Thesis Proposal

Employer brand co-creation: An empirical investigation

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Table of Contents
1. Introduction ................................................................................................................................. 3

2. Employer branding...................................................................................................................... 6

2.1 Employer Branding: a mini-map of the field ........................................................................ 6

2.2 The current state of employer attraction research and practice ............................................ 7

2.1.4 Reframing employer branding as a co-construction process ......................................... 8

3 Philosophy of Science and methodology ................................................................................... 12

3.1 The importance of the micro ............................................................................................... 12

3.2 What is CA and why is it appropriate? ............................................................................... 13

3.2.1 Employer brand co-creation and intersubjectivity ....................................................... 14

3.2.2 The importance of sequence and its relevance for Employer brand co-creation ......... 15

3.2.3 Grounding the analysis in members’ understandings .................................................. 16

3.3 Combining CA into the CCO paradigm.............................................................................. 17

3.3.1. The agency of things and ventriloquism ..................................................................... 18

3.4 data collection ..................................................................................................................... 21

4 Analyses ..................................................................................................................................... 23

5 PhD Plan .................................................................................................................................... 25

7 Challenges .................................................................................................................................. 27

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1. Introduction
Since the advent of the Resource Based View (RBV) of the firm (Barney 1991; Wernerfelt 1984)
it has been widely recognised that talented and skilled employees, often referred to as “human
capital”, can leverage the competitive advantage of companies in ways that are difficult to
imitate (Barney 2011; Barney et al 2001). This development coupled with a global scarcity of
talent has led to what a group of McKinsey consultants called “The war for talent” (Chambers et
al. 1998).

It is within this strategic context that employer branding should be understood as a means to
attract, recruit and retain talented and skilled employees. The term “employer brand” was
introduced by Ambler and Barrow (1996, p. 8), who defined it as “The package of functional,
economic, and psychological benefits provided by employment, and identified with the
employing company.” Employer branding can thus be seen as encompassing externally and
internally oriented activities. Though still in its adolescence, the concept has received
considerable attention, not least because it crosses two very different corporate functions, HR
and marketing. In addition, it merges different academic fields such as organisational
attractiveness (see Edwards 2010 for a comprehensive review).

The focus of my dissertation will be the “external” aspect of employer branding, although I
realise that the internal-external distinction is an oversimplification (Kärreman and Rylander
2008). More specifically, I will focus on the attraction of university graduates. This is justified
by the fact that although graduate unemployment has been rising, the battle for the most talented
graduate is as fierce as ever (Ewerlin 2013; Elving et al 2013). Companies are increasingly
turning towards internal recruitment and many have developed talent pipeline strategies to ensure
that there is always a new talent available for promotion (Clutterbuck 2005; 2012; Haynes and
Ghosh 2008; McDonnell et al 2010). The raw material that feeds into this pipeline is graduate
students and the interest in attracting the very best has increased dramatically the past decade as
evidenced by the explosion in the number of so-called “graduate programs” offered by large and
even medium-sized companies (Santesson 2014) as well as other graduate targeted employer
branding tactics such as job fairs, company visits, case competitions and even company dinners
(Breaugh 2009). In addition to creating awareness, the point of these interactive formats is to
allow prospective employees and company representatives to get to know each other a bit more

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personally through interaction. Thereby both parties curb the risk of bad hires. This motivation
has led to the development of a fairly new tactic called pre-hire mentoring (Spitzmüller et al
2008). Essentially this phenomenon combines realistic recruitment (Morse and Popovich 2009)
with organisational mentoring (Kram 1983), and it refers to a process where a senior employee
from a company acts as a mentor for a graduate student during his/her studies. During the
process both parties get to know each other on a deeper level and this presumably leads to a
better basis for evaluating whether future employment would be mutually beneficial. The study
by Spitzmüller et al (2008) showed that pre-hire mentoring increased the level of perceived
attraction, increased the intention to pursue job at the company and increased the likelihood of
the mentee getting hired. In addition, several studies in organisational socialisation have proven
the correlation between pre-entry knowledge and performance of employees. It has been shown
that more pre-entry knowledge about the company and the job leads to better perceptions of fit,
faster mastery of tasks, improved role clarity, and increased commitment among other things
(Riordan 2001; Kammeyer-Mueller and Wanberg 2002; Stephens and Dailey 2012). Adding to
this, a recent meta-analysis of the research into Realistic Job Previews showed the same
conclusions, namely that when realistic expectations of the job were established before entry it
led to lower employee turnover, increased acceptance of job offer, greater perception of honesty
and improved role clarity (Earnest et al 2011). It seems reasonable to conclude that the better the
prospective employee knows the company the faster they will become a valuable asset and the
less likely they are to leave the company shortly after being hired.

