2019/12/10 by Lars Thøger Christensen, Mette Morsing, Ole Thyssen · 1 citation
Business, Management and Accounting · Psychology · #Language, Metaphor, and Cognition #Management and Organizational Studies #Team Dynamics and Performance
paper · doi:10.1177/0170840619896267
openalex publication_date 2019/12/10 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/01
This paper investigates talk–action dynamics in the context of organizations, focusing in particular on situations where the talk concerns complex organizational aspirations, that is, situations where the implied action takes considerable effort to unfold and therefore extends into an unknown future. Using corporate social responsibility (CSR) as recurrent exemplar, we address talk–action dynamics in four different modalities of aspirational CSR talk: exploration, formulation, implementation and evaluation. By conceptualizing the precarious relationship between talk and action in each of these modalities, the paper disentangles talk and action, all the while acknowledging that the two are mutually intertwined. Hereby, the paper extends theories of communicative performativity, recovering the perlocutionary dimension and focusing on uptake beyond the moment in which the speech act is uttered.