Analyzing Websites

9The Documediality of Cross-border Organizations

Marie-Hélène HERMAND

MICA, Université Bordeaux Montaigne, Pessac, France

9.1. Introduction

This chapter is focused on the valorization of hybrid organizations on the Web, specifically organizations that bring together people and entities located in border regions and grouped together for the purpose of cooperation. These organizations – which can be institutional, economic, educational or associative – create spaces for meeting, interaction and where tensions or competition can even sometimes occur. Particularly in the areas of strategies and mechanisms of mutual influence, they build specific semantic universes around major issues that are shared on both sides of national borders (such as education, health and tourism) or that cannot be envisioned at a strictly national scale (such as cross-border labor, environmental issues, mobility and migration).

Cross-border organizations embody a major contemporary paradox: in a globalized world, border dynamics (movement, openness, control, closure) are at the heart of all crises (security dynamics during attacks, repressive dynamics during the migration crisis, selective dynamics during health emergencies). That is why the border territories and the entities that allow them to operate are at the heart of the concerns of many researchers in the humanities and social sciences (Considère and Perrin 2017; Bazin and Perron 2018) and, more generally, of various social actors (political, economic, ...