Sine Nørholm Just

• Professor (Associate) at Copenhagen Business School

Women political leaders, research shows, have been able to use stereotypically feminine traits to their advantage in their response to the pandemic, thus overcoming usual double binds of performing femininity and political leadership. But what, more precisely, accounts for women politicians’ successful performance of pandemic leadership? In this pa...

During a pandemic, the advice issued by public health authorities undergoes significant scrutiny, potentially affecting public adherence to recommended measures. Trust and trustworthiness become key. This book analyses the rhetorical strategies of the Norwegian public health authorities as the COVID-19 pandemic moved through phases that presented d...

Based on a qualitative study of Copenhagen 2021 WorldPride, this article explores collaboration between the local organiser and its corporate partners, focusing on the tensions involved in this collaboration, which emerge from and uphold relations between the extremes of unethical pinkwashing, on the one hand, and ethical purity, on the other. Here...

Artificial intelligence (AI) is making its way into the theory and practice of organizational communication, leading to new and important questions for the field: What is AI? What are its practical implications for the communication professional? And which ethical issues arise from the integration of AI in organizational communication? In this chap...

This paper applies ritual theory to study public LGBTQ+ gatherings, including Pride parades, silent vigils, and commemorative litanies. The analysis of public LGBTQ+ rituals has often focussed on Pride parades and their carnivalistic exuberance. We call instead for more attention to the whole nexus of public rituals that this movement consists of,...

Disconnective action, this article argues, is an important supplement to the logic of connective action, which enables social movements to organize informally online. Through the (threat of) disconnection, members may (re)assert their agency in relation to social movement organizations. In conducting a case study of LGBTI+ community members’ protes...

Digitally mediated publics are often discussed in terms of extremism and radicalization, but it remains possible that digital communication technologies can engender new connections and conversations through “creative subversion.” This article explores the potentials of one specific instance of such creative subversion: the “GameStop rescue” as let...

The digitalization of health promises individual empowerment while raising the threat of collective surveillance. Conceptualizing these threats and promises as sociotechnical imaginaries, we explore how issues of datafied female health are articulated in Danish public discourse. Empirically, we work with a large data set of Danish news media covera...

Digital capitalism troubles classical notions of contextual singularity and agential unity and destabilises delineations of online and offline realities. Following Floridi, this paper applies the concept of ‘onlife’ for the ‘new experience of a hypermediated reality’, and we contribute to the understanding of this experience by highlighting the soc...

As environmental and societal crises increase in numbers, severity, and urgency, online forums for so-called “doomsday preppers” have seen a concomitant surge in membership. Beginning from the perspective of communicative constitution of organization, we explore the sociotechnical communities that emerge on such forums. Methodologically, we use net...

While innovation studies traditionally ignore gender issues, predominant means of attending to this oversight tend to reinforce gender stereotypes. Thus, innovation is cast as male by default and female innovators are given niche roles, prompting us to ask: what does it take to make the gendered practices of innovation visible without re-confirming...

I sidste magtudredning blev det påpeget, at kønsmagten er under sociokulturel forandring, mens den politisk og økonomisk forbliver ulige fordelt i mænds favør. I de 20 år, der er gået, er det dog ikke lykkedes at rette op på det forhold. Snarere er Danmark sakket bagud på internationale ligestillingsranglister, særligt når det kommer til økonomisk...

Using unconditional basic income (UBI) as its empirical prism, this article offers new impetus to the foundational debate within critical theory as to whether and how redistribution and recognition can relate productively to each other. We explore the possibility of redistributive solidarity, arguing that unconditional and universal redistribution...

Studies of sexual harassment in professional contexts, including academia, provide detailed explanations of the predominance and pervasiveness of sexist organizational norms that enable harassing behavior—and offer a thorough critique of the structures and practices that support and reproduce these norms. When sexist organizational norms are linked...

This article places ambiguity at the centre of Human Resource Management theory and practice of organizational culture and advances a multi‐dimensional framework that makes productive use of tensions between cultural integration and differentiation. Providing an illustrative analysis of Greenland Police, we identify a clash between a strong integra...

