Abstract - pure.au.dkpure.au.dk/portal/files/39699450/thesis_TheExtraMile_sog.pdf · Abstract ......

Abstract This paper aims to analyse how the Volvo Group (AB Volvo) communicates its organisational values and what

identification strategies the Group uses in its global employee magazine in order to create a stronger corporate

brand. The purpose of doing this research is to further shed light on the role of organisational identification, in

the context of employer branding and values communication. Also, by doing the research, organisations would

be provided with more insight into identification strategies and the role of value congruence on organisational

values.

The research is a Critical Discourse Analysis of the Volvo Group’s employee magazine and is based on a dual

epistemological approach, combining a social-constructivist approach with critical realism in order to best try to

capture discourse in late or hypered modernity.

The research shows AB Volvo uses several different identifications strategies, most of which revolving around

indirect arguments, anchored on the core values of the Group. There were also examples of how the group

approaches its history and tries to create a sense of pride and a global community, as it seems that the Group

believes that a strong culture, rooted in values, it the best way to move forward out of the financial crisis to

capture future successes.

One of the raised questions from this research was that a different approach to communication at times, such

as storytelling, might be beneficial in helping to solve the problem that the magazine seems to have, regarding

low levels of interest or trust from some of the reader-groups.

The main limitation of this paper is that it is limited in scope, as it only deals with one organisation and a

limited number of discourse items., However, it will work well in combination with, and add to, other research

of how organisations communicate values internally and how employees might be seen as a key stakeholder

group when building a strong corporate brand.

Keywords:

Corporate communication, employer branding, internal communication, organisational identification,

hypermodernity, time, values, magazine, value congruence

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank my academic supervisor, Mona Agerholm Andersen, for her input,

expertise and guidance in the making of this paper. I would also like to thank my good

friends, old and new, for all their support during my education and in relocating to a new

country, and for giving me a push when needed.

This paper is dedicated to my parents, to my grandparents, and to my siblings+1, for all their

love, support and encouragement from home. This paper is also especially dedicated to my

girlfriend and our children. Without her, nothing would ever happen.

I thank all of these people, of whom some are gone, for making me who I am.

...for my family.

Table of Contents Abstract ................................................................................................................................................... 2

1 Introduction .......................................................................................................................................... 5

1.1 Overview ........................................................................................................................................ 5

1.2 Problem formulation ..................................................................................................................... 6

1.3 Delimitations ................................................................................................................................. 9

2 Theoretical framework ......................................................................................................................... 9

2.1 Employer branding ........................................................................................................................ 9

2.2 Values and Organizational culture .............................................................................................. 12

2.4 Organisational identification ....................................................................................................... 18

2.5 Time/Temporality ........................................................................................................................ 21

2.6 Hypermodernity .......................................................................................................................... 24

3 Methodology ...................................................................................................................................... 29

4 Results ................................................................................................................................................ 34

4.1 Results of Discourse 1 (Magazine #2 -2010) ............................................................................... 34

4.2 Results of Discourse 2 (Magazine #1-2011) ................................................................................ 43

4.3 Results of Discourse 3 (Magazine #2-2011) ................................................................................ 47

5 Discussion ........................................................................................................................................... 51

5.1 Discourse 1 (Magazine #2-2010 .................................................................................................. 51

5.2 Discourse 2 (Magazine #1-2011) ................................................................................................. 57

5.3 Discourse 3 (Magazine #2-2011) ................................................................................................. 61

6 Conclusion .......................................................................................................................................... 69

7 References .......................................................................................................................................... 73

8 Appendix ................................................................................................. Error! Bookmark not defined.

Appendix 1 – Selection from Discourse 1 (issue #2-2010) .................... Error! Bookmark not defined.



9 Character count: ..................................................................................... Error! Bookmark not defined.

121.112 characters, excluding spaces (55 standard pages) .................. Error! Bookmark not defined.

SIGFÚS ÖRN GUÐMUNDSSON AUGUST 2011 AARHUS UNIVERSITY • BSS

5 MA CORPORATE COMMUNICATION

1 Introduction

1.1 Overview

Multinational corporations and international organisations increasingly make use of the benefits of implementing employer branding in their

strategies. The two main components of a successful employer branding strategy could be argued, are communication and culture. Minchington

(2005, 2007) posits how the purpose of this strategy is to help brand the organisation as a great place to work for the current employees and to the

external market such as active and passive candidates, customers, clients and other key stakeholders. The use of employer branding by organisations

becomes “a long-term strategy for attraction, engagement and retention of talent” (in Gehrels & Looij 2010:3).

In order to better tailor the messages and modes of engagement towards its employees, to successfully retain talent and adjust values and

expectations of staff, organisations would do better by fully realising the nature (the hopes and fears and realities) of their employees. In order to do

all this successfully, international organisations should try to adjust their value propositions towards the employees; the promise of the benefits an

organisation has to offer its stakeholders.

Even in a time of global recession not all companies suffer, so the retention of employees, managing of expectations, reducing uncertainty and

fostering organisational identification of employees becomes ever so important when battling through difficult or uncertain times.

For an organisation to fully understand its employees it should perhaps view its employees as hypermodern people. The notion of hypermodernity, as

the present and historical social era, especially in the information and consumer-driven societies such as Europe, North America, Australasia and

Japan (Lipovetsky, 2005) as to having, or being in transition of replacing post modernity, is argued to be a key concept in successfully addressing these

stakeholders. This could hold to be even truer after the economic downturn in the latter part of this decade.

Social thinkers and philosophers Gilles Lipovetsky, Paul Virilio and John Armitage, among others, have been on the forefront of that school of thought,

even though their approach is different to the subject of hypermodernity. Lipovetsky’s hypermodernity refers to a mode of modernity that is in a

hyper state, more of everything and in how there seem to be contradictory motives behind peoples’ actions, and this will be combined with Virilio’s

and Rosa’s discussions of the role of time/speed in our society and how it affects actions of people and organisations. Lipovetsky’s view is more on

the state of the person -the consumer, but Virilio and Armitage deal with what they call the hypermodern organisation.



In order to offer an anchor for international organisations onto which they can base their employer branding, some value-based hierarchies will be

discussed and related to the notion of hypermodernity. In order to better motivate employees, an organisation needs to appeal to them on a deeper

level. Organisations might do well to realise that they can use organisational values to motivate the behaviour of group members, as that is the

primary social function of values (Parsons, 1951).

By making sure that the organisational values in an international organisation are a good fit between the organisation and its employees, a higher

level of motivation and organisational identification can be achieved through values-based leadership1. The focus in organisations should therefore

not only be on keeping its employees content and satisfied, but to make them happy and engaged, as there hide the keys to organisational success

(Kjerulf, 2007).

Dawkins (2004) discussed how the encouragement of informal, but credible still, communication should not be underestimated, in neither power nor

reach, and employees were excellent communicators of organisational values. Dawkins’ research showed employees were phenomenally strong

advocates of organisations, having a wide reach among other stakeholder groups, and that the employees themselves were considered a source of

credible information in relation to their companies.

1.2 Problem formulation

Implications of hypermodernity upon employer branding plays a critical role in creating organisational identification. In order to better enable

companies, and other international organisations, to get the most out of their employees, it has been argued that happy and motivated employees

are the key factor in value-creation for organisations. When organisations keep up with the changing social temperature, the shift from

communicating with the post-modern employee towards engaging the hypermodern employee, they can realign organisational values and employee

identification to create a common ground for prosperity.

By reconceptualising employer branding as a co-constructed and co-negotiated set of values between management and current/potential employees,

as argued by Aggerholm, Andersen & Thomsen (2011), employees become a key stakeholder, rather than a means or a channel to fulfil a brand-

promise to external stakeholders. Aggerholm et al. then go on to define employer branding in sustainable organisations as:

1 http://blogs.wsj.com/management/2010/01/13/the-hole-in-the-soul-of-business/



Strategic branding processes which creates, negotiates and enacts sustainable relationships between an organization and its potential and existing employees under the influence of the varying corporate contexts with the purpose of co-creating sustainable values for the individual, the organization and

society as a whole. (Aggerholm et al., 2011:117).



This paper aims to analyse the employer-employee relationship of the Volvo Group by looking at how the management communicates its corporate

values to its employees in an employee magazine in order to foster organisational identification. The purpose of doing this is to further develop an

understanding of the organisational identification processes within employer/internal branding, as placed within the context of strategic HRM,

sustainability and corporate branding.

The Volvo Group was chosen because the management of the group tells in its vision and mission statements that it views its corporate culture as a

unique asset and that this culture plays a key role in creating value for customers and shareholders, by upholding the corporate values of quality,

safety and environmental care.2 The Volvo group is also a member of the Dow Jones Sustainability Index3, which indexes the top 300 global corporate

performers annually.

-The problem statement is therefore:

What identification strategies does the Volvo Group use to communicate its corporate values in its employee magazine, in order to improve

organisational identification with employees?

By analyzing ‘Global magazine, a staff magazine for Volvo Group employees’, by using Fairclough’s Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and then relating

the findings to relevant models and theories of employer branding, organisational identification, value congruence, and the social theory of

hypermodernity, or late-modernity, this research should shed more light on the process of employer branding in sustainable organisations4. And, by

doing so, organisations would be provided with further insight of implementing strategies that would help foster organisational identification of their

employees based on value congruence.

2 http://www.volvogroup.com/group/global/en-gb/volvo%20group/visionmission/Pages/visionmission.aspx

3 The Volvo Group is included in the Dow Jones Sustainability World Index (DJSI). Annually the DJSI assesses the 2,500 largest companies in the world on the basis of economic,

environmental and social criteria, with a focus on long-term shareholder value. The 300 highest-ranked companies, one of which is the Volvo Group, are included in the DJSI World. http://www.volvogroup.com/group/global/en-gb/newsmedia/corpnews/_layouts/CWP.Internet.VolvoCom/NewsItem.aspx?News.ItemId=88311&News.Language=en-gb

4 Here, the notion of ‘sustainability’, in relation to corporate strategy, as a functioning corporate philosophy, is harmonious with Van Marrewijk’s (2003) concept of ‘corporate

sustainability’. That entails that the notion of ‘Sustainable’, here, will represent a superior concept to ‘corporate social responsibility’. ‘CSR’, in return, can thus be defined as a discipline of implementations, which support sustainable vision. (Aggerholm et al.,2011:18).

http://www.volvogroup.com/group/global/en-gb/volvo%20group/visionmission/Pages/visionmission.aspx

http://www.volvogroup.com/group/global/en-gb/newsmedia/corpnews/_layouts/CWP.Internet.VolvoCom/NewsItem.aspx?News.ItemId=88311&News.Language=en-gb



1.3 Delimitations

The analysis is set up to find instances of the strategic use of organisational identification in the Global magazine, employee magazine of the

Volvo Group (AB Volvo) and will not deal with other subjects. The analysis and research materials are therefore limited in scope and purpose. The

analysis does not include discourse outside of what is detailed in the Methodology chapter and the approach to CDA, which was chosen for this

analysis, is built upon epistemological arguments combining social theory and discourse analysis (also detailed in the Methodology chapter.

2 Theoretical framework

2.1 Employer branding

Deephouse & Carter (2005), and King & Whetten (2008), argue how research and practice-based observation have shown a strong connection

to the idea that organisational reputation is one of the main drivers of success, and by using reputation as a tool of differentiation, while still

remaining legitimate, an organisation is more likely to succeed (Martin, 2009).

Empirical proof as discussed by Martin (2009:220), of an existing strong link between corporate reputations, brands and financial performance has

been emerging (Downing, 2002, 2004; Roberts & Downing, 2002) throughout the decade and imply that the value of a brand is thought to be worth

up to twice the book value of their tangible assets (Fombrum & Van Riel, 2003), and how that is likely to become an even bigger factor in competition

to control markets (Martin & Hetrick, 2006; Martin, 2009). This, a so called differentiation argument, is based on the resource-based view (RBV) of

organisational strategy and it shows how non-substitutable assets that are rare and difficult to imitate (like the assets of reputation and brand) create

greater profit and monetary gains for organisations that harbour these assets (Barney, 2001; Wright, Dunsford & Snell, 2001).

Employees should be seen as a central figure in corporate brand management, and their connection to the corporate brand is mostly dealt with within

the fairly recent body of literature of internal branding and employer branding. The main focus of internal branding is to make sure that the

employees deliver the brand promise to external stakeholders, and this is achieved by adopting and applying branding concepts inside an organisation

and fostering organisational identification of employees. On the other hand, employer branding is more a way for employers to make sure that they

recruit the right people into the organisation in the first place. The relationships between the concepts, and practises of internal branding and

employer branding have yet to be fully mapped in order to better understand them better (Foster, Punjaisri & Cheng, 2010).



Einwiller & Will (2002) argue that the main concerns of corporate branding are to be the systemic planned management of behaviour,

communication, and symbolism. The outcome should then be a positive and favourable reputation from the target audience of the organisation, and

more specifically, that the behaviour-aspect is to refer to the behaviour of the employees so that they may better understand the brand promise of

the organisation. The management of employee behaviour, together with making sure that there is an ongoing congruence between the vision of the

organisation, and the values of the employees is part of what Hatch & Schultz (2001) have argued, so that the vision and values of these two groups

can meet each other and thereby help to communicate a consistent brand image towards external stakeholders (Foster, Punjaisri & Cheng, 2010).

Several scholars (e.g. Byrne & Neuman, 1992; Cable & Judge, 1996; Judge & Cable, 1997) have pointed out the relationship between recruitment and

value congruence. In 2001, de Chernatony argued that this type of recruitment, that is to make sure that there are similarities between those that an

organisation is hiring and the values of the organisations could be a more viable way for recruiting new employees, rather than putting too much

focus on technical/operational skills of that new recruit. Edwards & Cable (2009), building upon previous research into values and value congruence

(cf. Megalino and Ravlin, 1998; Kristof, 1996; Schwartz, 1992; Chatman, 1989; Rokeach, 1973), define value congruence as “what refers to the

similarity between values held by individuals and organisations” (Edwards & Cable, 2009:655).

Since values are drivers of staff behaviour and are difficult to change, it is more viable to make sure that the new-hire is a better ‘fit’ in the first place

than wasting resources on trying to change something that may never change. Foster et al. found that the available literature on internal branding

focuses on influencing existing employees to deliver better on the brand promise, but the literature is not too specific on the actual ways of how to

best make sure that the organisation recruits the ‘right’ candidates, whose values fit the organisation, to begin with (Foster, Punjaisri & Cheng, 2010).

Knox & Freeman (2006) point out that a potential applicant may also be a current customer of an organisation and that organisations need to deal

with ever increasingly complex identities of stakeholders. Therefore, the aligning of corporate branding and employer branding in managing the

corporate reputation becomes an intricate part of managing the corporate brand (Foster, Punjaisri & Cheng, 2010: 403).

Now, if we look at how the brand promise affects new hires and retention of employees it is best to look into the relationship between the brand

promise and the psychological contract (Schein, 1985, Rousseau, 1995). When the employer fails to deliver his brand promise to the staff, and new

employees begin to look to validate that promise soon after entering the organisation, it will lead to negatively affected employees and to a higher

turnover of staff if that promise is not fulfilled (Schein, 1985, Bachhaus & Tikoo, 2004). Foster et al. (2010) argue that this shows how important it is

http://www.emeraldinsight.com/journals.htm?issn=1061-0421&volume=19&issue=6&articleid=1886248&show=html#idb20





for an organisation to provide accurate brand messages, about the culture, identities and values of the organisation to potential job candidates so that

they are more able to form a realistic psychological contract that reflects an accurate employment experience.



