Organisational Semiotics is a young discipline which emerged from the late 1980’s, for which Ronald Stamper’s contribution is significant and essential. This paper is to mark his role and contribution to this field of study. The paper is based on an interview with Ronald Stamper and research of relevant papers. It reviews briefly the history of the evolution of Organisational Semiotics; summari...

Despite early and ongoing calls for a systematic engagement with history, social semiotics has largely emphasized research on the synchronic rather than diachronic dimensions of meaning-making. And while ‘instability’ semiotic practices (see Kress’s Multimodality: A Social Semiotic Approach to Contemporary Communication, 2010) importance change Van Leeuwen’s Introducing Semiotics, 2005) have be...

If you go into a bookshop and ask them where to find a book on semiotics you are likely to meet with a blank look. Even worse, you might be asked to define what semiotics is which would be a bit tricky if you were looking for a beginner’s guide. It’s worse still if you do know a bit about semiotics, because it can be hard to offer a simple definition which is of much use in the bookshop. If you...

The hybrid aspect of cultures has been on the agenda of cultural and social studies as well as the arts for several years. From the perspective of the semiotician, cultures will necessarily be in continuous contact with a minimum of neighbours in order to enhance cultural semiosis, i.e., to make innovation and change possible. Otherwise, isolation would be in effect and limit a culture to its o...

Evaluating cross-platform systems is challenging due to the different constraints and capabilities of each platform. In this paper we extend the Semiotic Inspection Method (SIM), a Semiotic Engineering evaluation method, to evaluate cross-platform systems. We introduce the term cross-communicability to denote the quality of the meta-communication of the system as whole, taking into account the ...

In Cognitive Linguistic Critical Discourse Studies (CL-CDS), metaphor is identified as a key index of ideology and an important device in the legitimation of social action. From this perspective, metaphor is a cognitive-semiotic operation, invoked by metaphorical expressions in discourse, in which a source frame is mobilised to provide a template for sense-making inside a target frame, leading ...

This comment on Valsiner’s (2003) theory of enablement appreciates the theory’s contribution to fill the lacuna of social representation theory in dealing with individual reasoning and behaviour through a mechanism of semiotic mediation. It is shown, however, that the experimental illustration of the theory falls slightly short of providing evidence for the claims. In re-interpreting the experi...

This paper introduces the concept of myth, a dominant image on which an organizing vision may be formulated. It is proposed that organizational myths can be used to evaluate the nature and outcomes of information technology use in particular operating contexts, by permitting an enframing or disclosure of critical contradictions and tensions arising in such contexts. An analytical schema, the se...