As members of organizations, we continuously construct stories about our experiences, and in turn these stories construct the organization and its culture. Specifically, organizations choose to feature individual stories or profiles of community members, vignettes of personal experience that epitomize the culture. Whether internal or external communication, these profiles offer the opportunity for others to view and identify with the organization, and as such the texts are part of the organization’s strategic communication about what it is and what it wants to be. Though both narrative and strategic communication are subcategories of organizational communication, their connection has not been fully explored. This thesis will investigate the use of narrative as a form of strategic communication though the profile genre.
By combining theories of rhetoric and linguistics, genre ecology and activity systems, and visual communication and information design, I hope to conduct a comprehensive analysis of profiles within one industry or longitudinally for a short period of time. The print or web-based profiles will be analyzed using textual or discourse analysis, with a focus on rhetoric and identification. The textual features will be described, analyzed, and finally explained in relation to the social context, and with consideration to overarching issues of identity, ideology, and power, though the theoretical and methodological lens of critical discourse analysis. In addition, I hope it will increase my knowledge of profiles from a writer’s perspective and also lead to suggestions for other communicators and the future of the profile genre.
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