The business corporation is explored as a reflexive cultural form shaped through complex and ongoing sign processes. The concern specifically is with the dynamic whereby external representations become internal to the corporation, shaping its form and operations, and, correspondingly, internally produced representations get projected outward into the world, mingling with other representations to influence how the corporation is construed. Seven contributions to this Signs and Society supplement are organized along a continuum—from the point of what is metaphorically conceptualized as the origo to the terminus, that is, from those studying the corporation as shaped through external representations, on the one end, to those presenting a view of how the corporation emerges through representations it projects outward on the other end.

This essay draws on fieldwork conducted in a workshop organized in New York City by an innovation consultancy group and attended by representatives of different business corporations. In this workshop, participants are supposed to learn a set of innovation techniques for generating new products and services and to become convinced that there can be added value in buying the consultancy group’s services. The task of the consultancy group embodies a basic cultural contradiction because innovation is widely associated with notions that derive from a modern Romantic ethos of creativity, which itself connotes resistance to routinization. To overcome this contradiction the facilitators engage the participants in ritual semiosis. They orchestrate densely multilayered and multimodal discursive practices that reflexively consolidate a macrosociological order, which opposes a Romantic ethos and a professional ethos, and that dynamically figurate transformations in the microsociological context of the participants’ role-inhabitance with respect to innovation—from their role-inhabitance of a Romantic ethos at the beginning of the workshop to their entailed role-inhabitance of a professional ethos at the workshop’s end.

This thirteen-year ethnography investigates how two Wall Street banks instantiated dualism in practice and what the evolving consequences were for bankers and the organizations that they joined after their careers at the banks. The banks dualistically split visible controls that targeted the mind, such as autonomy and work-life balance narratives, from unobtrusive controls that targeted the body, bypassed the mind, and intensified the pace of work in ways that bankers experienced as self-chosen. These practices caused evolving forms of dualistic embodiment. During the first four years, bankers identified with their minds and treated their bodies as unproblematic objects. Starting with year 4, body breakdowns occurred; the body imposed itself as an antagonist. Desperate to perform, bankers pushed harder, which caused more severe breakdowns that eventually forced some to treat the body as a knowledgeable subject that can direct action. The bankers implemented the banks’ practices in the organizations they joined subsequently, intending to enhance autonomy, but unintentionally replicating indiscriminate overwork for all participants. As they experienced more severe breakdowns, some bankers followed their bodies’ guidance into new ways of living. Dualism thus followed a dialectic pattern, first intensifying the body repression until breakdowns turned passive bodies into revolutionary forces.

This article addresses the social, material, and practical dimensions by which intertextuality is managed in a corporate setting. Managing intertextuality entails more than the circulation of entextualized fragments—it involves the everyday ways in which individuals come to negotiate with environments saturated and defined by textual objects. Based on fieldwork at a Korean brand consulting firm, I chart a range of ways that employees took different stances to intertextual practice—from how they defined relationships with their business partners to how they disciplined internal activities, even to how documents became “leaked” from within the office. This article advocates for a broader view of the practical and material dimensions of intertextuality, the diverse ways individuals can engage with texts, and the importance of considering intertextuality in the construction of managerial figures.

A condensation symbol is a complex and relatively discrete bundle of icons, indices, and symbols, in the Peircean sense, that calls up affect and directs that affect toward social ends. This article analyzes a corporate motivational video produced by Harley-Davidson, Inc., an American motorcycle manufacturing company, as a condensation symbol. In addition to analyzing the formal features of the video, the article furnishes evidence, in the form of interview data, that the symbol is capable of influencing the orientations of individuals who view it. The “symbolic force” of the video is the force of interest that causes the orientation to the company carried by the symbol to be transmitted to its viewers. In this sense, the video resembles the dominant ritual symbols described by Turner. The present research also suggests, however, that the video summons distinct kinds of affect in different individuals, exerting a differentiating effect within social space.

I use interactional sociolinguistics to explore how participants in a thirteen-month-long executive master’s program focused on leadership navigate leadership identities within the classroom, focusing on narratives of professional experience. As I will argue, narrators claim a professional identity semiotically by constructing a corporation and then claiming a position within or relative to it. Whereas in a related project I explore such work through the concept “discursive othering,” in this project I focus on narratives. Specifically, I examine how agency is accomplished in these narratives at several levels: first, within the world of the story, second, at the interactional level, and, finally, at the intertextual level. Ultimately, I will consider what implications all of these processes have on the discursive construction of leadership.

This paper discusses how a Hawaiian corporation planned to redevelop an existing town by using a community-based approach to urban design. It examines how local residents were enlisted into the corporate work procedures in the capacity of authors and how their ideas and beliefs expressed were semiotically transformed and inscribed into design renderings of the future town. Analyses focus on how the corporation discursively positions itself as a person relative to the locals, and how various ideas expressed linguistically regarding the town are used to visually draw specific town design features. What is shown is that in taking into account and synthesizing the views of both the corporation and the local residents (i.e., customers), a design of the future town emerges as representation of a corporate brand community. It is argued that developed in this manner, the town as a commodity is one in which it is prefigured as a sign of the corporate status and social role within the community, and also that which has the capacity to yield future returns to the corporation in both the metaphorical (i.e., brand mediation) and actual (i.e., leases and sales) sense.

This article discusses the variable construal that brand fractions exhibit in social practices around the world and their implications for the study of brand semiosis in social life. Whereas brands are sometimes imagined to be unitary objects with inherent power, the discussion shows that the significance of distinct brand fractions is formulated by distinct metasemiotic practices, only some of which are the practices of brand corporations. When brand fractions like trademarks are taken up in distinct social practices around the world, their significance is routinely reanalyzed through locale-specific metasemiotic frameworks, which formulate varied forms of life in societies around the world.