On January 7th, 2011, CNN published the results of a survey from The Conference Board5 in USA. 5000 households were polled for the survey and only

about 45% of people said they were satisfied with their jobs, this number is down from 61.1% in 1987. This number does not include the roughly 10%

of the nation that is unemployed at this time so it might be argued that the dissatisfaction is even higher than the numbers suggest.

Lynn Franco, director of the Consumer Research Center of The Conference Board said, in a prepared statement: “Through both economic boom and

bust during the past two decades, our job satisfaction numbers have shown a consistent downwards trend... [that] could spell trouble for the overall

engagement of U.S. employees and ultimately employee productivity“.6 She added that the drop in satisfaction was across all age and income levels

and that almost 25% of respondents did not expect to be in the same job within a year.

2.2 Values and Organizational culture

When dealing with internal branding functions, finding the fit between the values of the organisation and the values of the employee should

be seen as a task of big importance. The concept of values has recurrently been used (most notably Kluckhohn, 1951; Williams, 1970; Rokeach, 1973;

Hofstede, 1980; Schein, 1985) to shed light on the behaviour and attitudes of individuals and of the operation of organisations, institutions and

societies in general. Then, in the end of 1990’s and into the first decade of the 21st century, a systematic theory of the content and the organisation of

the value systems of individuals have been proposed and partially validated (Schwartz, 1992; Smith & Schwartz, 1997, in Schwartz et al., 2001B).

Corporate values can be designated as organisational values or organisational culture, as argued by Agle & Caldwell, 1999, and in the literature they

are defined “as a group of central values that arise from a group of shared beliefs, and that establish the philosophy and way of understanding the

organisation’s activity” (Broms & Gahmberg, 1983; Schein, 1985; in Cambra-Fierro et al., 2008:158).

Even though Schwartz et al. (2001B) find anomalies in validating, or fitting in, 5% of the world to their theory they do provide us with some

explanation of why that part of the world does not seem to fit these theories. The conclusion for them was that it might be due to the structure of the

schema and the form of the tests that took place, since the 5% that did not match up with the rest of the world was from underdeveloped, low

5 http://www.conference-board.org. The Conference Board is a global, independent business membership and research association whose mission is to provide the world‘s leading

organisations with practical knowledge to help them improve performances and provide better services in order to better serve the society. The Conference Board is a non-advocacy, not-for-profit entity (information from their website /about). 6 http://money.cnn.com/2010/01/05/news/economy/job_satisfaction_report/

http://www.conference-board.org/

http://money.cnn.com/2010/01/05/news/economy/job_satisfaction_report/



education areas of sub-Saharan Africa, India and other “remote” and rural places. This anomaly can be left out of this paper without much

explanation, as the main focus here is on the techno modern, western world.

Many have argued (such as Clugston, Howell, & Dorfman, 2000; Cohen, 1999; Cohen & Kirchmeyer, 2005; Mueller, Iverson, & Price, 1999) that the

differences between ethnic/cultural groups have a tendency to be stronger than the differences between countries, and Schwartz (1999) also argues

that national boundaries do not seem to correspond with the more naturally developed, and somewhat uniform societies that share a culture. Within

any given country one should expect to find several different cultures that exist together but each of them having, perhaps its own religion, language,

norms and a way of life. It is not until they are combined into one ‘national’ culture that you might get a faulty representation of that given country.

This is also the core in most of the criticism that were pointed towards both the Hofstede, 1980, and the Schwartz, 1999 surveys, as their main tools of

observation was to compare cultural values across countries by aggregated scales (Cohen, 2007).

The main argument behind examining cultural values is that they are seen to affect people’s attitudes and behaviours (Schwartz, 1999), but not many

studies have looked into the specifics of how this claim holds up in practice, be it in general or within the workplace. Schwartz & Bardi (2001) make

the argument of how this type of a relationship (if it exists) stems from how observations have pointed towards individuals both within and across

societies have quite different value priorities that reflect different heritage, different experiences, socioeconomic levels, and so on, and that these

values will influence how an individual perceives and interprets a given situation “in light of the key values that are important to him”(Schwartz, Sagiv

& Boehnke, 2000 in Cohen, 2007:274).

This, arguably, means that a person is highly likely to interpret a situation, and react and be affected in a given situation, based on as to what priorities

each of his personal values is assigned in his personal value hierarchy.

Although, by far, most research revolves around mapping differences in value systems (e.g., Hofstede, 1982, 1991; Inglehart, 1997; Markus &

Kitayama, 1991; Schwartz, 1997; Smith & Schwartz, 1997; Triandis, 1995), and a great deal of variation in value priorities is seen within individuals of

different societies, Schwartz & Bardi (2001) found that hidden behind the very important differences are some indications that there exist some

values that reflect something about the origins and role of values for the human society in general. They found that there was a reoccurring theme of

values, and a striking consensus of which values seemed to be especially important across individuals and societies7.

7 The countries studied, from around the world, were Brazil, China, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland,



France, Germany, Greece, Hong Kong, Hungary, Israel, Italy, Mexico, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Spain, the United States, and Venezuela, as well as taking in other studies from Finland and Israel.



What the research showed was that the most universally important values were pro-social and benevolent values, like honesty and the wish to do

good, but what was ranked as less important were the so called power values (like wealth). In a follow-up paper, in 2001(B), Schwartz et al. also point

out a correlation between age and of moving from assigning higher value to power values, and (with age) moving towards the pro social values part of

the scales.

Cambra-Fierro et al. (2008) argued that the corporate values of an organisation had impact on its employees not only within the work environment,

but the behaviour of the organisation, and its managers, affected the employee’s global value system on the outside as well. The research concluded

that the study had implications for business ethics, and in particular for multinational companies working across many cultures, as signs show that an

organisation’s value system goes beyond the business context. This study adds to what others have found (i.e. Harris & Crane, 2002; Hemmingway &

Maclagan, 2004) on the suggested connection between personal values, shared values and productivity, as well as the connection between personal

values, social values and business behaviour.

The relationship between corporate values and how they are often influenced by the values of the senior management and company owners is the

consideration of many articles (Guth & Tagiuri, 1965; Hambrick & Brandon, 1988; Moore, 1999; Macalister, 2001; Harris & Crane, 2002; Hemingway &

Maclagan, 2004; Forte, 2004), and Hemingway (2005:35) suggests that many managers seem to act in their own interest, by a so called “psychological

selfishness”. This entails that managers are trying to align the company’s conduct with a value system that is closer to their own. By doing this,

managers are able to feel better about their decisions since there is less dissonance taking place between their behaviour at work and their personal

values (Cambra-Fierro et al. 2008:159).

It has been argued that employees need to properly be acquainted to the identity of their corporation in order for them to play a critical role in

passing that knowledge onwards to its other stakeholders and that strong corporate brands are coupled with employees that are in tune with the core

values of the organisation (Ackerman, 2000). Also, the role of values as an important feature at the core of the organisational brand itself is something

that is argued to be a key element in inspiring change, in motivating, and in establishing identification (Durgee et al., 1996; Jones, 1999; Schultz et al.,

2000 in Chong, 2007).

The main concern of all internal branding functions whatever their name is to make sure that the brand promise is delivered to those that are waiting

for it. When hiring new people, organisations could perhaps make the recruits even more valuable for the organisation in the long run by making sure

that there is some congruence, between the values of the organisation and the values of the new employee. By ensuring that, the employee is likely



to be happier working for the organisation, he is likelier to be better at delivering the brand promise to other stakeholders (as to the customer), and

he is more likely to stay around for longer, resulting in less cost for the organisation (de Chernatony, 2001).

The brand promise affects the behaviour and motivation of newly hired employees and there is a suggested relationship linking the psychological

contract and the brand promise (Schein, 1985).

It’s been fairly argued that by making sure that the values of the organisation and the values new employees hold dear and are close to one another,

then, as a result, the organisation as a brand is likely to become stronger. For that to happen the employee needs to be a strong advocate of the

organisation and the brand promise it carries, and truly understand the core values of the organisation. In order for that to be likely to happen the

values of the organisation and the values of the employee, again, need to be in line with one another.

When international organisations set out to define their core values it would seem to make sense to choose values that strike a chord with their

future and current employees. International organisations, or multicultural, or transnational or whatever the reach and definition is, choosing their

values from a set of values that matter deeply to the population, can only be a good thing for a company, both in relation to its customers and to its

employees. That is because in the end, the company communicates a stronger brand which means more value for the organisation and fosters a

stronger sense of organisational identification in the employee. This is echoed in both the employer branding and internal branding literature and

again in the researches of Cambra-Fierro et al. (2008), where there was evidence of a connection between personal values, shared values, and

productivity.

Choosing values and then making sure the employee fully understands and carries out the values is not easy. All modern organisations are values-

driven, that is given almost, but in order for them to be engaging for their employees, motivating these values needs to be well thought through.

Some of the “classics” of organisational values are, to name but a few: advantage, differentiation, value, focus, discipline, accountability, efficiency,

superiority and leadership. Most people who have worked anywhere will recognise these values as values that have been at the core of their

organisation. Gary Hamel, in his Wall Street Journal article (20108) titled: “The hole in the soul of business”, discussed how these good and standard

goals and values, mentioned above, were strikingly lacking in anything remotely motivating. No living man will feel his pulse quicken when trying to

8 http://blogs.wsj.com/management/2010/01/13/the-hole-in-the-soul-of-business/



live out this type of value, he states. Hamel then asks where the transcendent values, such as beauty, wisdom, truth, justice, charity, courage, honour

and joy, are to be found. Fittingly, those values are to be found close to the core values within the value hierarchy identified by Schwartz et al. (2001).



2.4 Organisational identification

Organisational Identification is defined as ‘the perception of oneness with or belongingness to an organisation, where the individual defines him

or herself in terms of the organisation’ (Cornelissen, 2008:198). Internal communication effects organisational identification considerably, especially

when done well. When an employee receives information from the organisation, and feels that the information he gets is adequate and reliable, his

identification with the organisation is enhanced. For information to be considered as adequate it has to be both useful and sufficient for the

employee, and to carry with it something about what is expected of the employee regarding his work contribution. When this is communicated well,

the employee will identify better with the organisation which should result in a more satisfied worker, and a more cooperative and helpful employee

towards the organisation as well (Cornelissen, 2008).

Early modes of the notion of identification, originating with Freud’s (1922) definition of ‘an emotional tie with another person’, then being refocused

by Lasswel (1965) in a wider understanding of mass-identifications, like that of nationalism, was what Patchen’s (1970), identification theory was built

on. Cheney (1983) then took what were the three main components of Patchen’s theory and developed his Organisational Identification

Questionnaire (OIQ), dealing with the notions of similarity, membership, and loyalty, in an organisational context. Cheney and Tompkins (1983:144)

conclude that “organisational identification occurs when, in making a decision, the person in one or more of his or her organisational roles perceives

that unit’s values or interests as relevant in evaluating the alternatives of choice” ( in Gautam et al., 2004:302).

Cornelissen (2008) also argues that it has been shown that an employee will identify even more strongly with an organisation if the corporate values

and other attributable identities of the organisation, correspond with the personal values of the employee. This means that the closer the gap, or

perceived fit, between the two value systems (of the organisation and the employee), the stronger the level of identification towards the organisation

on behalf of the employee. This process is strengthened by steady and reliable information coming from management.

The concepts of organisational identification and organisational commitment , although overlapping at many points, should be seen and treated as

two distinct concepts, as argued by some theorists (cf. Wiener, 1982; Van Dick, 2001, 2004; Van Dick et al., 2002), claiming strong theoretical

arguments for the split position (Gautam et al., 2004).

According to Ashforth & Mael (1989), the main distinction of the two concepts is the self-referential/definitional function of organizational

identification, which, incidentally, is not to be found in organizational commitment. An employee can be all alone and by himself, working at a remote



site, but because the group norms and values of the organization have been, or are, integrated into the self-concept, the employee can still feel a

powerful sense of organizational identification. (Gautam et al., 2004)

In case of mismatch between personal and company values, the resulting tension can be too much for the employee. This is most often seen in cases

where a person has a job that puts him in a situation of having to go against personal values (perhaps if that person works for a company making land

mines or a company that pollutes). Having to work against your personal values on a daily basis is not good for you, because it means that you

consistently have to do things for a living that you cannot even defend to yourself. This type of work creates what is called values stress which is a

feeling of stress that comes directly as a result of doing something that conflicts your own set of values.9

The Values stress is close to being the exact opposite of what is being looked into in this paper, but good as a reference point since it reflects a very

common situation (not that everyone works for landmine makers, but perhaps to a lesser degree need to work for a living for an organisation that has

different values than they do). The famous Milgram experiment, conducted by Stanley Milgram and Yale University in 1963, also revolves around the

same issue; being part of a bad system changes your perception. When a person has invested in an organisation (not just those that invest money but

also regular employees that invest time and effort and identity in their work) the harder it is to leave, and easier it gets to blind yourself to

wrongdoings of the organisation. Again, this has been mentioned as one of the contributing factors in the fall of Enron and WorldCom and other

financial misfortunes even more recently (like the crash of Icelandic banks in 2008). The Milgram experiment showed that the system, of in which you

operate and exist, shapes your perception; if everyone around you thinks it is acceptable to cheat about the company finances, then you are more

likely to think so too.10

Organisational commitment develops from slightly different sources than identification (as argued by Pratt, 1998; Tyler & Blader, 2000). The perceived

similarity and a sense of shared fate with the organisation is a common companion of identification (Mael & Ashforth, 1992) but commitment stems

from exchange-based factors, like the material relationship that the employee has with the organisation. That implies that committed individuals are

more guided by the formal aspects of the relationship they have with the organisation. This happens through work descriptions and level of control

given by their supervisor (Pratt, 2000; Tyler & Blader, 2000), and not the stronger self-validating mechanism of the more fluent co-creation of

9 http://positivesharing.com/2007/08/can-you-be-happy-in-an-evil-business/

10 http://positivesharing.com/2007/08/can-you-be-happy-in-an-evil-business/



answering the ‘who am I’ question so inherent in the identification-creation process. Commitment, contrastingly, is seen as more of a relatively stable

and enduring attitude, once established (Gautam et al., 2004:305).

Another factor in organisational identification comes about when employees feel they are listened to, and they feel that they are involved by

management when decisions are made.



When this feeling of involvement and control is given to the employee he feels ownership, and that he has some control over his working life,

resulting in a stronger and deeper commitment to the organisation. Interaction with managers, where the employee gets a feel of the policies and the

direction the organisation is headed is a combining force where the communications should run both ways –upwards and downwards. The employee

should feel that he gets adequate information and that he has opportunities to speak out and to get involved, be listened to, and that he has an open

invitation to actively participate in the organisation (Cornelissen, 2008).

Researchers have shown how organisational identification is increased as the perceived external prestige of the organisation rises. When an employee

feels that the organisation he works for is associated with strong reputation and prestige in the eyes of outsiders, the employee often feels proud to

belong to that organisation and gets satisfaction from the reflected glory it carries with it. When this process takes place in unison with a harmony in

values between the organisation and the employee the effect might be even stronger, or longer lasting (Cornelissen, 2008).

