Exploring Dialogue and Dialectics in the Co-Construction of Citizenship

This research paper explores the role of corporate-consumer dialogue in organizing citizenship knowledge for consumer stakeholders in a social media context. It adopts a discourse-centred view of organizations (Boje et al., 2004), urging that negotiation and legitimation of citizenship knowledge integrates discourses from a range of organizational stakeholders (Grant and Marshak, 2011; Sillince and Brown, 2009). To date, few studies have examined the powerful role that corporations play in constructing citizenship knowledge for key external stakeholders, and where they have come close (e.g. Caruana and Crane, 2008, 2011; Livesey, 2002), they tend not to integrate the consumer stakeholder’s part in this process. Our study is novel in its interpretation of both corporate and consumer communications through the lens of discourse.