thesis proposal - pure.au.dk

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Thesis Proposal

Employer brand co-creation: An empirical investigation

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Table of Contents 1. Introduction ................................................................................................................................. 3

2. Employer branding...................................................................................................................... 6

2.1 Employer Branding: a mini-map of the field ........................................................................ 6

2.2 The current state of employer attraction research and practice ............................................ 7

2.1.4 Reframing employer branding as a co-construction process ......................................... 8

3 Philosophy of Science and methodology ................................................................................... 12

3.1 The importance of the micro ............................................................................................... 12

3.2 What is CA and why is it appropriate? ............................................................................... 13

3.2.1 Employer brand co-creation and intersubjectivity ....................................................... 14

3.2.2 The importance of sequence and its relevance for Employer brand co-creation ......... 15

3.2.3 Grounding the analysis in members’ understandings .................................................. 16

3.3 Combining CA into the CCO paradigm.............................................................................. 17

3.3.1. The agency of things and ventriloquism ..................................................................... 18

3.4 data collection ..................................................................................................................... 21

4 Analyses ..................................................................................................................................... 23

5 PhD Plan .................................................................................................................................... 25

7 Challenges .................................................................................................................................. 27

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1. Introduction Since the advent of the Resource Based View (RBV) of the firm (Barney 1991; Wernerfelt 1984)

it has been widely recognised that talented and skilled employees, often referred to as “human

capital”, can leverage the competitive advantage of companies in ways that are difficult to

imitate (Barney 2011; Barney et al 2001). This development coupled with a global scarcity of

talent has led to what a group of McKinsey consultants called “The war for talent” (Chambers et

al. 1998).

It is within this strategic context that employer branding should be understood as a means to

attract, recruit and retain talented and skilled employees. The term “employer brand” was

introduced by Ambler and Barrow (1996, p. 8), who defined it as “The package of functional,

economic, and psychological benefits provided by employment, and identified with the

employing company.” Employer branding can thus be seen as encompassing externally and

internally oriented activities. Though still in its adolescence, the concept has received

considerable attention, not least because it crosses two very different corporate functions, HR

and marketing. In addition, it merges different academic fields such as organisational

attractiveness (see Edwards 2010 for a comprehensive review).

The focus of my dissertation will be the “external” aspect of employer branding, although I

realise that the internal-external distinction is an oversimplification (Kärreman and Rylander

2008). More specifically, I will focus on the attraction of university graduates. This is justified

by the fact that although graduate unemployment has been rising, the battle for the most talented

graduate is as fierce as ever (Ewerlin 2013; Elving et al 2013). Companies are increasingly

turning towards internal recruitment and many have developed talent pipeline strategies to ensure

that there is always a new talent available for promotion (Clutterbuck 2005; 2012; Haynes and

Ghosh 2008; McDonnell et al 2010). The raw material that feeds into this pipeline is graduate

students and the interest in attracting the very best has increased dramatically the past decade as

evidenced by the explosion in the number of so-called “graduate programs” offered by large and

even medium-sized companies (Santesson 2014) as well as other graduate targeted employer

branding tactics such as job fairs, company visits, case competitions and even company dinners

(Breaugh 2009). In addition to creating awareness, the point of these interactive formats is to

allow prospective employees and company representatives to get to know each other a bit more

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personally through interaction. Thereby both parties curb the risk of bad hires. This motivation

has led to the development of a fairly new tactic called pre-hire mentoring (Spitzmüller et al

2008). Essentially this phenomenon combines realistic recruitment (Morse and Popovich 2009)

with organisational mentoring (Kram 1983), and it refers to a process where a senior employee

from a company acts as a mentor for a graduate student during his/her studies. During the

process both parties get to know each other on a deeper level and this presumably leads to a

better basis for evaluating whether future employment would be mutually beneficial. The study

by Spitzmüller et al (2008) showed that pre-hire mentoring increased the level of perceived

attraction, increased the intention to pursue job at the company and increased the likelihood of

the mentee getting hired. In addition, several studies in organisational socialisation have proven

the correlation between pre-entry knowledge and performance of employees. It has been shown

that more pre-entry knowledge about the company and the job leads to better perceptions of fit,

faster mastery of tasks, improved role clarity, and increased commitment among other things

(Riordan 2001; Kammeyer-Mueller and Wanberg 2002; Stephens and Dailey 2012). Adding to

this, a recent meta-analysis of the research into Realistic Job Previews showed the same

conclusions, namely that when realistic expectations of the job were established before entry it

led to lower employee turnover, increased acceptance of job offer, greater perception of honesty

and improved role clarity (Earnest et al 2011). It seems reasonable to conclude that the better the

prospective employee knows the company the faster they will become a valuable asset and the

less likely they are to leave the company shortly after being hired.

Unfortunately Spitzmüller et al (2008) is the only study of pre-hire mentoring to this day, and

while it offers some evidence that it is effective, it does not show how these effects come about

apart from the very general terms psychosocial and career functions of mentoring. Arguably,

what happens during the actual mentor conversation has a significant impact on the effectiveness

of the tactic, but no studies have investigated this yet. In my dissertation I will do an in-depth

investigation of pre-hire mentoring as an employer branding tactic and thus alleviate to dearth of

research on the topic.

In investigating the subject, I will write myself into the emerging redefinition of employer

branding proposed by Aggerholm et al (2011, p. 107) who define it as “a dynamic and

interactional process of negotiating and co-creating brand values”. This redefinition stands in

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sharp contrast to the vast majority of classic employer branding research which builds the “linear

model of communication” (West and Turner 2014) as evidenced by the following definition

offered by Bonaiuto et al (2013, p. 780):

“Employer branding (EB) focuses on the identification and communication of the functional,

economical, and psychological benefits and values provided by an employer or a profession to

current and future employees.”

