“Ready to roll up their sleeves” – Creating scenarios of unity in employee magazines

Abstract

Based on a research project dealing with a large automobile company in Germany, the article presents a case study of what we call a “discourse of unity”. We choose the term “discourse of unity” to describe a particular type of discourse that tries to attain consent and promote a form of identification spanning the varied perspectives of organizational members. In this way, the discourse seeks to play down latent struggles by offering symbolic participation and unification and by dealing with inconsistencies in a specific way. Empirically, we analyse a corpus of three different employee magazines published between 2004 and 2005. The magazines relate to various configurations in connection with the company – to a specific factory site, to a product line, and to the global corporation. In analysing the discursive and linguistic features of the articles, we will identify four main characteristics of an organizational “discourse of unity”. These are, in each case, a specific way of addressing time, of appealing to the readers’ common sense of rational behaviour, to their affects and emotions, and, finally, of thematising the life-world of the employees. We will argue that all three different magazines are both vehicles and producers of such a discourse, of one which attempts to create and support symbolic and normative control even in “hard times”.