which shares the aim of overcoming dualistic views of societies driven by either individualism or structuralism (Taylor, 2011).

To clarify, first, the Montreal School prioritizes communicational practices over individuals. It turns around the picture of traditional social network analysis, in which the vertices represent individuals and communication represents the edges, and instead views communication events as vertices (Blaschke et al.,

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2012). The vertices hereby represent communicative acts that involve at least two people (A and B) who communicate about and co-orient toward something (X). It follows the notion of co-orientation, “where actors ‘tune in’ to one another as they engage in interdependent activity” (Kuhn, 2008, p. 1232). Co-orientation was first described by Newcomb (1953, p. 393, emphasis in original), who argued that “communication among humans performs the essential function of enabling two or more individuals to maintain simultaneous orientation toward one another as communicators and toward objects of communication.” The relationships between A and B, A and X, and B and X are interdependent so that A–B–X form a system. Organizations accordingly consist of many such systems that overlap like tiles and, over time, become imbricated, that is, accepted as given and automatic (Taylor et al., 2001).

Second, the Montreal School differentiates between two manifestations of communication: text and conversation (Taylor et al., 1996; Taylor and Van Every, 2000). On one hand, the textual dimension refers to the stable and “imbricated” forms of communication (the organization’s surface), comparable to what Alvesson and Kärreman (2000) described as Discourses with a capital D. The textual dimension includes the written word as well as other modalities, such as images, logos, objects, or even buildings (Taylor and Van Every, 2000). Some of these texts are more representative of the organization than others. So-called

authoritative texts have a representational function because they allow goals and

agendas of powerful actors, now imbricated in the organizational fabric, to persist even long after the actors have gone (Kuhn, 2008). It is through those texts that organizations manifest in “metaphors—for example, of an organization as a person or of communication as a physical act of building—and metonymic compressions in which various parts can be seen to intimate the whole (person or building)” (Christensen and Cornelissen, 2011, p. 389).

On the other hand, the conversational dimension refers to the fluid co-constructive side of communication. Conversations are the observable interactions between people that form the sites of organizations (Cooren and Taylor, 1997; Quinn and Dutton, 2005). The conversational dimension depends on texts as they provide pre-established meanings and the “symbolic ‘surface’” (Koschmann et al., 2012, p. 335) on which conversations unfold. Conversations are thus the local enactments of texts, which, at the same time, produce texts and are able to morph and adapt meaning in relation to the conversational circumstances.

These attempts to understand how communication constitutes organizations speak directly to the first three flows mentioned by McPhee and Zaug (2000). They largely concern the internal workings of an organization and its constitution

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in communication. However, it is in the fourth flow of institutional positioning, that is, “communication outside the organization, to other entities, ‘at the macro level’ in systems or functional terms” (McPhee and Zaug, 2000) that an organization develops an “image” or “reputation,” we as distinct from them. The entity-like status of an organization forms in relation to its surrounding structures and institutions by entering into local conversations and eventually more global Discourses (cf., Alvesson and Kärreman, 2000). It is through this identity that organizations can have agency in themselves and communicate with external stakeholders (Taylor, 2011, p. 201; Taylor and Van Every, 2000).

The imbrication in external communication is a key distinguishing factor of formal organizations and what can be considered as everyday organizing activities (Taylor, 2011). Take, for example, a group of friends that organizes a wedding party. Such an undertaking certainly involves membership negotiation as the members need to discuss which friends will be involved in the wedding’s organization. It also requires the coordination of activities, for example by assigning responsibilities to different members of the organizing committee. It might even involve organizational self-structuring if, for example, the group of friends decides to have meeting protocols or note down its responsibilities in some type of chart. This does not suffice, however, to build an identity as an “organization.” It is possible, for example, that each member of the organization goes about his or her activities and interacts with other stakeholders (e.g., bakers, bands, and location services) without claiming to act in the name of an

organization. As long as the individual members of a committee do not act in the

name of some unified entity, no organization will enter local conversations. However, if the friends decide to open a wedding planning agency, such as “Friendly Wedding Planners Inc.,” the interactions with stakeholders will differ. Instead of individuals acting in their own name (although on behalf of someone else), they would act in the name of and on behalf of the organization (Bencherki and Cooren, 2011). In effect, the organization establishes itself as a distinct entity not only in localized conversations but also imbricated in a public meta-conversation, that is, “a conversation of conversations in which it is no longer only individuals who assume an identity (although they may mediate the exchange and thereby assert their identity there) but communities as well” (Taylor, 2011, p. 1279).

