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.
Project Plan
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 as the following:
• Rhetoric – including Aristotle’s distinction and emphasis on examples or narratives and enthymemes
• Auto-communication – specifically Cheney and Christensen’s concept where external communication turns inward and vice versa
• Image – both the external image of the organization and the images connected to the profiles
In addition, I might consider overarching issues of identity, ideology, and power through the theories of Bourdieu, Burke, Fairclough, and Foucault.
Conclusion and Contributions
This research will describe the features of profiles, while examining their persuasive power in terms of identification. 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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