PhD Defence Nils Grimm | Corporations in Search of Meaning

Corporations in Search of Meaning

Nils Grimm is a PhD student in the Department of Product-Market Relations. (Co)Promotors are prof.dr.ir. J. Henseler and dr. Y. Sahhar from the Faculty of Engineering Technology and prof.dr. B. Österle from Hochschule Heilbronn.

Organizations increasingly invoke purpose, authenticity, values, and responsibility to explain who they are and why they matter. Corporate branding and strategic communication research, however, often treats meaning as comparatively stable: something organizations can identify, articulate, and transfer to their audiences. This becomes problematic once meaning is understood as contested, relational, and transformed through its incorporation into organizational practices.

Against this background, this dissertation asks: (1) How do organizations understand, create, and communicate meaning? and (2) What happens to that meaning as it becomes incorporated? It addresses these questions through four interconnected studies, presented in Chapters II–V, combining corporate branding, strategic communication, existentialist philosophy, and the communicative constitution of organizations.

Chapter II develops the concept of conscientious corporate branding and a moral maturity model, explaining how corporate brands become worthy of moral consideration across organizational and societal levels. Chapter III introduces an existentialist perspective on corporate branding and reconceptualizes authenticity as responsibility for organizational becoming. Chapter IV develops purposing as a temporal and interpretive process and shows how purpose emerges, stabilizes, and passes through organizational practice. Chapter V conceptualizes strategic communication as the ongoing stabilization of public intelligibility, demonstrating how meaning is circulated, negotiated, and provisionally stabilized under conditions of public exposure.

Overall, this dissertation contributes to corporate branding theory by shifting attention from the corporate brand as a stable entity towards corporate branding as the continuous organization of meaning. It connects moral consideration, existentialist becoming, purposing, and strategic communication within a processual account of how meaning becomes organizationally and publicly consequential. For practice, it challenges managers to move beyond the search for fixed identities, definitive purpose statements, and message control. Instead, it encourages them to assume responsibility for the meanings their organizations create, to remain attentive to plurality and contestation, and to treat corporate branding as an unfinished communicative practice.