Unfortunately Spitzmüller et al (2008) is the only study of pre-hire mentoring to this day, and
while it offers some evidence that it is effective, it does not show how these effects come about
apart from the very general terms psychosocial and career functions of mentoring. Arguably,
what happens during the actual mentor conversation has a significant impact on the effectiveness
of the tactic, but no studies have investigated this yet. In my dissertation I will do an in-depth
investigation of pre-hire mentoring as an employer branding tactic and thus alleviate to dearth of
research on the topic.

In investigating the subject, I will write myself into the emerging redefinition of employer
branding proposed by Aggerholm et al (2011, p. 107) who define it as “a dynamic and
interactional process of negotiating and co-creating brand values”. This redefinition stands in

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sharp contrast to the vast majority of classic employer branding research which builds the “linear
model of communication” (West and Turner 2014) as evidenced by the following definition
offered by Bonaiuto et al (2013, p. 780):

“Employer branding (EB) focuses on the identification and communication of the functional,
economical, and psychological benefits and values provided by an employer or a profession to
current and future employees.”

Their definition assumes that the employer brand management team constructs an unequivocal
brand message which is then sent to the target receivers who unproblematically interpret the
message as intended. A recent study by Edinger (2015) showed that this definition corresponds
quite well to how employer branding practitioners perceive their work. It is however a gross
simplification of how communication works especially in interpersonal, face-to-face
communication contexts such as pre-hire mentoring. As an alternative, Aggerholm et al (2011)
argue for a co-construction model where the employer brand is constituted in communication
and constantly negotiated between interactants as it is “talked into being” (Heritage 1984). As
illuminating as their article is in terms of theoretical development, it lacks a sound grounding in
empirical evidence and this is vital for the further development of a co-creation model for
employer branding. Summarising all of the above, the problem statement of my dissertation is:

• How is an employer brand co-created in pre-hire mentoring conversations?

In answering this question I hope to make the following contributions:

• An in-depth investigation of the popular, under-researched employer branding tactic pre-

hire mentoring
• An sound methodology for the empirical analysis of employer brand co-creation
• Empirically grounded insights how employer brands are co-created in interaction
• Practical insights into re-hire mentorships as a mutual accomplishment relevant for both
mentors and mentees

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2. Employer branding
In this section I will present a condensed version of a review the employer branding field. I will
zoom in on externally oriented activities, the communication models dominating the literature
and argue for a co-creation perspective as a relevant reconceptualization.

2.1 Employer Branding: a mini-map of the field

Since the initial conceptualisation of employer branding (Ambler and Barrow 1996), there has
been an explosion of publications on the topic both in the scientific literature and not least in
practitioner how-to books. One of the most widely cited conceptualisations of employer branding
is offered by Backhaus and Tikoo (2004, p 505) depicted in figure 1.

