How Organizations Incorporate Insights from Stakeholder ...

How Organizations Incorporate Insights from Stakeholder Communication

The Role of Media and Modal Affordances

Doctoral Thesis

Thomas Cyron

Jönköping UniversityJönköping International Business SchoolJIBS Dissertation Series No. 144 • 2021

Doctoral Thesis

Jönköping UniversityJönköping International Business SchoolJIBS Dissertation Series No. 144 • 2021



Thomas Cyron

Doctoral Thesis in Business Administration

How Organizations Incorporate Insights from Stakeholder Communication The Role of Media and Modal AffordancesJIBS Dissertation Series No. 144

© 2021 Thomas Cyron and Jönköping International Business School

Publisher:Jönköping International Business School, Jönköping UniversityP.O. Box 1026SE-551 11 JönköpingTel. +46 36 10 10 00www.ju.se

Printed by Stema Specialtryck AB 2021

ISSN 1403-0470ISBN 978-91-7914-007-6

Trycksak3041 0234

SVANENMÄRKET

Trycksak3041 0234

SVANENMÄRKET

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

The Whitest Boy Alive – Burning

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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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Table of Contents

1 Introduction .............................................................................................. 15 1.1 Problematizing stakeholder communication theory ............................. 16 1.2 Formulating the research aims and questions ....................................... 18 1.3 Redressing knowledge in a theoretical bricolage ................................. 19

2 Stakeholder communication: A constitutive view .................................... 23 2.1 Stakeholder communication literature: From functional to relational

views ..................................................................................................... 24 2.2 A constitutive extension of relational communication models ............ 29 2.3 Human and non-human agencies in organizational communication .... 33 2.4 Distinguishing media from modes ....................................................... 35 2.5 Affordances in relation to media and modes ........................................ 38

3 Ontology: Communication embedded in practices .................................. 43 3.1 Connections between practice theories and communication ................ 45 3.2 Organizations and beyond: The wider nets of practice-arrangement

bundles .................................................................................................. 49

4 Method: Studying stakeholder communication practices across physical and digital sites ......................................................................................... 53

4.1 Epistemology: What is knowledge in practice? ................................... 54 4.2 Research strategy: Cases as studying the subject in the light of the

object .................................................................................................... 55 4.3 Collecting data from offline and online sources .................................. 61 4.4 Analysis and interpretation: Abductive zooming ................................. 65 4.5 Establishing trustworthiness in qualitative research ............................ 69 4.6 Research ethics ..................................................................................... 71

5 How organizations incorporate insights from stakeholder communication . .................................................................................................................. 73

5.1 The co-authoring of organizational texts in stakeholder communication .............................................................................................................. 75

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5.2 How the affordances of media and modes shape stakeholder communication ..................................................................................... 77

5.3 Future research and limitations ............................................................ 84 5.4 Practical implications… ....................................................................... 88

References ................................................................................................................. 93

Paper 1: The Construction of Social Performance in Social Media ....................... 115

Paper 2: Managing Firm-Hosted Online Communities: A Multi-Channel Perspective ................................................................................................................................. 167

Paper 3: How Idea Representations Shape Feedback Interactions in Creative Revision Processes .................................................................................................. 225

Paper 4: Using Digital Methods for the Study of Entrepreneurship-as-Practice .... 251

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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

Jönköping International Business School

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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

Introduction

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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

Introduction

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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 effectively eliminates the distinction between “the organization” on one side and

Introduction

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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

Stakeholder communication: A constitutive view

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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 al., 2013). It assumes that stakeholder communication is not only something that


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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 practices without being communicated at all times. However, these aspects 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


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(McLuhan, 1964). This is reflected in the common way of learning a language in the past century: via textbooks, learning words based on how they are written down, and learning the grammar of a language, that is, its rules and regularities. Nevertheless, the fact that illiterate people are still able to voice language and speak with other people shows that spoken and written language are separate from one another. They represent different modes of communication.

Continuing technological developments began tackling the dominance of text. The invention of film and photography brought a revival of the image, boosted and transformed by the invention of television (Postman, 1985). More recently, the advent of digital communication technology introduced new forms of electronic media (McLuhan, 1964; McLuhan and Fiore, 1967). These new forms of electronic media afford new combinations of multiple modalities, which also affect the workings of society. These shifts in communicational environments have, for example, brought about changes in power structures, moving from “vertical” to “horizontal” forms (Kress, 2010). In vertical forms, power was hierarchical and limited to those individuals and organizations that had access to the means of media production. Book publishing, the broadcasting of news via television, or the distribution of newspapers required relatively high investments up front compared with the new media landscape, in which access to the production of media has become more accessible for many individuals. This new power distribution is what Kress referred to as “horizontal” forms of power structures.

Communication researchers have therefore promoted the study of multimodality in recent years, suggesting a move away from the dominant focus on studying communication from the perspective of spoken and written language (e.g., Geenen et al., 2015; Jewitt, 2009; Kress, 2003, 2004, 2010; Meredith, 2019). The notion of multimodality rests on four core assumptions: (1) that language is only one part of multimodal ensembles; (2) that each mode in multimodal ensembles fulfills a different role in meaning making; (3) that it is people who “orchestrate meaning through their selection and configuration of modes”; and (4) that the meanings of signs in multimodal arrangements are social (Jewitt, 2009, pp. 14–15).

The topic of multimodality has also increasingly been acknowledged by organization and management theory, though often with a focus on internal organizational communication. While some scholars have argued more generally for a “material and visual turn in organization studies” (e.g., Boxenbaum et al., 2018; Höllerer et al., 2018; Jarzabkowski et al., 2013; Jarzabkowski and Pinch, 2013; Meyer et al., 2013), others have investigated the role of multimodality in strategy work (e.g., Arnaud et al., 2016; Jarzabkowski et al., 2015; Kaplan, 2010)


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or design work (e.g., Stigliani and Ravasi, 2012, 2018). Still other scholars have even started to explore the role of multimodality at the boundaries of corporate strategy and stakeholder communication, such as when studying the role of gestures in keynote speeches (Wenzel and Koch, 2018) or entrepreneurial pitches (Clarke et al., 2019). These contributions broadly suggest a move away from a unidimensional focus on the mode of written and spoken language (e.g., Alvesson and Kärreman, 2000; Samra-Fredericks, 2004) to account for the entanglements of multiple modes in organization, strategy and management, and entrepreneurship theory.

Despite the recent development, many questions about the role of multimedia and multimodality in stakeholder communication remain unanswered. Although scholars have begun to investigate the role of either new media (e.g., Baptista et al., 2017; Etter et al., 2019; Gulbrandsen et al., 2020; Kent, 2013) or multimodality (e.g., Clarke et al., 2019; Cornelissen, Clarke, et al., 2012; Wenzel and Koch, 2018) in stakeholder communication, none of these studies has considered the entanglements of media and modes in practices of stakeholder communication. This is surprising given that media and modes are often entangled in communicative practices (Kress, 2004). Therefore, how is it possible to differentiate the roles of media and modes in communicative practices? To answer this question, I build on the notion of affordances.

2.5 Affordances in relation to media and modes

To understand better how entanglements of modes and media affect stakeholder communication, I set out to investigate their affordances. The notion of affordances has its roots in ecological psychology, which originally described how animals come to perceive objects as the types of actions that they afford instead of their particular features (Chemero, 2003; Gibson, 1979, 1986). The notion has since also gained popularity in the study of design (e.g., Krippendorff, 1989, 2006; Norman, 1990), communication (e.g., Bucher and Helmond, 2018; Evans et al., 2017; Hutchby, 2001), and organization and management (e.g., Leonardi and Vaast, 2017; Majchrzak et al., 2013; Treem and Leonardi, 2013).

“The affordances of the environment are what it offers to the animal, what it provokes or furnishes, either for good or ill” (Gibson, 1979, p. 127, emphasis in original). The central tenants of Gibson’s definition have not changed dramatically except that scholars have replaced “the environment” with “the technology” or “the object” and replaced “the animal” with “the user” or “the human” (cf., Evans et al., 2017). Gibson (1979) originally argued that affordances


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are always relative to the animal, similar to Hutchby’s (2001, p. 444) note: “Affordances are functional and relational aspects, which frame, while not determining, the possibilities for agentic action in relation to an object.” Affordances should therefore be described not in terms of physical attributes or features, such as being flat, round, slippery, and so forth, but in terms of how objects and animals/humans form a relational bond that is represented by the use of an object. Consequently, affordances are not given but always emerge situationally from the way in which humans interpret the features of objects based on their previous experiences and current needs. This has been broadly supported by studies that have found neither objects (i.e., structures) nor human agency (i.e., individual) to suffice in explaining technology in use (Evans et al., 2017; Leonardi, 2011; Leonardi and Barley, 2010; Orlikowski, 2000).

Culturally shared understandings among humans can pattern and stabilize some affordances in relation to the features of objects (Duffy et al., 2017). That is why many human-made objects are cultural as well: the design of their features is a response to human needs that emerge from individual situations and become culturally shared. However, it is possible that humans reinterpret the affordances of objects or transform or combine existing objects to fulfill their current needs when appropriate alternatives are lacking. Although there is room for interpretation in how to use particular artifacts (Leonardi and Barley, 2010), the affordances are ultimately limited. Features and affordances are thus hierarchical: variabilities of affordances, that is, affording something to a lesser or greater extent, result from combinations of an object’s features and its user’s features, capabilities, and understandings (Evans et al., 2017).

The notion of affordances has also been applied directly and indirectly, though separately, to the topics of media and modality. Early traces of research describing affordances of media reach back to the notion of media richness theory (Daft and Lengel, 1986), which compared different types of media, such as face-to-face interactions, telephone calls, and emails, based on a range of characteristics and ranked their respective effectiveness. Although not explicitly using the label of affordances, Daft and Lengel (1986) indirectly compared affordances concerning how they support multiple information cues simultaneously, facilitate rapid feedback, establish a personal focus, and utilize natural language. Inspired by this work, Kaplan and Haenlein (2010) categorized different types of social media based on their affordances for self-presentation and social presence. However, others have criticized the media richness model’s deterministic nature for failing to account for the multimodality of electronic media (Dennis and Kinney, 1998; El-shinnawy and Markus, 1997) and the cultural particularities of media adoption (Ngwenyama and Lee, 1997).


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While media richness theory was critiqued for being too deterministic, the concept of affordances might suffer from the opposite problem because it risks scholars continuing to discover new affordances with each (new) media platform that they study in a different context. Simply adding these to an endless laundry list instead of abstracting from their particularities would promote theoretical myopia. For that reason, McFarland and Ployhart (2015) compared the characteristics of different forms of media and identified eight so-called “discrete ambient stimuli”1 through which researchers can differentiate different forms of media: physicality, accessibility, latency, interdependence, synchronicity, permanence, verifiability, and anonymity. Similarly, Evans et al. (2017) suggested three prominent affordances of social media in the communication literature: anonymity, visibility, and persistence. Treem and Leonardi (2013) identified four affordances of social media (visibility, persistence, editability, and association) and determined how these influence the workings of internal organizational communication. Argyris and Monu (2015) reviewed affordances in external organizational communication literature and identified the following: presentability, self-expression, monitorability, reach, engagement, connectivity, recordability, and availability.

The incongruence between those lists suggests that searches for all-encompassing and definite lists of stable affordances might differ depending on theoretical interests (cf., Bloomfield et al., 2010); personnel psychologists (e.g., McFarland and Ployhart, 2015) might therefore emphasize different affordances from communication or organizational communication theorists (e.g., Evans et al., 2017; Treem and Leonardi, 2013). Nevertheless, the notion of affordances offers a useful lens to understand the impact of different media forms on organizations (Leonardi and Vaast, 2017) and strategy (Gulbrandsen et al., 2020).

The notion of affordances has also been used in relation to modality. For example, Kress (2003, 2004) compared the affordances of images and written texts, noting that the former enable meaning to be conveyed in spatially ordered ways, while the latter allow meaning to be conveyed in linear ways. In images, relationships between objects emerge from their spatial arrangements. In written text, relationships emerge from the sequential arrangements of words. Furthermore, “words are (relatively) vague, often nearly empty of meanings; by

1 McFarland and Ployhart (2015) did not use the term “affordances” but discussed “ambient stimuli,” referring to Johns’s (2006, p. 368, own emphasis added) notion of context as “situational opportunities and constraints that affect the occurrence and meaning of organizational behavior as well as functional relationships between variables.” This suggests that “ambient stimuli” can be considered the functionalist’s equivalent to “affordances.”


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contrast images are full, ‘plain’ with meaning” (Kress, 2004, p. 112). Even within the field of organization studies, a recent “visual turn” has led to a growing appreciation of multimodality and modal affordances. For example, Meyer et al. (2018) distinguished affordances of verbal and visual text in the process of institutionalization. Their findings suggested that, whereas verbal text affords arguing, specifying, narrating, and abstracting, visual text affords infiltrating, spatializing, captivating, and materializing.

Taken together, the recent applications of affordances in communication research more broadly and in organization studies more specifically support the idea that affordances can be useful in studying how multimedia and multimodality affect stakeholder communication. The pattern emerging from the above literature review is that modes afford different semiotic resources while media afford different possibilities for interaction with the meaning. A text offers different means of meaning making from an image, and it is difficult to translate the meaning of an image into a text (and vice versa) without losing something along the way (Iedema, 2001, 2003; Kress, 2010). The medium, however, does not as such carry any meaning because it acts as a vehicle for modes. The medium instead allows people to interact with the signs portrayed in multimodal arrangements. It also enables and restricts individuals’ communication with each other.