2.5 Time/Temporality

Rosa (2003) discusses what might be called as the ‘speeding-up’ of society, and how that is a feeling that has been around for some time, or a

common theme throughout modernity. The feeling of speeding-up is probably best characterised in different kinds of technological, social and cultural

processes and some added sense of how the general pace of life just seems to go a little bit faster every year. This change of pace, or speeding-up, is

referred to as “temporal change” (Rosa, 2003:3) and its impact can be felt in the closely-related terms of individualisation and rationalisation and is

not felt to be a steady process of social acceleration, but that it comes in waves, driven by new technologies or new forms of socio-economic

organisation (Rosa, 2003:3).

Rosa’s sentiment of the role of time echoes that of Gane (2006), where he talks about how speed is not only present in the digital age, but as an

increasing time compression throughout the history of modernity, driven by a series of advancements (like the arrival of trains, cars and air travel in

the 19th century, the telegraph, telephone, radio and computer and satellite communication in the 20th century). Gane (2006) argues also that each of

these technological innovations increases the independence of social-relations of time itself from space and from body, meaning that succession and

duration is replaced with simultaneity and ‘instanteity’ (Wajcman, 2008:59).



The cultural theorist Paul Virilio, even though he rejects cultural theory himself (1995, 2000), posits that the forces of techno-sciences are speeding

everything up, which then causes even reality to disappear. His evidence is to be seen in intensive electronic presence and how this no longer

demands our chronological presence but a new conceptualisation of time (Armitage, 200111).

Rosa (2003) points out how social acceleration is the irreducible attribute of modernity and when we perceive changes in the temporal structure of

modern society (this feeling of speeding-up) we are witnessing the very essence of our culture, social-structure and personal identity. And Rosa draws

out what could be the missing link in connecting modernity with post- and late modernity, the notion of social acceleration (Rosa, 2003:28).

Schor’s (1991) paper on the ‘Overworked American’ discussed how modern American workers are putting in more time at work than their ancestors

(although this was not supported by empirical data), and Schor’s arguments were picked up and echoed by others, such as Hochschild (1997) and

Galinsky (1999).

This argument got into contemporary debate because it had been thought that economic progress and increased prosperity were to bring with it

more time for leisure, however they seemed to bring only time scarcity and paucity to leisure time (Wajcman, 2008:60). By combining these findings

with the classical Marxist argument, that there are two ways to extract more profit from labour; to lengthen the working day or to work labour more

intensely, we can start to spot the signs of social acceleration again. This means that advanced capitalist economies, with a high state of technology at

its disposal, can manage to derive more productivity and therefore profits by compressing time (to have people do more work within each unit of

time) and by eliminating unproductive time by intensifying the labour (Wajcman, 2008:60).

Lipovetsky (2005) also discusses Marx’s analysis of the economy of time, and how everything in modern organisations centres on organizing the

working time. Diverse temporalities -the different kinds of social time (free time, consumption, leisure, holidays, health, education, variable working

hours, and retirement age) are accompanied by unparalleled tensions that then bubble up within the organisation and the management of social

time. When we prioritise the future we have to miss out on real life in the present. Lipovetsky continues:

Should we enjoy pleasures as they come, or else ensure that we still have vitality for the years to come (health, figure, and beauty)? Should we

give time to our children or to our career? There is not just acceleration in the rhythms’ of life, but also a subjective conflict that arises in our

relation to time.” (Lipovetsky, 2005:49)

11

http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=




How different time-perspectives influence organisations in their daily operations is something that has been a topic of academics for decades,

especially when it comes to looking into the global workplace; organisations that have multinational operations or international employees. Hofstede

(1980) argues, in his research of cultural dimensions that one of these dimensions is one of long-term vs. short-term orientation. Within this time

perspective sit values that Hofstede says go all the way back to the teachings of Confucius, the Chinese philosopher who lived around 500 B.C., and

that they also apply to countries that are not considered to be of Confucian heritage

This view, of how we spend our time, or prioritise, embodies the tensions and conflicts of our everyday decisions, conscious or sub-conscious,

tightening the tension of our struggle to just be; it is no longer a fight between classes, but of time vs. time, present vs. future, future vs. past and so

on (Lipovetsky, 2005:49). One of the roles of organisations might become to relief this tension by providing resources to help its employees better

deal with these time-wars, and thereby becoming a facilitator of time per se.

In our modern/hyper society the tempo of our lives, or referring to the techno-modern world of the western world and Australasia, people’s lives

have gone from moving in tandem with the rhythms of nature and into revolving around time being kept by machinery -clocks and other temporal

patterns of our working day.

2.6 Hypermodernity

Cultural theories, or theorists, and social theorists, have been trying to describe and explain society at large and their opinions differ. Here, the

ideas of modernity, post modernity and hypermodernity will be used to elaborate on the state of society in order to speculate on how to best describe

people as consumers of brands (corporate brands, as that is what is being dealt with in this paper). The broad range of these terms was seen as most

suitable in order to do this because all of them do not exclude the possibility of parallel explanations of society.

There is a consensus about the notion of post modernity, and how that came into academic and intellectual discussion in the late 70’s (Lipovetsky,

2005). Post modernity as a social theory was set forward to try to describe the cultural state of developed societies, having first been used in

architectural discourse but was later taken up to try to describe what was seen by intellectuals as the bankruptcy of the grand ideologies of history on

one hand, and a prevailing and forceful individualisation and pluralisation of the society (Lipovetsky, 2005).

Coining a term, like ‘postmodern’, made it more tangible that some sort of societal change had taken place; a shift of time and temperament, and an

acknowledgment of the way democratic societies worked, on both social and cultural levels (Lipovetsky, 2005). Consumption and mass



communication at that time was rising noticeably compared to before as well as individualism, and a watering down of authoritarian and punitive

norms.



There were several different ‘postmodernisms’ about but they all had the ‘post’ prefix common as well as several traits but the main thing the term

brought with it was the suggestion of how something new was about, some change, some sort of progress or movement of direction (Lipovetsky,

2005:30).

Lyotard defined the postmodern ‘as a crisis in foundations and the decline of great systems of legitimation’ (Lipovetsky, 2005:77) but that does not

mean that we as a society had given up on all systems. Democracies and monetary systems are still dependant on the very large belief and

applicability of those systems and democracies in particular rest on strong principles it seems, amongst people.

Some cracks have begun to show in these systems, especially after the financial turmoil on the global markets in the period of 2007-2010, but that

discussion is outside the scope of this paper but can be seen as another sign of the ‘hypered’ activities of man (hypermodern organisations and

hypernarcissism to name a couple)(Lipovetsky, 2005).

When postmodernist views had been the prevalent point of focus for over 20 years, at the turn of the century, more and more social theorists had

begun discussing the ever growing signs of a new shift of paradigm, and a break from the postmodernist individualism.

In today’s social climate there is some feeling of times hardening again, as opposed to the cool and carefree days of postmodernism, dark clouds came

and vent and financial storms hit the world. The brief moment in history, where social constraints were loosened and the burden of establishment felt

to be diminished.

Concepts, and acts, of genetic technologies, liberal globalisation and human rights are on the rise again, alongside the re-emergence of social

constraints which were so heavily connected to the postmodernism era, making the label ‘postmodern’ come across as insufficient and incapable of

expressing the ‘new’ world order (Lipovetsky, 2005: 30)

One of the main themes of postmodernism was the so called disappearance of grand narratives (Lyotard, 1979) but what we do know, after having

dealt with post modernity concepts for over 20 years, is that some grand narratives have not gone away, -like that of human nature which is still

something to be obtained. By using the term postmodernism, theorist in early 70’s were trying to place a name on their own time, which is something

that had not been done before and the term post does imply that modernism had then been left behind and something very new had taken its place.



But what is modernity then? To put briefly, it can be seen as the organisation of four fundamental elements that were already defined in the 16th and

17th centuries. If we go through the four elements of modernity we find first the induction of a new manner of governance that was based, first and

foremost, on the notion of a social pact that awarded absolute rights upon its contract-holders, as well as viewing democracy as the best regime for

this type of contractualism. The second pillar would be the new manner of thinking about how reason and scientific invention were the central figures

of a well functioning society. The third, is how new forms of production and consumption, based on capitalistic laws of the market, started to emerge.

The fourth and final pillar was seen to be the new way of living, with the individual taking centre stage, as opposed to the collective being of the past.

Now, having gone through a postmodern era, we can still see how some of these elements structure our own being in the present, but in a more

radicalised and excessive manner, up to a point of being unstoppable by any power in the foreseeable future (Charles, 2009: 391).

In the past, the speed to which this modernity matured, the four pillars mentioned above, was halted by various holders of power; the state, religion,

royalty and ancestral custom, and democracy had to go through revolution to be set in place (the French and American revolutions), scientific

theorists were mocked and punished publicly for their modernistic views (such as those of Galileo, and his punishments by the church). The roles of

men and women in the society were kept in check by statutory stipulation of rights and so on (Charles, 2009:391).

By taking what Charles (2009, 2007, and Charles & Lipovetsky, 2005) posits, it can be argued that the core values of a modern society are still the main

drivers of society today, but only now they are pushed into even more speed by the reduction of the power of states, the powers of religion and

powers of ancestry, or to be more precise, the growing power of individuality and democracy over the former ‘brakes’ of modernity.

The four main pillars of modernity; Democracy, individualism, market and science are clearly all still at play in our society, but in a more radicalised

way (Charles, 2009). The intensification of how people view human rights and democracy as a mandatory value, and the market having become the

global economic reference system, reaching even the most remote places, can be seen as the intensification of modernity –hypermodernity, but not a

braking away from it, as post modernity denotes.

Why is this important to organisations? By having established the modern era as not a postmodern one, but as a hypermodern period, we need to see

which values organisations place in the centre of the organisational culture. By working with the more ‘proper’ outlook, and the knowledge that not

only their employees, but society in general value the principal pillars of modernity in a more intense way, we can begin to see where value can be

created or where there might be misplaced resources in organisations.



The reputation of an organisation is built from the inside out (Martin, 2009) and as a key driver for organisational success the organisational

reputation, alongside its values, should be seen as the main issue of properly addressing the stakeholders, of which most would be seen as

hypermodern people.



Managing the organisational reputation, whether the organisation is a for-profit or non-profit organisation, is becoming an ever vital component in

the overall strategy of organisations in developed and developing economies (Balmer & Geyser, 2003; Bouchikhi & Kimberly, 2008, in Martin, 2009).

That holds to be even truer if organisations rely on intangible assets (innovation, high level of service, creativity, intellectual capital, to name but a

few) as the basis for competition (Kay, 2004 in Martin, 2009).

Roberts & Armitage , in their 2006 paper named: “From organization to hypermodern organization: On the accelerated appearance and

disappearance of Enron” find, in a case-study of Enron, that failing to recognize the impact and context of hypermodernity upon organisations, and

organisational change in particular, is imperative in valuing them and how hypermodernity means that an organisation can appear and disappear,

having gone through all of the organisational life-cycles, in ever accelerated ways. In Enron’s case, it moved from dealing with very old-fashioned and

tangible assets into the more intangible services and innovation business which was a contributing factor of its demise (and, again, the failure to

recognise the context of hypermodernity and the ‘speeding up’).

Bakan (2004) and Clarke (2007) also discuss the concerns of big-business in America and of corporate governance scandals in the USA, Europe and in

the Asia Pacific region, where ‘dangerous’ lines of products and services influence on all aspects of social and political life, and how reputation and

brands have come even more important due to that, and in the aftermath of the credit crisis in 2008 (Martin, 2009: 219).

3 Methodology The research data in this study comes from conducting a discourse analysis on the (global) employee magazine of the Volvo Group (AB Volvo).

The qualitative benefits of analysing the discourse used by the Volvo Group gives the possibility of taking a close look into which strategies the group

uses to create organisational identification by means of communicating organisational values and strategic objectives in its employee magazine.

This paper, and the analysis itself, will be conducted with a social-constructivist approach. This implies that all materials of research and consequently

all findings thereof, reflect the interpretive understanding of the researched materials by the author/researcher, as well as the world reflection

evident in all other findings, such as conclusions, and recommendations if there are any to be made.

The precondition of basing the analysis on established and relevant theories, and reliable information within the respective fields of research, is

intended to give this study a firm base-of-relevance to stand on.



The line of approach within social constructivism follows the argument made by the IMK models (of culture, and situational context, and signage) of

message production by the sender which is then affected by the medium, genre, and the culture where the communication takes place and this,

again, affects the receiver who interprets the message (Frandsen et al., 1997). This is also representative of the situation that the recipients of the

research-materials (Volvo’s Global magazine) find themselves in after receiving the corporate message in the magazine.

The discourse analysis method that was used was Fairclough’s Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA, 2003), as well as taking into account Fairclough’s

arguments on epistemological dualism (2005, and Fairclough and Chouliarki, 1999) for CDA in late-modernity, where the positional viewpoint of the

critical realist is argued based on Bhaskar 1986; Archer 1995, and Sayer 2000. The outset of dual epistemology gives primacy to delving into the

relational aspect between agency (as a set of processes and events) and structure (based on the realist social ontology) (Fairclough, 2005:916).

Fairclough bases his arguments, regarding late-modernity and dual epistemology, on the work of Gidden (1991), amongst others, on late, or

radicalised modernity, in an effort to distance organisational studies based on discourse analysis from the ‘problematic’ micro-view of post-modernist

social theories which he calls extreme (Fairclough, 2005:916) . And, his reasoning for including the critical realist approach is built upon the works of

Bhaskar 1986, Archer 1995, and Sayer, 2000, as stated above. The arguments Fairclough uses in relation to his consideration of Gidden’s work on late-

modernity also go hand-in-hand with the view set forward in the theoretical model of this paper, regarding hypermodernity and time (discussed in

relation to e.g. Lipovetsky, Rosa, and Virilio ), and the interrelationship these theories have on one another.

The study took place in June of 2010 and the documents researched were 3 issues of ‘Global Magazine; staff magazine for Volvo Group employees’.

The issues examined in this study were issue #2 of 2010, and issues #1 and #2 of 2011, containing between 27 and 36 pages each.

The magazine is published by AB Volvo (The Volvo Group) and 6 issues were published in 2010 and 6 issues will be published in 2011. The magazine is

environmentally accredited in accordance to the ISO 14001 standard and printed in 75-80.000 copies and published in 12 languages (Swedish, English,

Dutch, Polish, German, French, Spanish, Korean, Chinese, Japanese, Russian and Portuguese (for Brazil)). The English version of the magazine was the

researched version in this study.

The issues that were chosen, out of all the available issues, were thought to be able to provide visible differences in content due to how the Volvo

Group was emerging from the economical turmoil of 2008-2010 (or 2007-2009, depending on the market), in early 2010, and signs of market-

improvement were beginning to be seen for the company. Then, the first two issues of 2011 (besides being the most recent) were thought to be able



to represent the state of communication that was being used when market conditions had been growing stronger for just over a year. At that time the

Volvo Group had also undertaken a readership survey (in 2010) to get feedback on the magazine’s content from its employees. So, it was hoped that

editorial changes (or if there were any) might be caught by the analysis.

First, the discourse in the magazines was analysed, and after having undertaken a pilot-study, on an issue (#1-2010) outside of the sample that was

used for this paper, a couple of amends were made on the approach. The main feature of the analysis was:

To identify a theme or genre of texts;

to search text for references towards Volvo’s core values;

to search text for references towards the company’s vision and mission statements;

to search text for references towards the strategic objectives of the company;

to identify the relationship between the identified strategies and how they were being used as part of Volvo’s identification strategies, to advocate value

congruence in its employees towards the company’s core values;

to locate adjustments in the presentation/content of the magazine;

to evaluate the findings.

