Organizational Semiotics: Multimodal Perspectives on Organization Studies

Description

This edited volume brings together two largely separate fields – organization studies and multimodal social semiotics – to develop an integrated research agenda for the novel interdisciplinary field of ‘organizational semiotics’. Organizations, whether for profit, non-profit, or governmental, dominate much of everyday life, and multimodal communication is not only an output of organizations, but is also constitutive of them. This volume argues in particular for the importance of organization studies for social semioticians – not just as a site of application, but also as a critical contemporary context that requires novel and expanded methods of analysis and critique, and new practices of partnership. The volume addresses a range of institutions and sectors, from civil to retail to medical, from corporations to universities, and reveals how a deep engagement with their meaning-making practices produces insights not just about communication but also about the broader contemporary cultural context in which organizations play such a significant role. Fundamentally, it reveals that the rich analytical and theoretical resources of multimodal perspectives on organizations studies can – and should – make a fundamental contribution to our understanding of organizations in social life. This volume is relevant to social semioticians and organizational researchers as well as to practitioners and decision-makers in organizations. Cover Half Title Series Page Title Page Copyright Page Table of Contents List of Figures List of Tables Author biographies Chapter 1 ‘Organizational semiotics’: Toward an integrated research agenda Chapter 2 Social semiotics and organization studies: Building an effective bridge Chapter 3 The resemiotisation of health information in a family planning organization Chapter 4 Organizational identity design: The evolution of a university web homepage Chapter 5 The emotional civil servant: On the multimodal construction of affect in ‘platform of values’ texts of Swedish public authorities Chapter 6 Communicating in space: Relating the physical and the social in open-plan offices Chapter 7 Redesigning organizations through the built environment: Changes at a university campus Chapter 8 How multimodal structures constitute organization: The meaning of structure in offline and online shopping environments Chapter 9 ‘It’s not just getting a biopsy’: Transposing ‘take-home’ messages from the operating theatre to a proforma Chapter 10 Texturize and texturization in organizational identity design and legitimacy work Afterword Index