Storytelling in corporate discourse – a critical introduction

“Narrative, together with its cognates such as story, tale, account, myth, legend, fantasy and saga, has received attention from those who tell ‘tales from the field’, collect ‘tales of the field’, conceptualize organizations as storytelling systems (Boje 1991), and engage in literary forms of ‘disciplinary reflection’” (Brown 2006). As stated here, storytelling has been often explored across different disciplines such as, for instance, social sciences and corporate studies, for different purposes and through a variety of interpretive lenses,. In particular, in corporate discourse, storytelling has been considered as ‘responsible’ for corporate collective identity. The latter […] “‘resides’ in the collective identity stories that, for example, people tell to each other in their conversations, write into corporate histories, and encode on websites” (Brown 2006: 734). More specifically, from a narrative perspective, organizations’ identities are identified as discursive linguistic constructs constituted by the multiple identity-relevant narratives that their participants author about them, and which feature, for example, in documents, conversations and electronic media (Brown 2006). Thus, narratives can be performative, as they are “speech acts ‘bringing into existence a social reality that did not exist before their utterance’ (Ford and Ford 1995). This concept has a long history, and derives from social constructionist and critical studies which have suggested that narratives are the products of particular contexts (Gabriel1995), that fragments of narrative intertextually dialogue with, quote from and anticipate other narratives (Fairclough1992), and that organizations literally are narratives (Cooren 1999) or antenarrative networks of dynamic and unfinished stories (Boje 2001). Corporate narratives have been shown to play a key role across a broad range of corporate functions and communication activities. For instance, a recent study by Riviezzo et al. (2015) has shown the close connection existing between the orientation of the personal storytelling of Italian family firm owners and the persuasive strategies enacted in the companies’ promotional discourse, suggesting that storytelling plays a role – however indirect – in defining marketing strategies and constructing promotional identities. Storytelling has also been shown to be crucial in the construction of corporate ethos and the communication of Corporate Social Responsibility engagement. For instance, transmedia storytelling has been analysed as a lens for understanding and guiding the use of various social media channels in the distribution of CSR communication (Coombs 2019), and CSR storytelling has been explored as a strategy to shape stakeholders understanding of social responsibility and manage impressions about CSR conduct (Paynter / Halabi / Tuck 2019: 205). The above-mentioned studies also bring to the fore the changing nature of corporate storytelling. Traditionally conceived of as entrusted to sequential narrative forms, often in exclusively verbal mode (albeit frequently accompanied by supporting images), storytelling has progressively become less linear and more digitalized. For instance, the innovative use of storytelling in social media, especially on Twitter, resulted to be extremely effective in legitimacy diffusion as the storytelling elements, specifically cognitive, pragmatic and emotional elements influenced the extent on diffusion as well as network density and eigenvector centrality (Duygu Phillips, Matthew W. Rutherford and Curt Moore 2019). Finally, storytelling is currently conceived as a publishable, screenable and sharable digital resource, often involving multimodal features (Gachago 2015). Thus, the multimodal dimension, defined as the employment of several semiotic modes in the design of a semiotic product or event, along with the way in which these modes are combined (Kress / van Leeuwen 2001) can provide us with novel insights into the narrative effects of the interplay of the multiple semiotic processes (Kress / van Leeuwen 2001) employed on corporate websites in order to assert or promote corporate identity. In this scenario, this issue aims to present a variety of approaches and methodologies to be applied to storytelling and narrative analysis in corporate communication from both corporate and discourse studies perspectives.