In the wake of the financial crisis, Danish retail bankers have experienced a marked increase in mundane administrative tasks, which do not conform to what they expect their work lives to be. Seeking to understand how the bankers cope with this, the paper conducts a qualitative inquiry into the identity work of Danish retail bankers, focusing on th...

During the COVID-19 pandemic, communication with the public has been a central concern for state actors. One important question has been how to best use social media to ensure the sufficient uptake of their advice and recommendations to the public. With regard to such strategic communicative aims, a significant amount of attention has been previous...

Queer parrhesia is an activist mode of speaking truth to power that destabilizes dominant societal positions and their opposition. We develop this concept and illustrate one of its registers, parodic paranoia, through a close reading of the whistleblower and transactivist Chelsea Manning’s bid to run for U.S. Senate in the 2018 Democratic primaries...

In this paper, we explore the politics of trust in alternative organizations, understood as counter-hegemonic collectives characterized by an equal commitment to individual autonomy and collective solidarity. Although trust is rarely theorized in studies of alternative organizations, it is frequently claimed to be the glue that holds such collectiv...

This paper proposes that being alternative is not a question of adhering to certain principles or applying certain practices, but rather a question of freedom. It does so by exploring three empirical cases of alternative organizing, namely the sustainable fin-tech start-up SusPens, teachers of mindfulness meditation and the UK minor party Independe...

What are the alternatives to currently dominant forms of economic organizing? And how can researchers help promote alternatives that offer hope for a more sustainable future? The present chapter begins by examining how these questions are currently addressed in the fields of critical management studies, diverse economies, and alternative organizati...

Diversity management efforts often turn diversity issues into a business case, thereby depoliticizing these issues and shying away from more political concerns of inequality and discriminating norms of difference. In this study, we explore the performative potential of activist practices to promote the repoliticization of organizational diversity w...

As organizational actors invoke and create the past, present and future of their organizational contexts in support of proposed decisions, the rhetorical framing of time is central to decision-making. To explain how such rhetorical framing occurs, this paper explores kairos as a conceptualization of the duality of encountering and enabling “the dec...

For public health promotion to succeed, popular support is necessary and the chosen policies and measures have to be perceived as legitimate by the public. In other words, health authorities need to build on and sustain established trust when they recommend a certain policy. When the policy is criticized, this trust is challenged, and the authoriti...

As illustrated by the COVID-19 pandemic, risk and crisis communication are crucial responsibilities of modern governments. Existing research on risk and crisis communication points to the importance of trust, both as a resource in and an end goal of communicative activities. In this paper, we argue that revisiting the classical rhetorical concept o...

Opinion polls have documented a considerable public skepticism towards a COVID-19 vaccine. Seeking to address the vaccine skepticism challenge this essay surveys the research on vaccine hesitancy and trust building through the lens of the rhetorical situation and points towards five broad principles for a content strategy for public health communic...

Building on critical approaches that understand algorithms in terms of communication, culture and organization, this paper offers the supplementary conceptualization of algorithms as organizational figuration, defined as material and meaningful sociotechnical arrangements that develop in spatiotemporal processes and are shaped by multiple enactment...

The ambition of integrating national economies into global value chains (GVCs) has become a staple of agricultural and industrial policies of the world’s least-developed countries. Working with Malawi as a representative case of such national policies of value chains for development (VCDs), we investigate how the national ambition of GVC integratio...

The aim of the following paper is to nuance the way in which mindfulness meditation, understood as a set of practices aimed at moment-tomoment awareness, is generally perceived in critical management studies as well as the broader critical social sciences. According to the general consensus, self-development practices thus produce various individua...

Applying a conceptual framework of hyphenation, understood as the organization of racialized subjects, this paper investigates rhetorical strategies for working existing hyphens as practiced within an Action Aid Denmark initiative to train young people to become public opinion leaders in anti-discrimination matters. We identify three such rhetorica...

In this introduction to the special issue on critical performativity and alternative organization we provide a brief historico-theoretical sketch of the key concepts involved and point to ongoing pertinent debates in the field of critical management studies. We also present the articles included in the issue, which all explore aspects of how critic...

This article contributes to the emergent field of corporate activism by exploring how corporate advertising voices, or is interpreted by the media as voicing, Trump resistance – that is, sympathy with anti-Trump protests and dismay at the politics of the White House incumbent. In so doing, we first situate corporate activism in relation to the more...

