This study examines how technology startups communicatively construct and legitimate their innovation activities through organizational narratives. Drawing on the Communicative Constitution of Organizations perspective, organizational narrative theory, and legitimation studies, we analyse publicly circulating self-descriptions from twelve technology ventures spanning fintech, logistics, creator economy, e-commerce, proptech, healthtech, foodtech, mobility and B2B SaaS. Using reflexive thematic analysis, we identify five narrative types (Disruption, Inclusion, Growth, Impact, and Team/Founder) and five articulation patterns. The central finding concerns narrative position rather than presence: Inclusion Narratives occupy dominant positions in the majority of ventures operating within inequality-dense institutional environments, while appearing exclusively as secondary narratives in ventures embedded in mature capital markets. We interpret this asymmetry as a re-specification of legitimation grammars conditioned by structural inequality, financial exclusion, and historical underprovision of services. The study contributes an empirically grounded contextual qualification of disruption-centred accounts of entrepreneurial legitimation, a typology of narrative articulation patterns, and an initial theorization of the Infrastructural Narrative as a legitimation strategy in platform economies.
This mixed-method study explores how strategic internal communication in the organization can foster employee passion at work. Drawing on interviews with 23 internal communication leaders and a national survey of 1,014 full-time U.S. employees, the study identifies key communication strategies such as purpose communication, openness, empathy, and participation that influences passion. Quantitative analysis reveals that dialogic communication and purpose communication both significantly enhance employee passion, with sense of meaningfulness mediating these effects. Rich communication channels, especially face-to-face and digital media, emerged as the most effective in fostering employee passion at work. This study offers both theoretical and practical insights, advancing the internal communication and workplace passion literature and providing actionable guidance for communication professionals.
CEO open letters are typically studied as monovocal texts whose persuasive force derives from the formal authority of CEOs. This paper challenges that premise. Drawing on Cooren’s ventriloquial theory, it characterizes these letters as polyphonic artifacts in which CEOs modulate multiple voices. Specifically, it introduces the notion of ventriloquial move (a configuration of ventriloquial effects that fulfills a unitary persuasive function within the text) to argue that the persuasive force of these letters depends neither on the CEO’s formal position nor on the accumulation of ventriloquial effects, but emerges from an architecture of ventriloquial moves that unfolds across the text. To develop and illustrate this concept, I analyze the open letters of three CEOs –Larry Fink (BlackRock), Wael Sawan (Shell), and Jamie Dimon (JPMorgan Chase)– published under a shared communicative pressure: the ESG controversy in the United States during 2022–2023.
Middle managers occupy a critical but structurally paradoxical position, often serving as the primary communicative conduit between strategic leadership and operational teams. Drawing on organizational paradox as a metatheory, this qualitative study utilizes in-depth interviews with 66 middle managers and an abductive thematic analysis to investigate how this liminal role functions as a nexus for competing communicative demands. The findings demonstrate that the role is structurally configured as a communicative tensional knot, where vertical pressures result in the convergence and interpenetration of three core paradoxes: Authority (enable/constrain), Information (ambiguity/transparency), and Performance (task accomplishment/relationship management). This research theoretically extends the concept of the tensional knot by grounding it in the structural liminality of the middle manager role, illustrating how these paradoxes are not merely encountered but are constitutive of the position itself. Practical implications shift the focus from pursuing role clarity to embracing a paradox mindset and utilizing strategic communicative responses (reframing, spatial/temporal separation, and synergy) to manage the irreducible friction inherent in the role.
Background During long-term disruptive events, employees face sustained ambiguity that challenges their understanding of organizational conditions. Purpose This study examines how perceived organizational information visibility relates to employee uncertainty and job satisfaction. We treat information visibility as an organizational communication practice that structures the perceived informational environment and examine whether perceptions of that environment, rather than information quality or content, shape uncertainty and, in turn, employees’ work evaluations. Research Design We tested a mediation model in which uncertainty explains the relationship between organizational information visibility and job satisfaction. Study Sample The study used survey data from a nationally representative sample of U.S. employees ( N = 609) collected during the COVID-19 pandemic. Data Analysis Data were analyzed using structural equation modeling. Results Higher perceived information visibility was associated with lower uncertainty and greater job satisfaction. Uncertainty partially mediated the relationship between visibility and job satisfaction. Conclusions These findings suggest organizational information visibility operates by structuring the conditions under which employees encounter information, thereby influencing employees’ evaluations of their work.