Each issue of the magazine is being taken as one discourse as a whole and treated in that way. This way it is possible to see each issue as one single

effort to create employee identification and to find examples thereof in a larger context, rather than when analysing one piece of article within each

issue on a minute linguistic level. By looking at a slightly larger picture it gets easier to spot pieces of a contextual puzzle and themes covering multiple

pages and over a years-worth of organisational communication instances that belongs to the line of discourse that a global employee magazine stands

for.

This method makes it possible to weigh the level of effort the Volvo Group puts into creating employee identification as a genre almost onto itself,

rather than by searching for instances and examples by doing an in depth analysis of four articles, as could have been done i.e. using Halliday’s

systemic functional analyses or other more focused discourse analysis methods.



The analysis registers 4 main categories and 2 sub-categories: Article title (name, and location of item and, if relevant, identity/title of interviewee);

Genre/Theme (news, interview etc.); Appeal (to whom or what, by what means)/Reference to the organisational values (what is the theme of the

item); Text as identification, with two sub-categories (type/category of identification strategy, and example of textual content).



By analysing the magazines in this manner, any reference or effort of addressing the pivotal ‘Who am I?’ question should be registered, both by the

employee and as put forward by the Volvo Group. The individual employee will be looking to reflect ‘the perception of oneness with or belongingness

to the organisation, where the individual defines himself in terms of the organisation in which he or she is a member (Mael and Ashforth, 1992:104).

4 Results The results of the analysis can be found in full detail in the appendix section of this paper. A table, summarising various identification strategies

found performing the discourse analysis will be put forward here, in the results section. The summaries in the results chapter will only cover the

different major types in each of the issues of the Global employee magazine, but not address each instance of each approach. Other examples from

the results will also be used and discussed in the discussion of the analysis, in the next section of the paper.

4.1 Results of Discourse 1 (Magazine #2 -2010)

Table 4-1 Discourse 1 (Summary)

Identification category

Genre/Theme (news, interviews,

speech-functions)

Appeal / Ref. to Values

Example

This is us

Editor’s note Progress Safety Quality

“You are our customer.” “The Volvo Group and all its employees are contributing to a raft of important functions in society such as roads, goods transport, water supplies and refuse collection.”

Grand purpose This is us

(our product)

Theme of the issue

Campaign (moving the

world)

Pride Quality Safety

“14 per cent of all the food in Europe makes its way to consumers in some of the Volvo Group’s one million trucks...on European roads.” If all of the Volvo Buses were set off at the same time, they would transport more than 10 million people!” “In 2009, Volvo Areo supplied components



to more than 90% of all the heavy-duty aircraft engines.” “All over the world there are 200.000 industrial engines from Volvo Penta that secure electricity supplies to hospitals airports and irrigation equipment.” “In the USA, more or less every second refuse truck is supplied by Mack and the 190.000 tonnes of refuse Mack’s refuse trucks remove every month would reach to the moon if the refuse bins were stacked on top of one another!” “Moving the World campaign...to illustrate the decisive role its products and services play in society and people’s everyday lives.”

Pride This is us

Transitivity

Our product at work

Quality Safety

Environment Profitable

growth

“Customers must be able to rely on refuse trucks to get through everywhere, in every situation.” “Most importantly, however, they must not break down!” “Mack’s refuse trucks which haul more than 11.000 tonnes of trash every day.” (Only 1 use of trash-term in the context of refuse related issues).

Pride This is us

Our product at work

Quality. Technical

specification Safety

“In less than 10 minutes, Volvo CE’s specially designed haulers clear the snow from the runway at Arlanda Airport, enabling business passengers to get to their meetings, tourists to leave for their holidays and goods to be delivered all over the world.” “During the winter months, heavy snowfalls are not unusual and ...the airport has never once been closed because of snowfall since it opened in



1962.” “At an airport, safety is paramount. As a result, the sweepers, as they are known in international flying terminology, are an integrated part of the traffic scenario and are in constant contact with air-traffic control. In just the same way as an aircraft is given a slot for take-off and landing, the sweepers are given a traffic slot for fighting the snow and ice.”

Management discourse

Interview with macro

economist in the group

Profitable growth

Financial recovery

“In terms of results, 2009 was the worst year in the Group’s history....which (net loss of over SEK 17 Billion) can be compared with a profit of almost SEK 18billion in 2008). The reason for this result are the global financial crisis...combined with a powerful recession.” “One positive aspect is that...the Group succeeded in reducing inventories and this helped cash flow to be substantially improved. Even if the majority of the Group’s companies reported losses, the results of the various savings programmes are now starting to be seen.”

This is us Pride

News Our product

Quality Technical

specification Environment

bonus

“Our customers are calling for a greater specialisation and we are listening to them.” “This is a fantastic truck and I am extremely proud of it.” “...the Volvo Group has developed a test vehicle for long-distance transport with the potential to reduce fuel consumption by 10-13 per cent.” “It makes us extremely proud to be able to present such a ground-breaking solution.”




Short news Profitable growth

“This is a positive trend, even if the recovery we are currently seeing is taking place from extremely low levels. As the market is still very uncertain, these employees will only be recruited on shorter contracts.”

This is us Pride

Ownership

Stories of our product

Quality Pride

Ownership Operation excellence

“At Volvo Buses (Poland)...the employees now have an unusual personal relationship with the buses they produce.” “Each bus in production has its own “sponsor” or “caregiver”, one of the employees, who makes sure that it (the bus in production) receives the attention and care it deserves.” “Creating personal ties between the production staff and the buses they produce helps to increase the employees’ involvement in the production.” “When the employees feel a personal involvement in the buses, they understand just how valuable the finished buses are to the customers.” “We believe this will help us improve our customer satisfaction, particularly in a challenging market situation. When we increase our employees’ knowledge of our customers, we can enhance our quality and improve production processes.”

Culture Management

discourse

Streamlining Operation excellence

Organisations culture

“Some of the employees weren’t used to taking responsibility, but, in the course of this work (of merging two organisations and their cultures); many of them blossomed and displayed new characteristics.” “...some of the younger



co-workers and a number of women were given the opportunity to assume more responsibility.” “Having a mix of different cultures, genders and knowledge in our organisation is a huge source of strength. It gives us energy and fantastic commitment among the employees.” “What is more, the results in the Group’s attitude survey, the VGAS, have improved dramatically, despite the important journey the whole team has undertaken. Today the results are over 90 per cent in the continental organisation. This can’t be described as anything other than a success!”

Culture Personal growth

Interview(s) with 5 employees

in the new organisation

Respect. Culture

Operation excellence Diversity Harmony

“However, the things that could have created problems were never allowed to grow because the employees respected the differences and were determined to succeed.” “We complement one another. The purchasing staff in China is more familiar with the Volvo Group’s process while the purchasing staff in Japan knows more about daily production.” “I can’t deny that I was sceptical and worried (about having a younger female manager), but I have now got used to the situation and I am very happy. She is a good manager and is good at listening.” “The Japanese employees are learning to express their opinions more than before...adding that he likes going to Shanghai to meet his



colleagues, enjoys Chinese food, plays badminton and is learning more about Chinese culture.” .” “She sees this as an extremely exciting, challenging assignment. We are learning from one another as a result of the differences and can find the best balance.”


Profitable growth Profitable growth Quality

“We are instead creating synergies and advantage for the Group’s operations through growth in new places.” “Last year, when The Wall Street Journal presented its prestigious rankings of the 200 best companies in Asia...the Volvo Group found itself in the 25th place. The rankings were made by hundreds of decision-makers in trade and industry.” In the category of quality, one of the Volvo Group’s core values, the Group came as high as ninth.” “One of the reasons for UD Trucks’ success in its home country is its environmental performance.” “People in India talk about “travelling Volvo” when they mean a luxury coach with top-class quality and comfort, regardless of the brand.”

This is us Our culture

Safety. Compassion

“news”

Helping Giving Safety

“Employees at the Volvo Group in North America have collected almost USD 68.000 to help the victims of the earthquake in Haiti. At the same time, the Volvo employees’ foreign aid organisation, the Volvo Employee Aid Association, has decided to donate money to the Swedish charity SOS-Barnbyar on Haiti.” “Interest in helping Haiti has been enormous among



the Group’s employees.” This is us Ad /poster The Volvo Way “We work together with energy, passion

and respect for the individual.” Pronoun use

This is us Interview with

chairman of the Volvo Group’s quality council

Growth Quality

Challenge Quality award

“Quality excellence – it is up to us.” “Quality is as question of customer satisfaction and continuous improvement. If we stop improving, we shall stop being good.” “We are good now, but we need to be even better tomorrow if we are to maintain and strengthen our position.” “We must never get ahead of ourselves and relegate quality to second place.”

Pronoun use This is us

Interview chairman of the Group’s safety

council

Safety. Awareness

Safety award

“Zero accidents in the Volvo Groups vehicles. This is the vision for the Group’s work on safety in the future.” “Safety is a significant part of our brand and we already enjoy a powerful position when it comes to these questions. However, we need to take the lead and demonstrate even more forcefully what we can do in this area.” “...not simply encompass the safety of vehicles, but also include the parts that relate to peripheral safety by preventing the theft of goods or other crimes involving the driver.” “As long as accidents occur, we shall continue to work towards solutions that will prevent them.” “To step up the focus on safety, the safety council recently instituted an internal award.”

This is us Our culture Pronoun use

Culture class The Volvo Way Joint culture

Adapting

“The habits and values of the country in which we grew up continue to influence us, no matter where we live.” “In a company



Culture shock

like ours which relies on people working together across national boundaries, the natural focus is on building a common corporate culture, but the strength of what we feel for our native countries should not be underestimated.” “...an international corporation has to find a way of acknowledging the strength of national cultural differences while creating a joint corporate culture. “...but one of the many good things about Volvo is that all employees can express their views about how they want the company to develop. These conclusions are...the Volvo Way, which is a statement of everything the organisation stands for and...is a reflection of how it views its employees.” “Every individual can change and develop, perform and improve.”

Our work matters

Pride This is us

Pronoun use

Note from the boss.

Purpose Safety. History

Integrity Respect Pride Adapt

“He doesn’t drive a truck, he drives the Indian economy. What a great headline! It could just as easily describe all the Volvo Group’s operations. We do not simply sell trucks, excavators or engines, we are also helping to develop society and drive it forward.” “We create jobs...indispensible part of peoples’ everyday lives.” “Since the Group was founded more than 80 years ago, we have been working actively on issues related to social development. Governments, the academic world and organisations regard us as a credible partner with integrity and we a frequently



asked whether we would like to take part in projects of different kinds.... (like) decisions related to the infrastructure and the way different cities and countries should plan their public transport.” “...we should develop our products so that they are adapted to match future needs at the same tome. We make sure that we continues to be an important factor when it comes to keeping the lifeblood of society flowing.”

We are our product

Question: If you could be

one of the Group’s products,

then which?

Environment. Safety Quality

“I would like to be a Volvo 7700 hybrid bus! It’s an environmentally sound, innovative, safe, shared resource which enables meetings between people.” ...a Volvo Penta marine engine. I love leisure, the sea and fishing from a boat. Being attached to a boat at all times in the open sea would be worth not being me.” “I’d like to be a truck cab because I’d like to play an important role in saving my driver and providing him/her with a comfortable ride....so I can be a symbol of the Volvo Group.” “I would like to be a Volvo Penta engine because it has a fine reputation for good quality and it definitely has a very long service life...they can sometimes be more than 30 years old, which is quite special compared with other products.”



4.2 Results of Discourse 2 (Magazine #1-2011)




speech-functions)


Example

This is us Pride

Note from the head-editor

This is us Profitable

growth

“These snow-clearance machines are specially modified haulers from Volvo CE and they are excellent illustrations of the way the Group’s products are offering important benefits to society.” “This important investment (in India), not only when it comes to the region and the job opportunities in Pithampur but also for the whole of the Volvo Group.”

This is us Personal growth

Pride

This is us. People of Volvo.

This is us Quality

“...working the whole time to reduce the number of defects.” “Working with Volvo quality imposes rigorous demands on all the employees, but it’s also going to be stimulating and it will give us more satisfaction.” “I started with (engine) blocks and then gradually (has worked at the site for 20 years) worked my way up to final inspection.” “So no engine makes its way to a customer with a defect.”

Managem. discourse

Partner/our/common

Joint/Unity speak

Interview (CEO of

Eicher+ManDir. Of VEVC)

Partnership. Growth

opportunity. Quality

“India is experiencing powerful economic growth and enormous investments are being made in the country’s infrastructure.” “We are fairly sure that the marked for heavy-duty trucks is going to explode in India.” “What neither the Volvo



Group or Eischer has been able to do individually, we are now able to do together.” “We share a common belief that we can not only be....over time, we can shape the course of the industry...be best in class in quality and aftersales...and customer satisfaction.” “The technology and quality that we are going to be able to offer.”

Success This is us

Short news Profitable growth

“chosen as the official partner.” “largest order to date.” “it decided to invest in the Renault Premium after test-driving the truck.” “Factors based on factors including driving comfort, fuel consumption and load capacity.”

This is us phrasing

Interview Profitable growth.

Operational excellence.

Environment

“Constructing the Group’s modern office building in Arendal cost five per cent more than a traditional building of the same type, but, at the same time, it consumes half as much energy and heating.”

This is us Classical

conditioning Award

Safety. Values. “In a country in which 20 per cent of the work force has HIV, the Volvo Group, in its capacity as an employer, needs to involve itself in the problem.” “It was quite simply the right thing to do.” “At Volvo South Africa, we have 38 people with HIV, which corresponds to seven per cent of the employees.” “So our programme is really making a contribution to our employees’ lives.” “It’s also important to remember that it’s better for the company when its employees are healthy.”

Management Interview. Operation “It will save both time and money, but, first



discourse Future benefit

high-ranked leader

excellence Prod-cycle.

Change

and foremost, it will increase collaboration...everyone will speak the same language.” “This gives us a customised solution for the entire Group and it supports our strategic objectives and our business model.” “We are creating opportunities for collaboration...easier to utilise skills and expertise from other units...potential for substantial savings in aftersales.”

Modality discourse

Future benefit

Interview employee

Personal growth

“We can save money...take advantage of future product design...anchor our group culture for the future.” “We have more opportunity to standardise the manufacturing process...has been extremely rewarding.” “Can contribute best practices in areas including production.” “open the door to different types of problem-solving...gives the Group important competitive benefits.” “The support of the Group’s Executive Management Team has been invaluable in the implementation of this huge change.” “PLM will create the potential to comprehend change and understand the consequences of decisions.”

Our Values This is us

Co-creation

Our History Quality. Safety. “Rear-view

mirror”

“Do you have any historical photos from your company which you would like to share”? “The Globetrotter is comfortable safety-oriented cab...helped to strengthen the company’s position.”

Award This is us Quality. Profitable

“...demonstrate that the Group is an important player when it comes to creating



growth. the society of the future.” “It’s important that we show this external audience that we are at the cutting edge when it comes to high tech and research.”

This is us Pride Quality

Our product. Quality. “It is really comforting to climb into the cab on Aabrekk’s Volvo truck and be surrounded by warmth.” “....as she backs confidently up the incredibly steep slope at the storage quay.” “A (Volvo, pictured) bulldozer moves the whole of the new pile in a single movement. The machines and trucks that work in the dark and the ice-cold conditions are really powerful.” “For the next ten years at least, powerful Volvo trucks and construction equipment with their heavy loads of coal will continue to operate in the Polar nights and under the Midnight Sun, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.”