This article contributes to the theory of rhetorical institutionalism ( Green & Li, 2011 ) by considering the relationship between institutional entrepreneurs and the institutional fields in which they operate as configured by rhetorical strategies. Thus, we posit that the legitimacy of institutional entrepreneurs and institutional fields, respecti...

While Roberto Bolaño never explicitly engaged with the scholarly field of organization studies, the introductory chapter of this edited volume playfully speculates as to what Bolaño might have thought of the field had he come into contact with it and its modes of writing. The introduction surveys actually existing encounters between organization st...

Climate – Chaos – Trump – Brexit – Terror: the apocalypse looms large in the Zeitgeist. Could and should this not provide the fulcrum for renewing the imaginative range of organization studies? In this volume, we bring together scholars who have taken Roberto Bolaño’s visionary novel 2666 as a starting point for reflections, provocations, and chall...

Taking higher education to be an arena in which professional and social interaction has a special propensity to overlap, this paper investigates university students’ experiences and perceptions of sexual harassment. Based on survey data, we find varying responses according to their gender and nationality, indicating that men and Danish students are...

Through a study of the so-called GamerGate controversy, this article argues that a new dynamic of affective intensification is currently instating itself in the digital organization of not only highly collaborative industries, such as that of gaming, but of society as such. This dynamic may best be understood and conceptualized through reconsiderat...

Building on postcolonial critical organization and development studies, this paper explores the neo-colonial drive of a global development initiative. The New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition (NA) was launched in 2012 and provides a governance framework for partnerships between donors, governments, and companies that applies principles and...

What may popular cultural depictions of socio-political institutions tell us of the institutions they portray? More particularly, how are institutionalized bodies configured, discursively and materially, in filmic representations of bodily institutionalization? In order to offer possible answers to these questions, Norholm and Kirkegaard analyse wa...

In this article, we study pole dancing as a potential site of feminist theorization. Finding that instructors at pole dancing studios figure themselves in and through tensions between empowering feminine sexuality and the taint of sexualized labour, we discuss the productive potential of these tensions in terms of postfeminist discourse, on the one...

Focusing on discourses of parental leave, we explore how certain bodies became visible and valuable in work contexts, whereas others are neglected/rejected. To this end, we study “the work-body relation as an indeterminate symbolic-material object constituted in communication” (Ashcraft, Knowing work through the communication of difference: a revis...

This chapter analyses the military uniform as a material and symbolic gendered marker of identity and belonging. It investigates the ways in which the military uniform affectively relates body possibilities of enacting profession with gendered identities. Taking the intersection of affect and discourse as our point of departure, we conceptualize an...

The Women’s March is arguably the most important counter-narrative to Trump’s post-truth regime, but does it also present a leadership alternative to his populist and authoritarian style? And is this alternative necessarily better than currently dominant social formations? In this paper, we argue that the Women’s March is partially configured by si...

Can one sell any positive value of Trump’s presidency to an academic audience? The editors of this special series invited polemical essays (Robinson and Bristow, 2017), but maybe asking readers to consider the merit of Trump is going a little too far? We put forward the argument here that as critical scholars we simply cannot allow ourselves to be...

Queer scholars and activists share a central predicament with critical management studies: how to avoid the dangers of self-defeat. That is, how can one make a critical difference without becoming embroiled with or turning into the powers that be? This chapter offers suggestions for how to remain critical and queer by first introducing the notion o...

There is a deep discrepancy between political actors’ official calls for public debate in and on the European Union and the debates in which European publics actually partake. Top-down invitations to debate in the deliberative mode leave the citizens cold, and political actors are unable or unwilling to listen to, let alone engage with, emotionally...

In this article we argue that although there has been an intensified exploration of how organizations strategize within the field of strategic communication, there seems to be a key component missing, namely questioning who these organizations are and become in the process of strategizing. Strategic communication implicitly, perhaps even unintentio...

