Dennis Jancsary is Assistant Professor at the Institute for Organization Studies at WU (Vienna University of Economics and Business). His current research focuses on institutionalist  approaches in organization theory, particularly the diffusion and theorization of management ideas, practices, and structures. Conceptually, he is primarily interested in verbal, visual, and multimodal forms of rhetoric, narrative, and symbolism, as well as in the role of silences in the construction and institutionalization of meaning.

Organization and management scholarship is increasingly considering the importance of intricate orchestrations of verbal, visual, and other semiotic resources in the construction, maintenance, and change of organizational realities. Managing and organizing involves multimodal communication. Accordingly, the study of organizations requires both a sensitivity for the multimodal aspects of shared organizational realities and the ability to think about organization and management theories in multimodal terms. In this talk, I will briefly introduce a social  semiotic perspective on multimodality and outline multiple approaches to integrating multimodality in organization and management research. I will then demonstrate the managerial relevance of multimodality based on various insights from published and ongoing collaborative research.