Examining the affordances of modes and media will help me to address better the second aim of this thesis, that is, to account for the diversity of contexts in which stakeholder communication takes place. In particular, it provides the means to analyze those aspects of the material context that are most central to the exchange of meaning, the generation of new insights, and the constitution of organization. The four papers included in this dissertation address these topics from different theoretical angles and within different contexts. What combines them is an implicit practice-based ontology, which I introduce in the following chapter.

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3 Ontology: Communication embedded

in practices

So far, I have suggested that seeing stakeholder communication as constitutive of organization can help to provide a better understanding of how organizations change through interactions with their (external) stakeholders. The perspective considers that organizations are unstable whenever they are the subject of conversations. At the same time, it accounts for the more stable aspects of organizations whenever it finds them to be manifested in the plenum of human and non-human agencies. Finally, it acknowledges the processual nature of organizations; organizations require continuous reconstitution through communication events across space and time. In that way, the perspective has the potential to capture both the subtle morphing of organizations through everyday communication processes and more radical disruptions of organizations through critical events.

Practice theory provides a matching ontological perspective that allows me to embrace the inherent paradox of stability and change in organizations (Putnam et al., 2016), balance the importance of discourse and materiality while keeping them distinct (cf., Putnam, 2015) and trace instances of communication across space and time (Taylor, 2011). Indeed, I agree with Taylor (2011) that research on the communicative constitution of organization fits into a larger stream of research labeled the “practice turn” (e.g., Schatzki, 1996; Schatzki et al., 2005; Simpson, 2010; Whittington, 2006), where practice refers to “an organized, open-ended spatial-temporal manifold of actions” (Schatzki, 2005, p. 471). Similarly, Schoeneborn et al. (2016, p. 924) stated that “‘communication’ refers here to a specific type of practice, a complex and dynamic process of (symbolic and material) meaning negotiation that is fundamental to organizational existence.”

More specifically, Schoeneborn et al. (2016) pointed out three similarities in the metaphors of organizations as communication and organizations as practice. First, both metaphors result from a prior metonymic2 compression of the source

2 Musson and Tietze (2004, p. 1306) explained metonymy in the following way: “metonymies, unlike metaphors, are substitution processes based on contiguity, or relations of similarity. […] Put simply, a metonymy involves an individual example (e.g. a mother) standing for the related general category (e.g. motherhood).”


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domain (the organization) into its constitutive elements (practices or communication). Second, in the metonymic dimension, both metaphors support strongly bidirectional images: communication constitutes organization as much as the organization features as an entity-like actor through its manifestations in texts; practices bundle into nets of practice-arrangement bundles as much as these practice-arrangement bundles influence the enacting of individual practices. Third, concerning the source domain, both are concrete and abstract at the same time; communication and practices have both observable (talk or material arrangements) and elusive aspects (meaning or understanding).

Still, there are two differences between the metaphors (Schoeneborn et al., 2016), one of which is critical for the purpose of my thesis. The less important difference is that, in the metaphorical dimension, the image of an organization as practice is often used in a unidirectional manner. Although scholars have used the metaphor of practice to learn something about organizations, theorists have shown less interest in learning something about the concept of practices from the concept of organization. In contrast, communication scholars have theorized in both directions and used insights from organization to understand communication (e.g., Cooren, 2000). This difference is unproblematic for two reasons. First, my thesis does not aim mainly to contribute to communication theory. Second, the difference does not lead to an incongruity of practice and communication ontologies. Instead, it is still possible to conceive of communication as being nested within and governed by practices (Schatzki, 1996).

The critical difference is that conceiving organizations as nets of practice-arrangement bundles is a rather abstract metaphor (Schoeneborn et al., 2016). In contrast, the metaphor of organization as communication substantiates organizations more concretely as anthropomorphic actors that participate in conversations in the form of talk, text or material artifacts. Nevertheless, it seems that CCO scholars have unwittingly confined themselves to finding agential manifestations of organizations within material arrangements, in particular verbalized and written language, images, architecture, and other modes of communication. This difference is important because, as I argue, modes are not the only thing that matter in communication. In addition, media act as material furnishings of communication and shape the way in which participants can interact with modes during conversations. Even though both are required for the materialization of an organization in the sense that human and non-human agents can “speak on behalf of” an organization and thus act as its “medium,” the current CCO literature does not seem to have disentangled the two concepts (e.g., Cooren, 2020a).

Ontology: Communication embedded in practices

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The aim of the upcoming sections is to reconcile this critical difference between metaphors of organization as communication versus practice by embedding communication within practices. I will review some historical underpinnings of practice theory in (social) philosophy and draw connections to matching assumptions in the CCO literature. I will then more specifically introduce Theodore Schatzki’s practice-based ontology, which conceptualizes organizations as bundles of practices and material arrangements. Ultimately, this helps me to retain the concreteness of material manifestations of organizations while keeping an open mind about how else material arrangements might influence the way in which conversations unfold.

3.1 Connections between practice theories and

communication

Practice theories represent an arrangement of social theories that are connected by some common principles (Feldman and Orlikowski, 2011; Hillebrandt, 2014; Nicolini, 2012; Reckwitz, 2002; Schatzki, 1997). These principles are grounded in three philosophical underpinnings. First, the Marxist roots of practice theories emphasize the material dimension of social life. Second, the Heideggerian roots emphasize that human beings understand the world as how they can interact with it. Third, the Wittgensteinian roots point out the indeterminacy of social life. Not surprisingly, then, these philosophical pillars are also reflected in what Feldman and Orlikowski (2011, p. 1241) identified as three underlying principles of practice theory: (1) that situated actions are consequential in the production of social life; (2) that dualisms are rejected as a way of theorizing; and (3) that relations are mutually constitutive. These three principles match the communication theories that I outlined in Chapter 2.

Two aspects of Marx (1845) are still relevant in modern practice theories: (1) the materiality of human conduct and (2) understanding research as a practice that should affect practice itself. Concerning the first aspect, Marx’s argument matches my acknowledgment of materiality in organizational communication as I primarily draw on the Montreal School of communication. Marx essentially asserted that it is not possible to understand human conduct without understanding how people go about their everyday life (Nicolini, 2012). Put differently, the world and thought are inseparable and joined in human action. “The object of inquiry for philosophers (and what we would today call social scientists) should therefore be praxis intended as what [people] say, imagine, conceive, and produce and think while attempting to carry out these activities” (Nicolini, 2012, p. 30,


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emphasis in original). Practice, according to Marx, can only be understood as embodied (Hillebrandt, 2014).

As a result, what differentiates a theory of practice from others is that it gives “ontological priority to neither humans nor non-humans nor discursive practices” (Gherardi, 2012, p. 77; see also Schatzki, 1996, 2017), unlike some other traditions, such as hermeneutics or post-structuralism, that often emphasize discourse over bodily actions (Nicolini, 2012). It thus enables me to capture the material aspects of stakeholder communication that might otherwise be disregarded with a pure focus on discursive practices (Østerlund, 2008).

The second aspect of Marxist philosophy may be less relevant to my views on communication and more relevant to what I believe to be the role of research in society. My aim as a researcher is not to provide a detached analysis of the world that only has value within the academic system. Instead, research and theory should also have an impact on the world and the researcher’s role is to draw connections between theory and practice. To achieve this ambition, Habermas (1971) explained how Marx’s historical materialism urges researchers to be reflexive in two ways: reflexive on the social practice of theorizing and its historical catalysts; and reflexive on the addressee of theory, understood as the object of its theorizing, to understand theory’s potentially emancipative effect on the social happenings that it analyzes. Put differently, historical materialism aims to reflect on the practice of theorizing, but also to have an impact on the theorized. Theory is always meant to be practical, that is, emancipatory. It differentiates theory as critique in contrast to theory as science or philosophy. Whereas science tends to ignore its underlying historical and social practice, philosophy falls short of providing any practical implications. The term “practice” is meant to represent such a connection of theory with people’s social realities (Hillebrandt, 2014).

Moving on from Marx’s historical materialism, the phenomenological tradition, the second major philosophical turning point that enabled practice-based theorizing (Nicolini, 2012), provides the philosophical basis for what I previously described as affordances. In particular, Heidegger’s notion of being thrown into the world argues that, most of the time, human actors cope with the world by understanding objects as a “usable environment” (Nicolini, 2012, p. 34) without consciously reflecting on it but rather by dwelling in sociomaterial practices (Sandberg and Tsoukas, 2011; Tsoukas, 2015). It is mostly when breakdowns occur that we become aware of our practicing and start to reflect on it (Geiger, 2009; Nicolini, 2012; Tsoukas, 2015). For example, a cyclist would not continuously ponder about the affordances of the bicycle’s components while breaking, accelerating, or turning as long as the flow of cycling is uninterrupted. Only when, for example, pulling the break lever does not result in the expected


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slowing down of the bicycle would the person (rather quickly) revert to a different mode of coping (cf., Tsoukas, 2015) that allows her to resolve the situation. This reflects the more or less stable dimension of affordances.

Besides this explanation of intelligibility and rationality in terms of practice, Heidegger added two other components that are relevant to this study. First, we often acquire the affordances of objects passively from being socialized in socio-material contexts. In Heidegger’s words, we are being thrown not into an individual understanding (Dasein) but into a collective understanding with other human beings (mit-Dasein) (Nicolini, 2012). Second, even though I acknowledge that the social world consists of more than just communicative practices, I prioritize them. Heidegger (1977) similarly acknowledged that language is a prime vessel of understanding and thus being. We are, to some extent, always subordinated to our language (cf., Nicolini, 2012).

The last aspect referring to the primacy of language links to the third philosophical underpinning of practice theory: Wittgenstein’s reflections on language and meaning (Nicolini, 2012). His reflections mirror the unstable dimension of affordances and the general indeterminacy of social life. According to Wittgenstein, the “fundamental condition of human beings is one of reactions to our surroundings and other beings within the context of living activities” (Nicolini, 2012, p. 38, own emphasis). Wittgenstein’s reflections on (language) rules illuminate this additional layer of practical understanding. He stated that, although speaking a language follows particular rules, it is not possible to speak the language only by following rules (Hillebrandt, 2014). Even if we included another layer of rules that would explain how to interpret the rules in more particular situations, it would be impossible to cover all practical scenarios of language use. Following rules is therefore insufficient to undertake something because it cannot account for the situational, relational, and historical understanding inherent in particular situations. Similar to the example of the cyclist above, we usually do not reflect on the rules while speaking because it would impede its flow; we rather interpret the rules of language ad hoc without reflecting on them. Wittgenstein’s rule regress argument thus illustrates the limits of rationalist and reductionist theory (Hillebrandt, 2014; Nicolini, 2012)—praxis cannot be reduced to a formal system of rules and relationships.

The indeterminacy of practice is also reflected in what Taylor (1993) described as the indexicality of language, which similarly indicates that rules can only be indexical. A full comprehension of rules requires ad hoc interpretation that is also influenced by the context. Therefore, communication and affordances cannot be predetermined because the affordances that emerge between a subject and an object depend on the context in which the situation takes place. As Kress (2010,


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p. 19) mentioned: “In a social-semiotic theory the assumption is that the cultural technologies of representations, production and dissemination and the affordances and facilities that they offer are used within the frame of what is socially possible at any one time” (Kress, 2010, p. 19). Hence, unlike the mechanistic and deterministic conceptualizations of communication in, for example, computer science, which conceptualizes communication as the encoding and decoding of messages exchanged between senders and receivers (cf., Axley, 1984), Wittgenstein’s philosophy welcomes the non-mechanistic and indeterministic tendencies of human communication. Communication in the social realm is not universal.

In summary, the above philosophical streams of Marxist materialism, Heideggerian phenomenology, and Wittgensteinian intelligibility provide important distinguishing features from, if not commonalities with, subsequent practice theorists. Wittgenstein’s reasoning, for example, was pivotal for Giddens’s (1984) structuration theory and his illustration of the actor–structure problem (Hillebrandt, 2014). Bourdieu clearly followed a Marxist agenda in his research and theory (cf., Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992; Bourdieu and Zanotti-Karp, 1968). Heidegger and Wittgenstein influenced most of Schatzki’s contemporary practice theory, which is detailed below (Schatzki, 1996, 1997).

For all the similarities in practice theory, there are several notable points of distinction, such as the role of intelligibility, the role of human and non-human actors, and the role of doings and sayings. While some authors promoted a more active understanding of actors (Schatzki, 1997), others argued in favor of the actors’ more passive understanding (Bourdieu, 1990; Giddens, 1996). While some supported an agency of non-human actors (Latour, 2005), others were more restrictive in ascribing agency to non-humans (Schatzki, 1996). While some argued that sayings are governed by practices (Schatzki, 1996), others asserted that sayings are practices that create governing structures (Reckwitz, 2002), and, while some distinguished between discursive and non-discursive actions (Bourdieu, 1990; Reckwitz, 2002; Schatzki, 1996), others did not (Gherardi, 2012; Giddens, 1996). Along these lines, any research project must make a decision for either side and bundle a “theory–method package” that fits with the research purpose (Nicolini, 2012). My dissertation builds on a combination of Schatzki’s social ontology (e.g., Schatzki, 1996, 2003, 2016), which was inspired by Heidegger and Wittgenstein, and a moderate process ontology, which incorporates notions from organizational becoming (cf., Chia and Holt, 2009; Tsoukas and Chia, 2002) but acknowledges some form of organizational entity.


