IMCA Research Seminar - Lars Thøger Christensen (Copenhagen Business School ) on Talk-Action Dynamics: Modalities of Aspirational talk
Institute of Marketing and Communication Management
Date: 18 March 2021 / 12:30 - 14:00
The Institute of Marketing and Communication Management (IMCA) extends an invitation to its upcoming IMCA Research Seminar:
Talk-Action Dynamics: Modalities of Aspirational talk
by Lars Thøger Christensen, Copenhagen Business School
Lars Thøger Christensen (Ph.D.), Professor of Communication and Organization at Copenhagen Business School (Denmark). Christensen's research interests include issues of organizational identity, corporate social responsibility, hypocrisy, and transparency.
The presentation will shed light on talk-action dynamics in the context of organizations, focusing in particular on situations where the talk concerns complex organizational aspirations, that is, situations where the implied action takes considerable effort to unfold and therefore extends into an unknown future. Using corporate social responsibility (CSR) as recurrent exemplar, we address talk-action dynamics in four different modalities of aspirational CSR talk: exploration, formulation, implementation and evaluation. By conceptualizing the precarious relationship between talk and action in each of these modalities, the paper disentangles talk and action, all the while acknowledging that the two are mutually intertwined. Hereby, the presented paper will extend theories of communicative performativity, recovering the perlocutionary dimension and focusing on uptake beyond the moment in which the speech act is uttered.