Figure 1: Backhaus and Tikoo’s (2004) conceptualisation of employer branding

The model proposes that employer branding leads to desirable results both externally (employer
attraction) and internally (employee productivity) through a number of mediators. The model
also shows how extremely large a concept employer branding is. All the concepts that link back
to employer branding have vast bodies of research supporting them, for instance employer
attraction research can be tracked back to the early 1980’s (Rynes and Miller 1983) and a recent
meta-analysis on the topic (Uggerslev et al 2012) included 232 studies. Research on
organisational identity also began in the 1980s and a review by Ravasi and Catano (2013)
identified 33 empirical studies and a larger number of theoretical articles. Moreover, Edwards
(2010) highlighted two additional fields from personnel psychology that could be subsumed
under the employer branding umbrella namely Psychological Contract and Personality

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Characteristics (trait psychology), and in addition I would add Realistic Job Preview research,
Talent Management, Mentoring and Vocational Socialisation to the mix as well. Put shortly, it
seems that all theory related to current and prospective employees could be fused into employer
branding. This clearly shows that investigating employer branding in its entirety is an impossible
endeavour. Consequently, my zooming in on employer attraction is arguably a rather small
contribution, but nonetheless I hope to make it a significant one by focussing on an
underexplored tactic and by adding to the paradigm shift presented by Aggerholm et al (2011)
which sees employer branding as co-construction.

2.2 The current state of employer attraction research and practice

Employer attraction research can be tracked back to the early studies by Sara Rynes and her
colleagues (Rynes and Miller 1983; Rynes and Barber 1990) who studied employer attraction
mechanisms in college students. Today the field remains centred on attraction of graduates (see
table 2 in appendix 2 for an overview of some recent studies) and how to communicate the right
attributes or benefits in order to appeal to the students. The research is usually carried out
according an experimental methodology and involves students’ responses to different
communication material such as hypothetical job adverts (Blackman 2006; Elving et al 2013),
and “about us” webpages (Jones et al 2014). Other studies simply ask graduate students about the
attributes possessed by a hypothetic dream employer (Chhabra and Sharma 2014; Jain and Bhatt
2015) or the attributes of a number of specified (Rampl and Kenning 2014; Terjesen et al 2007)
or imagined real-life companies (Srivastava and Bhatnagar 2010).

All the studies above subscribe to a linear model of communication as they assume that
“attributes” can unequivocally constructed and injected into the recipients who will interpret
them uniformly. This view prevails in the broader employer branding literature as well as it is
evidenced by all but the last three definitions of employer branding in table 1 (Appendix 1)
which all subscribe to the linear model of communication. The underlying assumption is that
meaning is constructed and controlled by the employer brand managers. This idea, that the
employer brand is a manageable entity, is naturally very appealing to practitioners schooled in
the management paradigm which assumes that meaning can be controlled by autonomously
acting managers (Stacey 2007). Edinger (2015) proved this point brilliantly by demonstrating
that for employer brand managers, the employer brand was essentially a boundary object that

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created a number of rights and responsibilities related to the creation, protection, and controlling
of the employer brand. Thereby their legitimacy to a large extent rests on the notion that an
employer brand is a manageable object which requires the specific competencies that they
possess. However convenient and socially relevant this conceptualisation may be, it does not
reflect how communication processes unfold, and it severely limits employer branding practices,
not least because it does not correspond to the tactics that many large and even medium-sized
companies draw on in their employer branding strategy (Breaugh 2009). An interpersonal
context of communication demands that the model of communication employed can account for
the dynamics involved in the negotiation of meaning between the interactants. To this end the co-
creation model of employer branding proposed by Aggerholm et al (2011) offers a very suitable
alternative to the linear model, and it will be outlined next.

2.1.4 Reframing employer branding as a co-construction process

In their article, Aggerholm et al (2011) argue that the classical conceptualisation of employer
branding is insufficient and that a co-creation approach is more appropriate. This redefinition has
a number of ramifications ranging from the redefinition of employer branding to the ontology of
the company (see table 1). Before elaborating on these a short introduction to the concept co-
creation is in order.

