Showing Legitimacy: The Strategic Employment of Visuals in the Legitimation of New Organizations

Entrepreneurs commonly engage in discursive activities to pursue the legitimacy of their new organizations. Previous studies on this pursuit have essentially been focused on verbal language and there is limited understanding of how other communication modes, such as the visual, offer specific potentials for influencing legitimation audiences. With the contemporary pervasiveness of digital documents and online environments that often employ the visual mode, this gap has become more relevant. To address it, this study is guided by the following research question: how do entrepreneurs use the visual mode of communication to legitimize their new ventures? Building on the case of a new organization, this study shows that specific features of the visual mode of communication are especially well suited to sustaining legitimation in particular ways. While previous research has mostly remained on a conceptual level, this study empirically advances the understanding of visual discursive legitimation.

The Outcomes of Fifth-Grade Emergent Bi/Multilinguals’ Introduction to a Visual Metalanguage When Constructing Scientific Explanations in Hong Kong

The visual mode provides emergent bi/multilinguals an essential resource to construct scientific explanations. Yet, while a metalanguage is used to describe the written mode of scientific language such as, claim, evidence, reason; there is little research that makes students aware of the metalanguage of a visual mode. We propose an introduction to the visual metalanguage will ensure emergent bi/multilinguals better access to the visual mode. This study employs an instrumental case study to examine the introduction of visual metalanguage to a fifth-grade science class. Two cameras record ten emergent bi/multilinguals as they construct scientific explanations in nine lessons. We use a framework informed by social semiotics to analyse the meanings made. The data revealed that an awareness of the visual metalanguage led to an enhanced commitment to illustrate the explanation of the phenomenon, illuminated key concepts and provided more context to the audience. In addition, teacher questioning became more focused.

Semiotic Analysis of Dove’s Femvertising

This qualitative study aimed to know in what ways the verbal (oral mode) and non-verbal (visual mode and gestural mode) semiotic resources help Dove meet the criteria of femvertising. The study used the Multimodal approach to help analyze the data. The writer collected and analyzed the data from Dove’s My Beauty My Say video. The findings showed that the verbal semiotic resources help Dove meet the criteria of femvertising by orally informing the audiences about the problems and arguments that are faced by the women in the video and how they responded to the problems in order to empower all the women. Meanwhile, the non-verbal semiotic resources help Dove meet the criteria of femvertising by revealing women in the authentic form and outside of traditional gender stereotypes so that they can deliver predominantly pro-female messages that can empower themselves and other women who are facing the similar problems as they do. The non-verbal semiotic resources are delivered by using the gestures (e.g. facial expression and body language) and objects (e.g. outfits, dominated background color, focus of the camera) in the video. In conclusion, I observe these semiotic resources are important to help Dove meet the criteria of femvertising. Keywords: Femvertising, Multimodal, Verbal semiotic resources, Non-verbal semiotic resources

A Cognitive Linguistic Study of the Persuasive/Attention Strategies Used in Selected American English E-Advertisements

The present paper aims to examine the use of the persuasive rules in texts and images to determine the role of these visual modes in recalling or adding what they mention. Such a study helps set clearly which visual mode is much more convincing, the image or the text. Scholars generally agreed that the visual mode is more persuasive. However, such a statement is general as it does not state exactly which type of visual mode is more convincing. Accordingly, the research questions highlighted here are: What are the persuasive strategies invested in any of these two visual modes, texts and images? And, what is the role these visual modes play to enhance the sense of persuasion? To achieve the objectives, the researchers will adopt the cognitive linguistic theory of frame semantics by Fillmore (1995). Since the study is qualitative, the study’s data will be limited to four randomly selected American English advertisements posted on Facebook. Findings have revealed that the number of the evoked frame units is unlimited and subjective, reflecting, as a result, a person’s imagination power, his needs, and desires. The study has concluded that the visual, written text is more persuasive than the pictures and photos. The text reflects a bricolage of various persuasive strategies that help pull the attention. Besides, the images provided played a vital role, though secondary to the texts, supporting the textual information and flavor it realistically.

Beyond the Visible, the Material and the Performative: Shifting Perspectives on the Visual in Organization Studies

Visual organizational research has burgeoned over the past decade. Despite an initially hesitant engagement with visuality in organization and management studies, it is now only proper to speak of a ‘visual turn’ in this domain of scholarly inquiry. We wish to take the opportunity provided by the Perspectives format to engage with prominent work published in Organization Studies, in appreciation of the diversity of approaches to the visual in organizational research, and highlight some generative tensions across this body of work. In particular, we have scrutinized six articles based on their treatment of signification (how the visual mode enables meaning-making and meaning-sharing in and around organizations), manifestation (how visual organizational artefacts and their properties relate to affordances) and implication (how visualization practices produce organizational outcomes). Inspired by the frictions and gaps across these articles, we developed three distinct perspective shifts that highlight the importance of the invisible, the immaterial and the performance within visualization. We conclude with a comparative matrix that maps different conceptualizations of visualization, and suggest opportunities for future research based on how we see the field of visual organizational studies evolving.