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3.2 Organizations and beyond: The wider nets of

practice-arrangement bundles

My dissertation builds on Schatzki’s (1996, 2003, 2010) social ontology, a detailed and coherent framework that offers an orientation for empirical investigations of practices. Additionally, his frequent references to organization studies make it easier to understand organizational communication from a practice-based view. In a nutshell, his ontology identifies practice-arrangement bundles as the main building blocks of social life. These practice-arrangement bundles connect with one another to form an overarching net that eventually encompasses society. In that sense, Schatzki’s social ontology is flat (Schatzki, 2016; Seidl and Whittington, 2014) and abolishes the notion of analyzing different “levels”: the social world neither exists as abstracted in holisms nor is the sum of individual actors; it exists mainly in the practice-arrangement bundles and nets thereof (Schatzki, 2003).

The focus of my thesis on the constitutive role of stakeholder communication practices differs from conceptualizing organizations as collections of individuals or institutionalized legal entities. Similarly, it is Schatzki’s (2003) idea to depict practices as an intermediary construct between overly individualistic notions of society on one side, in which society is the sum of individual actions, and overly institutional notions of society on the other, in which individual actions are predetermined by supra-individual structures and powers. On the one hand, actions are not to be reduced to consequences of individuals’ motivation because intentions to some extent arise from interactions in society; on the other hand, actions are not to be reduced to mechanistic reactions to timeless societal structures because practices develop over time and thus require acknowledgment of their genesis (Hillebrandt, 2014). In consequence, Schatzki’s (1996, 2003) site ontology acknowledges by its nature that social life and social phenomena are inseparable from the context through and within which they occur. This helps me to understand how the context in which stakeholder communication takes place influences the extent to which the communication contributes to an organization’s constitution.

To understand better the context of stakeholder communication, Schatzki’s site ontology distinguishes two concepts: practice and material arrangement. Practice hereby describes “an organized, open-ended spatial-temporal manifold of actions” (Schatzki, 2005, p. 471) that is governed by (1) particular understandings of the practice, (2) explicit and formalized rules, (3) teleological(-affective) structures (a range of ends, projects, actions, and emotions) and (4)


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general understandings (Schatzki, 2006, p. 1868). Although practices can be defined as “organised sets of doings and sayings” (Schatzki, 2017, p. 129, emphasis in original), practices are not just about what people do in an orderly fashion (Gherardi, 2012; Hui et al., 2017; Nicolini, 2012). Instead, the enactments of practices are tied to the material contexts to which they need to adapt, the so-called material arrangements. Unlike practices, material arrangements refer to set-ups of physical entities, such as “persons, artifacts, organisms, and things” (Schatzki, 2006, p. 1864). In my view, the material arrangements also include the modes and media of communication. For that reason, a study of “what” practices are being used should always be complemented by “who” is carrying out the practice and “how” (Jarzabkowski et al., 2016).

The braiding of practices and material arrangements elicits sites of social life (i.e. contexts), so-called “practice-arrangement bundles” (cf., Schatzki, 2003, 2005). Taken together, each practice-arrangement bundle can be considered as a tiny context in which actors enact activities in distinct ways. Such practice-arrangement bundles in reference to stakeholder communication could be, for example, face-to-face conversations between the organizational members and the organization’s stakeholders, the organization’s communication practices in digital spaces, such as social media channels, and the organization’s communication practices via legacy media. Together, practices and material arrangements mutually constitute social life as they are combined in so-called practice-arrangement bundles.

However, a single practice-arrangement bundle and thus a single instance of stakeholder communication still does not make an organization. Instead, practice-arrangement bundles are themselves linked through (1) chains of actions that form as parts of practices, (2) an overall teleological structure, and (3) the material arrangements that channel the enactment of practices and thereby influence human coexistence (Schatzki, 2003). When connected, they form so-called nets of practice-arrangement bundles (Schatzki, 2005).

The analogy of a net helps in explaining broader phenomena, such as organizations (Nicolini, 2017). Interconnections between practice-arrangement bundles describe how human lives hang together and show how actions are arranged in chains that span individuals, sites, and time (Schatzki, 2010). An organization thus “(1) is a product of actions performed in extant practices, (2) is a mesh that embraces existing, to varying degrees altered, practices (possibly supplemented with new ones) and a mix of new and old material arrangements, and (3) continues in existence via a perpetuation of its practices and a maintenance of its arrangements that accommodates evolution and focused changes in the mesh” (Schatzki, 2005, p. 476). Therefore, the further we zoom out from any


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particular practice-arrangement bundle and begin to see how practices and material arrangements are linked with one another, the more we understand the constitution of larger phenomena, such as organizations.

However, this zooming out does not imply a higher level. I generally agree with Schatzki that site ontologies are flat and any differentiation between micro and macro (unnecessarily) simplifies the complex, contingent, and non-systematic nature of social life (Schatzki, 2016). The analysis can zoom out from single practice-arrangement bundles to understand how they are connected in a wider net of practice-arrangement bundles (Nicolini, 2009, 2012), but the larger at no point directly influences the smaller or vice versa. The special aspect of site ontology is that “context and contextualized entity constitute one another” (Schatzki, 2005, p. 468).

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4 Method: Studying stakeholder

communication practices across

physical and digital sites

The question of how stakeholder communication constitutes organization and how context influences this process poses a number of methodological challenges. First, it requires an epistemology that fits my assumption about knowledge as something that emerges from and is situated in human interaction. Second, it requires a research strategy that allows me to capture a particular context and theorize about the role of stakeholder communication in the constitution of organization. Third, it requires data collection techniques that can capture instances of stakeholder communication across time and contexts. Finally, the analysis of the data must match the focus of my study as well as its numerous assumptions considering the nature of social life and communication.

Given the broad range of influences coming together in practice theories, I used ideas from multiple qualitative research traditions, including interpretive, social anthropology, and collaborative social research (cf., Miles and Huberman, 1994). The awareness that research is always a practice reflects the interpretive approach. It aligns with an abductive case study approach that “offers understanding presented from another’s horizon of meaning but understood from one’s own” (Thomas, 2010, p. 579). The social anthropological approach is evident in the goal of understanding practice-arrangement bundles by directly or indirectly participating in the day-to-day activities of my case companies. Unlike the interpretive approach, it is less concerned with the individual. Similar to ethnography, the goal is to represent the intangible social so that a reader can understand how a phenomenon is expressed through human conduct (cf., Van Maanen, 2011). Finally, the collaborative social research approach is represented by the closeness that I establish to my research cases. Following Johannisson’s (2014, p. 233) interactive research agenda, my study “is founded on the conviction that knowledge creation about social reality benefits from a genuine dialogue, that is interaction, between those who permanently inhabit that reality and the researchers who visit it.” A bricolage of analytical approaches is necessary to address the different dimensions of practice-based approaches.


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4.1 Epistemology: What is knowledge in practice?

The first challenge is to find a suitable epistemological framework that falls into the logic of neither overly individual nor overly social theories. I have previously argued that communication is not merely a mechanistic exchange of meaning between individuals but a process by which all involved individuals interactively construct a shared basis of knowledge (see p. 29). Similarly, “praxeological epistemology emphasizes that it is not necessary to posit acting subjects as causes, authors or conceptual points of departure in the attempt to describe and apprehend the meaningfulness, reflexivity and dynamics of change of social practices” (Schmidt, 2017, p. 149). Instead, I follow the four moves suggested by Schmidt (2017) to conceptualize knowledge in practice: (1) from methodological individualism to methodological situationism, (2) from social actions to situated social practices, (3) from subjective meaning to the public nature of meaning, and (4) from subjectivism to a critique of theoretical/scholastic reason.

As mentioned above, Heidegger’s philosophy provides a suitable framework trough which to conceptualize understanding as something situational and yet not individual. “[P]eople respond to their conditions of life on the basis of how they make sense of what is going on, although such sense-making ought not to be explicit and too like decision-making. Humans are thus neither serial rational decision-makers nor cultural/rule/habitus dupes” (Nicolini, 2012, p. 163).

Knowledge is situated not only in the minds of people but also in practices or, as Schatzki (1997, p. 284) described it, “practical understanding and intelligibility are articulated in practice.” This understanding is usually portrayed in the fluent, non-deliberate dwelling through life (Tsoukas, 2015, p. 71). In such states of consciousness, the actor remains deeply entwined with the practice at hand so that life obtains meaning through the practice-arrangement bundles that it entails (Sandberg and Tsoukas, 2011; Schatzki, 2005). Put differently, practices open fields of intelligibility for actors (Schatzki, 2005), and they do so “inexorably” (Schatzki, 1996, p. 115). Schatzki clarified further:

When someone participates in particular practices, her life and relations to coparticipants are beholden to these practices’ semantic fields. By virtue of their semantic spaces, practices thus constitute the site of the social: all social life inherently transpires as part of these practices. (Schatzki, 2005, p. 470)

Put differently, fields of intelligibility acknowledge that knowledge is neither a purely social nor an individual phenomenon but local and situated, never having

Method: Studying stakeholder communication practices across physical and digital sites

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full causal power (Nicolini, 2012). Similarly, Taylor (1993, p. 92) acknowledged that information in communication is not a property of the message “but is conveyed jointly by message and situation.” In addition, the notion of affordances describes the opening of fields of intelligibility, though with a focus on the object with which an individual interacts. In certain contexts, people have learned to interact with certain objects in certain ways by observing others engaging in similar practices. However, this does not exclude the possibility that a person will find an uncommon use of an object in a different situation.

Furthermore, some types of common understanding must develop in situations in which the successful performance of an activity requires multiple human- and non-human actors to interact. Whenever people do not share an understanding, breakdowns can occur and only be overcome when they communicate to develop a common ground (Weick and Roberts, 1993).

4.2 Research strategy: Cases as studying the

subject in the light of the object

While the above description concerns epistemology in the sense of how others (including my research participants) construct knowledge and information in communication practices, it not necessarily shows how I construct knowledge about the phenomenon of stakeholder communication as part of my research practices. As Daft (1983) pointed out, organizational research is a craft. Similar to professional craftspeople, who use specific tools for different tasks and work practices, the appropriate research tools and methods depend on the research questions and theoretical perspectives (Flyvbjerg, 2006): “like all the tools of a good craftsperson, [research techniques] must be adapted, invented and made the object of bricolage, not of worship” (Gherardi, 2012, p. 5).

In that sense, being transparent about the tools that I use for practicing research helps others to evaluate the trustworthiness of the knowledge that I craft. Pratt et al. (2020, pp. 9–11) therefore encouraged qualitative researchers to answer the following questions:

1. Why was the study done? (Addressed in Chapters 1–3) 2. Why was the study done in a particular context? 3. What is the author studying? 4. How did the author conduct the study and analyze the data?


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Concerning the second to fourth questions, the downside of empirical practice-based studies is the risk of becoming lost in the many practice-arrangement bundles that constitute an organization. Particularly, the further an investigation zooms out from individual practice-arrangement bundles to their interconnections, the more diverse the practices become. Mirroring the concerns of the second and third questions, researchers have therefore narrowed their investigations by (a) focusing on a particular context in which practices unfold and/or (b) focusing on particular types of practices as they unfold within and across contexts (cf., Gherardi, 2012; Nicolini, 2012).

I apply both strategies to improve the trustworthiness of my dissertation. First, I focus on two different contexts in which practices unfold: an SME’s online community from its inception onwards and new ventures during their ideation phase. Second, I investigate practices of communication and specifically stakeholder communication practices. Practices of stakeholder communication take place at the boundaries of an organization’s net of practice-arrangement bundles. It is where organizations communicate with (external) stakeholders.

The logics of case study research match this framing of my empirical studies and help to support my choice of research context and my focus on stakeholder communication practices. Although case studies in business research often tend to take a neopositivist stance (Thomas, 2011), they are commonly applied in practice-based research projects (Gherardi, 2012; Nicolini, 2012). However, instead of considering a case study as a method in itself, I follow the approach of Stake (2000, p. 134), who stated that a case study “is not [only] a methodological choice but a choice of what is to be studied.” Similarly, Thomas (2011, p. 513) defined a case study as “analyses of persons, events, decisions, periods, projects, policies, institutions, or other systems that are studied holistically by one or more methods.” Put differently, a case study does not define my method but frames what is studied.

“What is studied” can further refer to two different things. Cases can refer to a subject, meaning a practical, historical entity or context (here an organization). Cases can also refer to an object, meaning a theoretical and analytical frame (here basically a case of stakeholder communication represented in practice theory) (Thomas, 2011). Whereas the subject dimension of a case is often given (such as a specific organization represented by its name or a team of people working together), the object dimension is less straightforward. As Ragin and Becker (1992, p. 6, emphasis in original) explained: “Researchers probably will not know what their cases are until the research, including the task of writing up the results, is virtually completed. What it is a case of will coalesce gradually, sometimes catalytically, and the final realization of the case’s nature may be the most


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important part of the interaction between ideas and evidence.” Hence, even though research projects might start with a general research question in mind, it is common for the focus of a study to change as new insights emerge and the researchers compare them with previous ideas, especially in the inductive and grounded theory types of research (Gioia et al., 2013; Glaser and Strauss, 1967; O’Reilly et al., 2012).