Co-creation as a theoretical construct was introduced by Prahalad and Ramaswamy in the early
2000’s (Prahalad and Ramaswamy 2004) and it has made a significant impact in particular in
marketing and branding theory (Galvagno and Dalli 2014; Cova et al 2013). It is defined by
Galvagno and Dalli (2014, p. 644) as “the joint, collaborative, concurrent, peer-like process of
producing new value, both materially and symbolically.” From this definition we see that value
is no longer engineered into a product or a service rather it comes about as the result of an
interactive process between product, service, or company and the customer. The term employer
brand co-creation therefore implies that employer branding occurs between two or more actors.
However, the original notion of co-creation is rooted in studies of consumption and it needs a
slight re-specification of value to be directly applicable to employer branding. We need to
understand value in the most general sense rather than utility in consumption, since the employer
brand is not a product to be consumed. Therefor when referring to co-creation we are refereeing
to the co-creation of meaning.

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Table 1

Employer brand conceptualisations

Classic conceptualisation Employer branding as co-construction
Employer Brand Stable, manageable entity Dynamic, intersubjective phenomenon
Employer Branding Linear, step-wise, one-way Two-way, dynamic transaction process
Employer Brand An “employment value Employer brand value is co-created
Marketing proposition” is brought to the between various interactants
market
Employer Brand Stable essence, controlled and Negotiated in interaction between
Identity injected into receivers interactants
Communication The activity involved in Constitutive of employer branding
transmitting the employer
brand
Suitable Contexts Mass-communication, if any Interpersonal communication, in
particular
The Organisation Stable entity, a container Emergent, constituted in
communication, grounded in action.

The reconceptualization implies an important shift in the definition of the employer brand and
employer branding. We can no longer see the employer brand as a manageable, stable entity, nor
can we assume that it can be unequivocally transmitted to the target audience through a one-way
process. It also means that we must reject the idea that employer branding involves a number of
steps to concluded in a linear fashion as it is proposed by Chhabra and Sharma (2014, p. 51):
“Employer branding starts with the analysis of the organization’s values, culture, competition,
HR and other policies, strengths, brand’s current image, trends and the like. This leads to the
identification of value propositions, based on which the employer branding strategies are
formulated. Once strategies are formulated, the communication channels for internal and
external marketing are identified for positioning the brand propositions in the minds of the
prospective and existing employees. This leads to employer attractiveness for the potential
employees and employer brand loyalty for the current employees.”

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The process they describe can be summarised as follows as:

Identify Inject
Make Select Monitor
Analysis value message into
strategy channels results
proposition recipients
Figure 2
The linearity and causal assumptions that support this model of employer branding must be
discarded entirely with the reconceptualization offered by Aggerholm et al (2011).

Instead the employer brad is negotiated in interaction in an on-going dynamic process of two-
way communication. The meaning of the brand is neither located “in” the sender or the receiver
but is intersubjectively1 constituted. The model of communication adopted is thus one of
transaction (West and Turner 2014) in which interactants negotiate their way towards shared
meaning through dialogue. It follows that companies are no longer able to condense their true
essence into an employment value proposition which is then “taken to the market” as it
suggested in the employer branding theory drawing on Spence’s (1973) signalling theory (see
e.g. Ewerlin 2013; Jones et al 2014). Instead employer brand meaning is co-created in interaction
and do not boil down to a fixed, stable essence at any point. In addition, the identities of the
company, its representatives and the prospective employee are not fixed either. Instead identity is
to be understood in a Goffmanian sense, namely as an ongoing performance (Goffman 1959).
This is particularly relevant in pre-hire mentoring a number of different roles (e.g. mentor,
mentee, expert, guide etc.) may be appropriated in the interaction. While this certainly increases
the level of complexity for the researcher and practitioner alike, it allows for a deeper
understanding also allows for more sophisticated insights into the process of employer branding.
These insights are needed if the literature is to offer something to a practice which has long
recognised the importance of getting closer to the graduates via interaction based employer
branding tactics that graduates also seem to prefer (Chhabra and Sharma 2014).

