Organizational Semiotics

This edited volume brings together two largely separate fields – organization studies and multimodal social semiotics – to develop an integrated research agenda for the novel interdisciplinary field of ‘organizational semiotics’.

Organizations, whether for profit, non-profit, or governmental, dominate much of everyday life, and multimodal communication is not only an output of organizations, but is also constitutive of them. This volume argues in particular for the importance of organization studies for social semioticians – not just as a site of application, but also as a critical contemporary context that requires novel and expanded methods of analysis and critique, and new practices of partnership. The volume addresses a range of institutions and sectors, from civil to retail to medical, from corporations to universities, and reveals how a deep engagement with their meaning-making practices produces insights not just about communication but also about the broader contemporary cultural context in which organizations play such a significant role. Fundamentally, it reveals that the rich analytical and theoretical resources of multimodal perspectives on organizations studies can – and should – make a fundamental contribution to our understanding of organizations in social life.

This volume is relevant to social semioticians and organizational researchers as well as to practitioners and decision-makers in organizations.

Louise Ravelli is Professor of Communication in the School of Arts and Media at UNSW Sydney. Her research explores how multimodality works in specific communication contexts, such as museums. She has published widely with monographs, edited volumes and articles, and is joint Chief Editor of the journal Visual Communication.

Theo van Leeuwen is Professor of Language and Communication at the University of Southern Denmark. He has published widely in the areas of visual communication, multimodality, and critical discourse analysis. His latest books are the third revised edition of Reading Images – The Grammar of Visual Design (with Gunther Kress) and Multimodality and Identity.

Markus A. Höllerer is Professor of Organization and Management at UNSW Sydney. His scholarly work currently focuses on social change, novel forms of organization and governance, and institutions as multimodal accomplishments. He has been widely published in leading academic outlets and is currently Editor-in-Chief of Organization Theory.

Dennis Jancsary is Assistant Professor at the Institute for Organization Studies at WU (Vienna University of Economics and Business). He is particularly interested in the role of language and multimodal communication at the interface of organizations and institutions. His work further includes methodological contributions to visual and multimodal analysis.