Website stories in times of distress

Abstract

Highlighting the uniqueness of websites as a specific form of interactive and visual communication tool, we explore how corporate websites aid storytelling in times of distress. Using the corporate website of BP as our empirical context, we analyze the visual story that unfolded before and after the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster though a visual semiotic method, and argue that the changes in the story potentially mitigated the impact of the environmental catastrophe after the spill. We propose that our website analysis of a case of serious corporate misdoing, where a company's stated and actual environmental practices were in dissonance, provides an insight to the construction of the 'liquid organization,' as well as to what Bauman calls 'liquid power' or 'the art of escape from all forms of social responsibility.' As such, we believe that mobilizing website study in management practice and education can provide a better understanding of 'corporate hypocrisy' in a liquid, modern world, as well as enable stakeholders' responsibility and power to hold organizations accountable for their misdoings.

Showing Legitimacy: The Strategic Employment of Visuals in the Legitimation of New Organizations

“…Firstly, websites nowadays assume a primordial role as a locus of communication intended to reach diverse audiences, including key resource providers such as investors, business partners, potential new human resources, and consumers (Barros, 2014;Pablo & Hardy, 2009). Secondly, websites feature a considerable set of relevant information that makes them especially relevant to addressing organizational strategy and communication (Bell et al, 2014;Kassinis & Panayiotou, 2017;Santos, 2019;Sillince & Brown, 2009). Thirdly and finally, websites are multimodal which allows researchers to address several modes of communication effectively, such as the visual and verbal (Jones et al, 2015;Kress, 2010;Meyer et al, 2013).…”

Methods in Responsible Management Learning and Education – A Review

“…Along these lines, it is noteworthy that several of the qualitative papers that focus on teaching RMLE content have used action research approaches (García-Rosell, 2013;Gearty et al, 2015;Page et al, 2014;Warwick et al, 2017), ethnography (Gherardi & Rodeschini, 2016;Mangan et al 2016), grounded theory (Montiel et al, 2018;Sutherland et al, 2015;Toubiana, 2014), narrative analysis (Deer & Zaretsky, 2017;Kassinis & Panayiotou, 2017;Tyran, 2017;Warhurst & Black, 2017), or discourse analysis (Heizmann & Liu, 2018;García-Rosell, 2013;Louw, 2015). All of these approaches focus in one way or another on the lived experiences of the participants, their sense-making processes, development over time, and the importance of context (physical context or relevant relationships and interactions) for said development.…”

A Critical Plot Twist: Changing Characters and Foreshadowing the Future of Organizational Storytelling

“…Already, in the few short years following the end of our data collection period, we are beginning to see forays into storytelling in a social media environment (e.g. Grafstrom and Falkman ; Kassinis and Panayiotou ). As technological capacity to capture and store data increases, there will be greater volumes of storytelling data to study using digital methods of inquiry.…”