1
We will touch upon the problem of intersubjectivity in section 3.2.1

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On a meta-theoretical scale the reconceptualization entails a shift in how we see the organisation
as a whole. Supporting the prevailing linear model of communication in employer branding (see
discussion above and appendix 1) is what Ruth Smith called the “container metaphor” (Fairhurst
and Putnam 2004). This implies that the organisation is considered a fixed, stable entity with a
true essence and a clearly distinguishable interior and exterior. The organisation is also often
anthropomorphised and able to act, which is seen in the often quoted definition by Lloyd (in
Berthon et al 2005) who states that employer branding is “the sum of a company’s efforts to
communicate to existing and prospective staff that it is a desirable place to work”. Here it is “the
company” as an anthropomorphised entity that acts towards other collectives, namely existing
and prospective staff. The definition contains an apparent paradox in that the existing employees
who belong to the “inside” can somehow be communicated to by the very company they
comprise. This highlights that in the container metaphor the organisation is quite separable from
its members.

The reconceptualization proposed by Aggerholm et al (2011) subscribes to very different

metaphor, the grounded in action metaphor (Fairhurst and Putnam 2004). The view gained
prominence in organisation studies with the work of Deidre Boden in the beginning of 1990’s
(Boden 1994) and has since developed into a complex research program called the
Communication Constitutes Organisations (CCO) paradigm. As the name implies this position
posits that organisations exist in and through communication and I will elaborate on this in
section 3.3.

In summary the reconceptualization offered by Aggerholm et al (2011) has significant

ramifications for the definition of employer branding, the role of communication and even the
ontology of the organisation. However, the term co-construction is at risk for being just another
buzz-word and we need a sound methodology for investigating these seemingly important co-
construction processes, and this is not put forward in the article. In the following, I will attempt
to sketch out a methodology for my empirical investigation that will lend substance to the
theoretical abstraction presented in their paper.

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3 Philosophy of Science and methodology
In this section I will argue for an Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis inspired
methodology nestled within the CCO paradigm. In my dissertation, the methodology will later be
applied in the context of pre-hire mentoring conversations, but could likely be of equal use when
investigating job fair interactions, case competitions or company visits. The main point of my
argument will be that the co-creation of an employer brand is a mutual members’
accomplishment intersubjectively established in talk-in-interaction.

3.1 The importance of the micro

With characteristic eloquence Boden (1994, p. 8) argued that: “Organisations are people. When
people come together in organizations to get things done, they talk.” Thus organisations are no
more than the actions of people. This stands in sharp contrast to the anthropomorphising of the
organisation that is customary in employer branding literature. Talking about organisations
communicating an employer brand is an abstraction that follows from the container metaphor
and it ignores the fact that collectives simply cannot act in and of themselves, they act always act
through people (von Mises 1996, p. 42; Schütz 1967, pp. 198-199). This acting through relation
can be described as one of attribution and appropriation (Bencherki and Cooren 2011; Bencherki
and Snack 2016). Thus presumably “organisational” actions, such as communicating employer
brands, are made possible because someone acts in the name of the organisation and thus makes
their actions attributable to it whereby the company appropriates the action of said individual.
The organisation simply needs to make someone’s actions its own in order to exist. The
consequence of this position is that we must look at how individuals do co-create employer
brands and

In spite of this seemingly apparent observation, there is very little emphasis on what human
beings do in organisation studies (Llewellyn and Hindmarsh 2010) and even less in employer
branding. It seems to be assumed in much of the literature that the micro level interactions
between people are simply annoying details that get in the way of theorising or that they are too
messy to be a proper object of study (Llewellyn and Spence 2009). Dismissing micro level
interactions as irrelevant details is in Garfinkel’s (1967, p. 22) words akin to claiming that “ if
the walls of a building were only gotten out of the way one could better see what is keeping the
roof up.” For my study this means that I must refrain from relying abstractions such as the

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“organization” as on ontologically given actor involved in branding itself as an employer. Instead
the focus must be on the actions of individuals, in my case mentors doing pre-hire mentoring
conversations, and how these become attributed to and appropriated by the organisation. It also
means that the investigation of employer brand co-creation between company representatives
(mentors) and prospective employees must rely on observational data as this is the only possible
way to gain access to the process as it unfolds. It also means that we cannot rely on non-
observational data such questionnaires used by Juntunen et al (2012) in their co-creation study.