Their definition assumes that the employer brand management team constructs an unequivocal

brand message which is then sent to the target receivers who unproblematically interpret the

message as intended. A recent study by Edinger (2015) showed that this definition corresponds

quite well to how employer branding practitioners perceive their work. It is however a gross

simplification of how communication works especially in interpersonal, face-to-face

communication contexts such as pre-hire mentoring. As an alternative, Aggerholm et al (2011)

argue for a co-construction model where the employer brand is constituted in communication

and constantly negotiated between interactants as it is “talked into being” (Heritage 1984). As

illuminating as their article is in terms of theoretical development, it lacks a sound grounding in

empirical evidence and this is vital for the further development of a co-creation model for

employer branding. Summarising all of the above, the problem statement of my dissertation is:

• How is an employer brand co-created in pre-hire mentoring conversations?

In answering this question I hope to make the following contributions:

• An in-depth investigation of the popular, under-researched employer branding tactic pre-

hire mentoring

• An sound methodology for the empirical analysis of employer brand co-creation

• Empirically grounded insights how employer brands are co-created in interaction

• Practical insights into re-hire mentorships as a mutual accomplishment relevant for both

mentors and mentees

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2. Employer branding In this section I will present a condensed version of a review the employer branding field. I will

zoom in on externally oriented activities, the communication models dominating the literature

and argue for a co-creation perspective as a relevant reconceptualization.

2.1 Employer Branding: a mini-map of the field Since the initial conceptualisation of employer branding (Ambler and Barrow 1996), there has

been an explosion of publications on the topic both in the scientific literature and not least in

practitioner how-to books. One of the most widely cited conceptualisations of employer branding

is offered by Backhaus and Tikoo (2004, p 505) depicted in figure 1.

The model proposes that employer branding leads to desirable results both externally (employer

attraction) and internally (employee productivity) through a number of mediators. The model

also shows how extremely large a concept employer branding is. All the concepts that link back

to employer branding have vast bodies of research supporting them, for instance employer

attraction research can be tracked back to the early 1980’s (Rynes and Miller 1983) and a recent

meta-analysis on the topic (Uggerslev et al 2012) included 232 studies. Research on

organisational identity also began in the 1980s and a review by Ravasi and Catano (2013)

identified 33 empirical studies and a larger number of theoretical articles. Moreover, Edwards

(2010) highlighted two additional fields from personnel psychology that could be subsumed

under the employer branding umbrella namely Psychological Contract and Personality

Figure 1: Backhaus and Tikoo’s (2004) conceptualisation of employer branding

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Characteristics (trait psychology), and in addition I would add Realistic Job Preview research,

Talent Management, Mentoring and Vocational Socialisation to the mix as well. Put shortly, it

seems that all theory related to current and prospective employees could be fused into employer

branding. This clearly shows that investigating employer branding in its entirety is an impossible

endeavour. Consequently, my zooming in on employer attraction is arguably a rather small

contribution, but nonetheless I hope to make it a significant one by focussing on an

underexplored tactic and by adding to the paradigm shift presented by Aggerholm et al (2011)

which sees employer branding as co-construction.

2.2 The current state of employer attraction research and practice Employer attraction research can be tracked back to the early studies by Sara Rynes and her

colleagues (Rynes and Miller 1983; Rynes and Barber 1990) who studied employer attraction

mechanisms in college students. Today the field remains centred on attraction of graduates (see

table 2 in appendix 2 for an overview of some recent studies) and how to communicate the right

attributes or benefits in order to appeal to the students. The research is usually carried out

according an experimental methodology and involves students’ responses to different

communication material such as hypothetical job adverts (Blackman 2006; Elving et al 2013),

and “about us” webpages (Jones et al 2014). Other studies simply ask graduate students about the

attributes possessed by a hypothetic dream employer (Chhabra and Sharma 2014; Jain and Bhatt

2015) or the attributes of a number of specified (Rampl and Kenning 2014; Terjesen et al 2007)

or imagined real-life companies (Srivastava and Bhatnagar 2010).

All the studies above subscribe to a linear model of communication as they assume that

“attributes” can unequivocally constructed and injected into the recipients who will interpret

them uniformly. This view prevails in the broader employer branding literature as well as it is

evidenced by all but the last three definitions of employer branding in table 1 (Appendix 1)

which all subscribe to the linear model of communication. The underlying assumption is that

meaning is constructed and controlled by the employer brand managers. This idea, that the

employer brand is a manageable entity, is naturally very appealing to practitioners schooled in

the management paradigm which assumes that meaning can be controlled by autonomously

acting managers (Stacey 2007). Edinger (2015) proved this point brilliantly by demonstrating

that for employer brand managers, the employer brand was essentially a boundary object that

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created a number of rights and responsibilities related to the creation, protection, and controlling

of the employer brand. Thereby their legitimacy to a large extent rests on the notion that an

employer brand is a manageable object which requires the specific competencies that they

possess. However convenient and socially relevant this conceptualisation may be, it does not

reflect how communication processes unfold, and it severely limits employer branding practices,

not least because it does not correspond to the tactics that many large and even medium-sized

companies draw on in their employer branding strategy (Breaugh 2009). An interpersonal

context of communication demands that the model of communication employed can account for

the dynamics involved in the negotiation of meaning between the interactants. To this end the co-

creation model of employer branding proposed by Aggerholm et al (2011) offers a very suitable

alternative to the linear model, and it will be outlined next.

