Suchergebnisse

The relationship between media and the organizations they cover has changed dramatically in the last few decades, and has witnessed a huge expansion of news coverage focusing on different types of organizations and their activities. In parallel, organizations have dramatically increased their investment in PR and other media oriented forms of communication. The expansion and increased importance of the media and its working practices and preferences has become an institutional force, alongside other societal developments such as globalization, marketization, individualization and scientification. The media has become central for shaping the environment in which organizations operate. This complex relationship remains relatively under-researched, especially with respect to the complexity and diversity of interests permeating contemporary business organizations. The main argument in this book relates to the notion of mediatization of contemporary organizations - that is to say the media must be understood not only as important in covering and scrutinizing individual organizations, industry or markets but also as a key influence on the actions of organizations, thereby shaping the entire landscape in which the organizations operate. What such a perspective provides is the accentuation of the interplay between organizations and different parts of the society as embedded in the media and its logic. This book explores how organizations and organizing can be understood as a part of a mediatized world and addresses - both empirically and conceptually - what kind of consequences such mediatization has.

In this paper, we investigate how public organizations, through their senior managers, perceive media-related activities and to what extent these perceptions support the existence of a 'media logic.' We interviewed 64 managers from 40 Swedish government agencies and compared their perceptions related to media with their perceptions related to the corporate logic, which has become vital in public sector contexts. The findings reveal that media and media-oriented activities are understood as contextual, contingent, and driven by individual events. In contrast to the understandings of management and strategy (i.e. corporate logic), which was much more coherent, universal, and aligned to sectoral conditions. Accordingly, media are generally more open for interpretations, local adaptations, and contextualization, making it difficult to provide clear-cut answers to what media means for public organizations. Our study suggests that public managers understand media in a manner that challenges the media logic rationale. We also challenge an institutional logic argument that institutional structures surrounding public organizations are, in general, to be seen as open for strategic responses. Our results point in another direction. The way managers understand different institutional structures, such as those associated with media, are, to a much greater extent, characterized by uncertainty linked to a lack of necessary knowledge about what constitutes the underlying qualities of the structures at hand; and by ambiguity about what meanings to mobilize and follow when institutional structures are to be introduced into specific organizational contexts.

What is the role of media(tisation) in organisation and provision of elderly care? By looking at how planning, organising and execution of elderly care is understood in two Swedish municipalities this paper seeks to contribute to discussions of the ways in which values, preferences and working practices of news media play out in shaping conditions for provision of municipal welfare services. Our findings suggest that we can see the role of media values and preferences as embedded – although in different ways and to varying extent – in three distinct but inter-related processes that influence how actors connected to organisation and provision of municipal welfare services understand and relate to each other. These are: 1) setting the aims, aspirations and priorities in the provision of welfare services (i.e., the what); 2) translating these aims, aspirations and priorities into necessary means, resources and activities (i.e., the how); and 3) explaining and justifying the what and the how to different constituencies (i.e., the why). The paper concludes that commonly held values and beliefs about media reinforce the ongoing changes in the governing regime of elderly care in a direction where the role of municipal administrative bodies is more explicitly articulated, especially in terms of accountability and responsibility.

The relations between the media and their corporate sources have become increasingly routinized and organized. In contrast to traditional perspectives on news making this article introduces an embeddedness perspective on business journalism and reports on the findings from a study of the way the major Swedish corporations and financial analysts contribute to and participate in the production of business news. Through a qualitative analysis of two cases we show that such production is organized and carried out in a stream of continuous and well-coordinated activities and structured interaction settings – that is, in a system of recursive mediation. Our analysis further illustrates how this system is maintained through the technological, relational and situational embeddedness of the activities and settings. Through our studies we show how news production has developed outside the journalistic domain. One implication of our findings is that the possibility of individual actors influencing the content of the news is likely to be limited. Instead, it is the actors' ability to join the organizational and technological settings in which news material is generated that gives them the opportunity to actively participate in news production.

Recent analysis of interactions and relations between media, individuals and organisations is commonly based on the notion of mediatization. Research in journalism and media studies, political studies as well as business studies have explored mediatization as prevailing transformation influencing communication activities of individuals as well as organisations. In the field of organisational studies an increasing interest has been paid to the mediatised settings in which organisations conduct their activities. But despite the growing interest we still lack a sufficient understanding of the inner dynamics of these processes. Contemporary research often focuses on the effects of mediatization and, therefore, relatively little is known about how agents are involved in the creation, maintenance, re-shaping and interruption of the institutional properties of mediatization. In this article we seek to examine the dynamics of mediatization and how it is shaped, reproduced and reshaped through activities of individual corporations. Thus, Mediatization is not only "out there", it will be argued, coming to expression through actors' more or less passive and explicit adaptation to the dominant perceptions and understanding of the way the media operate. The aim of the article is to show how mediatization evokes processes of skilful and purposeful activities of actors involved in the creation, maintenance and disturbance of the shared rules, norms and practices that guide organisations in their effort to deal with media-related issues. The article, thereby, goes beyond examining the media activities of individual organisations as a result of mediatization, and focuses on these activities as a constituent of the processes in which mediatization is re-constructed and enacted (cf. Hartman 2009). The analysis rests on a study of thirteen Swedish publically listed corporations and their media activities. The material was collected through in-depth semi-structured interviews and participant observations.

