In this article we introduce AMR's Special Topic Forum on Communication, Cognition and Institutions. We conceptualize the roots of cognitive, linguistic and communicative theories of institutions, and outline the promise and potential of a stronger communication focus for institutional theory. In particular, we outline a theoretical approach that puts communication at the heart of theories of institutions, institutional maintenance, and change, and we label this approach "communicative institutionalism." We then provide a brief introduction to the set of articles contained in this forum and describe the innovative theorizing of these articles in the direction of communicative theories of institutions. Finally, we sketch a research agenda and further steps and possibilities for theory and research integrating communication and institutions.

Putting Communication Front and Center in Institutional Theory and Analysis

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Editorial: Toward an EDI agenda in corporate communications

The UN Sustainable Development Goals as a North Star: How an intermediary network makes, takes, and retrofits the meaning of the Sustainable Development Goals

This empirical paper adopts a narrative approach to explain how a strategic goal of internationalization within a UK business school developed over a three year period and in particular how two conflicting institutional logics - a market logic and a professional logic - were given meaning and played out within a specific organizational context. The paper is in four parts. First, the theoretical framework explains the business school as characteristic of a professional organization, with a professional academic workforce, ambiguous strategic goals and multiple competing but legitimate demands. We then frame our methodological approach of narrative as a means of understanding how professional actors are co-opted into enabling organizational goals, even where these are perceived as antithetical to professional interests. We do this by showing how actors within organizations that exist with multiple, potentially competing institutional logics draw upon those logics and embed them in narratives to give meaning to their actions. Second, the research design, which followed the pursuit of an internationalization goal within a UK business school over three years, based on a dataset of three rounds of interviews, documentary analysis and meeting observations is explained, showing how we used a narrative approach for analysis. Third the results are presented as a series of co-existing and entwined narratives: organizational/managerial narratives, professional narratives of resistance, and professional narratives of engagement. Finally our findings show that narrative is a useful theoretical lens for explaining how multiple, ambiguous and conflicting strategic goals within professional organizations may coexist, enabling the organization to act both as a collective unit and also to fulfil the sometimes contradictory professional interests of its constituents. These findings contribute to understanding about strategy in professional organizations and also to narrative theory by showing how organizations may comprise multiple, entwined narratives, in which actors change roles according to their varying interests in the 'central' narrative.

Internationalization in a business school: Co-existing and entwined professional and organizational narratives

This study examines how the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) can be leveraged to facilitate strategic change towards sustainability involving multiple stakeholders in a pluralistic city environment. By drawing on an exemplary case study of the localisation of the SDGs in Bristol, a medium-sized UK city, we show how the goals can operate as a boundary object. In particular, we identify a pattern in which the discursive localisation of the SDGs moved from problematisation and visioning through strategising and structuring towards embedding and performing. In addition, we elaborate on the three tensions that the SDGs help participants to understand and use productively, that is, across scale, time and different ways of valuing. Our study contributes to research on strategic change in pluralistic settings, such as cities, by offering a nuanced account of the discursive use of the SDGs by organisations involved in a city’s sustainable development. Furthermore, by proposing a framework based on the specific tensions that play an important role in the discursive localisation, our study advances research on the role of city strategising and practice more generally.

Leveraging the Sustainable Development Goals as a boundary object in the City of Bristol

This paper empirically examines how firms have discursively adopted the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). More precisely, it studies firms' ability to constitute their organizational identity by way of associating their past, present, and future practices with the newly established Goals. By focussing on the temporal dynamics of change, this paper provides analytical clarity on the role “narrative fidelity”.,The author collected all online available SDG-related communications, including financial and non-financial reports, of 29 large French multinationals throughout 2016 and 2017. These data were analysed using a systematic narrative approach incorporating open-ended coding cycles.,Four narratives were distilled: the descriptive narrative, which promotes general knowledge; the past narrative, which reinterprets the organizational past by retelling and reviewing actions; the present narrative, which associates prevailing organizational strategies with new categories; and the future narrative, which articulates and prioritizes new ambitions.,Current performativity theories in Corporate Social Responsibility scholarship focus solely on future narratives, such as “aspirational talk”, and fail to incorporate how revising and redefining past and present stories creates an imperative “fit” between an organization's identity and a new framework. This study goes beyond future narratives and contributes to our understanding of the dynamic nature of temporal narratives (past – present – future). By building on narrative fidelity, it shows how all four narratives are crucial, sequential steps that help build a new corporate identity.

Narrative fidelity: making the UN Sustainable Development Goals fit

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Narrative fidelity: making the UN Sustainable Development Goals fit