This is us Our culture

This is us. Safety. Our quality. This is us.

Health/safety. Unity.

“The employees at Renault Trucks in Lyon have been working in their leisure time to collect money for “Doctor Clown.” “The clowns go from room to room at the children’s hospital and help the children forget their illnesses and fear for a moment.” “UD Tennis Club...designed to increase communication between the employees and promote a healthy lifestyle.”

This is us Culture

Culture class We are all human, we

make mistakes.

“What causes you and your fellow countrymen or women to fume with rage may well leave the rest of the world unmoved.” “I know there was something



we did a number of years ago which irritated our Indian readers.” “no one said working in a culturally diverse organisation would be easy and we’re bound to get things wrong sometimes. When we do, we ought not to be too hard on ourselves and should simply resolve to put things right the best we can.”

Management discourse cohesion pronouns

Word from the boss

Operation excellence. Profitable growth.

“favourable trends are going to continue in 2011...in spite of this, there are some dark clouds on the horizon we would be wise not to ignore (dept crisis in some European countries).” “Impossible to make any safe predictions and the only thing we can do is to continue keeping an eye on our costs and maintain a high level of readiness to deal with unexpected events by retaining high flexibility.” “I have never...experienced anything but enormous pleasure and satisfaction to have been given the chance to lead this company.”

4.3 Results of Discourse 3 (Magazine #2-2011) Table 4-3 Discourse 3 (Summary)



speech-functions)


Example

Unity Personal growth

Employees and their day

This is us “I have excellent contact with my foreman and I enjoy spending a great deal of time with my co-workers. At the same time I am involved in development projects.



This...makes my job both varied and challenging.”

Phrasing News. + CEO Profile-

interview

This is us “he regards the Volvo Group as standing on stable foundations. “A great deal of this comes from all the ambitious, engaged employees.””

Classical conditioning

Short news Safety award This is us

Employees send in suggestions themselves, nominating someone for the internal safety award

Our values This is us

News Environment “It is our mission to be able to link carbon emissions to a carbon budget, exactly like the financial budget, so that people have to make adjustments and try not to exceed their budget”

Managerial discourse

News Operation excellence. No cost numbers.

“Co-ordination is important. What’s more, we shall save a great deal of money on maintenance if we have the same basic offer for everyone”


Success story

Main feature. Technical

specification

Environment Quality

Operation excellence Profitable

growth Prod-cycle competitor

failed

“This is the story of the project that became a textbook example of top-class collaboration in the Volvo Group, where failure was not an option.”

Our values This is us Wording

Interview. Portrait of low-

level leader

Who are we? The Volvo way

This is us. Stories

“I could see he (the CEO) really cared about these (cultural) issues and that he was knowledgeable and committed...to building strong culture”. “I regard our culture as a child that needs to grow every day.”



Success This is us

Our product Quality Operation

excellence in action.

Success story. Profitable

growth

“The result was so good that we continued to collaborate with Volvo Trucks (not the competitor).” “the partnership with Volvo Trucks is a long-term relationship...and a business with a human face.”


Our Values Wording

Interview. high-ranked

leader

Operation excellence Profitable

growth Safety. Quality Environment

No cost numbers

“We are going to work proactively on the development of smart new telematics solutions....helping to support the Group’s core values. Using new and advanced technology we shall be able to help develop the Group’s business.”

Our values This is us Cohesion

Interview employee

Personal growth

“Having a common organisation is a good start. In the future we will need to work in the same way.” “I personally enjoy working more globally. It helps me to develop.”

Success by argument This is us

Our Values by reflection

Interview VP Corp.Relations At Novo Nordisk

Value of corporate

culture

“”Our vision explains who we are and what we want. It isn’t enough to simply say what we do.” “...she smiles when she sees the Volvo Group’s counterpart to the Novo Nordisk way, The Volvo Way (in italics for emphasis).” “It looks as though we are thinking along the same lines.” “Our driving motivation is based on the fact that we can make a difference for the millions of people...”


Co-creation

Our History Quality. Safety “Rear-view

mirror”

“Do you have any historical photos from your company which you would like to share”? “The Globetrotter is comfortable safety-oriented cab...helped to strengthen



the company’s position.” Our Values This is us Stories

Classical conditioning

Cultural class Different but same. Learning about others. My mistakes.

Lesson. Personal

growth. Unity. (profile picture of the ‘chatty-

aunt’)

“But knowing something was not the same as felling it and I was caught unaware by the strength of my own reaction.” “...so a few misunderstandings are inevitable.” “But that’s something we can change.” “I’d like you to send me links to websites...so we can all practice...so we are more prepared for our next international telephone meeting.” “Small prizes...winners published”


By argument Pronoun use

Word from the boss

The Volvo way Pride. Passion (3/4 full body

pictured, ‘light-of-the-

knowledgeable’ on forehead)

“the way every employee can make a difference.” “incredible commitment many people are demonstrating when it comes to the severe and catastrophic earthquake.” “incredible commitment our colleagues at Mack...enthusiasm, pride, art of building an engine”. “I was proud to see the employees desire to help make the company even better and more prosperous.” “Every individual in the Volvo Group should feel that he or she has an opportunity to influence our future...also understand that it’s everyone’s responsibility to play an active part in the development of our operations.” “This is how we can be winners!”




5 Discussion

5.1 Discourse 1 (Magazine #2-2010

The most prominent identification strategy in Discourse 1, the second issue of Global magazine of 2010, revolves around positive wording, or

framing of how the work of the employees is beneficial to society. There is a focus on giving visual or a mental image of what the world would be like

without all the quality products that the Group’s employees make and what the consequences might be if the products were not of such high quality.

Little stories are told to help with the visualisation process in the mind of the reader. Examples of this strategy, from the magazine, could be:

“Imagine a normal day. You get up in the morning, but the refrigerator and larder are empty. You wait for the bus to take you to work, but it never arrives.

Even if it did arrive, it would probably have had difficulty getting you to your destination, as the roads are blocked by refuse and snow. Your mobile phone

rings. It is you mother who was going to visit, but she tells you that she will not be coming as there are no longer any flights. In the newspaper, you read that

the hospitals have to cut back on the quality of health care as there is a shortage of emergency generators. Would you like to live in a world like this?

This is a very direct cause-and-effect charged discourse, put forward in a simplistic manner in order to dramatize the current role Volvo’s products

play in the everyday lives of regular people all over the world. One could easily see an employee reading this text, nodding in silent agreement,

because, to him, these are really clear examples of how they hadn’t realised the big picture and big impact their little production-line job has, out

there in society.

Such a persuasive-rhetoric method as this, implementing a short-cut argumentation of ‘if A, then D’, is what Hyland and Paltridge (2011:50, citing

Kienpointner, 1996:562) call “seemingly convincing fallacious arguments”, and work to justify the transition from the argument and to the conclusion

by, somewhat, cheating the reader out of true rhetorical premises.

For an outsider reading this description it can be seen as overly simple and silly almost, as to the outsider, the begging question is that if Volvo was not

there to fulfil the need for these products, out there in society, to keep it moving, there would be plenty of other manufacturers happy to cater to

those needs. However, this type of discourse, as part of a campaign aimed at demonstrating how the Volvo Group and its employees contribute to

society by bringing out and underlining what their products ‘do’, will be looking to bring out in the employees pride and ownership of their work. All

while doing this ‘visualisation’ or short-cut-logic, the way the discourse is formulated, the feelings of pride, achievement, ownership, and a sense of

purpose get tied in with the Group’s core values throughout the text.



This method creates a cohesive argument carrying throughout the feeling of how the Group’s values play a major role in the successes of the Group

and the sense of pride and purpose for the employees. More examples of this type of discourse can be seen in these excerpts:

“Every day billions of people have to go to and from work...hybrid buses are also being tested in the city traffic in Gothenburg and London...” “Volvo Penta is

one of the world’s largest suppliers of industrial engines (that supply heat, water and electricity to hospitals or serve as back-up systems).” “Without refuse 12collection, all the world’s cities would soon be inundated with rubbish and dirt. Top-class vehicles are needed to handle all the tonnes of refuse every day.”

“The farmers in the desert in Saudi Arabia are totally dependent on their irrigation equipment. Otherwise, their crops will die, thereby eliminating their

source of income.” “...it is vital that the engines never stop working.” ”performance of the engines is absolutely vital.” “not be able to make a living without

their irrigation equipment.” “They are totally dependent on water” “We do not simply sell trucks, excavators or engines, we are also helping to develop

society and drive it forward.” “We create jobs...indispensible part of peoples’ everyday lives.” “People were so proud. They had invested their own time,

talked, exchanged ideas and laughed together. During that two-week period, there was a fantastic atmosphere at the office.” “as a result, the Volvo Group is

currently the only European truck manufacturer producing trucks under its own brand name in the country (China).”

Feelings of pride and ownership, or craftsmanship, do also feature under the this-is-us discourse. Not only is the word ‘proud’ used in many cases, but

the feeling of pride and ownership of a job well done floats around in many of the texts. By evoking these feelings in the employees they are

encouraged to identify with their product and their own work, and by doing so they, almost, automatically identify with the Group and its values and

all become ‘one’ in a shared sense of pride based on quality, history, craftsmanship, safety and environmental care. The discourse related to pride, but

in more contexts than the main theme of this issue (the ‘we keep the world moving’), can be seen in the following examples:

“In less than 10 minutes, Volvo CE’s specially designed haulers clear the snow from the runway at Arlanda Airport.” “During the winter months, heavy

snowfalls are not unusual and ...the airport has never once been closed because of snowfall since it opened in 1962.” “At an airport, safety is paramount. As

a result, the sweepers, as they are known in international flying terminology, are an integrated part of the traffic scenario and are in constant contact with

air-traffic control. In just the same way as an aircraft is given a slot for take-off and landing, the sweepers are given a traffic slot for fighting the snow and

ice.” “A global Volvo Group is automatically involved in the social debate in each country in which it operates.” “Last year, the Volvo museum had 50.000

visitors.” “This is a fantastic truck and I am extremely proud of it.” “It makes us extremely proud to be able to present such a ground-breaking solution.”

12

Refuse is, apparently, the officially approved terminology for garbage, waste, rubbish and other things that in everyday spoken language are referred to as trash. The term refuse is used in all relation to waste disposal in the three issues of the magazine. Only one instance was found in all of the three analysed documents where trash was used, and there it was used to dramatise the effects of what the world would look like without Volvo‘s ‘refuse’ handling-tools.



In a Volvo Group company in Poland, the company has started to ‘give’ each employee his own bus, one that he keeps an eye on throughout the

production and the employees tell how they feel proud and have invested ‘ownership’ in that particular bus throughout its production.

“At Volvo Buses (Poland)...the employees now have an unusual personal relationship with the buses they produce.” “Each bus in production has its own

“sponsor” or “caregiver”, one of the employees, who makes sure that it (the bus in production) receives the attention and care it deserves.” “Creating

personal ties between the production staff and the buses they produce helps to increase the employees’ involvement in the production.” “When the

employees feel a personal involvement in the buses, they understand just how valuable the finished buses are to the customers.”

Usage of pronouns as an identification strategy was found in many of the analysed items. The first-person plural was used by all of the interviewed

top-level managers when discussing the strategy, goals and values of the Group. Examples of this type of use can be seen in the following examples:

“Our customers are calling for a greater specialisation and we are listening to them.” “We impose the same quality requirements on these goods as we do on

the other products and services we sell in the Volvo Trucks system. Good products cost money and people are prepared to pay for them.” “We are instead

creating synergies.” “We work together with energy, passion and respect for the individual.” “Quality excellence – it is up to us.” “If we stop improving, we

shall stop being good.” We are at the cutting edge. In spite of this we need to change our approach and not take quality for granted. We are good now, but

we need to be even better tomorrow if we are to maintain and strengthen our position.” “We must never get ahead of ourselves and relegate quality to

second place.” “Safety is a significant part of our brand and we already enjoy a powerful position.” “we need to take the lead and demonstrate even more

forcefully what we can do in this area.” “As long as accidents occur, we shall continue to work towards solutions that will prevent them.” “it will strengthen

our core value of safety.” “The company’s founders started this important work and we are now demonstrating it.” “it will unite all of us in the Group as we

work on a clear and common target.” “clarifies the work we are already doing in this area.” “In a company like ours which relies on people working together

across national boundaries, the natural focus is on building a common corporate culture, but the strength of what we feel for our native countries should not

be underestimated.” “we should develop our products so that they are adapted to match future needs at the same tome. We make sure that we continues to

be an important factor when it comes to keeping the lifeblood of society flowing.”



By using the first-person plural, managers try to create a social relation between themselves and other employees. This works by shifting the normal

‘us’ management versus ‘them’ employees’ terminology and creates an ‘us-Volvo-folks’ versus ‘them-competitors’. The inclusive ‘we’, as discussed by

Van Dijk (2011), functions to include the audience (or reader in this case) and to construct a community with the reader.

Often, this type of discourse, especially used consistently by the CEO and other ranked highest in the organisational hierarchy, goes hand in hand with

other identification strategies used by management in their talks; positive wording, emphasising better times for the organisation being just on the

horizon; transitivity, pointing out how “we need to”, “we must never” do something, give employees almost direct instructions on how to act in order

to head in the set direction; modality, or time-oriented speech, helps to keep the focus of the employees on the desired future of the organisation,

and not the downsize-ridden past. “This is how the Volvo Group is hoping to create a cleaner, more efficient transport society.” “...the Volvo group is

working actively to lead the development of future transport.” This also helps in associating positive feelings with the strategic objectives of the

organisation, as the mind looks forward to being in that nice place.

Having a corporate magazine that is meant to cater to the needs of everyone in the organisation carries the risk of sometimes being either overly

broad, or that it focuses on too narrow subjects. The magazine’s staff did a survey before publishing this issue, and got some interesting results to

work with, under the headline of “Global Magazine given stamp of approval in readership survey”.

The results were drawn out in positive phrasing (even the not-so-positive results). “60% expressed positive views of the magazine and between 60 and

70% said it was credible.” Given this information it can also be concluded, also in relation to the magazine asking if it does a good job in fulfilling its

described role that even though 62% say it succeeds in doing so 48% of readers feel it does not, or is not sure. When asked if the magazine met the

objective of ‘describing and explaining important decisions’, 50% of the readers could not agree with that statement (with 6% giving a ‘no’ for an

answer), and 60% felt the magazine did not succeed in ‘stimulating discussion’.

Other results of note were that “89% interested in reading about new products and 84% wanted to see more technology and research in the

magazine...83% said they were interested in reading about other (Group) companies.” And, 63% of readers said the magazine did a good job in

spreading knowledge of objectives and strengthening the feeling of affiliation within the Group (meaning 47% did not feel that way). That final

revelation from the editors of Global magazine is the one that strikes most closely to the main task in this analysis.