2.1.4 Reframing employer branding as a co-construction process

In their article, Aggerholm et al (2011) argue that the classical conceptualisation of employer

branding is insufficient and that a co-creation approach is more appropriate. This redefinition has

a number of ramifications ranging from the redefinition of employer branding to the ontology of

the company (see table 1). Before elaborating on these a short introduction to the concept co-

creation is in order.

Co-creation as a theoretical construct was introduced by Prahalad and Ramaswamy in the early

2000’s (Prahalad and Ramaswamy 2004) and it has made a significant impact in particular in

marketing and branding theory (Galvagno and Dalli 2014; Cova et al 2013). It is defined by

Galvagno and Dalli (2014, p. 644) as “the joint, collaborative, concurrent, peer-like process of

producing new value, both materially and symbolically.” From this definition we see that value

is no longer engineered into a product or a service rather it comes about as the result of an

interactive process between product, service, or company and the customer. The term employer

brand co-creation therefore implies that employer branding occurs between two or more actors.

However, the original notion of co-creation is rooted in studies of consumption and it needs a

slight re-specification of value to be directly applicable to employer branding. We need to

understand value in the most general sense rather than utility in consumption, since the employer

brand is not a product to be consumed. Therefor when referring to co-creation we are refereeing

to the co-creation of meaning.

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Table 1

Employer brand conceptualisations

Classic conceptualisation Employer branding as co-construction

Employer Brand Stable, manageable entity Dynamic, intersubjective phenomenon

Employer Branding Linear, step-wise, one-way Two-way, dynamic transaction process

Employer Brand

Marketing

An “employment value

proposition” is brought to the

market

Employer brand value is co-created

between various interactants

Employer Brand

Identity

Stable essence, controlled and

injected into receivers

Negotiated in interaction between

interactants

Communication The activity involved in

transmitting the employer

brand

Constitutive of employer branding

Suitable Contexts Mass-communication, if any Interpersonal communication, in

particular

The Organisation Stable entity, a container Emergent, constituted in

communication, grounded in action.

The reconceptualization implies an important shift in the definition of the employer brand and

employer branding. We can no longer see the employer brand as a manageable, stable entity, nor

can we assume that it can be unequivocally transmitted to the target audience through a one-way

process. It also means that we must reject the idea that employer branding involves a number of

steps to concluded in a linear fashion as it is proposed by Chhabra and Sharma (2014, p. 51):

“Employer branding starts with the analysis of the organization’s values, culture, competition,

HR and other policies, strengths, brand’s current image, trends and the like. This leads to the

identification of value propositions, based on which the employer branding strategies are

formulated. Once strategies are formulated, the communication channels for internal and

external marketing are identified for positioning the brand propositions in the minds of the

prospective and existing employees. This leads to employer attractiveness for the potential

employees and employer brand loyalty for the current employees.”

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The process they describe can be summarised as follows as:

The linearity and causal assumptions that support this model of employer branding must be

discarded entirely with the reconceptualization offered by Aggerholm et al (2011).

Instead the employer brad is negotiated in interaction in an on-going dynamic process of two-

way communication. The meaning of the brand is neither located “in” the sender or the receiver

but is intersubjectively1 constituted. The model of communication adopted is thus one of

transaction (West and Turner 2014) in which interactants negotiate their way towards shared

meaning through dialogue. It follows that companies are no longer able to condense their true

essence into an employment value proposition which is then “taken to the market” as it

suggested in the employer branding theory drawing on Spence’s (1973) signalling theory (see

e.g. Ewerlin 2013; Jones et al 2014). Instead employer brand meaning is co-created in interaction

and do not boil down to a fixed, stable essence at any point. In addition, the identities of the

company, its representatives and the prospective employee are not fixed either. Instead identity is

to be understood in a Goffmanian sense, namely as an ongoing performance (Goffman 1959).

This is particularly relevant in pre-hire mentoring a number of different roles (e.g. mentor,

mentee, expert, guide etc.) may be appropriated in the interaction. While this certainly increases

the level of complexity for the researcher and practitioner alike, it allows for a deeper

understanding also allows for more sophisticated insights into the process of employer branding.

These insights are needed if the literature is to offer something to a practice which has long

recognised the importance of getting closer to the graduates via interaction based employer

branding tactics that graduates also seem to prefer (Chhabra and Sharma 2014).

1 We will touch upon the problem of intersubjectivity in section 3.2.1

AnalysisIdentify

value proposition

Make strategy

Select channels

Inject message into

recipients

Monitor results

Figure 2

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On a meta-theoretical scale the reconceptualization entails a shift in how we see the organisation

as a whole. Supporting the prevailing linear model of communication in employer branding (see

discussion above and appendix 1) is what Ruth Smith called the “container metaphor” (Fairhurst

and Putnam 2004). This implies that the organisation is considered a fixed, stable entity with a

true essence and a clearly distinguishable interior and exterior. The organisation is also often

anthropomorphised and able to act, which is seen in the often quoted definition by Lloyd (in

Berthon et al 2005) who states that employer branding is “the sum of a company’s efforts to

communicate to existing and prospective staff that it is a desirable place to work”. Here it is “the

company” as an anthropomorphised entity that acts towards other collectives, namely existing

and prospective staff. The definition contains an apparent paradox in that the existing employees

who belong to the “inside” can somehow be communicated to by the very company they

comprise. This highlights that in the container metaphor the organisation is quite separable from

its members.

The reconceptualization proposed by Aggerholm et al (2011) subscribes to very different

metaphor, the grounded in action metaphor (Fairhurst and Putnam 2004). The view gained

prominence in organisation studies with the work of Deidre Boden in the beginning of 1990’s

(Boden 1994) and has since developed into a complex research program called the

Communication Constitutes Organisations (CCO) paradigm. As the name implies this position

posits that organisations exist in and through communication and I will elaborate on this in

section 3.3.

