Images, Text, and Emotions

Organizations are increasingly communicating online with their key stakeholders. Chats on social media platforms, videos, and online meetings constitute key spaces for strategy communication and for the legitimation of organizations and their activities. In these digital spaces, emotions play an important role in conveying messages and convincing people to enact change. This chapter explains how strategic communication in multimodal spaces such as online communication platforms could be enhanced through emotion-symbolic work. Emotion-symbolic work involves using both text and visuals to transform negative emotions into positive ones in order to facilitate the enactment of a strategy. The chapter also discusses how multimodality, that is textual discourse to accompany visual images, can guide emotion-symbolic work and then reviews the characteristics of social media and communication platforms and the challenges and opportunities of studying emotion-symbolic work in online platforms The chapter concludes by discussing opportunities for further research.