Social Media, Organizational Identity and Public Relations

2 Communicatively constituted organizations, plausible?

To further explore the relationships between organization and identity, in this chapter I provide an overview of the CCO perspective. In doing so I identify the ways in which understandings of organizations and organizational events as communicatively constituted can inform individual engagement in processes of organizing. From that perspective, I suggest that organizational identities which emerge as durable and persist within and beyond the organization are created and maintained in language, not actions or results (Grant, Keenoy, & Oswick, 1998). Thus, a company’s identity may be formed with rhetoric, not tangible results of management processes (Oswick, Grant, Michelson, & Wailes, 2005; ...