In summary the reconceptualization offered by Aggerholm et al (2011) has significant

ramifications for the definition of employer branding, the role of communication and even the

ontology of the organisation. However, the term co-construction is at risk for being just another

buzz-word and we need a sound methodology for investigating these seemingly important co-

construction processes, and this is not put forward in the article. In the following, I will attempt

to sketch out a methodology for my empirical investigation that will lend substance to the

theoretical abstraction presented in their paper.

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3 Philosophy of Science and methodology In this section I will argue for an Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis inspired

methodology nestled within the CCO paradigm. In my dissertation, the methodology will later be

applied in the context of pre-hire mentoring conversations, but could likely be of equal use when

investigating job fair interactions, case competitions or company visits. The main point of my

argument will be that the co-creation of an employer brand is a mutual members’

accomplishment intersubjectively established in talk-in-interaction.

3.1 The importance of the micro With characteristic eloquence Boden (1994, p. 8) argued that: “Organisations are people. When

people come together in organizations to get things done, they talk.” Thus organisations are no

more than the actions of people. This stands in sharp contrast to the anthropomorphising of the

organisation that is customary in employer branding literature. Talking about organisations

communicating an employer brand is an abstraction that follows from the container metaphor

and it ignores the fact that collectives simply cannot act in and of themselves, they act always act

through people (von Mises 1996, p. 42; Schütz 1967, pp. 198-199). This acting through relation

can be described as one of attribution and appropriation (Bencherki and Cooren 2011; Bencherki

and Snack 2016). Thus presumably “organisational” actions, such as communicating employer

brands, are made possible because someone acts in the name of the organisation and thus makes

their actions attributable to it whereby the company appropriates the action of said individual.

The organisation simply needs to make someone’s actions its own in order to exist. The

consequence of this position is that we must look at how individuals do co-create employer

brands and

In spite of this seemingly apparent observation, there is very little emphasis on what human

beings do in organisation studies (Llewellyn and Hindmarsh 2010) and even less in employer

branding. It seems to be assumed in much of the literature that the micro level interactions

between people are simply annoying details that get in the way of theorising or that they are too

messy to be a proper object of study (Llewellyn and Spence 2009). Dismissing micro level

interactions as irrelevant details is in Garfinkel’s (1967, p. 22) words akin to claiming that “ if

the walls of a building were only gotten out of the way one could better see what is keeping the

roof up.” For my study this means that I must refrain from relying abstractions such as the

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“organization” as on ontologically given actor involved in branding itself as an employer. Instead

the focus must be on the actions of individuals, in my case mentors doing pre-hire mentoring

conversations, and how these become attributed to and appropriated by the organisation. It also

means that the investigation of employer brand co-creation between company representatives

(mentors) and prospective employees must rely on observational data as this is the only possible

way to gain access to the process as it unfolds. It also means that we cannot rely on non-

observational data such questionnaires used by Juntunen et al (2012) in their co-creation study.

But how is it possible to link micro practices to macro processes such as the co-creation of an

employer brand? For now, I suffice to refer to a passage from von Mises (1996, p. 43):

“There is no need to argue whether a collective is the sum resulting from the addition of its

elements or more, whether it is a being sui generis, and whether it is reasonable or not to speak

of its will, plans, aims, and actions and to attribute to it a distinct “soul”. Such pedantic talk is

idle. A collective whole is a particular aspect of the actions of various individuals and as such a

real thing determining the course of events.” Shortly put, employer brand co-construction is

right there in the micro-level of talk-in-interaction when individuals’ actions are attributed to and

appropriated by the organisation.

What we need then is a methodology that can ground the rather abstract idea of employer

branding as a co-construction in empirical analysis. We need a methodology where the locus of

meaning creation is not inside either a sender or recipient but between interactants, otherwise we

cannot speak of co-creation. The next section details why Conversation Analysis offers a suitable

methodology.

3.2 What is CA and why is it appropriate? Conversation Analysis (CA) emerged as an off-shot of Garfinkel’s Ethnomethodology (EM,

Garfinkel 1967) in the late 1960s and early 1970s in California under the intellectual leadership

of Harvey Sacks and his followers Emmanuel Schegloff and Gail Jefferson. It started out as a

broadly sociological discipline but has since developed into an applied science doing research

within various institutional settings such as medical encounters, court room encounters, news

interviews, business meetings, job interviews, and even job centre interactions (Antaki 2011;

Heritage and Clayman 2010; Llewellyn and Hindmarsh 2010; Nielsen et al 2016). A

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foundational aspect of CA no matter which institutional context is under investigation is the strict

reliance on audio or video recorded observations (Heritage and Clayman 2010). The orthodoxy

in terms of empirical material can be a hindrance as it makes it more difficult to obtain the data,

but it also secures a solid grounding in observational data. As we shall see in the examples

below, CA pays significant attention to seemingly minute details of talk-in-interaction such in-

breaths, pauses, overlaps and laughter. This follows from the notion that no detail can be

dismissed a priori as irrelevant by the researcher because it might prove to be relevant for the

interactants. Thus, its reliance on observational data and attention to detail makes CA a suitable

method but it is not enough to satisfy all our demands. First my methodology must offer a

satisfactory solution to the problem of intersubjectivity which is inherent in the notion of co-

creation. Second, my methodology must be able to account for the intersubjective co-creation of

meaning as an observable phenomenon. The next three sections should prove that CA fits the

bill.