The subject and object dimensions are represented in the three empirical papers included in this dissertation. Two of the papers focus on the company Miniatur Wunderland (the subject), addressing two different research objects. The first paper focuses on how stakeholders and managers construct the company’s social performance in social media and the subsequent reactions (or lack thereof) to the stakeholders’ feedback. The second paper sticks with the same subject but changes the focus to how the company leveraged the affordances of different communication channels to build an online community. The third paper concentrates on three new ventures (the subjects) and how different types of idea representations afford different types of feedback during interactions with stakeholders. In line with my view on case studies, each paper of my dissertation builds on different empirical material. Table 1 provides an overview and lists the major data sources, as also outlined in Paper 4.

4.2.1 Miniatur Wunderland: Cases within case and cross-

channel research

The first two papers build on a single-case study of the world’s largest miniature model railway exhibition—the Miniatur Wunderland (MWL) in Hamburg, Germany. Since its inception in 2000, the company has developed into an established, profitable firm with more than 300 employees. A different research question initially drew me to the case: how can business growth be conceptualized from a practice theoretical perspective? It was in particular the weekly blog posts published since 2001 that provided a rich database for addressing this question.


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Table 1. Overview of the empirical papers included in this dissertation.

Research Question3 Cases Data 1. How does social performance feedback construction take place on social media? How does an organization respond to social performance feedback on social media?

Single-case study (Miniatur Wunderland)

o Public profiles and blogs on social networking sites

o Public posts on Facebook accounts (including comments and replies)

o Online forum conversations o Interviews with owner-

managers 2. How do firms leverage the diversity of communication channels for building and maintaining a firm-hosted online community?

Single-case study (Miniatur Wunderland)

o Public profiles and blogs on social networking sites

o Public posts on Facebook accounts (excluding comments and replies)

o Public posts on YouTube o Public posts on Instagram o Weekly blog posts o Online forum conversations o Interviews with owner-

managers and forum members

o Books 3. How do idea representations shape feedback interactions in creative revision processes? How do organizations subsequently change their ideas based on feedback?

Multiple-case study (Nordic Adventours; Volentos; Starling)

o Backchannels o Productivity software o Digital files from online

data storage o Public profiles and blogs on

social networking sites o Interviews with

entrepreneurs o Observations

As I explained above, the object of a case study can change over time as the researcher becomes better acquainted with it. Two things began to emerge from the study as being important as I analyzed more data. First, MWL was pioneering in terms of building an online community and is continuing to grow its online community across different communication platforms. In addition to making use of legacy media, its fable for technological solutions made it aware of the benefits

3 The research questions here do not fully match the research questions outlined in Chapter 1 because the research questions here are guided by the theoretical frameworks of each paper, which differ from the broader framework that I use for bricolaging the knowledge across the papers.


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of online communication. In 2001, while building the exhibition, it had already created a sophisticated website and online forum that established a common meeting place for hobby model railway builders across Germany. In the subsequent years, the company added several social media platforms to its mix of communication channels and continued to expand its online community. For that reason, the case urged me to investigate how the purpose and relationship of each platform differ in relation to the affordances that the company perceives and uses on each platform (see Paper 2). I find that each communication channel fulfills a different purpose and fosters different relationships with MWL’s stakeholders.

Second, it struck me how frequently MWL engages in social performance initiatives despite being a for-profit organization. Its online communication on Facebook and its online forum frequently feature social initiatives, such as giving people who cannot afford it free entry to the exhibition, collecting money for charity, or offering special social pricing for disabled people. The affordances of social media allow stakeholders to communicate feedback about the social initiatives, which in turn can trigger managerial reactions. I therefore saw the opportunity to address a gap in the social performance feedback theory, specifically to determine how social performance is constructed in the communication among stakeholders and managers (see Paper 1). In that sense, this paper transforms the single-case subject MWL into a case-within-case design (Gondo et al., 2012) in which each instance of a social initiative (the subjects) provides evidence for the construction of social performance in social media channels (the object).

I believe that MWL has the potential to become a paradigmatic case (cf., Flyvbjerg, 2006) of (digitally facilitated) stakeholder communication. Despite many attempts to copy the idea worldwide, no other business has managed to succeed. What stands out is MWL’s ability to engage its stakeholders through various communication channels and thus retain and renew the interest in the exhibition. Beyond simply using different media as a one-way communication channel, both papers building on the MWL case show that the management engages in a mutual exchange with the stakeholders and is able to adapt to their requests. Especially in the beginning, the online forum served as a sounding board for strategic decisions, and it continues to do so today. Finally, MWL teaches us about how businesses can cope with the ongoing politicization of corporations (Palazzo and Scherer, 2006) by engaging in a dialogue with their immediate community via different communication channels.


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4.2.2 Stakeholder interactions in new venture ideation

In line with my second aim, to develop a model that accounts for the diversity of stakeholder communication as it happens in different organizational and communication contexts, the third empirical paper focuses on the organizational setting of new ventures and their early ideation phase. More precisely, I investigate how new venture teams present their ideas to stakeholders in different ways and how the different ways of representing a new venture idea influence the type of feedback that the new ventures can receive. Typically, the ideation phases of new ventures are rather short (Shim and Davidsson, 2017), which allows me to juxtapose multiple and diverging cases (subjects) (Flyvbjerg, 2006; Langley et al., 2013; Pettigrew, 1990).

Three new venture teams are included as cases. The first case is a new venture that has spent extensive amounts of time and financial resources on building an initial version of the product before testing it. The second case is a venture that explored very early versions of its product with limited resources. The third case resembles the second one in the sense that it received feedback on early prototypes and mock-ups early on in the process. Adding variance by using multiple cases allows for cross-case analyses, which increase transferability and credibility (Flyvbjerg, 2006; Langley et al., 2013; Pettigrew, 1990; Silverman, 2011).

The selection of cases follows a more purposeful sampling approach, in particular one searching for maximum variation (Flyvbjerg, 2006). The cases vary with regard to the leadership style, the team composition, and the number of resources put into the development of a prototype. At the same time, I limit some contextual differences by choosing new venture projects that were started by students who graduated with the same master’s degree in strategic entrepreneurship and who participated in the same accelerator program run by the university’s adjacent science park. The students involved in case three did not study for a master’s degree in strategic entrepreneurship but graduated in digital business. Some program content overlaps. In addition, the first two cases developed similar business models as they created two-sided market platforms within the industry of event tourism. The third case developed a digital store plan management solution for the business-to-business market. Table 2 provides an overview of the cases.


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Table 2. Key information on the cases.

Nordic

Adventours Volentos Starling Year started 2015 2016 2017 Time until minimum viable product launch

Approx. 12 months Approx. 6 months

Approx. 8 months

# Co-founders 3 4 5 Involved from inception

1 4 5

Additional employees

Yes (3 non-paid interns)

No Yes (3 non-paid interns)

Registered company

Yes No No

Business model Multi-sided platform (online tourism)

Multi-sided platform (online tourism)

Warehouse management software (B2B)

4.3 Collecting data from offline and online sources

The attempt to study stakeholder communication practices across different contexts poses several challenges concerning data collection. One of the challenges is to capture the connection between stakeholder communication practices across time, which suggests a processual dimension. In processual research, it is important to gather “as-real-as-possible-time” empirical material to avoid potential hindsight bias (Gehman et al., 2018; Langley, 1999). Another challenge relates to the increasing digitalization of work and stakeholder communication, which I problematize in Paper 4. Organizational communication is becoming less and less of a face-to-face phenomenon and instead takes place on digital sites. Such digital sites are hardly accessible if researchers decide to remain in the physical world and adopt traditional observational methods. Compared with face-to-face communication, which is rich in indexical cues in the physical world, digital communication often unfolds without much embodiment, leaving researchers who remain in the physical site sitting in silence.

To overcome such challenges, digital research methods, such as digital ethnography (Murthy, 2008; Pink et al., 2016) or netnography (Kozinets, 2020), inspired the collection of empirical material included in this dissertation. The empirical studies actively tap into the riches offered by the Internet, which provide an open playground for stakeholder communication research with detailed information spread across company websites, blogs, forums, messaging services, and productivity tools. Paper 4 builds on my experiences of employing digital


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research methods, and I argue that practice-based studies should embrace insights from digital research methods and combine them with traditional research approaches to gain a better understanding of purely digital practices as well as the entanglements between physical and digital sites. In addition, I point out that even studies of purely physical practices can benefit from the adoption of digital research methods.

I differentiate between five different sources of data, as outlined in Paper 4: (1) (semi-)public profiles and blogs on social networking sites, (2) backchannels, (3) productivity software, (4) digital files from (online) data storage, and (5) digital tools and devices. The categorization reflects the type of data that I collected for the three empirical studies.

In Paper 1, which investigates the construction of social performance in social media, I mainly rely on Facebook posts from MWL’s public profile, through which it consistently communicates social initiatives and receives subsequent feedback on them. The data are a sub-sample from a download of MWL’s entire Facebook feed, including its original posts, reactions, comments and replies. In addition, I capture discussions concerning social initiatives happening in MWL’s online forum. The forum was particularly important before the introduction of social media channels and today retains its role as a meeting place for a loyal community of MWL fans (the so-called “forumaniacs”).

In addition to information from social media, I interview the owner-managers of MWL to capture better their understanding of stakeholder communication concerning social initiatives. The interviews also help in understanding their reasoning concerning which posts they reply to and which ones trigger strategic change. In that sense, the interview data support my analysis of the social media data, which in themselves would not warrant the conclusions that I draw.

For Paper 2, in which I investigate stakeholder communication across different communication contexts, I broaden the perspective from Facebook to account for the multiplicity of social media channels that MWL uses to build its online community. For that purpose, I additionally collect all the posts from Instagram and YouTube as well as the company’s weekly blog page and online forum. Broadening the scope in terms of the number of channels that I analyze comes at the cost of focusing on MWL’s activities in the different social media channels while putting less emphasis on how stakeholders react to each and every comment.

In addition to the online data, I interview the owner-managers about their understanding of each platform to capture better how they interpret the affordances of each platform. These interviews follow a semi-structured approach in which I develop the questions alongside my initial analysis of the online


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community data. In the second round of interviews, the questions are furthermore guided by the empirical questions of Paper 1 and Paper 2. I also participate in two yearly meetings of MWL’s online forum fan club, the “forumaniacs” (see Picture 1 below). There, I observe the interactions between members, hold conversations with them about the history of their participation in the forum and the development of MWL’s online community, and formally interview some key members of the community to gain a better understanding of the stakeholders’ perspective concerning the affordances of different social media channels. Once again, the interview data help me to make sense of the analysis of online data.

Picture 1. Group photo at the yearly forumaniacs meeting, 2019. Ó Dirk Hillbrecht

In Paper 3, which investigates how idea representations shape creative feedback interactions in new venture ideation, the emphasis is less on social media accounts and more on the use of a combination of online and offline data collection methods to understand both the physical and the digital work practices of entrepreneurs. The primary source to approximate practices and actions is productivity software called Trello through which actors keep track of their to-do lists. This particular form of archival data allows me to follow the most crucial activities taking place. The analysis of these data reveals the importance of stakeholder interactions for the development of each case and allows me to track


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instances of stakeholder interactions, both offline and online. In addition, I collect information from backchannels such as Facebook messenger and Slack. It allows me to keep track of quasi “real-life” conversations and discussions among group members as well as stakeholder interactions. I also access the group’s digital archives on Google Drive. These archives include all the documents that the founders created, including the different idea representations that they subsequently communicated to different stakeholders. These allow me to analyze the extent to which the representations differ concerning their material characteristics. The digital archives also include reports about the stakeholder interactions and changes in representations, enabling me to track how the ideas evolved over time in response to stakeholder feedback. Although less emphasized, I also track the activities of my case companies via their public profiles and blogs on social networking sites. All the case companies run their own Facebook pages, often as part of their marketing strategy. The two first cases also have a blog section on their website in which they post longer status updates about their development. Consequently, it is possible to understand the practices that reached beyond the net of practice-arrangement bundles that are internal to the organization.

In addition to online data, I interview the actors who participate in the practice-arrangement bundles on a regular basis (monthly to bi-monthly). More specifically, I focus on the co-founders and interview them at regular intervals. In the case of Nordic Adventours, I also interview an intern who took on critical responsibilities early on and later became a co-founder of the business. The benefit of conducting interviews was the ability to delve deeper into the actors’ life-worlds (Habermas, 1981). In that way, I establish “a genuine dialogue, that is interaction, between those who permanently inhabit that reality and the researchers who visit it” (Johannisson, 2014, p. 233).

My focus on practice philosophy hereby pushes me to select matching interview techniques. Among the existing interview approaches, I find the notion of “active interviewing” to be appropriate (cf., Holstein and Gubrium, 1995, 2003). Active interviews aim to uncover how knowledge and meaning are constructed subjectively in addition to finding out what respondents know (Holstein and Gubrium, 2003). I also conduct real-life observations, including several pitch presentations at which the founders present the new venture idea to different audiences. In addition, I accompany a founder to a tourism conference, where I shadow the person engaging with other conference participants. When appropriate, I try to make sense of the situations by speaking with the founder about his experience, how he perceives certain people, other business ideas and so on. Such observations reveal practice-arrangement bundles in much greater


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detail because they allow me to account for physical material arrangements, which are more difficult to grasp than the other empirical material.

4.4 Analysis and interpretation: Abductive zooming

The final pieces in my methodological toolbox are the tools for data analysis. In line with my research purpose, to study how stakeholder communication contributes to the constitution of organization, the analysis follows three steps: (1) a move from activities to practice-arrangement bundles; (2) a comparative analysis; and (3) abductive inference.

