
Jesper Falkheimer
Professor

Strategy Texts as Auto-Communication: How narrative, language, and visual symbolism exercise discursive control
Författare
Summary, in English
Strategy texts are an important way of communicating a strategy to a range of different stakeholders, including internal audiences as the organization communicates with itself (auto-communication). In this article, we analyze two related strategy texts that were produced for auto-communicative purposes as part of a strategic change initiative in a UK organization that employed a storytelling approach to strategic communication. Our multimodal analysis shows how narrative, visual symbolism and directive lexical choices and grammatical forms used in the two strategy texts exercise discursive control using three main mechanisms: (1) encouraging action through future-focused narrative structure; (2) strengthening emotional attachment with the organization through purposeful selection of anecdotes from a shared stock of stories; and (3) defining desired actions and behaviours through visual symbolism and directive lexical choices and grammatical forms. Moreover, the article contributes to current debates of the nature of strategic communication by demonstrating the tension between linear and dialogic communication in practice, while also providing rare empirical insights on the use of auto-communication in contemporary strategic communication.
Avdelning/ar
- Institutionen för strategisk kommunikation
Publiceringsår
2025
Språk
Engelska
Sidor
86-104
Publikation/Tidskrift/Serie
International Journal of Strategic Communication
Volym
19
Issue
1
Dokumenttyp
Artikel i tidskrift
Förlag
Taylor & Francis
Ämne
- Communication Studies
Nyckelord
- strategy as discourse
- auto-communication
- corporate communication
Aktiv
Published
ISBN/ISSN/Övrigt
- ISSN: 1553-1198