3.2.1 Employer brand co-creation and intersubjectivity

Employer brand co-creation is necessarily an intersubjective activity, since meaning is located

neither in the mind of the sender or the recipient but co-created between them. Therefore co-

creation faces “the problem of intersubjectivity”. Shortly put, this problem relates to the question

of how two or more persons can share a common experience and communicate about it (Heritage

1984, p. 54). That is, how is it that a mentor and a mentee in a pre-hire mentorship come to share

a mentorship experience and relatedly, how can they come to share an understanding on the

employer brand? The answer to this question is found in Schütz’ phenomenology which laid

much of the foundation for ethnomethodology and CA (Heritage 1984). He contends that we

cannot get inside other people’s heads and grasp their experiences as they do (Schütz 1967, p.

98). However, it seems that social actors solve the problem rather unproblematically on an

everyday basis without this ability. The solution to this paradox proposed by Schütz is as simple

as it is ingenious. For him, intersubjectivity is not a problem of transcendental philosophy that

requires an all-encompassing definitive solution, rather it is a practical problem. Schütz (1967)

proposes that actors achieve shared meaning by assuming that for all practical purposes they

share a common world in the here-and-now and that their perspectives are sufficiently similar to

allow a mutual understanding. Based upon these assumptions social actors come to accomplish

whatever it is they are doing (Schütz 1967). Simply put, a pre-hire mentorship is constituted by

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the mentor and mentee because and as an effect of their agreement that that is what they are

doing. This does not mean however that they share the same motives for being there or that they

have the exact same expectations in terms of the outcome. It simply means that they agree that

what they are doing is a pre-hire mentorship and act accordingly. Elaborating on Schütz’

phenomenological perspective, Garfinkel (1967) developed the concept “ethno-methods” to

account for how social actors manage to accomplish whatever it is they accomplish. He shows

that members accountably make their actions intelligible to other people as actions constituting

an activity. It is this central idea further developed by Sacks and turned into a systematic

methodology for analysing talk-in-interaction with the inception of CA (Schegloff 2007). The

examination of pre-hire mentoring and employer brand co-creation must thus be examined as a

members’ phenomenon; that is something that is intersubjectively talked into being by those

involved in it. At the micro level of interaction, turns at talk comprise “the building blocks of

intersubjectivity” (Clayman and Heritage 2010, p. 15) and this will be elaborated next under the

two next headings.

3.2.2 The importance of sequence and its relevance for Employer brand co-creation

In addition to Garfinkel, Sacks was profoundly inspired by Goffman, especially his concept

“interaction order”, more specifically the sequential ordering of social actions as a mutual

accomplishment. The importance of sequence for the organising of organisation-comprising

activities has been thoroughly demonstrated in the outstanding volume edited by Llewellyn and

Hindmarsh’ (2010), and the sequential organisation of talk in interaction in general has been

covered comprehensively by Schegloff (2007). In relation to the co-construction of employer

brands the notion of sequence has several important advantages. First of all Sacks et al (1974)

showed that interactions demonstrate order at all points, and this ordering occurs in sequence. At

the most basic level an interaction comprises an adjacency pair comprising a first pair part (FPP)

and a second pair part (SPP) as illustrated below:

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Example 12

1 L : men hva gør du har interesse i- web branchen?

: but what does you have interest i- the web industry?

: But what does your interest in the web industry stem from?

2 E : Hv- hva der gør det h.?

: Wh- what which does it h.?

: Wh- what does it stem from?

The example is taken from a pre-hire mentoring conversation where the mentor L is asking the

mentee E a question. As the FPP is question, it constrains the SPP to be meaningful as a response

to it as such. No matter what E answers it will be understood as a response to the FPP. If he had

given a meaningless response such as “brown” it would be understood as meaningless because of

the FPP, and not answering would also be understood in relation to the FPP and the response

would then be considered “officially absent” (Schegloff 1968, p. 1083). We say that specific FPP

makes “conditionally relevant” one or more types of SPPs (Schegloff 2007, p. 20). Thus

sequence and the resulting conditional relevance is the condition under which actions are

“condemned to be meaningful” (Heritage 1984, p. 110).

In conclusion, through an understanding of sequence we should be able to observe the co-

construction process unfold “real time” between the interactants (Llewellyn and Hindmarsh

2010). This point deserves elaboration. Recall that CA strictly relies on “naturally occurring

talk” in the form of audio or video recordings. This type of data allows us to follow the co-

construction process “as it happens” (Boden 1994, p. 10). Since we adopt the point of view that

employer brands are intersubjective and dynamic, studying them as such is the only meaningful

approach. To reiterate, sequences of turns at talk are the “building blocks of intersubjectivity”

(Heritage and Clayman, p. 15).

3.2.3 Grounding the analysis in members’ understandings

With the importance of sequence thus settled we can now turn our attention to another central

concept that follows from the notion of sequence, namely next-turn proof procedure. Simply put,

next-turn proof procedure means that the recipient’s response to a turn at talk demonstrably

2 Note on the 3 lines of transcription: The first line is the original Danish transcription. Line 2 is a word-by-word translation into English, and the third is an intelligible transcription. 1 and 2 refers to the line numbers and L and E refers to the mentor and the mentee.

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shows his/her understanding of it (Sidnell 2013). Accordingly the analyst is able to ground the

analysis in members’ interpretations rather than guessing at the true meaning of or intention

behind the actors’ utterances. All the interpretation needed to account for the meaningfulness of

any interaction is right there in the data as a members’ phenomenon (Llewellyn and Spence

2009). And it has to be otherwise the members would not be able to intersubjectively accomplish

what it is they are doing in the first place. It follows that by following a CA methodology we

avoid the pit fall of framing an employer brand as the image that is constructed by employer

brand managers as it is customary in the literature (See table 1 in Appendix 1). Nor do we

assume that the employer brand resides only in the heads of the target audience as a stable

coherent impression. Instead we are able to empirically demonstrate how the employer brand is

continuously talked into being and ground the observation empirically in members’ interaction.

