Seminar series - Visual Analysis and Interpretive Methods
Prof Jonathan Schroeder and Dr Janet Borgerson (University of Exeter Business School)
"Critical Visual Analysis: Toward an Ethics of Representation"
An image economy requires approaches to ethics within visual issues in organization that move beyond codes of conduct, individual manager's actions, or particular campaigns. If strategic communication depends upon images, including brand images, corporate images, product images, and images of identity, then ethical tools meant to provide guidance in corporate communications must be capable of addressing the concerns that such depictions evoke. Our analysis concerns not only the ontological implications, or consequences, of representational conventions - customary ways of depicting products, people and identities - within corporate communications, but emphasizes the ethical context from which such representational conventions emerge. Our work integrates processes of tacit interpretation with phenomenological understandings about iteration and epistemic closure.