Browsing by Author "Porttikivi, Merja"

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Clowning around a polarized issue: Rhetorical strategies and communicative outcomes of a political parody performance by Loldiers of Odin
(2022-08-01) Laaksonen, Salla-Maaria; Koivukoski, Joonas; Porttikivi, Merja
A1 Alkuperäisartikkeli tieteellisessä aikakauslehdessä
For decades, political activist groups have used humor for ridiculing their opponents and attracting media attention. This study analyzed the online presence of the Loldiers of Odin, a clown-disguised activist group created as a parody of the anti-immigration group Soldiers of Odin. By analyzing the rhetorical strategies of Loldiers’ performance, we show how absurd and naïve parody stunts were used to criticize anti-immigration street patrolling, distort radical right-wing discourses, and mobilize like-minded progressives. Furthermore, by analyzing Facebook commentary of the performance, we trace its communicative outcomes: support and legitimization, but also problematization and delegitimization. Our results highlight the unpredictable and ambivalent nature of humor in facilitating a political protest. We argue that while humor offers a compelling way for citizens to discursively engage with political issues such as the immigration question, the polysemic nature of parody paradoxically works to amplify and support existing polarized positions in online discussions.
Governing with conversation culture–conditioning organizational interaction in a digital social movement
(2022-07-27) Laaksonen, Salla Maaria; Porttikivi, Merja
A1 Alkuperäisartikkeli tieteellisessä aikakauslehdessä
Digital platforms support forms of collective action with varying degrees of organizationality–that is, with organization-like attributes such as identity, actorhood, and decision-making. These forms include seemingly non-organized online groups, which can be easily dismissed as informal chatter. Building on communicative theories of organizing and Luhmann’s Theory of Social Systems, we explore the communicative organizationality of a Facebook group related to urban planning. By analyzing private chat logs of the group administrators, we explore the group’s organizationality and the ways in which organizational and interactional communication become intertwined to produce and curate digital political discussions. Our findings illustrate how technological affordances built for moderation also support the strategic organization of discussions to orchestrate political talk. We conceptualize such operations as discursive conditioning of organizational interaction and suggest that political action online can be propelled not only by connecting people, but also by the powerful yet concealed tactic of conditioning public online discussions.
Organisaatioiden diskursiivinen legitimaatio kiistelevässä verkkojulkisuudessa
(2016) Porttikivi, Merja
School of Business | Doctoral dissertation (article-based)
The focus of this thesis is the discursive legitimation of organizations in agonist online public sphere. Theoretically, it draws upon the institutional theory of organizational legitimacy, theories of the public sphere, and the discourse theory of Laclau and Mouffe. The purpose of the study is to bring about new understandings about the construction of organizational legitimacy in the mediated public sphere. The main research problem of this study is: How does the agonist online public sphere function as a discursive arena where the legitimacy of organizations is constructed? The main problem is divided into four different research questions, through which discursive struggle as an antecedent of legitimacy is investigated. The empirical material for the study comprises discourses in three different online materials, i.e. news commenting forums, discussion forums, and Wikipedia. The materials are analyzed with discourse-theoretical and narrative methods. The results of the study show how agonist online public sphere, by allowing fragmented and affective expression, offers a pluralist arena for participation and brings out multivocal discursive struggle where the dominant views on organizations and their roles in society are reproduced, challenged and recreated. The study broadens the understanding of online public sphere as an arena of moral (de)legitimation and legitimacy struggles, as well as of the role of the public as a source of legitimacy. Theoretically, the study contributes to a better understanding of the discursive legitimation of organizations especially by extending the investigation of mediated legitimation to social media, and by bringing forward the concept of agonist online public sphere as a model that helps to articulate the social and political significance of contentious practices of legitimation.