To summarise my argument: With a CA methodology employer brand co-construction should

be rendered observable in pre-hire mentoring conversations.

CA, however, is a sociological theory and it does not prescribe a specific ontology of the firm.

As mentioned above, the ontology of the firm must support the co-construction perspective and

the grounded in action metaphor and therefore we turn to the CCO paradigm.

3.3 Combining CA into the CCO paradigm As demonstrated in a recent round-table article (Schoeneborn et al 2014), the CCO paradigm

covers three separate schools: The Four Flows Model inspired by Giddens’ structuration theory

(McPhee and Zaug 2000), Luhmann’s Social Systems Theory (Seidl and Becker 2006) and The

Montreal School (Taylor and Van Every 2000; Cooren et al 2006). I subscribe to latter for

reasons explained below. A full elaboration of the Montreal School is beyond the scope of this

thesis proposal and therefore I will emphasise the most important points.

The Montreal School (TMS) is arguably the most well developed branch of the CCO paradigms

(Kuhn 2008). As the name implies it originates from Montreal, Canada, and it was founded by

James Taylor, Elizabeth Van Every and Francois Cooren in the late 1990s and early 2000s. They

and those inspired by them draw inspiration from a vast and diverse number of sources including

Latour’s Actor Network Theory (Clifton 2015), Greimas’ Narratology (Bencherki and Cooren

2011), Garfinkel’s Ethnomethodology and Sacks’ Conversation Analysis (Bencherki and Snack

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2016; Cooren and Fairhurst 2004), Bakhtin’s notion of dialogue (Cooren and Stadler 2014),

Austin and Searle’s Speech Act Theory (Cooren 2004) and Weick’s Sensemaking (Cooren and

Fairhurst 2004). A common thread in all the TMS literature however is the communication is

organisation, and that communication is action. It follows that they share the same ontology of

the firm as Boden (1994), namely that organisations are actions performed by people in

communication. Since Boden was herself an ethnomethodologist and a conversation analyst and

both of these programs also subscribe to the communication as action perspective it seems that a

merging is possible.

TMS also insists on the importance of never leaving the terra firma of interaction in favour of

seemingly higher level abstractions such as employer brands or even “a company” as such

(Cooren et al 2013). This is very much line with CA although TMS is by no means as

empirically driven. I would argue that CA has a lot to offer to TMS in terms of sound

methodology for doing micro level analysis. Regarding the notion of levels, both very sceptical

towards the entire idea of distinguishing between “levels” and prefer the idea that the any macro-

level phenomenon is in the micro level of interaction (Schoeneborn et al 2014; Boden 1994;

Llewellyn and Hindmarsh 2010). This scepticism can arguably be traced back to

ethnomethodology which is a common source of inspiration.

In addition CA and TMS has been merged before (Cooren and Fairhurst 2004), and for my

particular purpose they form a very suitable combination for reasons explained in following.

3.3.1. The agency of things and ventriloquism

In addition to the agreement on communication as action (Cooren 2010; Schoeneborn et al

2014), CA and TMS also agree that communication is transactional. This means that a

communicative action demands a reaction which is essentially what conversation analysts call

conditional relevance as touched upon earlier (Schegloff 1968). However, TMS adds to CA a

broadened scope of agency, the ability to make a difference (Cooren 2006). TMS argues the

organizational world is a plenum of agencies with various ontologies all capable of acting which

makes up for the myopic focus on talk which CA may be accused of. This means that in a pre-

hire mentoring conversation there may be a number of agencies involved in addition to the to

interactants for example brochures, the furniture, the organisation’s strategy or a hiring policy.

However, in line with the strict empiricism of CA, it cannot be assumed a priori that either of

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these entities are relevant, they must oriented to and made relevant by the interactants. Simply

put, things can be made to do things in conversations.

Expanding on this idea of hybrid ontologies and shares agency, TMS, most notably Francois

Cooren, has introduced the term ventriloquism. The concept describes the “actions through

which someone or something makes someone or something else say or do things” (Cooren 2015,

p. 476) and it has received considerable attention in recent years (Cooren 2010; Cooren and

Bencherki 2011; Bergeron and Cooren 2012; Cooren et al 2013; Sorsa et al 2013; Clifton 2015;

Jahn 2016). The concept implies that various human and non-human actants can make a

difference when they are invoked in local conversations as “dummies” or “figures”. However

this is a two-way relationship the ventriloquist talks through the dummy and vice versa. A

fundamental aspect of ventriloquism is that action always is shared (Cooren 2016), as it can be

seen in example 2 below:

Lines 1 and 2

Lines 3, 4 and 5

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This excerpt is from a pre-hire mentoring conversation between a marketing student (T) and the

marketing manager (B) of an engineering company that develops survey equipment and software

for the off-shore industry. In this excerpt the brochure3 is acting in collaboration with the mentor

B to show what their software does. She does so via pointing and gazing at it and thereby making

it relevant in the interaction. According to TMS theorising, B thus engages in a ventriloquizing

activity whereby she makes the brochure act while it, at the same time, makes her say certain

something about wind turbine foundations. Arguably, the brochure plays a very important role in

that it allows the mentor to show the technical nature of the company’s products in an

understandable way due to the illustrations contained within it. My preliminary analysis has

demonstrated that this mentor-brochure hybrid agent plays an essential part in the co-creation of

the company character as rather “geeky”.