But how is it possible to link micro practices to macro processes such as the co-creation of an
employer brand? For now, I suffice to refer to a passage from von Mises (1996, p. 43):

“There is no need to argue whether a collective is the sum resulting from the addition of its
elements or more, whether it is a being sui generis, and whether it is reasonable or not to speak
of its will, plans, aims, and actions and to attribute to it a distinct “soul”. Such pedantic talk is
idle. A collective whole is a particular aspect of the actions of various individuals and as such a
real thing determining the course of events.” Shortly put, employer brand co-construction is
right there in the micro-level of talk-in-interaction when individuals’ actions are attributed to and
appropriated by the organisation.

What we need then is a methodology that can ground the rather abstract idea of employer
branding as a co-construction in empirical analysis. We need a methodology where the locus of
meaning creation is not inside either a sender or recipient but between interactants, otherwise we
cannot speak of co-creation. The next section details why Conversation Analysis offers a suitable
methodology.

3.2 What is CA and why is it appropriate?

Conversation Analysis (CA) emerged as an off-shot of Garfinkel’s Ethnomethodology (EM,
Garfinkel 1967) in the late 1960s and early 1970s in California under the intellectual leadership
of Harvey Sacks and his followers Emmanuel Schegloff and Gail Jefferson. It started out as a
broadly sociological discipline but has since developed into an applied science doing research
within various institutional settings such as medical encounters, court room encounters, news
interviews, business meetings, job interviews, and even job centre interactions (Antaki 2011;
Heritage and Clayman 2010; Llewellyn and Hindmarsh 2010; Nielsen et al 2016). A

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foundational aspect of CA no matter which institutional context is under investigation is the strict
reliance on audio or video recorded observations (Heritage and Clayman 2010). The orthodoxy
in terms of empirical material can be a hindrance as it makes it more difficult to obtain the data,
but it also secures a solid grounding in observational data. As we shall see in the examples
below, CA pays significant attention to seemingly minute details of talk-in-interaction such in-
breaths, pauses, overlaps and laughter. This follows from the notion that no detail can be
dismissed a priori as irrelevant by the researcher because it might prove to be relevant for the
interactants. Thus, its reliance on observational data and attention to detail makes CA a suitable
method but it is not enough to satisfy all our demands. First my methodology must offer a
satisfactory solution to the problem of intersubjectivity which is inherent in the notion of co-
creation. Second, my methodology must be able to account for the intersubjective co-creation of
meaning as an observable phenomenon. The next three sections should prove that CA fits the
bill.

3.2.1 Employer brand co-creation and intersubjectivity

Employer brand co-creation is necessarily an intersubjective activity, since meaning is located
neither in the mind of the sender or the recipient but co-created between them. Therefore co-
creation faces “the problem of intersubjectivity”. Shortly put, this problem relates to the question
of how two or more persons can share a common experience and communicate about it (Heritage
1984, p. 54). That is, how is it that a mentor and a mentee in a pre-hire mentorship come to share
a mentorship experience and relatedly, how can they come to share an understanding on the
employer brand? The answer to this question is found in Schütz’ phenomenology which laid
much of the foundation for ethnomethodology and CA (Heritage 1984). He contends that we
cannot get inside other people’s heads and grasp their experiences as they do (Schütz 1967, p.
98). However, it seems that social actors solve the problem rather unproblematically on an
everyday basis without this ability. The solution to this paradox proposed by Schütz is as simple
as it is ingenious. For him, intersubjectivity is not a problem of transcendental philosophy that
requires an all-encompassing definitive solution, rather it is a practical problem. Schütz (1967)
proposes that actors achieve shared meaning by assuming that for all practical purposes they
share a common world in the here-and-now and that their perspectives are sufficiently similar to
allow a mutual understanding. Based upon these assumptions social actors come to accomplish
whatever it is they are doing (Schütz 1967). Simply put, a pre-hire mentorship is constituted by