Research on strategy as practice (SAP) has become a vibrant area of inquiry, but what do people actually do when engaging in strategizing in everyday situations? Drawing on insights from CCO scholarship and practice theory, this paper addresses that question by highlighting situational attunement as an important aspect of strategizing, which unfolds through communicative practices that make responsiveness to what a situation calls for observable, thereby bridging immediate conditions with evolving aims. Situational attunement, in other words, involves sensing what matters in the moment and acting with others who are also shaping the evolving relational field. The value of this concept is illustrated through an ethnography of a female entrepreneur’s communicative practices in a small Icelandic village during and after the COVID-19 pandemic. Thus, this paper contributes to SAP scholarship and communication research on strategizing by clarifying how a key aspect of strategizing is accomplished in and through communication, showing that situational attunement becomes empirically observable through communicative practices, and specifying two interwoven dimensions of this process (relational sensing and practical reasoning).
This study uses the Structurational Model of Identification (SMI) to investigate how resident primary care physicians (PCPs) manage multi-level identity conflicts during the routine activity of the medical office visit. Drawing from interviews with 27 physicians and more than 47 hours of office visit observations, the data build a Structurational Model of Identity Conflict. The model depicts how physicians encounter a taxonomy of identity-centered constraints, including financial (e.g., insurance availability), material (e.g., computer-use), and temporal (e.g., waiting times), among others, that disrupt their identification during office visits, creating multi-level (e.g., relational vs professional) identity conflicts. PCPs created and shared care appropriations (i.e., workarounds) to reposition their identities and re-engage with important social contexts of work (i.e., compassionate, patient-centered care). The model also depicts how the micro-level strategies that PCPs employed to manage their identity tensions during office visits were shared, routinized, and reified, generating structurational change. This study offers practical implications for professions beyond medicine, such as education, social work, and legal aid, where practitioners must balance competing structural demands with relationship-oriented goals through creatively appropriating identity and work tasks.
This article examines the tensions and sustainability of resilience practices, particularly during geopolitical, social, and organizational precarity. Using Buzzanell's (2010) Communication Theory of Resilience (CTR) and conceptualization of adaptive-transformative resilience, we seek to answer the question, "How did workers navigate and make sense of the competing resilience strategies they cultivated while working during an extended crisis?" Our findings revealed that participants used short-term efficiencies to manage work through the pandemic, resulting in embodied tensions, conviction paradoxes, and work-life sacrifices. Additionally, we discovered potential moments for transformation. Theoretically, we offer implications for resilience research, highlighting the unsustainability of short-term efficiencies in organizational life and (in)capacity for transformative change. Additionally, we complicate how backgrounding negative feelings while foregrounding productive action can impact the re-narrativization of resilience experiences. Finally, we offer practical suggestions for organizations to prepare for the well-being of future employees so that resilience can encourage thriving rather than just surviving.
Drawing on 30 interviews with volunteers and employees in community-based organizations, this study theorizes volunteering as the evolution of attachments throughout one's career, rather than a decision to "give time" driven by fixed motivations. Our theorizing combines insights from interactionism with those of the communicative constitution of organization (CCO) perspective, complemented by Hennion's notion of attachment. Our analysis reveals that volunteers become attached to tasks, people, and causes through situated interactions, and that these attachments are repeatedly tested in moments of trial. Vignettes illustrate how involvement deepens, shifts, or unravels as individuals navigate organizational constraints, personal identities, and collective commitments. This approach moves beyond psychological models of motivation to show volunteering as a relational accomplishment shaped by organizational environments and power dynamics.
This qualitative study grounded in phronetic iterative analysis examines how big science organizations adapted to the COVID-19 pandemic while sustaining their scientific missions. Using the communication theory of resilience (CTR) as a guiding framework, infused with the literature on high-reliability organizations (HRO), the analysis draws from 56 semi-structured interviews across three phases (2020-2023) to identify 10 adaptive strategies linked to four of CTR's five core processes. The fifth-affirming identity anchors-did not surface as an explicit strategy but operated implicitly, suggesting that when organizational identity aligns with crisis demands, explicit identity work may be unnecessary. Flexibility emerged as a central meta-process that shaped how strategies were implemented in context. Key strategies included adjusting work expectations, focusing on outcomes over time/place, and leveraging peer networks. This study contributes to CTR and HRO scholarship by emphasizing the contextual, communicative, and identity-sensitive nature of adaptive resilience during systemic disruption.
Background Identity anchors are powerful communication resources that reflect and impact organizational resilience. Family business members draw on identity discourses to explain who they are to themselves, others, and in relation to threats or hardships.Purpose This paper seeks to better understand what identity anchors contribute to family farm businesses' resilience as they navigate uncertainty and contemporary challenges.Research Design This study include analysis of interviews with 16 family maple farm businesses.Results We identified three identy anchors that were discursively shared, reinforced, and transformed: (I) High-Quality Producers, (II) Family Farm, and (III) Financially Focused Farm Enterprise. We argue that the sustainability of family farm businesses depends on how families construct and adapt organizational identity anchors.Conclusions Resilience emerges when members can use them to negotiate the tension between change and continuity, as well as tensions created by pressures within the family, farm, and business systems. Results will be discussed in terms of their theoretical contributions and offer insights into managing resilience in family farm businesses.
