Voices in the Employee Magazine: A Critical Investigation

Modern day corporations are becoming the primary places where employees (and with them citizens) develop their identities. Various aspects of this increasing so-called corporate colonization of our life worlds have been investigated by scholars from within the field of critical organizational communication. Nevertheless, core theoretical aspects and substantial empirical expressions remain under-researched. In this paper, we isolate and investigate the phenomenon of voice in an instance of strategic corporate journalism. More specifically, we describe and critically discuss voice as a managerial means with which to mold employee identity formation. We begin by establishing a theoretical framework where we, against a background of critical organizational communication theory, integrate research-agenda relevant schools of thought. The theoretical aggregation underlying this paper is comprised of presentations and discussions of select cross sections of voice research literatures, paired with an adherence to a communication-as-constitutive approach to identity formation. Empirically, we conduct in-depth investigations into the constitution of voice in an issue of G Magazine, the employee magazine of the Grundfos Group. This research design allows us to empirically document a number of major findings: That who has a voice in the magazine is strictly regulated; what an actor is allowed to give voice to equally so; and that the amount of space allocated for any given voicer as well as the distribution of voicers over the course of the magazine is indicative of the stipulated strategic importance. Towards the end of the paper, these findings are critically reflected upon and put into perspective vis-à-vis their ramifications for employee identity formation.