4.4.1 From activities to practice-arrangement bundles

Studying stakeholder communication from a practice perspective means studying practice-arrangement bundles that span two usually distant nets of practice-arrangement bundles: those that are more central to an organization and those that are more central to the lives and practices of stakeholders, such as (potential) business partners, customers, or online community members. Therefore, I consider practice-arrangement bundles as the “basic epistemic objects of social theory” (Nicolini, 2012, p. 162) and my main unit of analysis.

Therefore, to understand further how stakeholder communication can constitute a larger phenomenon, such as an organization, the analysis must take into consideration how stakeholder communication practices connect with one another and other (communication) practices. Building on Nicolini’s analogy of “zooming in” and “zooming out” of practice-arrangement bundles (cf., Nicolini, 2009, 2012, 2017), I accomplish this in three steps: (1) understanding activities of stakeholder communication, (2) summarizing activities as practices, and (3) enriching the activity-based analysis to represent practice-arrangement bundles. Consistent with the aforementioned ontology, this zooming in and out is different from an analysis of different levels; practice-arrangement bundles, and nets thereof, remain the only level of analysis that I consider in my theorizing.

In Paper 1, this zooming out is represented by the sequential moves from individual comments to the discussions among stakeholders and managers and finally to the reactions of managers. In each step, the analysis zooms out from individual activities to account for their connections with other activities until it finally views how the outcomes of some practice-arrangement bundles connect with other or adjacent practice-arrangement bundles, represented by the strategic changes or reactions of MWL in response to particular conversation patterns.


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Paper 2 then zooms out further from instances of social initiatives on Facebook and the online forum to MWL’s larger net of practice-arrangement bundles that encompass its online community. In a similar manner, I start by analyzing the individual activities within each communication channel and then zoom out further to look for connections between activities and practices across channels. Finally, I compare the differences in practice-arrangement bundles across the overall net, representing a constant switch between zooming in and zooming out again from particular practices to understand better how the affordances of each communication channel shape the stakeholder communication practices.

In Paper 3, I accomplish the first step by exporting the to-do lists from the productivity tools. In addition, I use the chat protocols and interviews to identify further activities that might not have been noted down on the task boards. The resulting activity list is chronological according to the time when they take place. In that way, activities that do not belong to the same practice might connect. Therefore, in the second step, I “patch together” activities that belong to the same practice but are disrupted by other practices. For that purpose, I use so-called activity records (cf., Werner, 1992). These activity records show the temporal structure of activities within the practice that they encompass. I then zoom out from individual practices and focus on those through which the new venture founders communicate and exchange their idea with stakeholders. I then zoom in on those practices to understand better how the idea representation shapes the interaction, before zooming out again to understand how the outcomes of such feedback interactions affect the connecting activities and practices that encompass the organization.

The “zooming out” is essentially also a time-sensitive analysis. It reveals the larger net of practice-arrangement bundles by showing how practices and arrangements connect through time. The main challenge is to balance accuracy, simplicity, and generality (Langley, 1999). Based on the in-between nature of practice-based theories, it seems appropriate to use a process analysis strategy that falls somewhere between high and low accuracy, between complexity and simplicity, and between idiosyncrasy and generality. Langley (1999) placed visual mapping strategies in such a position. Inspired by Miles and Huberman (1994), these visual mapping strategies are useful for the “representation of a large number of dimensions, and they can easily be used to show precedence, parallel processes, and the passage of time” (Langley, 1999, p. 700). I use such visual mapping strategies to represent connections between activities but also as first visualizations of theory. Such sketches of how practices interconnect helps to provide an understanding of the phenomenon at hand before moving on to analyze a new batch of data (cf., Glaser and Strauss, 1967).


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4.4.2 Comparative analysis

In addition to zooming in and out of practices, I need to employ some type of comparative analysis as the goal is to identify patterns and abstract from the particular to theory. For that purpose, I borrow ideas from grounded theory analysis (Glaser and Strauss, 1967; Strauss and Corbin, 1990) and more recent process-based interpretations thereof (Gehman et al., 2018; Langley, 1999). Readers of my dissertation will find that I employ three different types of comparative analyses.

First, there is the rather traditional method of comparing different cases (Langley et al., 2013; Pettigrew, 1990, 1997). Paper 3 allows for such a comparison of the different cases. The challenge is not to revert to a decontextualization of the particular case but to find a way to develop an understanding that can accommodate the particular in the general (cf., Tsoukas, 2017).

Second, the processual nature of my data allows for comparative analyses within single cases. Paper 1 achieves such a comparison by adopting a case-within-case design (Gondo et al., 2012) in which I compare several instances of similar stakeholder communication practices. In Paper 2, I use the analytic method of temporal bracketing (cf., Langley, 1999). Temporal bracketing is inspired by Giddens (1984), who divided analysis into smaller periods, analyzing each for itself instead of analyzing them all together. This method is especially useful for understanding how stakeholder communication practices change over time and across communication channels, as problematized in Paper 2. The transition from a heavier focus on legacy media and a few online channels to the use of social media platforms serves as a major switching point in the development of MWL’s history and allows me to compare the two successive periods, which highlights the changes and differences that occur in practice-arrangement bundles as the online community grows.

Third, the above only refers to a comparison of the case study’s subject, that is, the changes in practice-arrangement bundles, and not its object, that is, the case of something (cf., Ragin and Becker, 1992; Thomas, 2011). The design of my dissertation allows for such a comparative analysis of the cases’ objects, particularly a comparison of stakeholder communication practices across different contexts. The comparison between research objects reveals symmetric assumptions (Foss and Hallberg, 2013, 2016) that allow me to develop a distinct theoretical contribution in my introductory chapters by reflecting on the empirical papers from a meta-perspective.


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4.4.3 Inference: Moving from induction to abduction

That said, it is still not clear how I reach conclusions from these comparisons. Commonly, the distinction is between deductive and inductive approaches. These two, however, aim for theory in terms of statistically generalizable knowledge (Thomas, 2010). It is reflected in the empirical papers included in this dissertation, in which I follow closely the inductive research approaches of grounded theorizing (Glaser and Strauss, 1967; Strauss and Corbin, 1990). The generalizability of my findings in these papers is to some extent, however, bound by the context in which I conduct the research. Despite attempts to abstract from local observations to see larger patterns, there is no guarantee that these patterns will remain stable across context and time.

Similarly, others have pointed out that social sciences are subject to a number of limitations, which suggest that common modes of inference (induction and deduction) might not be appropriate for all types of theorizing (MacIntyre, 1985; Thomas, 2010). Instead, Thomas (2010) argued in reference to Peirce (1878) that abduction qualifies better to account for the unpredictability of human conduct:

“It could, perhaps simplistically, be thought of as ‘conclusions drawn from everyday generalization,’ whereas induction concerns conclusions drawn from a special kind of generalization […;] heuristics—ways of analyzing complexity that may not provide watertight guarantees of success in providing for explanation or predication but are unpretentious in their assumptions of fallibility and provisionality.” (Thomas, 2010, p. 577)

For the purpose of my thesis, abduction is an appropriate mode of inference to move beyond the somewhat contextual limitations of each empirical paper. It allows me to draw the type of “everyday generalizations” that seem to be adequate for developing a theory of stakeholder communication that accounts for contextual particularities. The model developed in the introductory chapters thus does not aim at statistical generalization. It does not seek to explain particular outcomes of situations under all circumstances. Instead, it aims to provide an understanding of critical contextual factors in stakeholder communication and how they affect it.

Other scholars have often discussed abduction from a somewhat different perspective. For them, abduction involves the combination of deductive and inductive reasoning (e.g., Alvesson and Sköldberg, 2009). It means “connecting what you see in the empirical world with theoretical ideas, which are also out there and can be further developed” (Gehman et al., 2018, p. 14). For example, Pettigrew (1997, p. 339) argued that what “may turn a case history into a case


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study reminds us that inductive pattern recognition has also to go hand in hand with deduction. Few process scholars enter the field with an empty head waiting to be filled with evidence.” Abductive approaches are considered to be useful for case studies over longer periods (Dubois and Gadde, 2002; Gehman et al., 2018).

Instead of confusing the two notions of abduction, I refer to the latter as systematic combining. “Systematic combining is a process where theoretical framework, empirical fieldwork, and case analysis evolve simultaneously, and it is particularly useful for development of new theories” (Dubois and Gadde, 2002, p. 554). Ideally, the approach avoids explaining everything and sticks to some more specific theoretical frameworks. When I first started collecting data on the different cases, I entered the field with a vague understanding of what I was looking for and did not have much theory in mind. Instead, the goal was to be surprised by what struck me as relevant in my observations. Only then did I start to look for theory that improved my understanding. In doing so, I also identified where theory did not help and where my research could potentially contribute (cf., Gehman et al., 2018). This explains why the different papers, despite their common interest in stakeholder communication, use different theoretical frameworks that are better suited to explaining the particular phenomenon of interest from a closer perspective. Over time, these theoretical frameworks guided my analysis and particularly also the reporting of my findings, showing me what to focus on and what information to exclude.

4.5 Establishing trustworthiness in qualitative

research

Being transparent about my research questions, my research context, and my research methods, as I have been on the previous pages, helps to establish trustworthiness because readers can evaluate whether my choices are consistent and warrant the conclusions that I draw (Pratt et al., 2020). In addition to laying open my choices concerning research design, I have taken other measures that contribute to the trustworthiness of my research. The criteria from Lincoln and Guba (1985; see also Guba, 1981) provide a fitting structure for describing how the measures that I have taken during and after my research contribute to trustworthiness. I discuss each criterion in turn: credibility, transferability, dependability, and confirmability.

Credibility describes whether the solution of a researcher gives justice to a situation’s multiple realities. It requires the researcher to remain constantly open to and actively seek alternative explanations. One method that helps me to


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uncover alternative perspectives is the ongoing exchanges with my research participants during my persistent observations and engagements in the field. In the study of new venture ideation, I use the interviews to voice my sensemaking of what was taking place and give the respondents the chance to oppose my ideas. Similarly, after spending a considerable amount of time in MWL’s online community, my research visits, the interviews with the owner-managers, and the interviews and informal conversations with the community members allow me similarly to “test” my assumptions against their experiences. I continue such member checks after my field visits by sharing the manuscripts with my research participants. I also engage in peer debriefing by discussing the preliminary findings with my co-authors and presenting the papers at conferences. Finally, the triangulation of data sources, investigators, and theories help further to give justice to the complexities of situations while teasing out what is more important to report.

Transferability describes the extent to which findings can be applicable elsewhere. An appropriate sampling method can overcome issues of transferability by selecting either appropriate single cases (Flyvbjerg, 2006; Thomas, 2011) or multiple ones that allow for comparison (Pettigrew, 1990, 1997). I have described my sampling method in Chapter 4.2. It is equally important, however, to clarify the contextual circumstances of the cases so that readers themselves can better evaluate whether the findings might be applicable in contexts that show some similarities or differences. For that reason, I include “thickish” descriptions (cf., Van Maanen, 2011) of the context and cases in each of my empirical papers.

Dependability concerns the stability of data and the consistency of interpretations. One technique that I use in the MWL papers is stepwise replication. For Paper 1, I code the data myself at the beginning and develop a coding manual, which a research assistant then uses to code the entire data again. This reveals missed nuances in the coding manual and generally supports the consistency of interpretations. For Paper 2, I and my co-author engage in separate analyses of the data before bringing our insights together. The analysis continues with ongoing phases of separate and joint analysis. For both MWL papers and Paper 3, I additionally leave a trail audit in the form of a detailed timeline that represents the initial structuring of the data. Together with the tables included in the manuscript, the readers and reviewers can establish trustworthiness in the analysis.

Confirmability considers whether the research process potentially misses contradictory data or alternative explanations. One strategy to support confirmability is triangulation of data, which I extensively practice throughout my


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empirical work. The different data sources allow me to find alternative evidence and I constantly take notes on index cards while analyzing the data. These index cards help me to practice reflexivity because I am able to trace my own reasoning and discuss it with my co-authors and advisors.

Taken together, the transparency about my research design and the described methods should help readers to evaluate the trustworthiness of my qualitative research and the presented findings.

4.6 Research ethics

As discussed in Paper 4, working with data that are (semi-)publicly available requires some ethical consideration. In particular, the use of naturally occurring data is debated in digital research methods (Ferguson, 2017; Kozinets, 2020). Such a type of data is not specifically intended for the research purpose, and sometimes the research design does not allow informed consent to be obtained from the people who generated the data. I took several measures to minimize the risk of harm or wrongdoing and to ensure the privacy of my research participants.

First, I started collecting data from MWL’s web page in a covert mode, meaning that I did not reveal my intentions to the firm. At that point in time, I still did not know whether the data included something interesting. I switched from covert to overt research in July 2017 after deciding to continue with the research project. I sent an email to MWL explaining the research project, purpose, and intent as well as asking for interviews with the owner-managers. Although the company initially declined my interview request, it also wished me all the best with the remaining investigations. It supported me in continuing with the available public data. In that sense, I established informed consent to use the data.

