Backstage Discourse and the Emergence of Organizational Voices: Exploring Graffiti and Organization

Abstract

The current study focuses on organizational bathroom graffiti in an urban coffee house, proposing that this form of communication forms constitutes an alternative public sphere for expressive and political voices. Public bathroom graffiti is interesting due to its unique spatial and textual affordances. In particular, anonymity of such spaces promotes voice and dialogue while insulating actors from social conformity pressures. This discursive relation to space produces dense and polyphonic communicative acts, allowing authors to tackle important social and organizational questions, engage in self-conscious reflection, and express taboo emotions. A 3-year study of organizational graffiti is presented, followed by a description of how the graffiti studies composed an expressive political space within the organization. Implications of the graffiti included the decentralized production of organizational voices, the problematizing of the notions of public and private, and the possibilities of political expression within organizational spaces.

Modalities of opposition: Control and resistance via visual materiality

“…Whereas some research explores how such ambiguity can facilitate resistance in the discursive mode (e.g. Giroux, 2006;Islam, 2010), the uses of visual ambiguity in organizational control struggles are not well understood.…”

Positive Frequency Dependence in Graffiti: An Empirical Case Study of Cultural Evolution

“…The notion that emotional strength of an idea can determine how likely students are to respond is consistent with the study by Heath et al (2001), in which the authors show that emotional selection can be stronger than informational selection in selecting which urban legends are passed along. Psychologists from other graffiti studies also suggest that the graffiti reflects the state of mind of people who write it, and can be used to gather information about the general feelings and thoughts of a population who share a space and write graffiti (Islam, 2010).…”

“…Graffiti have been categorized in a number of studies, some by the emotions evoked or kind of graffiti (Hagen et al, 1999), others by the content of graffiti (Klofas and Cutshafl, 1985;Ball, 2004), or a mixture of both ( §ad and Kutlu, 2009;Islam, 2010). Each study validated the selected categories by having multiple people cross-check the categorization and all of these studies have in common the fundamental principle that a good category is one upon which everyone can agree.…”

From Wall 1.0 to Wall 2.0: Graffiti, Social Media, and Ideological Acts of Resistance and Recognition Among Palestinian Refugees

“…Our article contends that, for Palestinians, each Wall has been used as a nonviolent communication site on which to operationalize writing as an ideological act of resistance and recognition. In the case of Wall 1.0, the graffiti on the separatist wall in the West Bank functions as "print weapons" (Peteet, 1996) and "open text" (Islam, 2010) for shaping public discourse. This graffiti visualizes and aestheticizes political claims of a disenfranchised constituency.…”