Cultivating consubstantiality with the land institute: Organizational rhetoric and the role of place-making in generating organizational identification

ABSTRACT

This essay examines the organizational rhetoric of the Land Institute in order to address the ways place-making contributes to the inducement of organizational identification (OI). In addition to defining place-making as a practice of cultivating arrangements, the essay unpacks two ways in which a strategically arranged place facilitates OI: (a) materializing the places and times imagined in textual materials, and (b) generating encounters with OI targets. By analyzing the Land Institute’s Prairie Festival alongside discursive materials, the essay also demonstrates how organizations take control of place’s inherently inventive character and thoroughly distributed rhetoricity in order to achieve organizational ends. In order to make these arguments, the essay employs a critical method that operates through both field immersion and textual criticism.

KEYWORDS:

• Organizational space and place
• place-making
• organizational rhetoric
• organizational identification
• rhetorical field methods

Acknowledgment

The author would like to thank Dr. Carly Woods, Dr. Danielle Endres, and Dr. Julia Moore for helping shape this essay through advising and/or offering substantive commentary on the manuscript as it developed, as well as Dr. Afifi and the three anonymous reviewers for their careful and challenging comments during the revision process.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Joshua P. Ewalt (Ph.D., University of Nebraska‐Lincoln) studies the relationship between space, place, and social advocacy, including regional rhetorics, places of public memory, environmental rhetoric, and the way place factors into organizational rhetoric, identity, and identification.

Notes

1. The phrase “constellation of mobilities” references the fact that all of the phenomena composing place are in motion. As Bennett (2010) and Massey (2005) indicate, all phenomena are moving and becoming different over time. Even a seemingly stable entity such as a barn was once wood, and trees, and a collection of seeds before that; and it undergoes constant repairs, and will one day be torn down. As Bennett (2010) explains,

the stones, tables, technologies, words, and edibles that confront us as fixed are mobile, internally heterogeneous materials whose rate of speed and pace of change are slow compared to the duration and velocity of the human bodies participating in and perceiving them. (pp. 57–58)

2. Note I am using the word “material environments” here instead of “place” as I am using the latter concept not just to refer to the non-human environment for human interaction, but the processes of arrangement whereby more-than-human encounters occur within broader ecologies.

3. Theory distinguishes between affect as a pre-personal intensity, feeling as personal and biographical, and emotion as the social categorization of feeling-affect (Shouse, 2005). I employ the term to connect scholarship on OI with place, understanding affect as the intensities that become experienced by the body, and which result in an emotional attachment to an organizational target.