Later on, MWL’s online forum emerged as a particularly interesting communication setting. Even though it was technically possible to crawl the data without the participants’ knowledge, I did not feel comfortable with quietly breaking and entering and exposing the forum’s intimate culture without at least receiving the approval of its main users, the “forumaniacs.” In August 2018, I therefore decided to participate in the forumaniacs’ yearly gathering. Before visiting the gathering, I contacted one of the organizers (nickname: “writeln”) and revealed my research interest in the community. The forum user welcomed me and later introduced me and my research to other forumaniacs during the physical meeting. In that way, I was able to strike a balance between “insider” and “outsider” and successively gain the trust of the forum members (cf., Abidin, 2020).


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Writeln also opened the door to MWL’s management as he introduced me to Stephan Hertz, one of MWL’s owner-managers, during my visit to the forumaniacs’ gathering in 2018. Stephan invited me to conduct a short first interview in which I was able to explain my research in person. It fostered a relationship through which I was later able to conduct two more interviews with him and another owner-manager. In addition, I shared interview excerpts with Stephan Hertz before submitting the manuscripts for review and printing and obtained approval to avoid any harm to the company’s image and reputation.

In parallel, my trust among the forumaniacs strengthened. I continued signaling my interest in the forum throughout the year 2018–2019 through limited participation in the forum. Although I kept out of the main discussions, I offered some insights from my research. These did not influence the remaining dynamics in the forum in any major way. However, several of the forumaniacs trusted me enough to grant formal interviews during my participation in a second gathering in 2019.

Concerning the semi-public data from MWL’s social media channels, it was not feasible to ask all of MWL’s stakeholders for their explicit consent. This issue has been acknowledged in digital research methods, and the status quo currently suggests that researchers can use publicly available data as long as they disguise the identity of people sufficiently to guarantee their privacy (Ferguson, 2017; Kozinets, 2020). In my research, this happened in two ways. First, I replaced user names with placeholders. Second, the translations from German to English added another layer of disguise, making it difficult to trace a message’s author. Furthermore, I did not openly share the entire data set but only excerpts, in which I paid attention to select instances that minimized the risk that exposure could cause wrongdoing or harm.

Concerning the new venture ideation cases, I agreed on non-anonymized reporting of case and participant names. I obtained informed consent from all the participants before data collection started, agreeing not to publish any sensitive information about their business ideas. In addition, the participants received a list of interview excerpts that I included in the manuscripts for approval.

The digital data from the cases was collected after the first couple of interviews, during which I was able to establish a trustworthy relationship. Whenever other people (such as interns or short-term employees) participated in the case’s communication channels, I ensured that the entrepreneurs would inform them about my “hidden presence” in advance.

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5 How organizations incorporate

insights from stakeholder

communication

The attached papers invite reflections concerning the three research questions outlined in the introduction to my thesis. The first two questions relate to the first three empirical papers included in this thesis. The different aspects covered by each paper afford a meta-reflection that connects their distinct contributions to an overarching model of stakeholder communication. The papers’ empirical insights therefore serve as inputs to build new organizational theory from a bricolage of the knowledge that I develop in each paper (Boxenbaum and Rouleau, 2011). The theoretical framework outlined in Chapter 2 and the philosophical assumptions outlined in Chapter 3 guide this bricolage.

First, I attempt to answer the question of how organizations incorporate insights from stakeholder interactions by reflecting on Paper 1 and to some extent Paper 3. My answers extend the previous ideas of the Montreal School in CCO scholarship (e.g., Cooren, 1999; Taylor and Van Every, 2000) beyond organizational boundaries, arguing that stakeholder communication can involve the co-authoring of organizational texts between organizational members and non-members (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 further contribute the insight 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.

Second, I attempt to answer the question of how context (in particular the organizational and communication context) shapes organizations’ incorporation of insights from stakeholder communication. The answers to this question mainly stem from Paper 2 and Paper 3, in which I expand the analysis from a few interaction channels to consider stakeholder communication across different media channels (Paper 2); I further extend my analysis beyond stakeholder communication via official media channels to include face-to-face interactions in new venture ideation processes (Paper 3). This allows me to contribute a more


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nuanced stakeholder communication model that accounts for entanglements of medial and modal affordances.

In addition to the two empirical questions, I address the methodological challenges of studying stakeholder communication across contexts in question three, which asks whether it is possible to study interactions between organizations and stakeholders across different contexts. Paper 4 addresses this question by pointing out the usefulness and sometimes even the necessity of using digital research methods. In Chapter 4, I showed how the empirical research that I conduct matches the logic of Paper 4. Taken together, Paper 4 and Chapter 4 are important puzzle pieces to answer the empirical questions of my thesis and its overall aim, which concerns the development of a model that accounts for the diversity of stakeholder communication as it happens in different types of organizations and in different communication contexts.

Figure 2. Model of stakeholder communication.

Figure 2 depicts this model. The main idea is that the nets of practices encompassing an organization overlap with the nets of practices encompassing stakeholders through practices of stakeholder communication. At the core of stakeholder communication is the co-authoring of organizational texts that stabilize the entity of an organization in a “more or less agreed-upon account” (Taylor et al., 1996, p. 3). These texts are not limited to language but constitute the organization in different modes, which afford different resources for meaning making (cf., Kress, 2010; Meyer et al., 2018). Often, organizational texts are multimodal. Modes alone, however, do not suffice for communication to occur. Instead, media are needed to transport the meaning represented in one or multiple modes. Similar to how modes afford different resources for meaning making, the literature has acknowledged that media afford different means of communication (e.g., Gulbrandsen et al., 2020; Leonardi and Vaast, 2017; Majchrzak et al., 2013).

How organizations incorporate insights from stakeholder communication

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Within the scope of my research, I observe that media influence how actors can participate in the co-authoring of organizational texts during stakeholder communication. Put differently, the media affordances organize the co-authoring of organizational texts. In the following, I expand on these ideas.

5.1 The co-authoring of organizational texts in

stakeholder communication

In the cases that I study, the process of incorporating insights from stakeholder communication typically starts with the organization sharing texts with external stakeholders. This broadly reflects the notion of Taylor and Van Every (2000, p. 39) that “text is the necessary input to and inevitable output from communication: both raw material and product.” By engaging in conversations and sharing texts with external stakeholders, the communicative constitution of organization is no longer restricted to intra-organizational members but also opened up to extra-organizational members (cf., Schoeneborn and Scherer, 2012).

From this starting point, I contribute to the literature on stakeholder communication by shedding further light on how organizations incorporate insights from stakeholder communication. In particular, I offer the following answer to the question of how organizations incorporate new insights from stakeholder communication: organizational texts, which elsewhere can be stabilizing and constitutive aspects of organizations (Cooren and Fairhurst, 2009; Taylor, 1999, 2009; Taylor et al., 1996), can become decontextualized from a potentially localized organizational context and recontextualized in stakeholder contexts across the world. Recontextualizing the texts in different contexts potentially exposes them to a multitude of alternative perspectives and opinions, as reflected in the stakeholders’ life worlds (cf., Habermas, 1981). The exposed organizational text is then no longer stable but contested and thus the object of co-authoring between organizational members and involved stakeholders as well as among stakeholders. Such conversations provide stakeholders with the opportunity to suggest alternative narratives to the underlying text that destabilize organizational texts to a greater or lesser extent (cf., Cooren and Fairhurst, 2009) and can trigger restabilizing efforts by organizational members.

More specifically, this tangible way of viewing the incorporation of new insights as the co-authoring of organizational text allows us to understand better the different trajectories that stakeholder communication can take. Importantly, my take on stakeholder communication moves beyond previous considerations of how such co-authoring constitutes an organization’s “outer” appearance (e.g.,


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Albu and Etter, 2016; Castelló et al., 2016; Etter et al., 2019; Schoeneborn and Scherer, 2012). As I show, not all instances of stakeholder communication that happen at the boundaries of an organization’s net of practice-arrangement bundles carry the same potential to destabilize internal organizational texts and subsequently become incorporated into the organization. For example, Paper 1 and Paper 3 suggest that, when stakeholders support the previous text, it merely leads to a further imbrication of those texts, not change.

Change is only triggered when stakeholders offer narratives that contest the existing texts. Following the logic of co-orientation, such contesting narratives suggest differences in the orientations of subjects A and B toward some object X (cf., Newcomb, 1953). When stakeholders and organizational members overcome these differences, new understandings and thus insights emerge that can subsequently enter the existing net of organizational practices in various ways. They can lead to adjustments of previous organizational texts or additions of new organizational texts that change or add to the meaning and interpretation of previous texts. When this happens, the cases that I study have often adopted the stakeholders’ narratives almost word for word and used them in future instances of stakeholder communication, which indicates their further stabilization, their imbrication, and thus also their incorporation into the organization (Kuhn, 2008; Taylor and Van Every, 2000).

In some cases, however, superficial adjustments or additions of organizational texts seem to be insufficient to accommodate the new insights. For example, when MWL responded to the pressure of an interest group of farmers, it decided to incorporate the insights by building a new special exhibition. Similarly, when entrepreneurs decided to pivot their idea, it involved a reconfiguration of multiple organizational texts. Such findings indicate that a general conflation of “doings” and “sayings” in constitutive models (Schoeneborn et al., 2020; Schultz et al., 2013) should be reconsidered. What has to be taken into consideration is also how much the incorporation of new insights “costs,” that is, how many other activities and communication instances it takes to generate a new text, which can be imbricated into the existing net of communication practices. Put differently, we have to consider the extent to which some insights require more or less effort in materializing (Cooren, 2020a). A practice-based ontology and its conception of organizations as nets of practice-arrangement bundles can help with understanding the extent to which new insights require more or less materializing. The incorporation of new insights requires more extensive adaptations of the existing net in some cases than in others.

Finally, these findings contribute to discussions on the communicative extension and maintenance of organizational boundaries (cf., Cooren and Seidl,


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2019; Schoeneborn and Trittin, 2013) by showing that an extension of organizational boundaries does not automatically lead to their penetration. Instead, the penetration of organizational boundaries seems to depend on whether the conversations between organizations and stakeholders take the form of dialogues in which new insights emerge from shared understandings among the involved parties (cf., Grunig, 1989; Kent and Taylor, 2002; Scherer and Palazzo, 2007). Whenever the dialogue among stakeholders as well as between stakeholders and managers does not result in a shared understanding but a polarization of opinions, the communication fails to generate new insights that might become incorporated into the organization. Even though the conversations and resulting texts of such stakeholder communication exist and are technically still contributing to an organization’s constitution in the form of its image or reputation, they remain at the boundaries of the organization and have little chance of penetrating the communication practices that are more central to the organization. Penetrating organizational boundaries through stakeholder communication thus requires a shared understanding from which new insights emerge; the penetration of organizational boundaries is therefore the basis for the incorporation of insights.

5.2 How the affordances of media and modes

shape stakeholder communication

The idea that stakeholder communication is a process of co-authoring organizational texts must not be limited to narratives in the form of spoken or written language but should acknowledge that organizational communication involves a diverse plenum of material agencies (Ashcraft et al., 2009; Cooren, 2006, 2015). The papers included in my dissertation illustrate how media and modes enter the plenum of agencies that is involved in stakeholder communication practices. It is through their features and the resulting affordances that media and modes can make a difference in stakeholder communication. The following discussion will therefore point out how the affordances of media and modes contribute to a shared understanding, which can foster the incorporation of new insights into organizations, as I argued above. However, instead of identifying new affordances, I mostly relate to those mentioned in the previous literature concerning media and modes to avoid theoretical myopia.


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5.2.1 The structuration of stakeholder communication

through media

Media make a difference in stakeholder communication via their affordances, which result from the interactions between their features and the social conventions of their use (Evans et al., 2017). Specifically, Paper 1 and Paper 2 suggest that media affordances affect stakeholder communication in two ways by (a) structuring conversations in stakeholder communication and (b) acting as a vessel for different modes and their arrangements. The recent literature on stakeholder communication has focused mainly on social media and the associated heterogeneity of stakeholders (Etter et al., 2019; Roulet and Clemente, 2018), as reflected in the polyphony of voices (Castelló et al., 2013). I expand those discussions by distinguishing the affordances of different social media types more precisely (cf., Kaplan and Haenlein, 2010) and including an analysis of legacy media, such as television or newspapers, and face-to-face communication.

Concerning social media, I suggest that two affordances stand out from the analysis. Accessibility regulates the exposure to different voices, whereas amity regulates the strength of the relationships that can develop among stakeholders and the organization. I discuss the role of both affordances in turn.

Probably the most fundamental affordance of media for the generation of a shared understanding is accessibility, that is, the “features of social systems or structures that influence the opportunity to join a network” (McFarland and Ployhart, 2015, p. 1657, emphasis in original). Media richness theory as well as most existing research on affordances in communication share a common focus on forms of media in which, by nature, all the participants can access the same medium for establishing a common understanding (Lengel and Daft, 1988; McFarland and Ployhart, 2015; Treem and Leonardi, 2013). It overlooks the fact that the inaccessibility of legacy media, which I study in Paper 2, does not fulfill the most basic requirement for developing a shared understanding: two-way communication (cf., Kent and Taylor, 1998, 2002). These media therefore make conversations and thus the co-authoring of organizational texts difficult, if not impossible. Except for media corporations themselves and larger interest groups, it will be more difficult for individual stakeholders to access such media; they are likely to have to switch and channel their message through other media, for example by telephoning the organization’s call center or sending a written document via email or mail. It increases the opportunity cost for responses and thus minimizes the likelihood that stakeholders will enter into the co-authoring of organizational texts.


