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Journal of Business Ethics
Published in: Journal of Business Ethics 3/2011

01-12-2011

Visualizing the Phronetic Organization: The Case of Photographs in CSR Reports

Author: Hans Rämö

Published in: Journal of Business Ethics | Issue 3/2011

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Abstract

Aspects of phronetic social science and phronetic organization research have been much debated over the recent years. So far, the visual aspects of communicating phronesis have gained little attention. Still organizations try to convey a desirable image of respectability and success, both internally and externally to the public. A channel for such information is corporate reporting, and particularly CSR reporting embrace values like fairness, goodness, and sustainability. This study explores how visual portrayals of supposedly wise and discerning values (phronesis) are used to reinforce the verbal features of CSR reporting. The two propositions underlying this study is (1) that visual images form some of the major parts of the structures of contemporary corporate reporting (particularly CSR reporting) and (2) that phronetic action in organizations is subjected not only to textual documentation, but also to visual expressions. This study also discusses how the Aristotelian concept of phronesis can be linked to contemporary concerns about responsibility, and how this is visually represented in CSR reporting. Finally, this study addresses the symbolic and contextual signification of images in corporate accounts of wisdom and responsibility.
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Appendix
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Footnotes
1
Cf. Plato’s allegory of the cave; Heidegger’s (1977) discussion of the word “picture” (Bild) in terms of “image” (Gebild); Baudrillard’s (1981) Simulacrum, not as a copy of the real, but truth in its own right.
 
2
The all-seeing eye can also be interpret to represent the evil eye, and hence some religious aversions and the use of nazars and hamsas (khamsa).
 
3
The Latin term evidentia—derived from the Latin verb ex+ videre: as something radiating its visibility—translates and conflates the Greek paronyms enargeia, denoting perspicuity, and energeia, denoting activity and force. [---] “Only then can an entity become exemplary and stand in for something else” (Wild 2001, pp. 100, 104).
 
4
19 of the reports in the original selection of 153 companies were not accessible online, hence the reduced number of 134 reports in the selection.
 
5
Because of the complexity of Peirce’s theory of categories—into a system with up to 66 classes of signs—this presentation is strongly simplified to grasp only some of the more basic implications of his typology of icon, index and sign (see Peirce, CP 2.276–2.277, EP 2: 273–274; Farias and Queiroz 2006).
 
6
In 1997, Edwards and Winkler associated McGee’s 1980 term of ideographs particularly with images.
 
7
The powerful symbolic value of Joe Rosenthal’s 1945 photograph of the flag raising at Iwo Jima, as discussed by Edwards and Winkler (1997), and Osborn (1986), or pictures of the Mount Rushmore monument are of course much more manifest than recurrent imagery and genres in CSR reports. However, the purpose of using the concept of ideograph in this presentation is to examine the visualization of virtuous symbolic depiction, and the ways in which the tenets of sustainability and phronesis are implied through pictorial choices in CSR reporting.
 
8
Reproduced in Waters (1980, p. 452).
 
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Metadata
Title
Visualizing the Phronetic Organization: The Case of Photographs in CSR Reports
Author
Hans Rämö
Publication date
01-12-2011
Publisher
Springer Netherlands
Published in
Journal of Business Ethics / Issue 3/2011
Print ISSN: 0167-4544
Electronic ISSN: 1573-0697
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-011-0916-8

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