At der er en forbindelse mellem retorik og kultur er ingen opsigtsvækkende påstand. Men hvordan kan denne forbindelse beskrives, og hvordan kan retorisk kritik bidrage til kulturstudier? Det er denne artikels hovedspørgsmål. Artiklen tager udgangspunkt i Barbara Johnstones tre perspektiver på forholdet mellem retorik og kultur: det tværkulturelle,...

In 2010 the Danish artist Søren Thilo Funder was in Cairo to produce the art film Disastrous Dialogue. As Funder set to work he had a foreboding about how politically charged the piece might be. When he cut the film, however, events had exceeded his most fateful premonitions, reshaping the interpretative context completely. The changes in Egyptian...

While the Basel Accords of 1988 and 2004 (Basel I and Basel II) ostensibly set out to regulate bank risk at the international level, they were effectively in the grip of neoliberal beliefs in the self-regulating potential of free markets. In 2009-2011, the Basel Accords were revised once more with the intent of establishing financial regulations th...

Purpose – The meaning of scandals like “Liborgate” is not given beforehand; it is constructed in the course of framing contests. The purpose of this paper is to provide a nuanced framework for understanding such framing contests by re-conceptualizing them as rhetorical struggles. Design/methodology/approach – A conceptual framework that combines m...

In this volume on political argumentation, the study of argument takes place within a rhetorical framework. As such, it is a contribution to the study of argumentation-in-context with an explicit rhetorical approach. Rather than focusing on the poor quality of political participation and political understanding by citizens, this volume explores how...

Based on a mixed-method case study of online communication about the Danish pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk, this article argues that online communication plays out as a centrifugal narration process with centripetal consequences. Through a content analysis of communication about Novo Nordisk, three dominant online meaning constructions that pr...

Forecasts are central to processes of market formation; they partake in the performativity of markets by visualising market developments and directing market actors' gaze towards these developments. Thus, forecasting is a certain way of looking that may be said to bring into being what it sees - market formation in the future tense, so to speak. In...

Questions of agency in text-audience relations are less studied than other aspects of rhetorical agency. We suggest conceptualizing and analyzing the relationship between texts and audiences from the perspective of performativity, as it has been developed by Judith Butler. Thus, we argue that texts invite audiences to take up subject positions, und...

Managerial discourses on diversity invoke goals of inclusion and emancipation of suppressed individuals and groups as well as objectives of creating benefits for organizations and society. Partially due to this two-fold emphasis, diversity discourses may, however, be as restricting as they are liberating to the subjects of which they speak. In this...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to re‐conceptualize the relations between rhetorical strategies and material practices in the processes whereby leaders create or change organizational cultures. Design/methodology/approach The authors compare and contrast two broad perspectives on cultural change in organizations. The first perspective is info...

Even as Danish banks are seeking to diversify in terms of the people they bring in and the careers they offer, existing employees who have taken ‘alternative career paths’ are expected to account for the ways in which they relate to the still powerful norm of ‘the banker’. Relying on the theoretical assumption that subject positions are established...

Media representations of the EU provide significant clues as to how citizens make sense of the EU/Europe, wherefore analyses of such representations are central to European studies as such. This paper aims to explain how the media represented the EU at the onset of the European constitutional process. To that end the paper employs a modified versio...

The use of video games for advertising purposes is persuasive communication which directly involves the recipient in the construction of an argument. This form is becoming increasingly common, and the present article explores the phenomenon of game-based advertising. We begin by discussing the increased reliance on participatory and digital rhetori...

The European Convention succeeded in creating a proposal for foundational reforms of the European Union that, with few alterations, became the Treaty Establishing a Constitution for Europe. However, the Convention did not spark the broad public debate which was also part of its mandate, and therefore the constitutional treaty was not generally know...

This article explores the co-constitutive relationship between individual and collective actors and texts. Identity formation is often studied by means of discourse analysis, which explains how subjects are positioned in and through recurrent features of discourse. The present article suggests that attention to such discursive regularities be suppl...

Philosophy and Rhetoric 38.3 (2005) 248-258 "I actually like this book a lot, but I am not sure how comfortable I am with liking it," wrote William Keith (1995, 488) in a review of the original 1993 edition of Steve Fuller's Philosophy, Rhetoric, and the End of Knowledge (PREK), in which rhetoric is invited to participate in the interdisciplinary r...