Introduction

Nathalie PINÈDE1, Luc MASSOU2 and Patrick MPONDO-DICKA3

1 MICA, Université Bordeaux Montaigne, Pessac, France

2 Crem, Université de Lorraine, Metz, France

3 LERASS, Université Toulouse 2 – Jean-Jaurès, France

I.1. Websites and digital presences of organizations

This book concludes a trilogy devoted to the study of websites1 and more generally of digital info-communicational devices from a number of perspectives (epistemological, methodological and pedagogical, in particular). This book is a result of a cycle of study days, initiated in 2015 by Patrick Mpondo-Dicka at the University of Toulouse 2 – Jean-Jaurès, around a somewhat provocative question: Is website analysis still relevant from an info-communicational point of view? The debates from this study day had then been considered sufficiently fascinating, relevant and topical for a small group of researchers (Luc Massou, Patrick Mpondo-Dicka, Nathalie Pinède, Sébastien Rouquette and Peter Stockinger) to take up this issue and give it life through a series of study days dedicated to the subject. Thus, four other days were organized between 2017 and 2021, each presenting one particular angle of questioning arising from this website “object”: the websites of organizations at the heart of plural digital dynamics (Bordeaux Montaigne University, 2017), the website in the new ecosystems of multi-cultural and intercultural communication (National Institute of Oriental Languages and Civilizations, 2018), audience representations and the practices of Internet users (Clermont Auvergne University, 2019) and finally the communication of organizations and online storytelling (University of Lorraine, 2021).

This book, prefaced by Peter Stockinger, thus completes the showcasing of the main contributions that emerged from this cycle of five study days, and brings together 23 authors around one main hub, that of the communication of organizations (companies, communities, NGOs, etc.), in the light of websites and, more broadly, digital ecosystems orchestrating differentiated strategies, themselves inscribed in a heterogeneous and complex multicultural space.

The concept of “digital presence” for organizations, chosen as the generic title of this book, testifies to the extension of our consideration of organizational communication in digital environments. Merzeau (2014) emphasizes the intrinsically temporal character of online presence, as a “form of existence in a space”. To this temporal dimension must be added a mode of existence, between representation and intervention (Rieder 2010). The digital presence of an organization is not confined to what it produces and controls in terms of discourse, rhetoric and narrative. By revealing a certain representation of its identity on the Web, it offers this up to be read but also to be rewritten, whether by its users, customers or by forms of algorithmic calculations of the traces produced by and around the organization. Therefore, if “institutions and organizations try to define themselves as stable entities with boundaries permitting a certain control of their image” (Le Béchec and Alloing 2016), this perimeter is constantly pushed back, redefined, its contours evolving all the time, the conditions of digital presence being constantly subjected to reinterpretation. Pélissier (2018) suggests defining the digital presence of an organization “as a system introduced into digital devices, formed from the traces of interactions between identity construction and reputation processing. […] The digital presence of an organization is thus evolutive, changing, corresponds to voluntary or involuntary traces and can be observed at least in part” (p. 112). We find in this definition the ingredients of the digital presence mentioned above, between dynamics, the construction of a mediated ethos and the unpredictable reuse of an interweaving of ephemeral and shifting traces. As a result, we cannot capture the totality of this digital presence and we are condemned to grasp only fragments, incomplete snapshots, inscribed in a given space-time.

If we return to our main topic, namely the role and legitimacy of websites through the prism of the digital presence of organizations, the website embodies one of the facets of the organization’s online presence, relatively stable in the register of inscription, but also a springboard to other spaces and always (re)negotiable when put into operation and calculated. The various contributions in this book propose, although with no claims to be exhaustive or able to explore every dimension, various levels of reading of this digital presence of organizations, for example, by updating the links that are forged between anchorage and flow or between representation and intervention, mobilizing and re-examining the concept of media ethos, analyzing the narrative logics and the reappropriations that are made of them, etc. The whole thus contributes to setting out a multifaceted and multi-strategic vision of the digital presences of organizations.

This work is structured on three major thematic axes built around 12 chapters. In the first part, we will look at the different strategies (content, services, territorialization) identified in various organizational contexts with various audiences. In the second part, the focus will be more specifically on the cultural dimension of websites, raising the issue of a digital organizational communication that oscillates between local and global. Finally, in the third part, we will pay particular attention to the role of storytelling and narratives in organizations’ online communication strategies.

I.2. Websites and organizational strategies

Between stability and dynamics, websites enroll organizations in a complex digital environment where their presence and their identity are constantly redrawn, according to practices, from being put into symbolic circulation but also from the logics of economic and technical development of the Web. This is highlighted by Mariannig Le Béchec through the concept of circulating entities, the symbolic signs transmitted by websites and put into circulation in a changing digital environment. This dynamic of transposition of signs, which the author describes as “agency”, thus contributes to modeling digital territories, in which the major challenge faced by organizations will be to control the circulation of their brands.

This link that is forged between statics and dynamics around websites is also highlighted by Stela Raytcheva, Thierry Côme and Gilles Rouet, who apply it through their approach to strategies for stabilizing a company culture. They use a processual reading of corporate culture through discursive strategies that can be identified in the communication narratives produced by an organization (in this case Danone) on its institutional website and Facebook pages. This discursive analysis thus operates at two levels: identifying the company’s values in the communication texts produced (static level) and analyzing the discursive sequencing and interweaving of the texts produced by the organization on social media (dynamic level). By adopting a dual perspective, semiotic and material, the communicational texts are analyzed in themselves but also at the heart of a set of interrelated texts from which a corporate culture is co-constructed in a performative and meaningful way.

Marion Rollandin for her part focuses on the representations made by companies on their websites, using the example of six manufacturers of photographic equipment. To do this, she mobilizes a semio-pragmatic analysis and the concept of media ethos to update the relationship between, on the one hand, media ethos and product promotion strategies and, on the other hand, media ethos and typology of target audiences, as read through websites. Although the organizations studied seek to produce a very positive media ethos while using the ploy of differentiation from their competitors, two factors of uncertainty remain: the risk of a mismatch between user perception of content and the communication’s intentions, and the difficulty of mastering and controlling a media ethos subject to change, whether by the company itself or by forms of reappropriation and reinterpretation of this ethos in digital spaces such as social media, which brings us back to this question of the circulation of signs, mentioned previously by Mariannig Le Béchec.

Christelle Larguier and Sébastien Rouquette examined the role of websites (belonging to associations and profit-making organizations) aimed at caregivers, in particular reviewing in this context the initial question that led to the cycle of events about websites: Are they still relevant in terms of digital communication strategies relayed by social media? To answer this question, they use a mixed methodological framework (comparative analyses of traces of activity on websites and social media sites, and in-depth interviews), which reveals that websites offer communicational advantages for which social networks are no substitute.

Marcy Delsione Ovoundaga extends the study initiated by Christelle Larguier and Sébastien Rouquette by focusing on the communication of associations based on their discursive online strategies. The author draws on the example of two associations, La Chaîne de l’Espoir and Action Contre la Faim, and on the analysis of a corpus of Facebook posts and comments. His study...