Adopting the Network Theory of Social Capital (NTSC), this study explores how bonding and bridging network ties in collaborative social networks of nonprofit organizations (NPOs) relate to organizational resilience and adaptive capacity following the COVID-19 pandemic. Network data were collected from 59 nonprofits in a midsize U.S. county, yielding a collaboration network comprising 240 partners organizations and 608 ties. Bridging social capital was measured via constraint and betweenness centrality, while bonding social capital was measured via transitivity and closeness centrality. Results show NPO resilience was associated with both forms of bridging social capital, constraint and betweenness centrality, but unrelated to bonding social capital. NPO adaptive capacity was positively associated with closeness centrality, but unrelated to constraint, betweenness centrality, or transitivity. Findings offer insight into NPOs networks, differentiating organizational resilience and adaptive capacity relative to network position, advancing a conceptual distinction between these constructs, and yielding practical insights for NPO collaboration.
How do global team members experience agency while navigating connectivity in their work communication across countries, continents, and time zones? Adopting a phenomenological approach, this study examines this question by investigating how employees in a global organization experience agency as a dialectical interplay of being able and unable to connect, respond, or disconnect. Based on an iterative analysis of interviews with 37 team members, we show how this experience unfolds relationally, shaped by the global context, organizational characteristics, work demands, communication technologies, and coworkers. At the team level, these relations form a dialectical web of freedom and constraint. Our findings advance understanding of how connectivity and agency are co-constituted in global teams, offering theoretical, methodological, and practical insights into the communicative experience of working in globally distributed, technology-mediated environments.
The study examined the resilience practices of street hawkers in Accra, Ghana, using the Communication Theory of Resilience (CTR) and liquid organizing framework. We utilized a critical ethnographic approach, which included field observation and in-depth semi-structured interviews with 31 participants. We found that street hawkers construct resilience processes to neutralize the constant, multiple, and simultaneous economic crises with which they are faced. We also found that street hawkers navigated economic uncertainty by transgressing local bylaws and defying city law enforcement using liquid organizing techniques. We conclude that examining individuals' micro-level resilience strategies, achieved through liquid organizing techniques, allows us to theorize about macro-level issues like neoliberal economics.
This study investigates how acquiescent silence impacts employees' intention to quit through the mediating effect of negative workplace gossip about supervisors and emotional exhaustion. The data were collected from 241 UK-based employees and analyzed using covariance-based structural equation modeling (CB-SEM). The results reveal that acquiescent silence directly increases negative workplace gossip about supervisors, emotional exhaustion, and intention to quit, pointing to its harmful effects. Further analysis suggests that engaging in negative workplace gossip about supervisors does not serve as a coping mechanism or alleviate frustration. Instead, negative workplace gossip about supervisors has a depleting effect as it exacerbates the impact of suppressed employee voice. These results shed light on the complexities of workplace dynamics and emphasize the importance of addressing acquiescent silence and negative gossip to foster healthier work environments.
Contemporary organizations navigate complex environments where plural institutional logics compete to shape organizational fields. These logics often prescribe contradictory actions, exposing organizations to scrutiny from multifaceted stakeholders with competing agendas and disparate expectations. Thus, hybrid organizing is essential for engaging diverse stakeholders - but poses significant challenges for achieving legitimacy. Using data from 209 certified benefit corporations integrating dual social-market orientations, this research examined three dimensions of hybridity-logic centrality, integration, and scope-in their institutional messages via mission statements. Results suggested that organizations with greater legitimacy (1) prioritized communicating their social mission, (2) exhibited higher levels of integration in benefit and employment models, and (3) targeted broader stakeholder groups. However, the legitimacy implications of each hybridity dimension varied based on the evaluating stakeholder group: the accreditation organization or social media users. This research sheds light on when and how organizational hybridity fosters legitimacy, highlighting an institutional and communicative model of stakeholder engagement.
Socially and financially disadvantaged communities are disproportionately affected by increasingly frequent and cascading disasters, leaving them limited time to prepare, respond, and learn. Existing theory about resilience in disaster situations rarely integrates cultural considerations and the role of technology into resilience practices. To address these gaps, this study employed an anticipatory resilience framework to analyze 22 in-depth interviews, with community members involved in designing and implementing a community-owned disaster data portal. Following research methods respecting the participants' language and culture, our grounded theory analysis revealed three core categories used to develop a new theory of resilience. Culturally anchored digital resilience theory claims that culture shapes the sensemaking, adoption, and knowledge production processes in resilient practices, challenging dominant narratives that exclude those most affected by disasters. The findings show how cultural context and communication can support technology-infused resilience initiatives and provide guidance for developing culturally sustained resilience tools.
