ABSTRACT. The past two decades vivid discussions on the relationship between discourse and materiality have emerged across critical management and organizations studies (Mumby 2011; Alvesson & Kärreman 2000; Putnam & Fairhurst 2001). Indeed, they address complex issues regarding the conceptualizations and explorations of discourse and materiality as, for example, isolated, correlating, opposing, or entangled and co-constitutive features of contemporary organizational life (Philips & Oswick, 2012). Moreover, they discuss whether critical scholars approach this interrelation properly, and in what ways that dis/orders their research methods as well as the way they account for the discursive and/or material organizational lives being studied. While these debates have enabled important cross-disciplinary conceptual advancements (Hardy & Thomas, 2015), and thereby embracing a co-constitutive perspective on materiality and discourse (Iedema 2007), less progress has been made methodologically (Phillips & Oswick 2012). Hence, this leaves the practical challenges of empirically studying discourse-materiality interrelations and their co-constitution of more or less organized realities, underexplored.

In this paper, we will address some methodological issues – and especially empirical methods – implicitly connected to the conceptual discussions of the discourse-materiality co-constitution. We pursue this, by engaging practically and pragmatically with “how to” grapple with discourse and materiality as co-constitutive in the study of organization as well as organizing. We do so by proposing a method-development framework with inspiration from organizational discourse studies and new materialist thinking (Hardy & Thomas 2015; Iedema 2007; Barad 2003, 2007). Through this, we seek to enable a form of inquiry facilitated by sensitivity to this ongoing and entwined interplay of discourse and materiality. We will explore the potentials of this with examples from a case-study of an informal leadership role recently given to chosen teachers in effect of the latest Danish school reform.

References

Alvesson & Kärreman (2000). Varieties of discourse: On the study of organizations through discourse analysis. In: Human Relations, 53 (9): 1125–1149. Organizations Studies, 28(6): 931-946.

Barad, K. (2003). Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter. In: Signs, 28(3), 801-831.

Hardy & Thomas (2015). Discourse in a Material World. In: Journal of Management Studies, 52(5): 680-696.

Iedema (2007). On the Multi-modality, Materially and Contingency of Organization Discourse. In: Organization Studies, 28(6): 931-946.

Mumby (2011). What’s cooking in organizational discourse studies? A response to Alvesson and Kärreman. In: Human Relations, 64(9): 1147-1161.

Phillips & Oswick (2012). Organizational Discourse: Domains, Debates, and Directions. In: Academy of Management Annals, 6(1): 435-481.

ABSTRACT. Religion upholds the value and meaning of life and guides individuals to be productive in society (Ellison & Levin, 1998). Most religions are beneficial socially, but some are damaging. The most notable damaging religions are destructive cults where leaders influence their followers to commit mass suicide such as Peoples Temple led by Jim Jones and Heaven’s Gate led by Marshall Applewhite. Previous research into destructive cults has mainly focused on their social-psychological development (Bohm & Alison, 2001). This research breaks new ground by examining linguistic issues through the analysis of sermons. The main data sets are the sermons of Jim Jones and Marshall Applewhite in the period leading to mass suicide. As a benchmark these sermons were compared to the sermons of Billy Graham and the sermons of Rick Warren, leaders of mainstream religious groups. Three methods were used to compare the corpora: key semantic tag analysis, key part of speech analysis and Multidimensional analysis (Biber & Kurjian, 2007). The sermons of destructive cults include non-religious contents and use various linguistic features to be highly persuasive and restrictive with the aim of controlling their followers. The results may allow destructive cults to be identified before damaging events occur.

References:

Biber, D., &Kurjian, J. (2007). Towards a taxonomy of web registers and text types: A multi-dimensional analysis. Language and Computers, 59, 109.

Bohm, J., & Alison, L. (2001). An exploratory study in methods of distinguishing destructive cults. Psychology, Crime & Law, 7(2), 133-165.

Ellison, C. G., & Levin, J. S. (1998). The religion-health connection: Evidence, theory, and future directions. Health Education & Behavior, 25(6), 700-720.

ABSTRACT. A number of critical scholars insist that subjectivity itself has become enrolled in capitalist production. What is put to work in contemporary “biocapitalism” (Morini & Fumagalli, 2010) is not just the material or cognitive capacities of the human subject, but also its capacity to establish relations and produce affects (Hardt, 1999). Building on past research that examined affective-relational work in different organizational settings, the present study explores the interactional mechanisms of podcast advertising, a media platform with a growing base of devoted listener communities which poses unique challenges for introducing commercial content.

Based on ethnomethodological conversation analysis (Sacks, 1995), which is especially relevant for uncovering various organizational activities (Boden, 1994), the study specifically looks at the affective-relational work involved in the delivery of scripted ads in niche podcasts. Such podcasts are typically financed through a combination of ad segments during the show and voluntary donations from the show’s listeners, but this feature poses a problem for the podcasters: ads are an important part of the hosts income, but they don’t want to appear as ‘sellouts’ to the podcast’s community. With a conversation analysis of ad segments from several niche podcasts within a range of areas (media, lifestyle, politics), the study demonstrates various practices that the hosts use for recognizably going off script during the ad segments, e.g. evoking or eliciting laughter, and suggests that the hosts use them strategically to manage the authenticity of the podcast.