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2.3 _{Human and non-human agencies in}

organizational communication

Following this line of thought, the question arises of how such a thing as an organizational identity can become imbricated in public meta-conversations. Taylor (2011) focused especially on the written text as a dominant form of fixating the organization in the social fabric. He argued that, in comparison with conversation, which is elastic and ephemeral, text “by its very nature, lays out explicitly, in black and white, the transaction-based rules of engagement. It has less ‘bend’” (Taylor, 2011, p. 1284). In addition, although Taylor and Van Every (2000, pp. 121–122) acknowledged that texts are both symbolic and material, Taylor’s focus remained on texts in the form of language as their primary modality (Taylor, 2009) and on the communication (and the materialized results thereof) between human beings.

Despite the important role of texts in the constitution of organization, whether as memory traces or as documents, they are not sufficient in themselves to constitute organizations. Certainly texts are autonomous and stabilize and coordinate the activities of human actors across time and space (Cooren and Fairhurst, 2009), but so do other non-human agents. For example, signs can make a difference by guiding people in a certain direction, smartphone screens can make a difference by reminding their user about an appointment and architectural properties combined with security technology can define the physical boundaries of an organization, separating who is inside and who is outside, by literally restricting access to what is considered to be inside the organization.

Cooren (2006) offered an alternative, more open view that accounts for the diversity of human and non-human actors involved in the communicative constitution of organization. He suggested that the organizational world is a plenum of agencies, including textual, mechanical, architectural, natural, and human ones. Whether these agencies are intentional is of lesser importance (Latour, 1994, 2005) because what matters in the end is whether human or non-human actors can “‘make a difference’ to a pre-existing state of affairs or course of events” (Giddens, 1984, p. 14). Whether human agents intend to cause a certain effect by their actions or whether the effects are unintended consequences of actions does not matter pragmatically for how actions unfold. In the same sense, it does not matter pragmatically whether my smartphone lacks the intention to notify me with a message. What matters is that it rings, lights up, and interrupts what I am doing at a particular moment. The technological device has the power to make a difference and thus agency, regardless of its intentionality.

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Non-human agents also assist in the accomplishment of two other aspects that are critical for the constitution of organization in communication: presentification and teleaction (Cooren, 2006; Taylor and Van Every, 2000). Presentification means “to signify those ways of speaking and acting that are involved in making present things and beings that, although not physically present, can influence the unfolding of a situation” (Benoit-Barné and Cooren, 2009, p. 10). Presentification also includes the “making present” of a collective entity such as an organization through a variety of other entities involved in communication (Cooren, 2006; Cooren et al., 2008). For example, the combination of a corporate logo set on top of a building designates the physical presence of the organization, visible to any outsider, that otherwise would be missing. Similarly, a representant of the organization makes it present by speaking on behalf of it. Non-human and human agents thus participate alike in the incorporation of organizations, referring to all the activities that transform a social collectivity into an entity-like state (Cooren

et al., 2008, p. 1343).

Presentification is also involved in teleacting, which means “transporting through technological devices or human memory what happened in one locale to another locale” (Cooren, 2006, p. 90, see also 2020a). Teleacting can concern the fulfillment of actions that are internal to the organization and connected to the attainment of organizational goals. For example, meeting notes including action items are involved in teleacting because they remind employees about their responsibilities after they have left the meeting room or even if they have not participated in the meeting. While fulfilling a particular objective, an employee might then have to move and travel across different sites while taking notes on a tablet device. The technological device might later remind the employee about what happened in another location so that she can accomplish another task and objective in her present location. Teleaction thus helps in the fulfillment of objectives. Teleaction is also a key feature of stakeholder communication. Media technology can, for example, help to transmit a corporate message from a CEO recorded in the press room to thousands of living rooms across the world. The message, however, can only make a difference because the technology allows the decoupling of the communication from restrictions of space and time. The technological device therefore becomes an agent that makes a difference in another location.

In essence, the above-mentioned examples support the idea that organizations depend on the relational agency of human and non-human actors, which together constitute them in entity-like states, materializing them in the world so that others can interact with them (Cooren, 2015). In contrast to functional and relational views of stakeholder communication, organization ought not either to be reduced

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to exchanges of meanings between individuals or to be seen as a container for communication but should be viewed as “the configuration of human and nonhuman representatives (e.g., products, websites, spokespersons, physical buildings)—an intricate web of figures (thus, ‘con-figuration’)” (Ashcraft et al., 2009, p. 37).