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In stark contrast, the high degrees of accessibility and digitality, as well as the low latency of social media (McFarland and Ployhart, 2015), are the main drivers of the heterogeneity of stakeholder voices that other scholars have highlighted (e.g., Castelló et al., 2013; Etter et al., 2019; Roulet and Clemente, 2018). In Paper 2, I describe this as the potential virality of a channel. These affordances enable fast and steady bidirectional communication between organizations and their stakeholders. Put differently, the communication of organizations via the Internet provides the symbolic and material elements that localize the organization in digital sites and thus overcome the localized and ephemeral nature of conversations (cf., Cooren, 2006; Cooren and Fairhurst, 2009).

In this respect, my findings also support others who have acknowledged that stakeholder communication not only involves bilateral relationships between the organization and its stakeholders but also enables stakeholders to form relationships among themselves on social media. The social media’s connectivity allows stakeholders to engage in the “coproduction of evaluations” that can result in so-called networked narratives, “which are threads of posts, discussion forums, and so forth where users comment on, add to, link, and/or “mash up” the content of existing narratives” (Etter et al., 2019, p. 36). Paper 1 adds that such networked narratives can reduce the polyphony of voices on social media when stakeholders begin to self-police or amplify each other’s voices. As a result, social media afford stakeholders somewhat more spontaneous and less costly means of joining forces based on shared opinions and amplifying each other’s voices compared with how stakeholders used to mobilize their communication efforts toward an organization in the form of activism (Aguilera et al., 2015; McDonnell and King, 2013; Waldron et al., 2013).

However, not all social media are equal in that respect (Kaplan and Haenlein, 2010) and the quality of networked narratives among stakeholders can be considered a key distinction. My findings from Paper 2 suggest that key affordances driving the quality of relationships among stakeholder are amity and persistence. Amity describes a communication channel’s ability to develop good relationships among the firm and its community members. In Paper 2, I connect this affordance to the degree of anonymity and the relationship intensity. Persistence describes whether communication “remains accessible in the same form as the original display after the actor has finished his or her presentation” (Treem and Leonardi, 2013, p. 155). This affordance is very similar in nature to what Kuhn (2008, p. 1234) described as the “relative permanence” of texts.

For example, the high visibility of content in MWL’s online forum facilitates conversations that can continue over many years with returning topics. The fact that contributions do not simply vanish but continuously build a repertoire of


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knowledge affords the development of shared understandings among stakeholders as well as between stakeholders and formal organizational members. The chances that such tight relationships will elicit co-authored texts that are subsequently incorporated in the organization increase. In contrast, content and conversations on social media platforms, such as Facebook or Instagram, are more ephemeral, temporally restricted, and effectively less persistent. Discussions around particular topics last only for limited amounts of time before vanishing in the continuous feed of information.

The affordance of persistence furthermore plays an interesting role in the context of new venture ideation. The relevance becomes clearer when comparing digital media with face-to-face conversations, video, and telephone calls. The latter will not persist in the same way after the conversations have ended unless they are recorded. It increases the risk that shared understandings from such conversations morph because memory fades.

Taken together, the use of different media channels for different forms of co-narrations suggests that stakeholder communication can sit anywhere on a spectrum between the tightly coupled interactions of organizational members and the loosely coupled interactions of unacquainted stakeholders (cf., Taylor and Van Every, 2000). The affordances of media are furthermore both distinct from and simultaneously entangled with the affordances of modes (Kress, 2003, 2004). Different media feature different constellations of multiple modes and foreground some modes more than others. Instagram, for example, is mostly focused on still and moving images, with little emphasis on written text. It also favors fast reactions in the form of likes. YouTube focuses on moving images combined with greater emphasis on written comments. Face-to-face interactions, such as pitch presentations, focus on modal arrangements, including visual PowerPoint presentations, spoken language, and gestures (Clarke et al., 2019; Kaplan, 2010; Wenzel and Koch, 2018). The foregrounding of some modes over others influences the potential meaning-making resources available for stakeholder communication.

5.2.2 Beyond texts as language: The role of multimodality in

stakeholder communication

The last compartment that I find in the black box of stakeholder communication contains the modes through which organizational texts manifest. As I argued above, the Montreal School of CCO has maintained at least an indirect interest in the topic by seeking manifestations of organizational agencies in different modes of communication (cf., Ashcraft et al., 2009; Cooren, 2006; Taylor et al., 1996).


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What I essentially argue is that modes offer a more nuanced view of what Kuhn (2008, p. 1234) described as concrete texts, that is, “signs and symbols that are inscribed in some (relatively) permanent form.” In particular, I suggest that analyzing the affordances of different modes allows us to understand better the different agencies provided by organizational manifestations in stakeholder communication. I will illustrate my point by discussing some of the major affordances of text and image, following Kress (2003, 2004).

One dimension of affordances in relation to modes is that of vagueness versus concreteness (Kress, 2003, 2004). For example, I find that the relative vagueness of spoken and written language as compared with images or 3D models can act as an agent for generating abstract insights (Meyer et al., 2018). As showcased in Paper 3, idea representations involve largely spoken and written descriptions. Conversations around such representations are more open than if the entrepreneurs represent their idea in more concrete ways. For instance, prototypes or mock-ups aim to represent an idea in those modes that will eventually be used for implementation and thus confine new emerging insights about the organization to less abstract levels.

The second dimension of affordances in relation to modes is that of linearity versus spatiality (Kress, 2003, 2004). For example, the common way of using written and spoken language in a linear fashion enables arguing, specifying, and narrating (Meyer et al., 2018). The entrepreneurs whom I study in Paper 3 leveraged these affordances in their business plans when they had to argue or explain something, such as why their team is competent or how customers would find out about their product (narrating the customer journey). In addition, business plans leverage the affordances of images and graphs, which allow things to be arranged in a spatial way. For instance, a common image found in business plans is a competitor matrix in which entrepreneurs position their idea spatially in relation to the existing solutions.

The last point illustrates further that the distinct affordances of different modes can then be leveraged in media that support multimodal arrangements. Without multiple modes interacting, it would indeed be difficult (a) to convey messages in the name of an organization and (b) to communicate the intended meanings with the same effects.

Consider, for example, the screenshot below of a Facebook post that exemplifies the multimodal arrangements typically analyzed in Paper 1 (see Screenshot 1). Several modes are at play to convey the meaning intended by MWL. The core message is to promote animal welfare in livestock farming. This message communicates via written language in several places, such as the post description and in the form of slogans in the upper-right corner of each fictional


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poster (“Stoppt die Massentransporte!” [Stop the mass transportation!]; “Stoppt die Massenmilchproduktion!” [Stop the mass milk production!]; etc.). However, the vague nature of the texts alone would leave considerable room for interpretation and thus be less suitable for capturing the stakeholders’ interest. In fact, the reactions of stakeholders do not address the written language in this post but the concrete radicalness of the way in which MWL conveys meaning through images. Many stakeholders react negatively because they find the meaning portrayed through those pictures to be excessive.

Screenshot 1. Example of multimodality in a Facebook post.


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poster (“Stoppt die Massentransporte!” [Stop the mass transportation!]; “Stoppt die Massenmilchproduktion!” [Stop the mass milk production!]; etc.). However, the vague nature of the texts alone would leave considerable room for interpretation and thus be less suitable for capturing the stakeholders’ interest. In fact, the reactions of stakeholders do not address the written language in this post but the concrete radicalness of the way in which MWL conveys meaning through images. Many stakeholders react negatively because they find the meaning portrayed through those pictures to be excessive.

Screenshot 1. Example of multimodality in a Facebook post.


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It shows how the concreteness of the image (cf., Kress, 2003, 2004) does not leave much room for interpretation and thus achieves its captivating agency (cf., Meyer et al., 2018). The resulting arguments, however, continue mostly in the form of written and later also in spoken language because the mode of language is better suited to argumentation. The conversation quickly switches from a discussion of the images to a debate about the current situation of livestock farmers. Through a lengthy dialogue that evolves mostly via written and spoken language, the organization’s owner-managers and stakeholders develop a new shared understanding that leads to a costly adjustment of the organization’s net of communicative texts: MWL decides to add a special exhibition section in which it compares different livestock farming standards in a miniature format (see Screenshot 2).

Screenshot 2. MWL’s reaction to stakeholder feedback.


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5.3 Future research and limitations

The suggested framework brings up new questions concerning stakeholder communication and its role in the constitution of organization. I suggest two topics for future investigation that emerge from my research and its current limitation: (1) tracing how insights from stakeholder communication travel through larger nets of organizational practice-arrangement bundles and (2) analyzing the entanglements of media and modes from a design perspective.

5.3.1 Tracing the co-authoring of texts through larger nets

of organizational communication practices

My take on stakeholder communication, which portrays it as a co-authoring process, has the potential to bridge further the notions of organizational and corporate communication, that is, the (arbitrary) division of “internal” and “external” communication in organizations (Christensen and Cornelissen, 2011; Schoeneborn and Trittin, 2013). Indeed, there is no immediate reason to restrict the idea that insights can emerge from a co-authoring of organizational texts to interactions between formal members of the organization and external stakeholders, as currently emphasized in my research. Instead, an application of the model to communication among formal organizational members seems reasonable and could shed further light on how organizations change through communication at large.

Put differently, a key message here is that future research on stakeholder communication should not limit itself to researching how communication generates new insights through conversation but should also trace how these insights “travel” through the organization’s practice-arrangement bundles at large. In other words, it urges us to acknowledge that organizational communication is also about active listening, that is, the incorporation of new insights (cf., Macnamara, 2016, 2018, 2019). This opens up stakeholder communication research to a set of new questions: How does the co-authoring of organizational texts at the boundaries of an organization challenge other communication episodes that are more central to the organization’s net of practice-arrangement bundles? How do newly negotiated narratives “travel” through the networks of organizational communication episodes? How do authoritative meta texts (Kuhn, 2008; Taylor, 2011) enable or restrict the traveling of new narratives? In my research contexts, I observed that it was particularly the direct involvement of key decision makers in stakeholder communication and the


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lack of authoritative texts (i.e., rules and regulation concerning communication) both at MWL and in the new ventures that allowed for somewhat immediate alterations of organizational texts. In other research contexts, in which dedicated communication departments are in charge and to some extent limited by regulations (Christensen and Cornelissen, 2011), the impact that co-narrations with external stakeholders can have on organizational texts might be limited by additional factors.

While my explicit focus on new ventures and SMEs contributes to the contextual diversity in stakeholder communication research, the fact that I did not compare it directly with how stakeholder communication takes place in larger organizations can be considered a limitation. This begs the question of how far the findings presented here are applicable to larger organizations in which, for example, key organizational decision makers do not participate directly in stakeholder communication. Although the model by itself should retain its validity, the impact that stakeholder communication can have on organizational texts might differ in larger organizations. Sticking with the idea that organizations are networks of communication episodes (Blaschke et al., 2012), larger organizations would naturally include more and thus a larger network of practice-arrangement bundles. Figuratively speaking, episodes of stakeholder communication can thus move “further away” from other key communication episodes, such as strategy meetings, depending on the organizational structure, culture, and power dynamics.

These issues seem particularly pressing for recent discussions on open strategy, particularly concerning its inclusive dimension (e.g., Birkinshaw, 2017; Hautz et al., 2017; Whittington, 2019). If we consider that strategists are opening up to both internal and external voices, the question remains of how such voices reach those whose job it is to take strategic decisions. The model that I offer in this dissertation provides the means to study these processes while being sensitive to the roles of media and modes. For instance, recent trends of strategists using social media as a more direct means of contacting stakeholders illustrate how social media afford direct communication between key decision makers and external stakeholders even in larger organizations (e.g., Baptista et al., 2017; Elliott et al., 2018; Grafström and Falkman, 2017; Malhotra and Malhotra, 2016; Yue et al., 2019). Such communication might reduce the distance between communication practices at the boundaries of an organization and its core. However, it remains an open question whether and how more direct exchanges and the resulting insights remain at the organization’s boundaries or manage to proliferate inside larger corporations.


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Even if strategists do not communicate directly with external stakeholders, they might gain insights indirectly from other departments, such as public relations or customer services. In that respect, the suggested model also raises questions concerning how insights translate from one mode to another, that is, how they change agencies through resemiotization (cf., Iedema, 2001, 2003). The traveling of insights throughout an organization requires various forms of media. Put differently, to materialize the organization to a greater than a lesser extent, insights from conversations with stakeholders will have to travel through several other communication episodes. The original texts will be translated into other texts, such as reports or analyses. Such translations between modalities potentially change and interpret the original meanings (Iedema, 2001, 2003; Kress, 2003, 2010). Tracing the developments of organizational texts as they take on different modes adds analytical nuances that can be considered in future investigations of how negotiated narratives “travel” through the networks of organizational communication episodes.

Finally, my research has focused almost exclusively on instances in which the organization initiates the stakeholder communication. However, the core idea of co-authoring of organizational texts also holds value in other scenarios in which stakeholders might initiate the communication. For example, cases of stakeholder activism (Aguilera et al., 2015; McDonnell and King, 2013; Waldron et al., 2013) or media criticism (Gamache and McNamara, 2019) can be considered as instances in which (more or less relevant) stakeholders offer alternative narratives to organizational texts that otherwise constitute the organizational external identity and reputation. The destabilization of organizational texts then requires reactions that potentially involve changes to the contested texts.