3 The brochure is situated behind the cups and is thus out of view for the camera but in plain sight for both the mentor and the mentee

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I will finish off this philosophy of science and methodology section with a few points on my data

collection.

3.4 data collection Working with CA necessitates the use of video recorded data so that comprises the bulk of my

empirical data. So far I have just over 10 hours of video recorded pre-hire mentor conversation. I

have also supplemented my recording with examples of promotional material used in the

conversations if anything is used at all. Acknowledging the role of the physical surroundings I

have also seen the premises in which the recordings take place, thus enabling me to understand

possible references specific departments or products. The following excerpt shows the relevance

of such “talk-extrinsic” data (Waring et al 2012):

1: E: men i jeg sys i- skriv- (.) body:- bodyshoppen der (.)

but I think you- wri- (.) body:- the bodyshop there (.) But I think that what wri- (.) The bodyshop there 2: I: j[a

Y[es

Y[es

Example 3

Here it is necessary to know that the bodyshop referred to by the mentee in line 1 is a specific

department of the company that they have just seen on their tour around the premises. In addition

I have also talked to all the participanst and gathered data on their backgrounds such as education

(mentor and mentee) and position in the company (mentors). I have also talked to the mentors

about the reason for doing pre-hire mentoring. As such I combine video-observations with

broadly ethnographic data (Daymon and Hollaway 2002).

I have gathered the data from three different mentor programs comprising students 3 different

universities: Copenhagen University, Copenhagen Business School, and Aarhus University. Two

of the three programs are arranged by the universities, and the third is arranged by a private

company as it is the case in the Spitzmüller et al study (2008). Since the study in exploratory in

nature, I follow a purposive sampling strategy and I have attempted to include different

institutions with different interpretations of pre-hire mentoring. Thereby I hope to be able to

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reach an understanding of the pre-hire mentoring process that cuts across institutional variations

of the concept.

On the company side I stuck to purposive sampling strategy in order to secure variety. In practice

however I had to rely on convenience sampling as well which is obviously not optimal but

consent from both parties was required for ethical purposes and thus I had to include those who

were willing to participate, and obviously exclude those who were not. The companies included

are:

Company Industry Size and

span of

operations

Number of

meetings

recorded

Total

Length

Mentee study

Manufacturing

Company

Electro-

mechanical

products

Large,

international

1 2 hours 6

minutes

Marketing

IT IT and

entertainment

Medium-

sized,

international

1 1 hour 10

minutes

Marketing

Public

Institution

Governing

Body

Large,

national

1 1 hour 20

minutes

Philosophy

Engineering

Company

Off-Shore Medium-

sized,

international

2½

(Technical

difficulty)

2 hours Communication

IT company IT

infrastructure

and

consulting

Large,

International

2 1 hour 57

minutes

IT

Marketing Online

marketing

consulting

Small,

national

1 1 hour 20

minutes

Communication

IT Company Websites and Small, 1 55 minutes IT

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online

marketing

consulting

national

IT Company Big Data Medium-

sized,

National

Still Going ?? IT and Business

Logistics

company

Logistics and

freight

Large,

international

Not settled ?? Supply chain

management

and logistics

4 Analyses In familiarizing myself with the data I have already discovered a number of topics which seems

to be relevant for the interactants. The main issue I face though is how to make the connection

between the observed micro phenomena of talk-in-interaction to the broader overreaching

concepts related to employer branding. In order to do so I will zoom in and be rather specific in

my focus. The general theme of all the three chapters is related identity negotiation in the

Goffmanian (1959) sense of “identity as performance”.

Having looked at my data, I have noticed that storytelling is ubiquitous. The concept is nothing

new in branding theory in general (Herskovitz and Crystal 2010) but has yet to receive

considerable attention in employer branding. It has been argued repeatedly in the storytelling

literature that stories are bearers of identity (Denning 2011) and as such they pose an interesting

way into the analysis of employer brand co-creation with a focus on both organizational identity

and the performance of personal identity in pre-hire mentor conversations. Storytelling research

however tend to limit its focus on the “story” which ignores the fact that stories in face-to-face

interactions are mutual accomplishments. A CA approach allows us to investigate how stories

are co-created by emphasising the telling aspect as much as the story content (Mandelbaum

2013). Through this investigation I hope to partially answer my problem statement by showing

how storytelling as a mutual accomplishment contributes to the co-creation of an employer

brand.

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The inspiration to pursue the next line of inquiry came from a couple of brilliant studies by Jan

Svennevig, who used CA to empirically demonstrate the doing of leadership style (Svennevig

2011; Svennevig and Djordjilovich 2015). These CA based studies show that it is possible to

identify abstract concepts such as leadership-style in thorough empirical analysis by

deconstructing it into analytically identifiable components. Following the same approach, I will

analyse how employer brand characteristics or attributes are co-created.

To this end the action of advice giving seems like a good starting point for an analysis since my

preliminary analysis has shown that they are quite frequent and that they are done by both

mentors and mentees. CA research has dealt quite extensively with advice giving in institutional

contexts (Couture and Sutherland 2006; Heritage and Lindström 1998; Heritage and Sefi 1992;

Vehvilainen 2001; Vehvilainen 2003; Waring 2007), and the research shows that it is by no

means a neutral, natural thing even when knowledge asymmetries are expected of the

institutional roles, quite the contrary. The act of giving advice assumes that the advisor knows

something relevant that the advisee does not know (Heritage and Sefi 1992). Therefore, I would

like to look at advice giving from the perspective of entitlement (Asmuss and Oshima 2012;

Clifton 2006; Heineman 2006); that is, who is entitled to give advice when and about what? By

analysing the negotiation of entitlement to give advice and I hope to be able to demonstrate how

some of the classic employer brand attributes such as “Recognition and Appreciation from

superiors” (Saini et al 2014) are co-created. For instance, how the mentor responds to a mentee’s

unsolicited advice might be quite telling whether new inputs are actually valued at the company.

