“Giant Toxic Lakes You Can See from Space”: A Theory of Multimodal Messages and Emotion in Legitimacy Work

Abstract

Organizations need to appear legitimate to access resources. Thus, actors often carry out legitimacy work to shape others’ evaluation of something as “desirable, proper or appropriate.” Such research has tended to focus on the cognitive appeal of words. Recently, research has also emerged on the persuasiveness of images, especially for creating emotional appeals. We develop a process model to explain the role of multimodal messages—combining words and images—in legitimacy work. With this model, we aim to answer: Why do certain combinations of multimodal messages (words and images) more forcefully evoke emotion and more reliably capture recipients’ attention, motivate them to process those messages, and (re)evaluate the legitimacy of an organization, its activities, and/or its industry? We conclude by discussing theoretical extensions and connections to other methods such as institutional work and values work.

The lure of the visual: Multimodality, simplification, and performance measurement visualizations in a megaproject

“…Organizational research on multimodality has paid particular attention to how the textual and visual modes interact, frequently by contrasting their operation (Meyer et al, 2018;Höllerer et al, 2019;Lefsrud et al, 2020). Research has highlighted that the textual mode structures meaning primarily in a linear, additive manner because it is governed by a vocabulary and a syntax (Höllerer et al, 2019;Knight & Tsoukas, 2019).…”

“…For this reason, the textual mode lends itself to the development of formal arguments and the creation of abstract and elaborate narratives (Meyer et al, 2018). On the contrary, the absence of a "grammar" that regulates the use of visuals makes them more ambiguous, polysemic, and dependent to a larger degree on the legitimacy and social regulation they possess in context (Puyou & Quattrone, 2018;Knight & Tsoukas, 2019;Lefsrud et al 2020). Further, since visuals are initially experienced holistically and then the components are parsed, they can intuitively capture spatial relations and convey complex relationships at a glance (Meyer et al, 2018).…”

“…Further, since visuals are initially experienced holistically and then the components are parsed, they can intuitively capture spatial relations and convey complex relationships at a glance (Meyer et al, 2018). In light of this, text can support images with specification by establishing complementarity relationships whereby textual components disambiguate visual meaning or provide context (e.g., museum tags "explaining" paintings), or words can cue what is absent from an image (Lefsrud et al, 2020).…”

“…To address these issues, we build on and expand recent developments in organizational scholarship on multimodality that investigate how different semiotic modes (e.g., visuals, text, or numbers) generate meaning in organizations (e.g., Höllerer, van Leeuwen, Jancsary, Meyer, Anderseen, & Vaara, 2019;Knight & Tsoukas, 2019). Multimodality research seeks to explain how different semiotic modes enable and constrain meaning-making and how they interact and interfere with each other in organizations (Meyer et al, 2018;Lefsrud, Graves, & Phillips, 2020). While accounting scholarship has explored issues of representation and visualization in depth (e.g., Hines, 1988;Tinker, 1991;Chua, 1995;Mouritsen, 2011; see Davison, 2015 for a review), multimodality offers further nuance by distinguishing between different semiotic modes that make up accounting representations, especially in relation to how they generate meaning in virtue of their distinct semiotic characteristics.…”

Exploring the Cognitive Foundations of Managerial (Climate) Change Decisions

“…Legitimising through words and images Shaping - Framing to through language can deceive not directly but through linguistic constructions. Framing through image word combinations to elicit emotions and attention Crilly et al ( 2016 ) Lefsrud et al, ( 2019 ) General Population Shaping Cognition Various factors shape an individual’s cognition. Cognitive bias.…”