On a related note, a type of management discourse weighs heavily in the content of the magazine, and, given the assumption that most of Volvo’s

employees are not managers, might be related to a feeling of discontent from some of the blue-collared employees in the Group, towards the content

of the magazine. Examples of this type of management discourse from the magazine:

“improving the Group’s product characteristics and for their commercial viability and improved efficiency” “he was tasked with streamlining the organisation and achieving more cost reductions” “has been tasked with assembling a team from the two companies that will work together to find opportunities for solutions that will appeal to customers.” “In terms of results, 2009 was the worst year in the Group’s history....which (net loss of over SEK 17 Billion) can be compared with a profit of almost SEK 18billion in 2008). The reason for this result are the global financial crisis...combined with a powerful recession.” “One positive aspect is that...the Group succeeded in reducing inventories and this helped cash flow to be substantially improved. Even if the majority of the Group’s companies reported losses, the results of the various savings programmes are now starting to be seen.” “This is a positive trend, even if the recovery we are currently seeing is taking place from extremely low levels. As the market is still very uncertain, these employees will only be recruited on shorter contracts.” “We are instead creating synergies and advantage for the Group’s operations through growth in new places.”

Much of this type of verbiage might not be fully, or even partially, understood by the average reader of the magazine. The meanings of streamlining

organisations, creating synergies and operative advantage, and commercial viability through substantial cash flow improvements, are all fine

examples of a discourse type that might get lost on employees belonging to other discourse orders. This could also represent opportunities for the

magazine’s editors to change the discourse types on offer, in order to reach more employees in a positive manner, as some of the employees did

express the opinion that too many management interviews were in the magazine, when surveyed.

Cultural-related discourse is also a feature in this magazine. Several statements were found to promote a singular corporate culture within a global

workplace and touch upon the perceived or ideal benefits of what a strong corporate culture brings.

“Having a mix of different cultures, genders and knowledge in our organisation is a huge source of strength. It gives us energy and fantastic commitment

among the employees.” “However, the things that could have created problems were never allowed to grow because the employees respected the

differences and were determined to succeed.” “On the other hand, language has sometimes caused problems...however, more and more of them are

improving their English and are able to make a greater contribution via e-mail, phone and at personal meetings.” “My age and gender are totally irrelevant,

as long as I produce results.” “I can’t deny that I was sceptical and worried (about having a younger female manager), but I have now got used to the

situation and I am very happy. She is a good manager and is good at listening.” “The Japanese employees are learning to express their opinions more than

before...adding that he likes going to Shanghai to meet his colleagues, enjoys Chinese food, plays badminton and is learning more about Chinese culture.”

“She says the mix of culture and genders is only positive.” “good results because we have mixed the good things from both countries (China & Japan) and this



has produced the best possible results.” “Diversity encourages us to have an open discussion and share our knowledge.” “She sees this as an extremely

exciting, challenging assignment. We are learning from one another as a result of the differences and can find the best balance.”

Ideal behaviour, or ideal values outside the core values of the company, but closely related to the safety-discourse, were noted as part of touching-up

on the subject of ‘this-is-us’ or the ‘who are we?’ identification is a core question.

“Employees at the Volvo Group in North America have collected almost USD 68.000 to help the victims of the earthquake in Haiti. At the same time, the

Volvo employees’ foreign aid organisation, the Volvo Employee Aid Association, has decided to donate money to the Swedish charity SOS-Barnbyar (villages

for children) on Haiti.” “Interest in helping Haiti has been enormous among the Group’s employees.”

In relation to the culture discourse, the Volvo Way document was a highly recurrent topic and in the ‘Letters’ page, one employee has some criticism

for the Group and asks why the middle managers, the ones who are to follow through and communicate to others about living the Volvo Way, have

not been given any leadership training, even after having been with the company for over two years. The person that answers on behalf of the

company justifies this by stating that there was just no money to do so, and how “we (the Group’s Executive Committee) agreed to focus on

“managers first, employees next”” and that “it was in the spirit of the Volvo Way to find another solution until it is possible to conduct this training.”

This comes off as a very circular logic. By accepting the assumed true statement of the organisation not having had enough funds to follow through on

leadership training, to train leaders to communicate and live out the Volvo Way, those same leaders and their workers are to solve this by living out

the (essence of the) Volvo Way? Also interesting, is the usage of ‘we’ in this context. Here, as opposed to almost all other management use of the

term in the magazine, it refers to the ‘we the management’ and the issue becomes ‘executives against workers’ and the in-group, or inclusion, of

employees and management in a grand ‘we of the organisation’ disappears swiftly.

“Strong words about the culture that we want to establish in the Volvo Group (in the Volvo Way).” “It is in the spirit of the Volvo Way to find another solution

until it is possible to conduct this training where needed.” “funding yet another ‘hope school’ in China.” “It’s important for the Volvo Group to be able to

contribute and take its social responsibility.” “The habits and values of the country in which we grew up continue to influence us, no matter where we live.”

“In a company like ours which relies on people working together across national boundaries, the natural focus is on building a common corporate culture,

but the strength of what we feel for our native countries should not be underestimated.” “an international corporation has to find a way of acknowledging

the strength of national cultural differences while creating a joint corporate culture. “but one of the many good things about Volvo is that all employees can

express their views about how they want the company to develop. These conclusions are...the Volvo Way, which is a statement of everything the

organisation stands for and...a reflection of how it views its employees. “every individual can change and develop, perform and improve.”



The ‘culture class’ is in its regular place in the magazine. This is a page where ‘experiences’ are shared in a first-person perspective with the reader,

and there are given examples of things that do not go according to plan, common misunderstandings, and a suggestion to solve future instances of

these problems. The final statement in this selection from the text, of how “every individual can change and develop, perform and improve” does fit

with the notion that some (e.g. Hatch & Schultz 2001; and de Chernatony, 2001) ‘supporters’ of values based leadership discussed when they say that

the values of the individual and the organisation can meet. That however, does presuppose a level of value congruence, to begin with.

5.2 Discourse 2 (Magazine #1-2011)

Organisational values and strategic objectives of the Group feature with some prominence in this first issue of 2011. Profitable growth, and

other organisational growth, is the subject of most of the interviews, and given the Group’s large investments in 2010, and given one of the

magazine’s purposes, of explaining strategic decisions to employees, it seems fair that this does take up so much space.

In relation to the investments and expansion plans, at the Group’s various sites, there were two prevailing categories of discourse-types that were

most found in the texts. Positive wording, coupled with management discourse, elaborating on the investments in positive light to encourage

employee identification by using the indirect argument that the values of the Group are what plays such a big role in the Group’s success. Some

examples of this can be seen in the following statements:

“chosen as the official partner.” “largest order to date.” “it decided to invest in the Renault Premium after test-driving the truck.” “Factors based on factors

including driving comfort, fuel consumption and load capacity.” “We are creating opportunities for collaboration...easier to utilise skills and expertise from

other units...potential for substantial savings in aftersales.” “We are creating new business by combining the Volvo Group’s basic skills with our own rapid

innovation.” “AB Volvo has world-class engineering skills, but we need to develop business skills to enable us to take competitive advantage.” “demonstrate

that the Group is an important player when it comes to creating the society of the future.” “favourable trends are going to continue in 2011...in spite of this,

there are some dark clouds on the horizon we would be wise not to ignore (dept crisis in some European countries).” “Impossible to make any safe

predictions and the only thing we can do is to continue keeping an eye on our costs and maintain a high level of readiness to deal with unexpected events by

retaining high flexibility.” “VECV is the latest and perhaps the most anonymous addition to the Volvo family, but that is soon going to change.” “India is

experiencing powerful economic growth and enormous investments are being made in the country’s infrastructure.” “we are fairly sure that the marked for

heavy-duty trucks is going to explode in India.” “What neither the Volvo Group or Eischer has been able to do individually, we are now able to do together.”

The benefits of the expansion process should be hard to miss for the employees that read these interviews. An interesting point of note was that cost

numbers, associated with expansions and investments, never seems to come up. This was found to be true throughout all the discourses in the



analysis. A couple of instances detailing cost numbers in the Group’s investments were found, and those numbers were followed directly with a time-

frame for recuperating that cost (within a year in both cases).

There were more cost numbers associated with the investment plans of the competitors, which were iterated in the short-news sections, so one could

get a sense of how the competition’s growth was almost more costly than the Group’s own growth. The competitors usually ‘acquire’ or ‘expand’, like

in the example of Caterpillar: “Caterpillar planning to acquire...the cost is USD 7 billion.” When associating growth with ‘costly’ verbs one gets a

feeling that future profitability or pay-off is not given, unlike with Volvo’s ‘investments’, where the verb ‘to invest’ carries with it that the action is

merely an extension of money until that ‘investment’ pays off in the future. For the employees of the Volvo Group, this should also work as an indirect

argument of how their own organisation, by following it’s values, is driven by sustainable growth.

More of the management discourse was also constructed using somewhat of a ‘management-speak’, even more jargon-infused than the examples

above. The main benefits and faults of management discourse were discussed in relation to Discourse 1, in the previous chapter.

“but we have what it takes to make it a good business proposition.” “sourcing materials globally...effective production...sourcing machinery and equipment

at low cost.” “part of a development portfolio that was included” “adapt this basic engine in order to comply with the EuroVI emission standard.” “By

improving the drivers of engagement, we will improve our work environments in a way that will ultimately have a beneficial effect on our business result.” “It

will save both time and money, but, first and foremost, it will increase collaboration...everyone will speak the same language.” “This gives us a customised

solution for the entire Group and it supports our strategic objectives and our business model.” “It will take VCE to new levels in terms of PPD efficiency.” “We

have more opportunity to standardise the manufacturing process...has been extremely rewarding.” “Can contribute best practices in areas including

production.” “open the door to different types of problem-solving...gives the Group important competitive benefits.” “The support of the Group’s Executive

Management Team has been invaluable in the implementation of this huge change.” “PLM will create the potential to comprehend change and understand

the consequences of decisions.”



Some importance is also given to the modality in the above examples; this can be seen as signalling the beginning of a new time, a new era, for the

Group. The future is coming and the troubles of the past are slowly, but surely, fading away and new and more prosperous times that ever are (or

could be) approaching. The beginning of a new year does, in all likelihood, play a large role in that type of ‘forecasting’ modality, as this tends to be

the time of year when everyone, including organisations, look ahead and try to determine what the new year brings.

An almost direct appeal to the corporate values (quality, safety and environmental care) featured in many of the texts. Some examples of this are:

“but VECV still works according to the Japanese Kaizen method13 (after having stopped working with Mitsubishi Motors in 1993).” “Some 96% of our vehicles

are totally correct when they leave the production line and the remaining four per cent generally have only minor defects.” “working the whole time to

reduce the number of defects.” “Working with Volvo quality imposes rigorous demands on all the employees, but it’s also going to be stimulating and it will

give us more satisfaction.” “be best in class in quality.” “The technology and quality that we are going to be able to offer.” “We are simply combining

Japanese quality, European state-of-the-art technology.” “Factors based on factors including driving comfort, fuel consumption and load capacity.” “The

main reason for this increase is the travel ban the Volvo Group issued as a result of the financial crisis. When the cost savings were at their highest, we

moved from 13.000 unique users of virtual meetings to 40.000 in just three months!” “Constructing the Group’s modern office building in Arendal cost five

per cent more than a traditional building of the same type, but, at the same time, it consumes half as much energy and heating.” “Established reputation as

the most fuel-efficient vehicles on the market.” “the machine works so smoothly and effectively that the rest of the production line (of a wood producing

company) has difficulty keeping up.” “to ensure transport complies with our requirements in terms of quality, safety and the environment.” “In a country in

which 20 per cent of the work force has HIV, the Volvo Group, in its capacity as an employer, needs to involve itself in the problem.” “It was quite simply the

right thing to do.” “At Volvo South Africa, we have 38 people with HIV, which corresponds to seven per cent of the employees.” “So our programme is really

making a contribution to our employees’ lives.” “It’s also important to remember that it’s better for the company when its employees are healthy.” “AB

Volvo has world-class engineering skills.” “None of the things we do would be possible without being part of the Volvo Group and taking advantage of the

experience and strength to which that gives us access.”

13

The Kaizen method is originally a Japanese management concept defined by incremental (gradual, continuous) change, or improvement. Kaizen is in its original meaning a way-of-life philosophy that assumes that every aspect of one's life deserves to be constantly improved. The Kaizen philosophy lies behind many Japanese management concepts (like the one of Total Quality Control, Six Sigma, Quality Control circles, small-group activities and labour relations.

The key elements of Kaizen are quality, effort, involvement of all employees, willingness to change and communication. Japanese companies distinguish between innovation (radical) and Kaizen (continuous). The etymological meaning of the word comes from the Japanese terms of kai (to change) and zen (to become good). The origin and meaning of Kaizen is explained in short in a ‘fact box’ next to this article, in the magazine. http://www.valuebasedmanagement.net/methods_kaizen.html and http://www.kaizentek.com/company_wordkaizen.html

http://www.valuebasedmanagement.net/methods_kaizen.html

http://www.kaizentek.com/company_wordkaizen.html



Alongside the organisational values discourse the core values are also reflected in this issue’s main theme of ‘More women taking seats on boards’

discussion. The topic of gender equality is closely related to the core values of the Group and it addresses both the ‘Who are we’ question as well as

using rhetorical arguments where the association of these moral principles are tied directly to (future) success.

“Instead of simply talking, it’s important to bring women onto our boards and so we have done something concrete to achieve this.” “This will add value to

the whole of our organisation. Diversity is really worthwhile.” “this project is going to be taken over and run by the Group’s HR departments in order to

establish the importance of gender-related issues throughout the organisation.” “By working on an internal board, I can obtain a new perspective...it gives

me a tremendous opportunity to improve my knowledge....I think I can contribute my knowledge...excellent initiative.” “It’s important for us to have people

with different approaches, experience and backgrounds on our boards. I think this will improve our business result.” “The Chairman, Per Carlsson, was

welcoming and helpful and because of his support I felt well prepared for my first board meeting.”

The Volvo Group seems adamant in trying to encourage value congruence, given the reach of topics discussed under values and context, even

expanding on the values discussion by incorporating the ‘gender topic’ which perhaps lies closer to home (Sweden) for the Group than in some of the

countries further away, where gender equality might not be as much of an issue (or a priority).

Value congruence could be seen as an important stepping-stone in the identification creation process, where, as discussed by Edwards & Cable (2009,

cf. Kalliath et al., 1999; Megalino et al., 1991; Berscheid, 1985; Kelley, 1973) one of the most rewarding benefit of value congruence happens through

enhanced communication, which then works to help smooth interpersonal interaction and reduce chances of misunderstandings.

An additional benefit of value congruence and a strong corporate culture that is driven by employee identification, is that employees will develop

more positive feelings for one another and the positive feelings will increase the predictability factor of actions, which happens when behaviour can

be anticipated, and all that leads to a state of reduced uncertainty and promotes better understanding in interpersonal exchanges (Edwards & Cable,

1999:657).

“demonstrate that the Group is an important player when it comes to creating the society of the future.” “and prepared to act as active ambassadors for the

Volvo Group.” “learning a new language is important for social reasons.” “I have to say, however, that anyone moving to another country on a full-time

assignment should learn the native language; even if it is not the dominant language for business purposes, it certainly will be socially.” “the idea is to turn

the recipes for the homemade cakes into a cookery book.” “creating a sense of fellowship and strengthening the feeling that this is a truly global

organisation...eliminate feelings of prestige.” “I love to visit other cultures...I think you are right about Volvo sites in other countries feeling like



family...because there is much more to unite than divide.” “What causes you and your fellow countrymen or women to fume with rage may well leave the

rest of the world unmoved.” “I know there was something we did a number of years ago which irritated our Indian readers.” “We took his point; we just

hadn’t realised that the picture could be interpreted like that (patronising picture).” “no one said working in a culturally diverse organisation would be easy

and we’re bound to get things wrong sometimes. When we do, we ought not to be too hard on ourselves and should simply resolve to put things right the

best we can.” “I have never...experienced anything but enormous pleasure and satisfaction to have been given the chance to lead this company.” “March

13th, because that is the day I started my journey at Volvo IT.” “I am proud to be part of this wonderful organisation.” “spending quality time and having a

cosy evening with our loved ones, being together in a nice atmosphere.”