The contributions of the paper are two-fold. The first entails a better theoretical understanding of and practical implications for podcast advertising and mediated consumption. Secondly, it urges a methodological reflection on studying dark/light side of communication, as our findings indicate the distinction between light/authentic/legitimate and dark/manipulative/illegitimate communication as a members’ phenomenon, calling for a method that documents a member’s perspective (vs. a researcher’s perspective).

References Boden, D. (1994). The business of talk: Organizations in action. Cambridge: Polity Press. Hardt, M. (1999). Affective labor. Boundary 2, 26(2), 89. Morini, C., & Fumagalli, A. (2010). Life put to work: Towards a life theory of value. Ephemera: Theory & Politics in Organization, 10(3/4), 234–252. Sacks, H. (1995). Lectures on Conversation. Volumes I & II. (G. Jefferson, Ed.). Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing.

ABSTRACT. As technology has radically changed translation, the research on translation technology should not only benefit current research on translation but also have a long-term positive impact on technology in the social context. The focuses of this paper are twofold. Firstly, to explore how translation technology facilitate to break the cultural barriers between two languages in cross-culture communication. And second, to explore translation technology’s involvement and interaction with human translator during the translation process for the strategies of its technical innovation. These focuses involve socio-technical system perspective rather than limit the translation research mainly on the linguistic level with the aim at treating human translator’s collaboration with translation technology as a mediator helping to realize successful cross-culture communication.

ABSTRACT. Modern User Experience (UX) is not solely concerned with understanding users’ needs and designing efficient, enjoyable interactions. It is also a form of communication which uses visual and textual means to communicate the functionality of systems to users, and guide them through the process of completing their tasks.

While UX typically seeks to help users by improving their interactions with software and companies, it can also serve less noble purposes, with various UX strategies being used to create addictive products (Eyal, 2014), or to manipulate users in some way (Nodder, 2013). This phenomenon is known as “Black Hat UX” and is defined as “the intentional act of creating [a] suboptimal user experience” (Szabo, 2015), generally with the aim of furthering a company’s business goals or agendas, and often at the expense of the users’ needs.

Against this backdrop, there is cause for concern at the current interest in conversational user interfaces particularly chatbots. While the aim is ostensibly to improve the user experience with more natural, intuitive, and efficient interactions, the mechanisms behind such technologies are hidden from users and are open to abuse. Taken together with the potential for humans to develop intense relationships with virtual communication agents (e.g. Weizenbaum, 1966) and to be influenced by them (Rizoiu et al., 2018), the potential role of chatbots in dark communication clearly merits further discussion.

After examining various business cases for chatbots, this paper will explore various commercial, ethical, legal, psychological, and social issues involved in their use. In doing so we can understand the ways in which chatbots might be used for nefarious purposes and, armed with this knowledge, highlight ways of preventing this.

REFERENCES: Eyal, Nair (2014) Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products. New York: Portfolio Penguin Nodder, Chris (2013) Evil by Design: Interaction Design to Lead Us into Temptation. Indianapolis: Wiley Rizoiu, M.A., Graham, T., Zhang, R., Zhang, Y., Ackland, R. and Xie, L. (2018) #DebateNight: The Role and Influence of Socialbots on Twitter During the 1st 2016 US Presidential Debate. In Twelfth International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media. Pp.300-209 Szabo, Peter W. (2015) Black Hat UX. [online] Available from: https://kaizen-ux.com/black-hat-ux/ [Accessed: 05/12/2018] Weizenbaum, Joseph (1966). "ELIZA—a computer program for the study of natural language communication between man and machine". Communications of the ACM. 9: 36–45.

ABSTRACT. The explosive growth of digital communication tools has provided powerful channels for accessing and disseminating relevant information. However, there are also related serious problems concerning access to and control of proprietary information. There are growing controversies over who owns personal information stored online. Many organizations have begun to track the online activities of employees and other organizational stakeholders (Holland, Cooper, & Hecker, 2015). Organizational administrators have access to very personal digital information shared by employees, faculty, students, customers, and patients on organizational information systems (panopticon surveillance) (Clawson & Clawson, 2015). Increasingly employers are searching social media platforms to investigate job applicants and to keep tabs on personnel. There is controversy concerning consumer ownership and access to personal health information stored in medical records (Kreps, 2012). Computer hackers have learned how to break into online bank and commercial records that can jeopardize financial security (Hemphill & Longstreet, 2016). Personal information shared on social media can also be readily accessed by those who know how to search social media communication platforms (Fuchs, 2017). This presentation will examine ethical issues and communication strategies for managing access and control of private information.