Organizational Discourse: A Language‐Ideology‐Power Perspective

Citation

Boon, B. (2007), "Organizational Discourse: A Language‐Ideology‐Power Perspective", Personnel Review, Vol. 36 No. 5, pp. 834-836. https://doi.org/10.1108/00483480710774070

Organizational Discourse: A Language‐Ideology‐Power Perspective can be summarized as a linguistically informed discussion of how corporations construct and communicate their public identity. According to the authors, corporate identity is primarily communicated through corporate public discourse (CPD). The aim of CPD is to generate public consent of corporations and their ideologies. Using this conceptual framework, the authors seek to “explore how corporations use discourse to practice power through consent” (p. 8). To achieve this agenda, they examine a small number of examples of US‐based corporate public language drawn largely from annual reports, web sites, and published CEO interviews. Organizational Discourse presents an examination of how corporations use specific language practices to communicate a particular corporate identity. Given the emphasis on language practices within the text and the concomitant paucity of attention to context, however, I was left unconvinced about how, and whether, these texts generated public consent.

To explain my reaction to Organizational Discourse it is important to locate it within the growing international collection of work that attends specifically to the relationship between language and organization. As recent discussions identify, the term “organizational discourse” can refer to a number of quite different theoretical and empirical practices (Grant et al., 2004; Phillips and Hardy, 2002). This multiplicity in the meaning of discourse can easily lead to confusion. My initial engagement with this book is an example of the confusion that can arise. Having an interest in Foucauldian‐ and Marxian‐informed critical engagements with organization I was attracted to Organizational Discourse by the words “ideology” and “power” in the title. My expectations of a focus on the relationship between text and socio‐political context, however, were quickly challenged by the book's emphasis on language at the level of the text. The discussion of the Shell Corporation's ideology was a particular case in point. In their analysis of Shell's corporate report “People, Planet, and Profits” the authors pay specific attention to the technical construction of the text. In particular, they focus on words such as “engage”, “participate”, “commit” and “sustainable environment” that Shell uses to construct its ideology. As a result of focusing on how the ideology is constructed (and communicated) within the text, the socio‐political relationships that surround the text are not emphasised. In other words, there is no discussion of the relationship between Shell's ideological statements and contemporary practices around capitalist environmental sustainability. Neither is there any rigorous discussion of the relationship between Shell's stated commitment and their actual performance. Instead, claims that “today Shell's commitment to sustainability is incorporated into every aspect of the corporation, including capital allocation, technology ranking, and contractor selection” (p. 28) are supported by reference to the language contained within the corporation's 2001 annual report. This textual orientation to the relationship between language, ideology and power suggests to me that Organizational Discourse is informed,albeit implicitly, by the theoretical and empirical practices of critical discourse analysis (see for example Fairclough, 1995). Having come to this conclusion, the orientation of the discussion contained within Organizational Discourse became easier to understand.

While Organizational Discourse contains only 184 pages of text, these pages are organized into 19 chapters. The impression gained from these often very short chapters is of a swift and consequently rather superficial journey. This is particularly evident in the chapters presenting analyses. Part III: Corporate Management, for example, offers a very brief analysis of disclosures of power, leadership and social position in public statements made by a collection of American CEOs within interviews published by the Harvard Business Review. A similar style is adopted in Part IV where the Hewlett Packard–Compaq merger internet site is briefly examined in relation to the mass media forum and in Part VI where five brief discussions around the themes of corporate metaphor, globalization, gender, the CEO's media interview, and promotion of CPD are presented. In these three sections potentially interesting discussions are barely introduced and developed before moving on to the next theme. In so doing I found that they tended to generate more questions than answers.

It is in Part V: Quantitative Analysis that the underlying linguistic sensibility of this book is highlighted. After introducing computational text analysis – where central and typical language features are identified within a text, including the size of a text and the lists of frequently used word forms – the authors proceed on to examine five corporate web pages. While computational text analysis produces a detailed table of the top 50 words used by each of the five sites, this result is presented, rather than analysed, in terms of its relationship to power and the manufacture of consent.

The authors conclude the book with Part VII: Postscript. Within this four page restatement of the book's content the authors position organizational studies as a multidisciplinary field that still relies on “accredited – and therefore seemingly dependable and orderly‐ theories” (p. 184). In doing so, the authors go on to assume that introducing “nonaccredited” theories – such as their theory of CPD – will bring chaos and instability to organization studies. This will, however, “initiate a major shift of organizational studies research parameters from resistive to such theories toward supportive of them … . When that happens, an “epistemological break” in organizational studies will take place” (p. 184). For HRM students and academics who are interested in a linguistic‐based critical discourse analysis this book may be of some interest and have relevance for their research as a brief introduction to this research perspective. HRM students and academics who are more familiar with a Foucauldian informed analysis of organizational discourse may feel that the claim that this book represents a major shift of organizational studies research parameters – particularly in terms of the relationship between language and power – is over stated.