By giving the employees a voice in the Global magazine, Volvo is allowing its employees throughout the world to see how much alike they really are

and that helps the encouragement of identification in an almost cyclical manner (a la Kaizen). The cultural editor, or teacher, which has her own page

close to the end of the magazine, usually tells a story. The story is a personal account of ‘a cultural-difference’ experience where she explains to the

readers what went wrong on that occasion and how it might be avoided or rectified. She gives the feeling of a personal bond with the magazine

(embodying the Group), as the experiences she talks about are, in all likelihood, something that many of the employees themselves have gone

through at one point or another.

5.3 Discourse 3 (Magazine #2-2011)

The majority of the approximately 60 items in issue #2-2011 revolve around the organisational values in some way. Most of the texts carry

either at least one reference to the core values of the Volvo Group, or a reference to the strategic objectives for the time period of 2010-2012, that

the Group has set.

The Volvo Group has issued a document called the Volvo Way, and in the document the benefits of doing things the ‘right way’ are discussed, both on

a personal note as well as in relation to helping the Group reach its strategic objectives; by doing work ‘The Volvo Way’. It then, in hindsight, seems

that the main objective of the global magazine is to make sure that the employees know about the Group’s strategic objectives and prevailing

strategies, as well as stimulating a feeling of affiliation and fostering of value congruence and organisational commitment.

Interviews do play a large role in the magazine. Discourse #4 has 11 identified interviews. A total of 6 Management interviews were noted against 5

interviews with low-level (team-leaders) managers and ‘ordinary’ employees in this issue.



Management interviews were heavily laden with references to values and wording or phrasing drawing positive attention to a successful company,

having come through hard-times triumphantly and now entering a phase of expansion again. Examples of this can be seen in the following

statements:

“he regards the Volvo Group as standing on stable foundations...this comes from all the ambitious, engaged employees.” -Newly appointed CEO. “Mack

employees live up to the reputation of our brand – they are tough, genuine, committed and reliable.” – CEO of Mack. “We are now once again on the way

up, but we need to make sure this is done in a structured manner...we can leverage customer focus thanks to the sales organisation that is dedicated to each

Volvo Group Business Area.” –CFO Volvo Finances, Russia. “Incredible commitment of our colleagues at Mack...enthusiasm, pride, art of building an engine.”

“Every individual in the Volvo Group should feel that he or she has an opportunity to influence our future...also understand that it’s everyone’s responsibility

to play an active part in the development of our operations.” “This is how we can be winners!” – CEO of Volvo Group.

This type of discourse points to the direction of making an indirect argument, that the current success is the result of the values of the company and

by stressing that these same values are the values of the employees, the success of the company is because of them, and the company might fail if

these values were not upheld. Many of the management interviewees stressed that although things were looking bright, the company had only

recently started to emerge from the ‘tougher times’ of the recent past and, as such, there was still reason to adhere even stronger to the corporate

values, so that the newly had success would not slip away.

The interviews with the more ‘ordinary’ employees of the company fall in the category of cohesion by argument. This means that the values of the

company are to be seen as important, and by identifying with the values the company will keep being successful. An example of this can be seen in

these excerpts taken from different individuals within the Group:

“I regard our culture as a child that needs to grow every day.” “It proves that Shippenburg and Volvo VE care about the environment and live up to the high

standards that are set within the Volvo Group.” “I could see he (the CEO) really cared about these (cultural) issues and that he was knowledgeable and

committed...to building a strong culture.” “For us, quality means that the right parts are sent to the right customer at the right time.”

The term of ‘classical conditioning’ was used to represent one of the most basic identification strategies available to organisations, or anyone else for

that matter, referring back to classical behaviour psychologists such as B.F. Skinner’s operant conditioning and Ivan Pavlov’s classical conditioning, the

practice of rewarding ‘correct’ behaviour.



Deal & Kennedy (1982) write, on the subject of the impact of ceremony and rituals on organisational values that any culture would simply die without

the expressive events of rewarding behaviour.

If new business development is an important value underlying the organization's competitive strategy, then when someone hits a home run—or perhaps

even a single— the best way to reaffirm the value's significance to that individual and, more important, to everyone else in the organization, is to do

something that reinforces its importance. It may be nonmonetary, such as special recognition in a meeting or an article in the company newsletter

“(Bettinger, 1989:39).

It came as no big surprise to find ample examples of award-giving, award-receiving and award-nominating related discourse. There were 5 articles

revolving explicitly around the topic of awards in some way, in this issue alone. Similar numbers, relating to many other awards were found in the

other two issues. Then there were countless variations of recognising success, either by positively framed news or in the short interviews telling

readers about the increased production of a business unit, a large order or sale by a unit or team, or the successful results of complicated testing of

new products or products in development.

“This system keeps the air-force in the air.” “We are going to act as a centre of excellence for accounting and economics.” “Volvo 3P’s...has once again

received awards from UD Trucks for its work on (such and such product).”

These statements, and other statements of similar nature, regarding product-quality of the Group’s production of hard and soft product-lines, can be

taken as examples of this line of discourse.

The history of the organisation featured in some of the texts and the general identification category revolving around that theme was related to value-

discourse and the co-creation of history by the employees, in an effort to merge the many histories of all of the Group companies together.

The research material indicated that once an organisation, or a business unit, becomes part of the Volvo Group it receives ownership of all of the past

history of the Volvo brand and it works the other way around as well, as the Volvo Group now refers to the past history of the new Group-member as

its own history. This means that the linear storyline of the two separate entities merge into one, not at the time of the merge, but as soon as recorded

history of said organisation started (not two histories joining from then on, but a single linear storyline is created, as illustrated below.

The former sequence is what was expected to be found/noted on the histories of two different companies joining or merging, but the latter sequence

is more representative of what takes place in all of the discourses.



Table - 5-3-1 Future History

However, the discourse allows for, and encourages, another understanding of history as even more linear. This understanding of a joint ‘our’ history

makes it easier for all employees of all of the business units to have ownership in past conquers of the joint ‘us’.



Table - 5-0-2 'Our' History

“Do you have any historical photos...to share?” “The Globetrotter is comfortable safety-oriented cab...helped to strengthen the company’s position.”

“This signalled the end of 37 years of production (of a certain type of truck from one of the Group companies).” Another point of note, and a large

part of Volvo’s past comes from making regular cars, and that process is still referred to as part of the Group’s history, rightly so, but the Volvo-car

brand was sold out of the Group in 1999, and has since been resold in 2010 to yet another company (The Zhejiang Geely Holding Group). It is probably

assumed that all group employees are aware of this, but it should be noted that after carefully reading all the research materials the researcher had to

look for this information elsewhere, to get it confirmed.

Interviewees did refer to a past history of making Volvo passenger cars but the information about the Volvo car not being part of the Volvo Group

anymore did not appear to be self-evident.14

14

The Volvo Group was officially established in 1927, according to the Group‘s website, when the first Volvo car rolled off the production line in Gothenburg. The first truck, Series 1,

was then presented the following year, in January 1928. Volvo‘s marine engine-maker, Volvo Penta has been a part of the group function almost as long as building cars and trucks.

Pentaverken, founded in 1907, was acquired in 1935. The first bus was launched in 1934 and aircraft engines were added to the product range in the early 1940‘s. The Group is

considered among the world's largest manufacturers of heavy trucks, buses, construction equipment, marine engines and engine components for the aircraft and aerospace industry. In



One of the benefits of this somewhat blurring line of history, and the breaking up and joining of brands and their backgrounds, can be that

owning/having owned a successful brand can function as adding value to the company as well as carrying onwards the identification that employees

already have invested in the brand from ‘before’. This ‘play’ with modality and time allows the Group to pick-and-choose desirable items from the

Group’s history in order to present an ‘ideal’ history.

The next category of identification was the class of stories and articles that were deemed to most directly address the ‘who am I’ question, by

projecting the ‘this is us’ image/answer to the posed question. Most of these texts also addressed the core values of the Group in some way. Some

sentences carried a reference to one of the values, some to more than one value and some touched upon them all, either by using the same terms

(quality, safety, environment), or terms closely related to those.

“this technology could make an important contribution to reducing the number of accidents on the road and preventing congestion.” “We are receiving great deal of support and sympathy from colleagues all over the Group.” “The Group has contacted Japanese authorities with a view to providing vehicles for the rescue and recovery work.” “the partnership with Volvo Trucks is a long-term relationship...and a business with a human face.” “I personally enjoy working more globally. It helps me to develop.” “Instead of giving its (Volvo Group NAP) employees a Christmas present, it would give each of them the opportunity to donate SEK 200 to a charity organisation at the company’s expense.” “Our driving motivation is based on the fact that we can make a difference for the millions of people.” “When you make friends with Russians, they are friends for life.” “I was so proud the way the Volvo Group communicated information on the Queensland floods to its employees.” “I was very grateful the Volvo management thought about us first.” “It was very impressive to see al large company like the Volvo Group put the safety of all its employees first.” “incredible commitment many people are demonstrating when it comes to the severe and catastrophic earthquake.”

1999, the Volvo Group sold Volvo Cars to the Ford Motor Company. And since then, the Ford Motor Company has sold the Volvo car brand to the parent company of the Chinese motor

manufacturer Geely Automobile, in 2010 (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/29/business/global/29auto.html).

The Group's position in the area of trucks was further consolidated with the acquisition of Renault Trucks and Mack Trucks in 2001, and branched off to both France and the US. During

2006 and 2007 the Volvo Group acquired the Japanese truck manufacturer Nissan Diesel. Also in early 2007, an agreement was reached regarding the acquisition of Ingersoll Rand's

road development division. Furthermore, the acquisition of 70% of the shares in Lingong, one of China's largest makers of wheel loaders, was finalized. In the last ten years the Group

has undergone rapid growth in the service area with, for example, financial solutions supporting the sales of the manufacturing business units.

History of the Volvo Group in short is from:

http://www.volvogroup.com/group/global/en-gb/volvo%20group/history/volvo_80years/Pages/volvo_80-years.aspx:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/29/business/global/29auto.html

http://www.volvogroup.com/group/global/en-gb/volvo%20group/history/volvo_80years/Pages/volvo_80-years.aspx



Besides the Group’s core values being referred to in these texts, the discourse induces a heavy sense of pride, union and a sense of community. The Group is presented as a compassionate person or a benevolent uncle almost, if it was a person.

The values, or ‘This is us’, theme touches on most, if not all of Bettinger’s (2007) 12 points of corporate culture article on “how to trigger high performance in organisations by creating a strong organisational culture”. A fast rundown of his 12 components to creating a unison corporate culture include a ‘problem-solving’ attitude of management towards change and the necessity in clarity of organisational values. It has to be said that Volvo’s core values do not need much explanation as they stand in ‘plain’ language, and can be easily understood without having to read any additional bullet-points extending on and explaining in ordinary terms what the values really do mean. 15

When employees believe that management is genuine in their concern, or interest shown, for their employees, a stronger bond of trust is created,

and it is that trust and a sense of shared fate that is important in creating organisational identification (Bettinger, 2007). The concern shown for

employees by the Group, as expressed by employees, ties well in with building on the trust that seems to be there. Other statements that go hand in

hand with the values include comments of pride, excitement and an ‘esprit de corps’ which has been shown (cf. Bettinger, 2007; Andersen, 2010) to

be an important factor in reacting to, and dealing with organisational change, internally as well as externally.

The magazine also encourages employees to be aware of cultural differences within the group, and addresses on regular basis the problems that often

come up in a global company. Stories were told/shared of ‘cultural misunderstandings’ and a recommended ‘solution’ to the problem was given.

The ‘cultural theme’ is related to the ‘our values/this is us’ theme. The magazine even has a special full-page dealing with what was labelled in the

analysis as ‘culture class’, a staff-writer addressing the topic of culture and the problems that can turn up in such a global workplace. Example of

statements that fall into this category:

15 On the website for the Volvo Group, the core values are named, and then a short sentence elaborating on that value follows. The corporate value of „Quality‟ is followed by the statement “Quality is an

expression of our goal to offer reliable products and services.” The corporate value of „Safety is our soul‟ is followed by a slightly longer statement “Safety has been our guiding star since 1927. The

Volvo founders stated that “Safety is and must be the basic principle in all design work.”” This statement addressing and referring to the aforementioned „blurred‟ history-line of the Group, evoking

feelings associated with the identity of the brand throughout history. And the third of Volvo‟s core values is „Environmental care‟ followed by the statement “Environmental care is a corporate value for

the Volvo Group”. Within the website it is possible to read more on how the Group lives out those values but the values-statements themselves are simple and do not need much clarification as they are

somewhat made up of „universal‟ terms. -http://www.volvogroup.com/group/global/en-gb/volvo%20group/ourvalues/Pages/volvovalues.aspx

http://www.volvogroup.com/group/global/en-gb/volvo%20group/ourvalues/Pages/volvovalues.aspx

http://www.volvogroup.com/group/global/en-gb/volvo%20group/ourvalues/Pages/volvovalues.aspx



“But knowing something was not the same as feeling it and I was caught unaware by the strength of my own reaction.” “so a few misunderstandings are

inevitable.” “I’d like you to send me links to websites...so we can all practice...so we are more prepared for our next international telephone meeting.”

“Having a common organisation is a good start. In the future we will need to work in the same way.”

Aside from these direct statements there were articles and pictures stating average heat and weather for various Group locations, to help employees

that need to travel decide what to pack, also there was a list detailing public holidays in the time-period covered with this issue of the magazine, so

that employees might understand why there is not anyone around answering telephones or emails. It was also noted that on all occasions Korea and

Korean where never referred to as South-Korea or South-Korean.

”Our vision explains who we are and what we want. It isn’t enough to simply say what we do.” “This is how we can be winners!”

The former statement comes from a centre-page, full-spread interview with an executive at Novo Nordisk, where she details the importance of a

strong corporate culture to the success of the company. In the interview she also gives a nod-of-approval to the emphasis that the Volvo Group places

on its plaque, The Volvo Way, as can be seen in this statement: “she smiles when she sees the Volvo Group’s counterpart to the Novo Nordisk way,

The Volvo Way (in italics for emphasis in the magazine).” “It looks as though we are thinking along the same lines.” This is somewhat a success-by-

association rhetoric, meaning that Novo Nordisk is doing things this way, and they are incredibly successful in what they do, so therefore, if ‘we’ keep

doing our work in this manner, we too will be successful.

The second statement is the final statement on the back-page of this issue. It concludes the direct address to the employees by Leif Johansen (the

CEO), where he has claimed his workforce of 100.000 people, from around the world to be “Engaged, passionate people who do a fantastic job.” Then

he asks them to “imagine” what they could do for the company if they would be more of what they are, “little more, a little better” and how the

effects of that type of behaviour would have dramatic impact on the Group’s success.

Here, he is referring back to the Volvo Way values guide and trying to persuade people, by telling them that the way they do their work now,

accordingly to the Volvo Way, is the way that has brought back success. An argument based on cohesion, and one that aims to create value

identification by having the employee realise how the company will survive and do better if he identifies with the company’s values. He extends the

argument by claiming it would be even more dramatically better for the bottom line (and, therefore, the employees themselves) if they would simply

follow the Volvo Way more than they do already.