5.3.2 A design-based approach to stakeholder

communication

Another limitation of my work is that it focuses on the emergent process through which events of stakeholder communication arise. It thus potentially underrates the sets of choices that organizational actors are making knowingly or unknowingly to shape stakeholder communication. The suggested model highlights two dimensions of communication that could indeed be subjected to more conscious decisions. First, the organization needs to consider which mode is most likely to afford the intended meaning and agency. Second, the organization needs to match the selection of modes with a suitable choice of media. In addition to being a suitable vessel for a particular mode, the medium will also influence how communication can unfold between organizations and


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their stakeholders. Finally, the combinations of media and modes result in varying degrees of affordances concerning the co-authoring of organizational texts.

Stakeholder communication can therefore also be seen as a design activity (cf., Barbour et al., 2018). It follows the idea of Krippendorff (2006, p. xv), who suggested that “design is making sense of things,” acknowledging that artifacts and sense are inseparable from human activity. Similarly, Kress (2010, p. 23) argued that “design is an assertion of the individual’s interest in participating appropriately in the social and communicational world.” In the context of communication, design thus includes more than simply the configuration of messages or the choice of media. In the attempt to communicate with stakeholders, the organization designs communicational contexts using multiple modes and media that take into consideration how new insights can emerge. Notions of design introduce a more proactive perspective into the study of stakeholder communication. As Kress (2003, p. 49, removed emphasis from original) summarized:

Design does not ask, “what was done before, how, for whom, with what?” Design asks, “what is needed now, in this one situation, with this configuration of purposes, aims, audience, and with these resources, and given my interests in this situation?”

In contrast to the aforementioned future research questions that focus on what happens after events of stakeholder communication, the design perspective invites research into their antecedents. It would be interesting to see, for example, how certain designs of stakeholder communication context can mitigate the associated dilemmas of open strategy (Hautz et al., 2017). The MWL case study is a vivid example of how the design of a multimedia and multimodal stakeholder communication environment can balance these dilemmas by slicing the heterogeneous group of stakeholders into different arenas and assigning different degrees of importance to them. A single-case study is insufficient to cover the exhaustive range of heuristics that might exist in practice concerning stakeholder communication. Future research thus warrants more insights concerning the following questions: Why do organizations use certain modes and media for stakeholder communication in the way that they do? How do organizational actors enact different affordances of similar modes and media, and what shapes their perceptions of affordances? How can media assist the self-governance of stakeholders? Similar questions can also be asked from the stakeholders’ perspective and their experiences of interacting with organizations via different modes and media.


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What is needed today in a multimodal environment is not competence with a single mode or medium but the awareness of the world’s multimodal and multimedia nature. In short, it requires new forms of literacies (Kress, 2003; Meyer et al., 2013, 2018; Stigliani and Ravasi, 2018), especially concerning the design of stakeholder communication. Developing the required literacies requires knowledge in the first place about how organizations are using different media and modes for different purposes. Research following a design perspective can thus offer insights that eventually could enable the development of new literacies in the classroom.

5.4 Practical implications…

Referencing Marx earlier on his agenda to “make a difference in the world” comes with a burden. I am skeptical that a chapter in a dissertation that few practitioners will ever hold in their hands can make such an impact. Instead, the following reflections on practical implications for (owner-)managers, entrepreneurs, and stakeholders offer ideas for what I—and hopefully others who agree with me—can include in business school curricula. I, therefore, conclude my thesis with a brief reflection on practical implications for educators.

5.4.1 …for (owner-)managers

Stakeholder communication can be a great source of new insights managers can tap to develop their business. Today, technologies have opened up new communication channels that have removed many previous barriers in reaching stakeholders. Most importantly, it has become easier to listen to what stakeholders have to say instead of just shouting at them from afar.

However, the potential risks of open stakeholder communication can, in practice, sometimes overshadow its bright sides. Once a firm opens its boundaries, stakeholders are well aware of changes in the communication landscape and demand more attention. When managers shirk the resulting responsibilities or ignore messages, the same communication channels that offer useful insights from stakeholders can quickly become used against the firm. In that sense, the new means of communication are both a blessing and a curse. I understand that managers—maybe especially those of small- and medium-sized enterprises—might therefore be afraid of opening up in the first place.

My dissertation’s findings should encourage managers in all types of organizations to at least try opening up instead of letting their fears abound. The


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findings suggest that stakeholder communication does not require extensive and expensive communication departments, strict guidelines and regulations, and fancy social media analytics tools. The owner-managers at MWL have not been relying on either of those to communicate with their stakeholders successfully. Instead, MWL has been engaging in authentic dialogues where the managers can express their opinions while being willing to listen and change if stakeholders offer valid counter-opinions.

Stakeholder communication is not about trying to suit everybody. As I mentioned at the beginning of my dissertation, stakeholder communication is about finding and continuously re-adjusting the organization’s place in society. The process will most likely involve some controversy along the way. But such controversies are not destructive, and they certainly do not imply that an organization must adapt to every stakeholder’s opinion. Whenever such controversies occur, the case of MWL has shown that organizations can defend their perspective. And when they do so, our analysis of MWL’s social initiatives shows that stakeholders can sometimes even be willing to retract their negative feedback in response to the owner-managers’ explanation of their choices. It underlines the importance of recognizing the person behind every social media account. Stakeholders are not robots, although interacting through software might sometimes make them appear like such. Instead, many stakeholders are willing to listen to the reasoning of an organization.

It is only when negative feedback accumulates that managers should reconsider their previous position. If it then means that the organization also needs to change substantially, it can be a constructive development. After all, the organization might be adjusting its position for the better in the long run.

That being said, managers also should be reflective about how they communicate with their stakeholders to make the best of such communication. My thesis has shed light on the differences between media and modes, and I advise managers to build their skills and knowledge about both. The managers at MWL showed an exceptional understanding of the affordances and characteristics of different media channels. Paper 2 shows that the managers’ ability to entertain and communicate with diverse stakeholder groups through different media channels is part of their success story. Simultaneously, the owner-managers use the meaning-making affordances of different communication modes to their fullest potential. This intuitive understanding is something that other managers can learn. Especially in Paper 2, I intend to communicate these learnings in a fashion that offers other (owner-)managers some useful heuristics.

Over time, managers can improve their communication skills and thus gain confidence in their position. The owner-managers at MWL did not start as the


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excellent communicators they are today. They have learned through mistakes and continue doing so. The increasing firm size and economic autonomy have allowed them to put forward their position little by little up to the current point. Now, they can use the exhibition for political satire without risking too much of their reputation. Similarly, other managers can gradually develop and increase their confidence.

5.4.2 …for entrepreneurs

Entrepreneurs face a complex challenge. On the one hand, they have to obtain feedback on their idea from different stakeholders. On the other hand, their idea representations will not represent the solution as imagined or intended—especially in the early phases where no prototype or product exists. My dissertation has acknowledged this issue and elaborates on some potential pitfalls of entrepreneurship that have received little attention in the literature.

The most important pitfall to avoid may be the risk of design fixation throughout the process of new venture ideation. When new venture founders represent their ideas in relatively concrete forms close to or equal to the final product, it risks two things. First, it risks that founders fixate on improving a product that might be doomed to fail in the first place. Second, it risks that stakeholder feedback will likely focus on the product instead of the idea on more abstract levels. The second factor corroborates the first one. Therefore, design fixation is a potentially vicious circle that new venture founders ought to be aware of.

My research on new venture ideation cautions against the early and exclusive use of (semi-)functional prototypes for obtaining feedback. At first, this statement might seem to conflict with the widely popular lean startup methodology, which heavily emphasizes that functional prototypes can improve feedback (Blank, 2013; Ries, 2011). A closer look reveals that the two views must not exclude one another. My research supports the idea that entrepreneurs ought to use prototypes to improve their products. But entrepreneurship is also about improving the new venture idea. New venture ideas involve much more than a product. They include relationships with partners, resources, business models, and much more, which is why the business model canvas (Osterwalder and Pigneur, 2010) has become such a popular type of idea representation. Prototypes and more abstract representations need to go hand in hand, especially in the early stages of new venture ideation.

Another thing that struck me throughout my research on new venture ideation is how limited the “typical” representations are. How many new types of


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representations have we seen in the past decades since business plans, business model canvases, and mockups have become commonplace? I encourage new venture founders and those working in startup ecosystems to explore and invent new means of representing new venture ideas. The most considerable challenge might be to find a representation that addresses the conceptual and implementational dimensions of new venture ideas simultaneously or at least in a less divisive fashion.

5.4.3 …for stakeholders and feedback providers

In my research setting, another practitioner is also the stakeholder who communicates with an organization. And the dialogic approach to stakeholder communication requires that both parties consider changing their positions while interacting. Thus, organizations are not the only ones to blame when communication goes wrong and when discussions do not converge.

What my dissertation suggests is that stakeholders might be better off meeting the organization halfway when voicing their opinion. When the overall feedback from other stakeholders is positive, the organization usually has little reason to take diverging opinions seriously. However, chances of finding recognition seem higher when stakeholders take the effort to acknowledge the organization’s efforts first before suggesting what it can improve. Chances are further improved when stakeholders find others who share similar opinions and amplify each other instead of voicing separate comments. At all times, stakeholders should keep in mind that behind every organization’s face, people are working hard to produce the value a stakeholder is interested in. An entirely negative critique too often risks disregarding this factor.

Similarly, stakeholders in the context of entrepreneurship can improve their feedback-giving skills. Many of the new venture founders I have come across in my research expressed how little stakeholder feedback helped them improve. It is easy to blame the founders for being unable to “ask the right questions”, as a popular saying goes, but my dissertation cautions against such simplifications. Instead, it points to a greater need for “training the trainers”. Improving their knowledge concerning the limitations of different idea representations is an important step forward, as far as my thesis’s implications go.

5.4.4 …for educators

Considering the above, I ask: How well do business school curricula prepare students for such implications? In 1996 The New London Group published a


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manifesto for improving multimodal literacies. Kress (2003) has further supported the need for multimodal literacies in the modern world. My dissertation also adds to such calls by underlining the relevance of stakeholder communication education in business schools, particularly concerning the skillful use of different media and modes.

From such a point of view, the separation between communication and business schools seems problematic for students who want to start their own venture or act as (owner-)managers of small and medium-sized enterprises. In such contexts, the analogy of “wearing many hats at the same time” has proven itself. Expensive communication departments might not be feasible financially, and many entrepreneurs need to design communication independently. Despite the increasing importance of stakeholder communication, business school curricula leave hardly any room for indepth discussion of the relevant topics.

A potential step forward is to integrate stakeholder communication education in established curricula. For example, Hart (2018) has published a book filled with classroom exercises for new venture ideation that bridge the gap between entrepreneurship and arts education. A colleague at Jönköping International Business School, Michał Zawadzki, is developing exercises involving music and sound that beautifully answer calls for more arts in leadership education (e.g., Adler, 2006; Tung, 2006). Creating such links can help prepare students better for engaging in stakeholder communication.

Such integrations can further offer reflections about multimodality and multimedia. University education still primarily emphasizes writing over other forms of meaning-making. Writing is good for linear thinking and reasoning, and it is an essential skill that all university students should learn. However, writing can be difficult, particularly when expressing emotions. Exercises can additionally include the use of imagery, photography, music, or video. Simultaneously, exercises can aim at exploring different types of media, such as the production of podcasts, the launching of YouTube channels, personal blogs, or Kickstarter pages. In that way, educators can open spaces where students experiment with different media and modes to diversify their literacy. Ideally, such experiments also facilitate the students’ expression of empathy, which is a crucial ingredient in stakeholder communication and can help educate good managers and entrepreneurs, instead of just better ones.

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Collection of Articles/Papers/Studies

Paper 1 The Construction of Social Performance in Social Media Thomas Cyron & Norbert Steigenberger Paper 2 Managing Firm-Hosted Online Communities: A Multi-Channel Perspective Thomas Cyron & Leona Achtenhagen Paper 3 How Idea Representations Shape Feedback in Creative Revision Processes Thomas Cyron Paper 4 Using Digital Methods for the Study of Entrepreneurship-As-Practice Thomas Cyron

ISSN 1403-0470ISBN 978-91-86345-XX-X

ENRIQUE SANDINO VARGAS

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ISSN 1403-0470ISBN 978-91-7914-007-6

THOMAS CYRON is a doctoral student at Jönköping International Business School and affiliated with the Media, Management and Transformation Centre. He has presented his research on stakeholder communication, entrepreneurship, and business development at numerous management and organization theory conferences, including the Academy of Management Meeting and the European Group for Organizational Studies Colloquium. Besides his theoretical interest in the topics, Thomas also enjoys starting and developing for-profit and non-profit organizations in practice.

Openness is gradually characterizing the stereotypical 21st-century organization as management and entrepreneurship trends suggest that decision-makers should engage with their stakeholders. New media fuel such tendencies by opening rapid and boundless two-way communication channels through which stakeholders can voice their opinions with little effort. Despite the topic’s significance, we have limited knowledge concerning how organizations incorporate such insights from stakeholder communication. This doctoral thesis sheds light on related theoretical blind spots by featuring qualitative research from two contexts. The first context is the firm-hosted online community of Miniatur Wunderland—the world’s largest model railway exhibition and one of Germany’s most popular tourist attractions. The second context accounts for the difficulties of aligning new venture ideas with feedback from external stakeholders. Reflections on the empirical studies from both contexts assume that organizations are assemblages of conversations and texts. This assumption allows us to conceptualize the incorporating of stakeholder insights as a co-authoring process. It highlights how the media and modes that organizations use for communication enable the stakeholders’ participation in the authoring of texts that constitute organizations. These insights carry implications for theory and practice.



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