A Cognitive Linguistic Study of the Persuasive/Attention Strategies Used in Selected American English E-Advertisements

The present paper aims to examine the use of the persuasive rules in texts and images to determine the role of these visual modes in recalling or adding what they mention. Such a study helps set clearly which visual mode is much more convincing, the image or the text. Scholars generally agreed that the visual mode is more persuasive. However, such a statement is general as it does not state exactly which type of visual mode is more convincing. Accordingly, the research questions highlighted here are: What are the persuasive strategies invested in any of these two visual modes, texts and images? And, what is the role these visual modes play to enhance the sense of persuasion? To achieve the objectives, the researchers will adopt the cognitive linguistic theory of frame semantics by Fillmore (1995). Since the study is qualitative, the study’s data will be limited to four randomly selected American English advertisements posted on Facebook. Findings have revealed that the number of the evoked frame units is unlimited and subjective, reflecting, as a result, a person’s imagination power, his needs, and desires. The study has concluded that the visual, written text is more persuasive than the pictures and photos. The text reflects a bricolage of various persuasive strategies that help pull the attention. Besides, the images provided played a vital role, though secondary to the texts, supporting the textual information and flavor it realistically.

Verbal and multimodal metaphorical patterns in Wikipedia migration discourse

The use of metaphors in the refugee discourse since 2015 has so far mostly been explored in newspapers in different EU countries. In this study, we combine linguistic discourse metaphor analysis with a corpus-based approach, complementing qualitative and quantitative corpus evidence from Wikipedia migration corpus to explore verbal and multimodal metaphorical patterns. As a multimodal and multilingual hypertext, Wikipedia, represents a highly relevant source of information and a unique source for the multimodal and cross-linguistic discourse linguistic analysis. In this paper metaphorical expressions are considered as a transtextual discursive phenomenon in the light of Foucaudian tradition. The results of the study show that the analyzed migration discourse in Wikipedia is like the newspaper migration discourse predominantly structured by metaphorical patterns that draw from the source domains water flow/natural catastrophes as well as military/warfare. These source domains are conventionally used in relation to a wide range of target domains (multivalency), however, they play a constitutive role in the analyzed discourse by providing a specific view of events and emphasizing certain aspects and evaluations. The patterning of water flow metaphors across Wikipedia articles and talk pages is in multimodal metaphors extended, elaborated and reinforced in visual mode, referring to those migrating as a flow, wave, influx. However, especially on Wikipedia talk pages Wikipedians point to the dehumanization of those fleeing and the securitization of migration through metaphorical expressions as a problematic linguistic discourse practice

Where Blackness dies: the aesthetics of a massacre and the violence of remembering

This article focuses on the presence of ‘Blackness’ in Latin America, and the role/location of ‘Blackness’ in the necropolitics of Mexico, in particular, as a visual mode of aestheticizing violence in the aftermath of the 2010 Tamaulipas massacre of 72 undocumented migrants. As an act of remembering the victims, Mexican journalists, writers, and activists created a digital altar: 72 Migrantes. Focusing on photography and narrative as visual frames of Blackness, this article analyzes the representation of Black bodies in the digital altar to conceptualize Blackness as: a constitutive part of violent landscapes; a symptom and supplement of that violence; and, conversely, the location itself from which to critique that violence. At stake is a call for Blackness to be read within hemispheric Latin Americanist visual studies as a locus for understanding antisociality and critical race theory by closely studying the role of the human, social death, and the aesthetics of remembrance. Over 10 years after the massacre, the arguments raised in this article both implicitly and explicitly underscore the need to conceptualize contemporary Blackness and death in the wake of the growing anti-racism activism, Black Lives Matter, and the disproportionate number of people of color who have died as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Visual Arts: Protestant

The story of Protestant visual art begins well before Luther posted the 95 Theses. It is a story bound up with iconoclastic revision and destruction as well as with new ways of telling the Christian story in a distinctly Protestant visual mode. In the centuries since the Reformation, artists have emphasized prophetic themes such as the peaceable kingdom, the abolition of slavery, the suffering of women, and the plight of the homeless.

Picturing a Thousand Unspoken Words

I explore how empathetic visual argument may be the mode best suited for eliciting appropriate force to the reasons given by arguers who face systematic identity prejudices. In the verbal mode, this force is often skewed through epistemic injustice (Fricker 2007), argumentative injustice (Bondy 2010), and discursive injustice (Kukla 2010). Highlighting their reliance on the Aristotelian sense of enthymeme, I show how visual arguments are highly context specific. Using Ian Dove’s Visual Scheming (2016) and the theory of the Retort collective (2004) via case study, I demonstrate how the visual mode can leave the appropriate force in the arguer’s control.