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4 - The Discursive Construction of Newcomers

A Critical Examination of the Onboarding Program of a Global Pharmaceutical Company

from Part II - Language Awareness in Business and the Professions

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2022

By
Peter Kastberg  and
Marianne Grove Ditlevsen
Edited by
Erika Darics
Erika Darics
Affiliation:
Rijksuniversiteit Groningen, The Netherlands
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Summary

We present a critical investigation of an organization’s onboarding communication, i.e. the initial phase of an organization’s socialization process for new employees. This process facilitates the newcomer’s acquisition of appropriate role behaviors related to the resolution of role demands, the development of work skills, and integration into the organization’s norms and values. We draw on a theoretical backdrop of corporate communication, strategic HRM and organizational socialization in order to frame onboarding as an organizational socialization practice. We have established a corpus comprising texts, images and videos from the Welcome Onboard website of the global pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk. Our methodological lens is one of discourse analysis from a critical perspective with a view to how an individual’s identity is constructed discursively. The analysis revealed one overall pattern. We point to various ramifications, both for the individual newcomer and for society as a whole. We end our paper by firmly situating this work in a setting where it may be put to constructive use, namely in the training of managers of tomorrow.

Keywords

Organizational socializationOnboarding communicationStrategic human resource managementIdentity construction
Type
Chapter
Information
Language Awareness in Business and the Professions , pp. 62 - 82
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

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