ECREA16-Abstract

486

Friday, November 11

1 6 : 0 0 – 1 7 : 3 0

OSC06

Communicative Organisations

PP 395

Benchmarking Communicative Organizations: A Large-Scale Survey from Sweden

J. Falkheimer

, M. Heide

, H. Nothhaft

, C. Simonsson

, S. Von Platen

, R. Nilsson

Lund University, Department of Strategic Communication, Helsingborg, Sweden

Communications professionals struggle to establish a link between their work and the overall business goals (cf. Zerfass,Verčič,Verhoeven, Moreno &Tench,

2015). TFrandsen and Johansen (2015) argue that there is still a very limited understanding of what communication professionals mean when they claim

that they work strategically and with strategies.What characterizes an organization, in terms of e.g. structure, norms, values, climate, practices and process‑

es, where communication actually add value to goal attainment, resilience against crisis and sustainable survival? These are core questions for scholars as

well as practitioners in the communication sector and during the last few years, they have increasingly been related to the rather wide notion of the ‘com‑

municative organization’. Even though communication’s crucial importance for organizations is axiomatic in perspectives such as e.g. CCO (see e.g. Putnam&

Nicotera, 2009), few researchers have explored the concept thoroughly (Cappati, 2011; Modaff, Butler & DeVine, 2011; Zerfaß & Franke, 2013). The concept

has rendered considerably more interest in practice, embraced by professional associations (Global Alliance 2010, 2012 and 2014). Unfortunately, these

programmatic documents neither define nor substantiate the term per se. As a consequence, it is tempting to discard the industry’s vision of communicative

organizations as idealistic and opaque (cf. Seaman, 2010; Gregory, 2015).The value of communication, its contribution to society and organizations deserve

to be taken seriously, however. And that means a move away from speculative theorizing to empirical research. The purpose of this paper is to contribute

conceptually and empirically to the understanding of a what a communicative organization is.The empirical material is the outcome of a quantitative survey

conducted in a three-year Swedish research project, Communicative Organizations. The project’s overall aim is to further understanding of value-creation

by means of strategic communication. The survey was conducted in ten Swedish public and private organizations in 2015–2016. It was administered to

three main respondent groups: managers, employees and communicators. The survey establishes, amongst other things, to what degree the organizations

under scrutiny approach ideal states that we preliminarily identified as characteristic for a truly communicative organization. Constructs captured are, for

example, (1) leadership and communication climate; (2) communicative resilience, e.g. the willingness of ‘ordinary’ employees to confront false rumours

(3) value-creation, e.g. the degree to which the reputation and image of the organizations effect the work of regular employees (4) positive feedback cycle,

e.g. the degree to which co-workers and managers perceive the media representation of their employers (5) the degree to which the role of communicators

in the organization is clearly defined. The data indicate that the participating organizations rate high, in absolute terms, on aspects such as communicative

leader- and co-workership, participative communication climate and employees’ willingness to defend the organization. But the data also reveal that

cross-departmental communication is perceived as difficult, information overload as burdensome, spreading of rumours as problematic. Moreover, commu‑

nicators struggle with ill-defined roles and unclear responsibilities in many organizations, trust in top-management varies greatly.

PP 396

Between Factoid and Facts. Analyzing Excellence in NGO Communication

M. Jungblut

, R. Fröhlich

Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich, Department of Communication Studies and Media Research, Munich, Germany

To understand the ways in which the media shape and constitute reality on war and conflict, it is not sufficient to only analyze news content. Instead, one

must also investigate the communicative strategies of other key actors involved in the formation of conflict news – amongst others also NGOs (Fröhlich,

2014, p. 2). As significant actors in conflict-related discourses, they do not solely operate as media sources, but increasingly circumvent the media as

gatekeepers and distribute their content directly to their audience(s) (Meyer & Sangar, 2014, p. 10; see also Thrall et. al, 2014). In doing so, NGOs no longer

only call for support or donations but aim to create awareness for (their) particular concern(s), advocate their perspectives of current events and thereby

legitimize specific actions ( Van Leuven & Joye, 2014). Since the news media are still in crisis with decreasing budgets and fewer foreign correspondents

(cf. Livingston & Asmolov, 2010), the importance of NGOs as providers of information might be at a historic peak (Powers, 2014). No wonder, that research

focuses on the relationship between NGOs and the news media (e.g. Baumann et al., 2014; Minić, 2014; Ramos, Ron & Thoms, 2007) in which to date,

however, only little scholarly work has been analyzing the way NGOs characterize the‘reality’of conflicts (cf. Meyer & Sangar, 2014).The study at hand, thus,

seeks to comparatively analyze the conflict-discourse in NGO communication about the Democratic Republic of Congo and Burundi. These cases have been

selected due to the high relevance of NGOs in the Great Lake area and the on-going and therefore current nature of both conflicts (cf. Büscher &Vlassenroot,

2010; Kolk & Lenfant, 2012, 2015). Moreover, the study relies on the normative approach of excellence in (activist) communication (Grunig, Gruni, & Dozier,

2002; Grunig & Huang, 2000). It, thereby, aims to examine (1) if and how NGOs ascribe epistemological statuses to the presented factual statements. In

doing so, the contribution addresses the question whether NGO communication provides sufficient evidence for factual claims. Additionally, the paper seeks

to analyze (2) how transparent NGOs communicate the origins of their evidential claims and how they justify factual statements. It, thus, investigates if and

under what circumstances what kind of evidence and sources are presented, which sources are relied on more frequently and how the validity of the given

information is constituted. This paper analyzes a large corpus of texts in French, English and German. To reach a high level of comparability across cases

and languages, the research relies on data from a multi-language, computer-assisted content analysis that identifies around 3,800 semantic concepts in

publicly available strategic texts. It thereby builds on the initial findings of a large-scale EU-funded research project. To address the presented research

interest, the work examines the texts’ semantic structure, relying on concept frequencies as well as co-occurrences. It thereby analyzes the occurrence

of epistemological qualifiers and the co-occurrence of these concepts with different kinds of evidence like for instance relevant actors, sources and origins

of information.