The constitutive model thus offers a very tangible tool for opening the black box of how organizations incorporate insights from stakeholder communication. Following the assumption that human actors include internal and external stakeholders who engage in conversations, researchers can trace (a) how the existing texts of the organization influence the conversations and (b) how the insights emerging from such conversations imbricate successively into the textual fabric that constitutes organizations (cf., Kuhn, 2008; Schoeneborn and Scherer, 2012; Schoeneborn and Trittin, 2013). The tangibility is further enhanced by acknowledging the role of materiality and non-human actors in stakeholder communication. The constitutive models developed so far seem to emphasize finding manifestations of organizations in different material objects, that is, how different “things” can act as a medium of organizations (Cooren, 2012, 2020a). To understand better the role played by non-human actors in stakeholder communication, I suggest a more nuanced distinction between media and modes.

2.4 _{Distinguishing media from modes}

The previous sections have presented a few examples of how communication can constitute organizations via face-to-face conversations between organizational members and further manifest through texts, such as meeting notes that are exchanged either in printed or in digital format, pictorial representations of the organization, such as organizational charts, or logos that can designate, for example, architectural structures as belonging to the organization. Furthermore, technological devices assist the organization’s presentification and teleaction across time and space, such as in audio or video recordings of organizational representants speaking on behalf of their organization and subsequently being distributed via different media channels.

Looking more closely at each of these examples, the communicational practices involve not only media but entanglements of different media and modes. Although the entanglements might sometimes hinder the drawing of a clear distinction between media and modes, the distinction is nevertheless the key to understanding how different configurations of media–mode entanglements influence the unfolding of organizational communication practices.

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Concerning media, I follow Yates and Orlikowski’s (1992, p. 319) definition as “the physical means by which communication is created, transmitted, or stored.” Media play a crucial role in communication because, as Cooren (2020a, p. 8, emphasis in original) pointed out, “for communication to happen, there

always needs to be, by definition, a channel (also called medium) through which

what is said can be transported from one point (the sender) to another (the receiver).” Examples of media include face-to-face interactions that involve spoken language and gestures; television, with its focus on the moving picture; books and newspapers, with their (traditional) focus on written language; and, more recently, electronic media and social media, which are inherently multimodal. As well as these more traditional examples of media, there are many more things that can act as media. A wall, for example, can become the canvas for graffiti or street art. Children can use the ground as a medium on which to draw and write using chalk. Even humans can be considered as media if we think of them as the means by which an organization can act (Cooren, 2012, 2020a, 2020b).

My view on modes builds on the writings on multimodality of the semiotician Gunther Kress. Accordingly, a “mode is a socially shaped and culturally given semiotic resource for making meaning. Image, writing, layout, music, gesture,

speech, moving image, soundtrack and 3D objects are examples of modes used in

representation and communication” (Kress, 2010, p. 79, emphasis in original). In comparison with signs, which describe particular instances used to represent a particular meaning, a mode describes the meaning-making properties of signs on a higher level of abstraction. According to the New London Group (1996), we can differentiate between five categories of modes: linguistic, visual, aural, spatial, and gestural. A key consideration is that “different modes offer different potentials for making meaning” (Kress, 2010, p. 79). Text offers different semiotic resources from images. Sound offers different semiotic resources from color. Gestures offer different semiotic resources from speech.

The main point here is that communication practices jointly involve media and modes (Couldry, 2004). Their diverse entanglements have developed historically, and society has experienced a set of changes concerning the type of mode that it uses predominantly. These changes were partly driven by the dominant medium used for communication. For example, before the invention of text and partly also while text was limited to writing, society was largely visual and aural (McLuhan, 1964). We understood the spoken word not as what it represented in the form of a written text but only as what it sounded like. Meaning making was closely related to listening. Technological progress, in particular the invention of the press, changed this situation and made us switch to text-heavy societies

How organizations incorporate insights from stakeholder communication : The role of media and modal affordances

How Organizations Incorporate

Insights from Stakeholder

Communication

The Role of Media and Modal Affordances

How Organizations Incorporate

Insights from Stakeholder

Communication

The Role of Media and Modal Affordances

Acknowledgments

Abstract

Table of Contents

1

Introduction

1.1

Problematizing stakeholder communication

theory

1.2

Formulating the research aims and questions

1.3

Redressing knowledge in a theoretical bricolage

2

Stakeholder communication: A

constitutive view

2.1

Stakeholder communication literature: From

functional to relational views

2.1.1

Functional models of stakeholder communication

2.1.2

Relational models of stakeholder communication

2.2

A constitutive extension of relational

communication models

2.3

Human and non-human agencies in

organizational communication

2.4

Distinguishing media from modes

_Introduction

_{Problematizing stakeholder communication}

_{Formulating the research aims and questions}

_{Redressing knowledge in a theoretical bricolage}

_{Stakeholder communication: A}

_{Stakeholder communication literature: From}

_{A constitutive extension of relational}

_{Human and non-human agencies in}

_{Distinguishing media from modes}