Concepts like reputation, recognition, legitimacy, visibility, image, popularity and others are frequently used in describing how successful an organization or its activity has been. In this paper we seek to address some of the concepts used for assessment of political communication and examine what underlying qualities and criteria these concepts refer to. By way of situating our discussion into a broader context of how neo-institutional perspective understands organizational performance we use a two-dimensional framework to identify and illustrate the essential qualities of the most popular concepts. We combine then the different qualities these concepts invoke and suggest a model that can be used in more accurate evaluation of not only (political) communication but also other types of organizational activities.

Universities are exposed to a variety of external forces that influence the way they are managed and organized. In this paper we examine how these principles are given space in the way universities communicate. We do this by analyzing how the university management - in this case Swedish universities' Vice-chancellors – describe, promote and explain their organizations via official blogs. The paper builds on a framework where university governance is understood as based on a relationship between state, profession and market, and as driven by three forms of social judgments - legitimacy, status and reputation. From a total of fourteen VC blogs, 1330 posts are analyzed according to three sets of arguments: 1) legitimacy arguments driven by political outcome; 2) status arguments driven by professional values and boundaries; and 3) reputation arguments driven by market consequences. The results reflect a dominance of reputation aspects, highlighting the centrality of market principles in communication and university governance. ; Organized freedom: university autonomy and the higher education and research reforms in Sweden

Recent analysis of interactions and relations between media, individuals and organizations is commonly based on the notion of mediatization. Research in journalism and media studies, political studies as well as business studies has explored mediatization as prevailing transformation influencing communication activities of individuals as well as organizations. In the field of organizational studies an increasing interest has been paid to the mediatized settings in which organizations conduct their activities. But despite the growing interest we still lack a sufficient understanding of the inner dynamics of these processes. Contemporary research often focuses on the effects of mediatization and, therefore, relatively little is known about how agents are involved in the creation, maintenance, reshaping and interruption of the institutional properties of mediatization. This article seeks to examine the dynamics of mediatization and how it is shaped, reproduced and reshaped through activities of individual corporations. The aim of the article is to show how mediatization evokes processes of skilful and purposeful activities of actors involved in the creation, maintenance and disturbance of the shared rules, norms and practices that guide organizations in their effort to deal with media-related issues. The article, therefore, goes beyond examining the media activities of individual organizations as a result of mediatization, and focuses on these activities as a constituent of the processes in which mediatization is reconstructed and enacted. The analysis is based on a study of 13 Swedish publicly listed corporations and their media activities. The material was collected through in-depth semi-structured interviews and participant observations.

This article seeks to explain why the media affect some governmental agencies more than others. We develop a measuring instrument for the mediatization of agencies; gauging how they adapt to the media. We analyse the effects of six potential explanations of mediatization: media pressure, organizational size and task, salience, geographic location, and management structure. The analysis is based on a comprehensive quantitative contents analysis of policy documents from all governmental agencies in Sweden. The results show that agencies' propensity to adapt to the media is mainly determined by their management structure rather than, as could have been expected, by media pressure. Organizations managed by career managers invest more in media management than those led by field‐professionals. Our results suggest that agencies have substantial agency in terms of how they cope with the media and that mediatization refers to much more than passive adaptation by organizations.

This special section seeks to enrich research on the field by using neo-institutional theory to describe, explain and understand the activities, processes and dynamics of public relations. By this we open up for a wider understanding of public relations, its preconditions, its performances and its consequences for shaping the social. We argue that public relations could be analyzed as an institutionalized practice with certain set of governing mechanisms including taken-for-granted activities, rules, norms and ideas. Here neo-institutional theory is well situated as it is a tradition where communication is put at fore in the understanding of organizations, institutions and society. Another argument for this is recent developments where public relations and other forms of organizational communication have been examined as a major dimension of organizing in some of the more profound works among neo-institutional theorists. The article starts with a discussion of earlier work in the tradition of neo-institutional theory were a lot of attention was paid to the governing mechanisms of institutions and how they control the behaviour of actors. A perspective leading to some fundamental challenges where the primary objections were raised against the over-determinism neo-institutional researchers ascribed institutions. Taking these objectives seriously has served as a source of extensive theoretical and empirical puzzles characterizing many of the contemporary efforts – most of them explicitly emphasizing the role of communication and symbolical/rethorical means as essential in all institutional processes. Among these we find three streams we find relevant and fruitful for analyses of public relations: institutional logics, translation and institutional work. These themes are further developed in text and discussed in releationship to what implications they have on public relations research. How an employment of the logic can help us gain a more profound understanding of public relations and communication as an institutional practice. How public relations function as a carrier and translator of institutions. How public relations is used to challenge and re-shape the foundations on which social actors interact with each other.

Crisis communication research has primarily focused on universal models guiding managers of various organisations in times of crisis. Even though this is about to change, a tendency remains for research in the field to overlook the impact of structural conditions on organisation's crisis communication. In order to add to the emergent discussion on new theoretical and empirical venues within the field of crisis communication, this paper proposes a framework based on new institutional theory for analysing crisis communication practices as a societal phenomenon. New institutionalism is advocated due to its ability to shift the focus from agency to structure and in doing so emphasise the social preconditions for organisational activities. In line with this, this conceptual paper discusses crisis communication as an institution, i.e., as a set of more or less conscious ideas about formats (the organisational structures developed for crisis communication work), contents (the content of organisations' communication in times of crisis) and contexts (the situations during which organisations are expected to perform crisis communication). Moreover, we discuss how these ideas become translated (i.e., modified) as they travel (i.e., become legitimate, popular and get widely spread) across organisational and institutional contexts. In order to illustrate the framework described above, the Swedish authorities' communication in connection to the A/H1N1 outbreak is used as a case study.