Section: Organisational and Strategic Communication
COLLABORATIVE NARRATIVES – REPRESENTATIONS OF FINNISH CORPORATIONS IN WIKIPEDIA
Merja PORTTIKIVI, Aalto University, School of Economics
Salla-Maaria LAAKSONEN, University of Helsinki
The recent advances of online communication have amplified the role of publics and stakeholders in the processes of defining corporate image and corporate reputation. In the online context, the narratives or reputation are formed in various arenas – from news commentaries and personal websites to wikis, the blogosphere, and social networking services. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the representations of corporate reputation in a collaborative online arena, Wikipedia. We aim to find out 1) the ways in which reputations of corporations are constructed in Wikipedia entries over time, and 2) what kinds of discursive struggles do these reputational narratives evoke.
We argue that open and collaborative online services such as Wikipedia create an arena for an ongoing debate about the roles and responsibilities about companies and their activities in society, and more importantly, an arena for discursive definition of the organization. The wiki platform offers corporate critics an equal opportunity to shape the public image of corporations, which gives more visibility to negative topics such as scandals and issues of social responsibility (see e.g. DiStaso & Messner 2010). Thus an entry of Wikipedia can be conceptualized as a manifestation of a reputational narrative, which is collaboratively and collectively created, part of participatory corporate publicity and in a state of constant flux.
We define reputation as a discursive construction (Dowling 2006, Deetz 1986, Czarniawska 1997), not constant, but built and modified in communicative actions between different publics over time (e.g. Aula & Mantere 2008, Gotsi & Wilson 2001). In theorizing this reputational debate as discursive struggle, we draw on the post-structural discourse theory (Foucault 1972, Laclau & Mouffe 1985, Hall 2001). In addition, we utilize the antenarrative intertextual approach of David M. Boje (2001). The empirical material for this study consists of the Finnish Wikipedia pages of 100 top companies in Finland (Talouselämä 2011), a local equivalent of Fortune 500 ratings.
In the first stage of the analysis, we classify these 100 companies by their Wikipedia-coverage using a comparative content analysis of different categories such as presence, entry length, amount of contributors, number of edits, company participation, and amount of debate. Based on this data, a number of representative cases are selected to indepth qualitative analysis in order to gain deeper understanding about the processes of reputational narrating and the discursive struggles within. Finally, we aim to identify and examine the different discourses that represent the corporations as certain types of sociocultural actors in online environment. We expect the findings to illustrate social media as an arena for multifocal, diverse, and polemic representations of corporations and their reputation. We argue that Wikipedia, due to its participatory and transparent nature, plays an important role in setting the stage for elaborating the interfaces between organizations and the society as a whole.