6 Conclusion The goal of this research was to analyse the employer-employee relationship of the Volvo Group, as it appears in the Group’s global employee

magazine. Trying to map what strategies the Volvo Group (AB Volvo) uses to encourage organisational identification in its employees, and by looking

at how the Group communicates its values in the employee magazine, could help organisational researchers develop a deeper understanding of the

identification process as part of the strategic HRM and employer branding, in the context of hypermodernity and its effects on international

organisations.

Three main bodies of theoretical discussions stand as the basis of this research and can be seen as the foundation from where this analysis takes off;

branding, values, and temporality. The research method that was used was Fairclough’s Critical Discourse Analysis (Fairclough, 2003, 2005;Chouliarki

& Fairclough, 1999), taking into account arguments regarding discourse in late-modernity (cf. Bhaskar 1986; Archer 1995, Sayer 2000; Gidden, 2001a,

2001b), also as discussed in relation to hypermodernity (cf. Lipovetsky, Rosa, 2003; Virilio, 1995, 2000; Armitage, 2001).

In short, the main focus of any research trying to discover instances of organisational identification, is the process of finding examples of answers

addressing the who-am-I question, as the individual employee will be looking to reflect ‘the perception of oneness with or belongingness to the

organisation’, as was argued by Mael & Ashforth (1992).

The main identification strategies that the Volvo Group was found to use, in the magazines, included positive wording, cohesive argumentation, short-

cut logic and involved modality discourse, as well as come classical conditioning, to name some of the strategies.

The focus of building a visual image of a world without the Group’s products, as a grim and almost dystopian world, combined the identification

strategies of implementing cohesive argumentation with what is meant to carry through a specific feeling, and to instil a sense of pride and purpose,

as the Group’s products play a seemingly large role in helping the people on the planet live somewhat decent and safe lives. This type of discourse

strategy emphasises the big role that the Group’s values play in the company’s success and is a strong persuasive-rhetoric method that involves a

seemingly convincing, yet deceptive, argument that uses verbal cues (Hyland and Paltridge, 2011) to justify a transition from an argument and straight

over to the conclusion; A, somewhat, rhetorical sleight of hand.

By stirring up these feelings in the mind of the employee, he is encouraged to identify with the product as his own work, and it is this perception of

oneness with or belongingness to the organisation that Cornelissen (2008) uses in his definition of organisational identification.



One strategy was found to emphasise the difference in how ‘we’, as a Group, in a phase of profitable growth talk about how ‘they’, as our

competitors, grow in a more costly way. Cost numbers, usually associated with expansions or investments were almost never brought up when the

investments were made on behalf of the Volvo Group. However, when the Group’s competitors undertake similar investments their actions are

associated with more ‘costly’ speech-functions, as the competition tends to acquire or expand, or by taking out loans. The secondary strategy involved

in this type of identification carries with it the indirect argument that Volvo’s growth is more sustainable than the growth of the competition, as

investments have a future pay-off inherent in the term.

Another identification strategy that the Volvo Group relies on is praises and awards. This set of corporate behaviours, that were found to be closely

related to conditioning, in the classical psychologist sense of the word, towards employees, is what Deal & Kennedy (1982) described as expressive

events of behaviour rewarding. By establishing multiple tools and occasions for internal rewards and recognition, and reporting on any external

rewards coming the Group’s way, the company sends a strong signal that this type of behaviour is what its culture is all about. Also, that any culture is

likely to fade away without the expressive recognition events that nurture it. There were numerous variations on how the Group recognised successes

of its employees, ranging from positively framed news, to short interviews, to all sorts of award-giving, award-receiving, and award-nominating

discourse.

Pronouns as an identification strategy was a widespread tool in the magazines, and also within the management discourse type, and the first-person

plural was found to be used by all top-level managers when discussing the strategy and vision of the Group. The inclusive use of pronouns functions to

include the audience more deeply, and constructs a sense of community between the employers and employees (Van Dijk, 2011).

Management discourse, mediated mostly by interviews, was one feature in the results of the analysis. The management interviews were anchored

around references to the core values of the Volvo Group and there was a sense of wording being intentionally positive, to paint a picture of a

successful company, having entered a new phase of expansion once again after leaving hard-times behind. The transitive benefits of words guiding

the reader to look forward in time, embedding modal cues, help to keep the focus on the desired future goal.

This type of discourse entailed an indirect argument, revolving around success and the Group’s values, and how the two go hand in hand. Another

feature of the indirect argument was how the employees, by sharing the same set of values as the organisation, they too own their part in the

successes of the Group. This induces the perception of a shared fate with the organisation, and that tends to go hand in hand with strengthening

organisational identification (Mael & Ashforth, 1992) because the company might still fail if these values are not upheld. That fate was also what some



of the managerial interviewees pointed out when they mentioned, in passing, that the employees have to keep the course and not get complacent, as

the rough seas of the financial turmoil were only recently in the past.

Interaction with managers and two-way communication is encouraged by the editors of the magazine, as the readers are often asked to send any

comments or concerns relating to the content back to the magazine’s writers. Cornelissen (2008) discussed the importance of giving the employees a

feeling of being listened to, and that information should flow both ways, so that the employee feels he is an active participant in (creating) the

organisation.

The employees probably do feel they have a voice in the magazine, and more so after the editorial changes starting with the re-launch of the

magazine in issue #2-2011. The contents of the magazine do, after this change, give more weight to regular employees, their lives and hobbies, and

their social activities in relation to living out the Volvo Way. This way, the employees are more likely to see how much alike they really are all over the

world, and that encourages more organisational identification, in somewhat of a ‘Kaizen-esque’ manner.

It has to be concluded though, in relation to the management discourse and as the magazine stands in the analysed materials, that management

discourse takes up a lot of room and that there must be more interesting and effective ways for the Group to communicate the same type of

messages, in a manner that is more easily understood by more readers coming from different discourse backgrounds, and in that relation storytelling-

methods or other narrative-related means, do come to mind.

The discourse as a whole works in a way to induce a sense of pride and a sense of community regardless of where you find yourself within the Group’s

organisations. All the values related to the ‘this is us’ theme did touch upon most, or all even, of Bettinger’s (2007) twelve points of how to trigger

high performance in organisations by creating a strong organisational culture, and the Volvo Group, based on how much emphasis there is on

anchoring the discourse in the magazine around the core values of the company, seems to buy into the whole argument of the importance of a strong

corporate culture and its influence on the Group’s future success.



7 References

Ackerman, L.D. 2000. Identity is Destiny: Leadership and the Roots of Value Creation, Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc., San Francisco.

Aggerholm, Helle Kryger, Sophie Esmann Andersen, Christa Thomsen, 2011. Conceptualising employer branding in sustainable organisations, Corporate Communications: An

International Journal, Vol. 16 Iss: 2, pp.105 - 123

Andersen, Mona Agerholm. 2010. Creating esprit de corps in times of crisis: Employee identification with values in a Danish windmill company, Corporate Communications: An

International Journal, Vol. 15 Iss: 1, pp.102 - 123

Bettinger, Cass. 1989. Use Corporate Culture to Trigger High Performance, Journal of Business Strategy, Vol. 10 Iss: 2, pp.38 - 42

Burr, 1995. An introduction to social constructionism

Cambra-Fierro, Jesús. Yolanda Polo-Redondo, Alan Wilson. 2008. The Influence of an Organisation’s Corporate Values on Employees Personal Buying Behaviour. Journal of Business

Ethics 81:157–167. Springer 2007. DOI 10.1007/s10551-007-9486-1

Carley Foster, Khanyapuss Punjaisri, Ranis Cheng. 2010. Exploring the relationship between corporate, internal and employer branding. Journal of Product & Brand Management,

Vol. 19 Iss: 6, pp.401 – 409

Caselagno, J-C., D. Sheehan. 2009. Suffering at work and Managerial Neuroses

Cheney, G. 1983. On the various and changing meaning s of organizational membership: A field study of organizational identification. Communication Monographs, 50, 342–362

Chong, Mark. 2007. The Role of Internal Communication and Training in Infusing Corporate Values and Delivering Brand Promise: Singapore Airlines' Experience. Corporate

Reputation Review (2007) 10, 201–212. doi:10.1057/palgrave.crr.1550051

Chouliaraki, L., and N. Fairclough. 1999. Discourse in late modernity. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Christensen, L.T. and S. Askegaard. 2001. Corporate identity and corporate image revisited. European Journal of Marketing, 35 (3/4), 292–315.

Cohen A., 2007. One Nation, Many Cultures: A Cross-Cultural Study of the Relationship Between Personal Cultural Values and Commitment in the Workplace to In-Role Performance

and Organizational Citizenship Behavior. Cross-Cultural Research August 1, 2007 41: 273-300 doi: 10.1177/1069397107302090



Cornelissen, J., 2008, Corporate Communication: A guide to theory and practice 2ED, SAGE

Dawkins, J. 2004. Corporate responsibility: the communication challenge. Journal of Communication Challenge, 9, pp. 108–119

de Chernatony, L. 1999. Brand management through narrowing the gap between brand identity and brand reputation, Journal of Marketing Management, 15 (1–3), 157–179.

de Chernatony, L. 2002. Would a brand smell any sweeter by a corporate name? Corporate Reputation Review, 5 (2/3), 114–132.

Edwards, Jeffrey R., Daniel M. Cable. 2009. The Value of Value Congruence. Journal of Applied Psychology. American Psychological Association 2009, Vol. 94, No. 3, 654–677

Fairclough, N. 2005. Discourse Analysis in Organization Studies: The Case for Critical Realism, Organization Studies, Vol. 26, No. 6

Fairclough, N. 2003. Analyzing discourse: Textual analysis for social research. London: Routledge.

Frandsen, Finn, Winni Johansen, Anne Ellerup Nielsen: International markedskommunikation i en postmoderne verden. Århus: Forlaget Systime, 1997

Gautam, T., Van Dick, R. and Wagner, U. 2004. Organizational identification and organizational commitment: Distinct aspects of two related concepts. Asian Journal of Social Psychology, 7: 301–315. doi: 10.1111/j.1467-839X.2004.00150.x

Gehrels, Sjoerd A., Joachim de Looij. 2010. EMPLOYER BRANDING A NEW APPROACH FOR THE HOSPITALITY INDUSTRY. http://www.eurochrie2010.nl/publications/1024.pdf

Gleick, James. 1999. Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything (New York: Pantheon, 1999).

Giddens, A. 1991 (A). The Consequences of Modernity. Stanford University Press.

Giddens, A. 1991 (B) Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age. Stanford University Press.

Hyland, K., and Brian Paltridge. 2011. Continuum Companion to Discourse Analysis. Continuum International Publishing Group

Harris, F. and de Chernatony, L. 2001. Corporate branding and corporate brand performance. European Journal of Marketing, 35 (3/4), 441–456

Hofstede, Geert. 1980. Culture’s Consequences, International Differences in Work-Related Values (Cross Cultural Research and Methodology) Newbury Park, CA: Sage

Hofstede, Geert. 2002, Human Relations. [0018-7267(200211)55:11] Volume 55(11): xx–xx: 028921. Sage Publications. London.

Johnson, Kimberly Michelle. 2009. The Influence of Organizational Values on Profitability. Dissertation December 18, 2009 Copyright 2009 by Kimberly Michelle Johnson

http://www.eurochrie2010.nl/publications/1024.pdf



Kjerulf, Alexander. 2007. Happy Hour is 9 to 5; how to love your job, love life and kick butt at work. alexander

Lee, Raymond L.M., 2010. On the margins of belonging; Confronting cosmopolitanism in the late modern age. Journal of Sociology June 2010, vol 46 no 2 169-186

Mael, F. & Ashforth, B. E. 1992. Alumni and their alma mater: A partial test of the reformulated model of organizational identification. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 13, 103–

123.

Minchington, B. 2007. Your employer brand; attract, engage, retain, Mile End: Collective Learning. Australia

Roberts, J., Armitage, J. 2006. From organization to hypermodern organization: On the accelerated appearance and disappearance of Enron, Journal of Organizational Change

Management, Vol. 19 (2006) Iss: 5, pp.558 – 577

Rosa, H. 2003. Constellations Volume 10, No 1, 2003. © Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Judy Wajcman. The British Journal of Sociology Volume 59, Issue 1, pages 59–77, March 2008

Schein, E.H. 1985. Organizational Culture and Leadership

Schwartz, 2004. The paradox of Choice. Why more is less

Schwartz, S.H., and A. Bardi. Value Hierarchies Across Cultures-Taking a Similarities Perspective. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology May 2001 vol. 32 no. 3 268-290

Schwartz S.H., Gila Melech, Arielle Lehmann, Steven Burgess, Mari Harris and Vicki Owens. Extending the Cross-Cultural Validity of the Theory of Basic Human Values with a Different

Method of Measurement. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology 2001B 32: 519 DOI: 10.1177/0022022101032005001

Sherlock, Richard. 1986. Selective Nontreatment of Newborns. Pp. 147-151 in Robert F. Weir (ed.), Ethical Issues in Death and Dying. New York: Columbia University Press.

Sewell, Jr., W. H. (1992). A theory of structure: duality, agency, and transformation. The American Journal of Sociology, 98(1):1-29.

Van Dijk, Teun A. (2011). Discourse Studies: A Multidisciplinary Introduction. SAGE Publications Ltd

Weick, K.E. (1995) Sensemaking in Organizations

Wood, John B. 1986-87. "The Birthday-Deathday Effect: Fact or Artifact?" Omega 17(4):321-326.

http://edition.cnn.com/2011/LIVING/01/24/from.executive.to.teacher/index.html?iref=allsearch

http://www.employerbrandingtoday.com/blog/2011/01/26/facing-an-unfullfilling-corporate-job/

http://jcc.sagepub.com/search?author1=Shalom+H.+Schwartz&sortspec=date&submit=Submit

http://edition.cnn.com/2011/LIVING/01/24/from.executive.to.teacher/index.html?iref=allsearch

http://www.employerbrandingtoday.com/blog/2011/01/26/facing-an-unfullfilling-corporate-job/



http://positivesharing.com/2007/08/can-you-be-happy-in-an-evil-business/

http://blogs.wsj.com/management/2010/01/13/the-hole-in-the-soul-of-business/ http://www.conference-board.org http://money.cnn.com/2010/01/05/news/economy/job_satisfaction_report/ http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id= http://blogs.wsj.com/management/2010/01/13/the-hole-in-the-soul-of-business/ http://www.valuebasedmanagement.net/methods_kaizen.html http://www.kaizentek.com/company_wordkaizen.html

http://positivesharing.com/2007/08/can-you-be-happy-in-an-evil-business/

http://blogs.wsj.com/management/2010/01/13/the-hole-in-the-soul-of-business/

http://www.conference-board.org/

http://money.cnn.com/2010/01/05/news/economy/job_satisfaction_report/


http://blogs.wsj.com/management/2010/01/13/the-hole-in-the-soul-of-business/

http://www.valuebasedmanagement.net/methods_kaizen.html

http://www.kaizentek.com/company_wordkaizen.html

Abstract - pure.au.dkpure.au.dk/portal/files/39699450/thesis_TheExtraMile_sog.pdf · Abstract ......

Documents

Transcript of Abstract - pure.au.dkpure.au.dk/portal/files/39699450/thesis_TheExtraMile_sog.pdf · Abstract ......