Making sense of the corporate philosophy:: Dialogic employee engagement, and narrative positioning

We find an increased interest in the concept of employee engagement within the area of organizational and corporate communication. Employee engagement is an umbrella term for a number of cognitive, emotional and physical aspects (Kahn, 1990) of relating positively to one’s work, and research within this area has mostly connected employee engagement to organizational productivity and effectiveness. In this paper, we suggest a new approach to employee engagement by relating it to employee communication and placing it within dialogue theory (Buber, 1970) combined with Bamberg’s (1997) positioning theory. Our case is a strategy meeting on the topic of how a corporate philosophy devised by top management and entitled “Business Kind2Mind” is interpreted by managers and what they view is the best way to implement the philosophy within subsidiaries. Theorizing engagement dialogically enables a shift from instrumental perspectives to a more interpretive approach in which true mutuality entails participants’ views being heard and incorporated in the corporate philosophy, and engagement is not purely about efficiency and outcome. A dialogical approach enables us to conceive of employee communication not as only upwardly or downwardly directed between manager and employee, but as interactional, with mutual change

Learning to shift gears? A multimodal approach to plot in the literary text

With a point of departure in multimodal social semiotics, this article presents a multimodal approach to narrative with special focus on plot in the literary text. We argue that plot is a characteristic of literary texts that is realized multimodally through images, graphic elements, verbal language, layout and typography. Through an analysis of Dorthe Nors’ novel Mirror, Shoulder, Signal, we demonstrate both the cogency of a multimodal social semiotic analysis of a novel that does not explicitly foreground its multimodality and the analytical advantages of incorporating plot as a central concept in analysis. This article’s primary contribution to research in multimodal social semiotics is in incorporating plot in multimodal analysis and in doing so, showing how the narrative category of plot, which is often conceived of as a purely verbal construction designed by the author, can be seen as the result of choices made among different semiotic resources and at different levels of realization.Med udgangspunkt i den multimodale socialsemiotik præsenterer denne artikel en multimodal tilgang til narrativ med særlig fokus på plot i den litterære tekst. Vi argumenterer for, at plot som en strukturering af tekstens begivenheder er særligt kendetegnende for den litterære tekst, og at det realiseres multimodalt gennem billede, grafik, verbalsprog, layout og typografi. Gennem en eksemplarisk analyse af Dorthe Nors’ roman Spejl, skulder, blink viser vi dels den multimodale socialsemiotiks udsigelseskraft i forhold til en roman, der ikke eksplicit fremhæver sin multimodalitet, dels de analytiske fordele ved at inddrage plot som et helt centralt element. Artiklens primære bidrag til det socialsemiotiske multimodale forskningsfelt består i at inddrage plotbegrebet i den multimodale analyse og derved belyse, hvordan den narrative kategori plot, der ofte opfattes som en rent verbalsproglig konstruktion designet af forfatteren, kan ses som resultatet af valg truffet gennem forskellige semiotiske ressourcer og på forskellige realisationsniveauer.&nbsp