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Regimenting Circulation: A Case Study of Mediatization in Corporate Communication

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2025

Kyung-Nan Koh
Kyung-Nan Koh*
Affiliation:
Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, Republic of Korea
*
Contact Kyung-Nan Koh at Semiosis Research Center, Faculty Bldg Rm. 601, Imun-ro 107, Dongdaemun-gu, Seoul 02450, Republic of Korea (knkoh@hufs.ac.kr).
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Abstract

Communication is necessary work and imagined want in corporations. Using firsthand data from a midsize corporation, this essay discusses the professional practices of corporate communication as a metadiscursive project of proleptically shaping the circulation of representations of the corporation. In corporate work, activities spoken of as “communication” are segmented and ritualized with respect to who the corporation seeks to engage in discursive and semiotic frameworks of participation and which communicative media it employs. The ways in which various communicative scenarios are imagined and framed in the design and use of corporate media are examined, as is the manner in which the boundary of the corporation’s communicative activity is drawn and (re)defined through metapragmatic regimentations of future participatory encounters. The expertise of corporate communication practitioners involves the ability to formulate the corporation as the mediatized center of the groups with which it communicates and to devise messages that target diverse groups as addressees.

Type
Articles
Information
Signs and Society , Volume 10 , Issue 3 , Fall 2022 , pp. 388 - 402
Copyright
Copyright © 2022 Semiosis Research Centre at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies. All rights reserved.

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Footnotes

I am deeply grateful to Asif Agha for his tremendous generosity in helping to phrase my ideas here in not only a receivable but also a precise manner. I had the good fortune to attend a graduate seminar where he presented his conceptualization of mediatization. I then felt it curiously relevant to my own fieldwork observations; but it has taken me more than a decade to figure out how to fully apply it to the practice discussed here. This essay also benefits from comments received during the 2021 Semiotic Anthropology Conference held at the University of Pennsylvania. Last, but not least, I owe thanks to my informants—in particular, TG, KK, VP, DY, and DC.

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