The misleading nature of flow charts and diagrams in organizational communication: The case of performance management of preschools in Sweden
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Per Ledin
Abstract
It has become common to find diagrams and flow-charts used in our organizations to illustrate the nature of processes, what is involved and how it happens, or to show how parts of the organization interrelate to each other and work together. Such diagrams are used as they are thought to help visualization and simplify things in order to represent the essence of a particular situation, the core features. In this paper, using a social semiotic approach, we show that we need to develop a much more critical sense of how these diagrams and flowcharts can easily abstract, conceal and substitute actual causalities, work roles and relationships. We demonstrate this using the example of a series of interrelated flows-charts used to implement a new system of target-based learning in preschool/kindergartens in Sweden – a system which works highly in favor of a rapidly privatizing education sector. Here, the flow charts shape how school processes and learning are presented to devalue the former system and value the new.
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© 2020 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Research Articles
- Covenantal trust and semioethics: A reflection on interpersonal and intercultural summoning
- The semeiotic self
- Peirce’s diagrammatic reasoning and the cinema: Image, diagram, and narrative in The Shape of Water
- The three approaches to the semiotics of power
- Musical meaning and indexicality in the analysis of ceremonial mbira music
- The intersemiotic affordances of photography and poetry
- Graphic analogies in the imitation of music in literature
- Exploring the politics of visibility: Technology, digital representation, and the mediated workings of power
- Smart objects in daily life: Tackling the rise of new life forms in a semiotic perspective*
- The dagoba and the gopuram: A semiotic contrastive study of the Sinhalese Buddhist and Tamil Hindu cultures
- The Selfish Meme: Dawkins, Peirce, Freud
- Towards a semiotic model of interlingual translation
- Intermedial references and signification: Perception versus conception
- The “material function” in cinema: Resolving the paradox of the glitch
- Extending the embodied semiotic square: A cultural-semantic analysis of “Follow your Arrow”
- Time embodied as space in graphic narratives: A study in applied Peircean semiotics
- The origin of editorial images: Recycling, culture, and cognition
- Imago Dei: Metaphorical conceptualization of pictorial artworks within a participant-based framework
- On the origins of semiosic translation, the role of semiosis in translation and translating and the nature of sign systems: Response to Jia
- Special section: A sociosemiotic exploration of identity and discourse (Le Cheng, Ning Ye and David Machin, guest eds.)
- Introduction: A sociosemiotic exploration of identity and discourse
- The misleading nature of flow charts and diagrams in organizational communication: The case of performance management of preschools in Sweden
- A tentative analysis of legal terminology diachronic changes and the problem of communication effectiveness in legal settings
- Re-exploring Language development and identity construction of Hui nationality in China: a sociosemiotic perspective
- Evidentiality of court judgments in the People’s Republic of China: A semiotic perspective
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Research Articles
- Covenantal trust and semioethics: A reflection on interpersonal and intercultural summoning
- The semeiotic self
- Peirce’s diagrammatic reasoning and the cinema: Image, diagram, and narrative in The Shape of Water
- The three approaches to the semiotics of power
- Musical meaning and indexicality in the analysis of ceremonial mbira music
- The intersemiotic affordances of photography and poetry
- Graphic analogies in the imitation of music in literature
- Exploring the politics of visibility: Technology, digital representation, and the mediated workings of power
- Smart objects in daily life: Tackling the rise of new life forms in a semiotic perspective*
- The dagoba and the gopuram: A semiotic contrastive study of the Sinhalese Buddhist and Tamil Hindu cultures
- The Selfish Meme: Dawkins, Peirce, Freud
- Towards a semiotic model of interlingual translation
- Intermedial references and signification: Perception versus conception
- The “material function” in cinema: Resolving the paradox of the glitch
- Extending the embodied semiotic square: A cultural-semantic analysis of “Follow your Arrow”
- Time embodied as space in graphic narratives: A study in applied Peircean semiotics
- The origin of editorial images: Recycling, culture, and cognition
- Imago Dei: Metaphorical conceptualization of pictorial artworks within a participant-based framework
- On the origins of semiosic translation, the role of semiosis in translation and translating and the nature of sign systems: Response to Jia
- Special section: A sociosemiotic exploration of identity and discourse (Le Cheng, Ning Ye and David Machin, guest eds.)
- Introduction: A sociosemiotic exploration of identity and discourse
- The misleading nature of flow charts and diagrams in organizational communication: The case of performance management of preschools in Sweden
- A tentative analysis of legal terminology diachronic changes and the problem of communication effectiveness in legal settings
- Re-exploring Language development and identity construction of Hui nationality in China: a sociosemiotic perspective
- Evidentiality of court judgments in the People’s Republic of China: A semiotic perspective