In connection to this, a highly attractive attribute to graduates is the possibility to “use degree

skill” (Terjesen et al 2007). Indeed, a mentee’s interest in demonstrating competence would be

expected given the pre-hire nature of the mentorship and therefore this attribute deserves a

chapter of its own. But as with advice given, “doing being knowledgeable” is something that

happens in interaction and which is not neutral and problem free. The same goes for the mentor

who is doing being a knowledgeable professional which is also a negotiated identity. By

investigating how both parties come to demonstrate knowledgeability I hope to uncover how

they co-created the rights and responsibilities connected to different knowledge territories and

how this contributes to the co-creation of role distribution and expertise in the company.

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5 PhD Plan Status on core parameters

Teaching I have taught strategic management and communication theory the past

two semesters. I will conclude my teaching in November

PhD courses I have completed 2 courses of 5 ECTS each, one in Conversation

Analysis and one in Philosophy of Science. Both have proven quite

helpful and will contribute to my final dissertation. Two more 5 ECTS

courses have been planned and they are Research Design in November

2016 and Advanced Qualitative Methods in May 2017.

Stay abroad I have contacted a representative from the Coaching and Mentoring

Special Interest Research Group at Sheffield Hallam University. I want

to focus my stay abroad specifically on mentoring since this is where

my current environment has the least to offer

Data Collection I have approximately 11 hours of video recorded pre-hire mentor

conversations with one more mentorship to be recorded from October. I

am also negotiating with an additional company but no agreement has

been reached yet

Conferences I have been accepted as speaker at the European Mentoring and

Coaching Council conference in Edinburgh in March 2017. This will

be self-financed. I have yet to decide on which conference to attend as

my main academic event, as I see this as a strategic career move that

cannot be settled yet

Dissemination I have held 3 workshops on mentoring with based on my data and

analysis already. These have been valuable experiences that confirmed

the interestingness of my findings. My experience so far shows that

mentors and mentees alike are very interested in the micro level finding

that CA can offer.

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Plan for the next 2 years:

The plan below includes 2½ months of slack, therefore the final revisions are set to be completed

in the middle of May. I also need to fit in one more conference, but I have yet to decide on

which. The decision will depend on a variety of career related factors as I see my conference

participation as an opportunity to work toward these ends.

• 1st August 2016 – 1st January 2017:

o 1st August – 20th September: Thesis Proposal

o 1st October – 1st January: Data collection

o 10th October – 20th November: Teaching

o 28th November – 1st December: PhD course in Research Design (5 ECTS)

o 20th September – 1st December: Finish theoretical framework

Connect data and concepts: Bridge micro-macro gap

Separate employer branding into analysable components

o 1st October – 1 January: Transcribe 2 hours of conversation

o 1st December – 1st January: Begin analysis of Storytelling sequences

• 2nd January – 1st July 2017:

o 2nd January – 1st of February: Finalise Storytelling analysis

o 1st February – 15th April: Complete my stay abroad in Sheffield

Work with the Advice Giving analysis in the Mentoring and Coaching

special interest group

Contribute to 3 Discourse and Rhetoric Group data sessions

Work on publication for EMCC journal

o 15th February – 28th February: Prepare for European Mentoring and Coaching

Council conference in Edinburgh

o 1st March – 3rd March: EMCC Conference. Convince the mentoring community of

the value of CA micro analysis (a tad optimistic perhaps)

o 15th April – 1st May: Finalise Advice Giving analysis

o 1st May – 4th May: PhD course in Advanced Qualitative Methods (5 ECTS)

o 1st May – 14th May: Finalise paper for PhD Course

o 15th May – 1st June: Revisit analyses

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o 1st June – 1st July: Begin analysis of Employer Brand characteristics

o Identify and complete a 5 ECTS PhD course.

• 1st August 2017 – 1st January 2018

o 1st August – 15th September: Finalise Employer Brand characteristics

o 15th September – 1st October: Revisit the entire analysis

o 1st October – 1st January: Write discussion and conclusion

o Identify and complete the final 5 ECTS PhD course

• 2nd January – 1st September

o 1st January – 1st February: First read through

o 1st February – 1st March: Major revisions

o 1st March – 15th March: Second Read through

o 15th March – 1st April: Minor Revisions

o 1st April – 15th April: Go somewhere nice and leave the Dissertation for two

weeks. No PhD thinking allowed!

o 16th April – 1st May: Final read through

o 1st May – 15th May: Final revision

o 1st September: Hand-in

7 Challenges I picture those three chapters to comprise the bulk of my analysis. Yet I keep coming back to the

challenge that is looming large in background: Is it even impossible to empirically observe

employer brand co-creation in the micro level details of pre-hire mentoring conversation? The

fact that this may well not be entirely possible is a fairly large threat to my project, despite my

attempt to build a rigorous methodology. Another challenge I face is the question of whether my

methodology has anything to offer in terms of empirical investigations of employer brand co-

creation outside of pre-hire mentoring. If this is not the case a significant possible contribution is

lost. Essentially, what I am facing currently is how to bridge the macro-level abstractions

presented in employer branding theory and the micro-level activities that ought to constitute

them. As seen above, my solution for the moment is to deconstruct employer brands into fairly

small components such as single attributes and then identify these in my data. But I am certainly

open to suggestions regarding how to address the issue.

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