This article examines the embeddedness of corporate social responsibility (CSR) communications in strategic planning. By drawing on the idea that talk and texts about CSR are an essential part of responsibility practices, I study how CSR aspirations—responsibility-related organizational self-descriptions, goals, and ideals that the organization cannot yet live up to or that the organizational constituents deem necessary to maintain—are intertwined with strategy texts and strategic episodes. Conducting a qualitative case study on a series of biennial strategy processes over a 20-year (...) period, I show how CSR aspirations are established in authoritative strategy documents during stakeholder interactions, elaborated in consecutive strategic episodes, extended to new business areas, and evaluated in subsequent communications. These findings contribute to the CSR and strategy literature by showing how (a) aspirational talk can be established and perpetuated through recurrent communicative processes, (b) stakeholder engagement in CSR issues can influence strategy texts and how strategy texts become a part of intertextual organizational communications, and (c) strategic context can be conducive to progressive performativity. (shrink)

This article examines care plan meetings between professionals and clients held in a mental health supported housing unit. The article asks what is discussed about the recording of the plan and how it is discussed in the meetings. The study focuses on intertextual institutional interaction. The methodical tools used are genre and the genre chain. As a result of the analysis, we gain information on how the plan form, as a product of joint discussion through the meeting interaction, becomes the (...) basis of the care plan. In addition, the article highlights at which stages and for what purposes the care plan is discussed, and how earlier texts and discussions about the client’s situation serve as resources for making the plan. Plan forms have a significant role in directing the meeting conversation, the transferring of the information and producing and maintaining the care plan discourse. (shrink)

Organisational planning processes often materialise as a series of meetings, where the future of the organisation is jointly discussed and negotiated as a part of local decision-making sequences. Using conversation and discourse analytical approaches, this article investigates how proposals concerning the future can also be resisted by employing a specific device, a conditional construction. The data for the study originate from a city organisation, whose customer services are being developed. The results show how the conditional constructions work in two interrelated (...) ways. First, by introducing a problematic hypothetical situation, they outline the undesirable consequences of the proposed idea in real work life. Second, by highlighting the experience of the customer, they present the organisation as benefitting from the potential rejection of the idea. The article discusses the implications of the results for the study of proposal and decision-making sequences in longitudinal, multisemiotic discursive processes. (shrink)