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the mentor and mentee because and as an effect of their agreement that that is what they are
doing. This does not mean however that they share the same motives for being there or that they
have the exact same expectations in terms of the outcome. It simply means that they agree that
what they are doing is a pre-hire mentorship and act accordingly. Elaborating on Schütz’
phenomenological perspective, Garfinkel (1967) developed the concept “ethno-methods” to
account for how social actors manage to accomplish whatever it is they accomplish. He shows
that members accountably make their actions intelligible to other people as actions constituting
an activity. It is this central idea further developed by Sacks and turned into a systematic
methodology for analysing talk-in-interaction with the inception of CA (Schegloff 2007). The
examination of pre-hire mentoring and employer brand co-creation must thus be examined as a
members’ phenomenon; that is something that is intersubjectively talked into being by those
involved in it. At the micro level of interaction, turns at talk comprise “the building blocks of
intersubjectivity” (Clayman and Heritage 2010, p. 15) and this will be elaborated next under the
two next headings.

3.2.2 The importance of sequence and its relevance for Employer brand co-creation
In addition to Garfinkel, Sacks was profoundly inspired by Goffman, especially his concept
“interaction order”, more specifically the sequential ordering of social actions as a mutual
accomplishment. The importance of sequence for the organising of organisation-comprising
activities has been thoroughly demonstrated in the outstanding volume edited by Llewellyn and
Hindmarsh’ (2010), and the sequential organisation of talk in interaction in general has been
covered comprehensively by Schegloff (2007). In relation to the co-construction of employer
brands the notion of sequence has several important advantages. First of all Sacks et al (1974)
showed that interactions demonstrate order at all points, and this ordering occurs in sequence. At
the most basic level an interaction comprises an adjacency pair comprising a first pair part (FPP)
and a second pair part (SPP) as illustrated below:

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Example 12

1 L : men hva gør du har interesse i- web branchen?

: but what does you have interest i- the web industry?
: But what does your interest in the web industry stem from?
2 E : Hv- hva der gør det h.?
: Wh- what which does it h.?
: Wh- what does it stem from?

The example is taken from a pre-hire mentoring conversation where the mentor L is asking the
mentee E a question. As the FPP is question, it constrains the SPP to be meaningful as a response
to it as such. No matter what E answers it will be understood as a response to the FPP. If he had
given a meaningless response such as “brown” it would be understood as meaningless because of
the FPP, and not answering would also be understood in relation to the FPP and the response
would then be considered “officially absent” (Schegloff 1968, p. 1083). We say that specific FPP
makes “conditionally relevant” one or more types of SPPs (Schegloff 2007, p. 20). Thus
sequence and the resulting conditional relevance is the condition under which actions are
“condemned to be meaningful” (Heritage 1984, p. 110).

In conclusion, through an understanding of sequence we should be able to observe the co-

construction process unfold “real time” between the interactants (Llewellyn and Hindmarsh
2010). This point deserves elaboration. Recall that CA strictly relies on “naturally occurring
talk” in the form of audio or video recordings. This type of data allows us to follow the co-
construction process “as it happens” (Boden 1994, p. 10). Since we adopt the point of view that
employer brands are intersubjective and dynamic, studying them as such is the only meaningful
approach. To reiterate, sequences of turns at talk are the “building blocks of intersubjectivity”
(Heritage and Clayman, p. 15).

3.2.3 Grounding the analysis in members’ understandings

With the importance of sequence thus settled we can now turn our attention to another central
concept that follows from the notion of sequence, namely next-turn proof procedure. Simply put,
next-turn proof procedure means that the recipient’s response to a turn at talk demonstrably

2
Note on the 3 lines of transcription: The first line is the original Danish transcription. Line 2 is a word-by-word
translation into English, and the third is an intelligible transcription. 1 and 2 refers to the line numbers and L and E
refers to the mentor and the mentee.

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shows his/her understanding of it (Sidnell 2013). Accordingly the analyst is able to ground the
analysis in members’ interpretations rather than guessing at the true meaning of or intention
behind the actors’ utterances. All the interpretation needed to account for the meaningfulness of
any interaction is right there in the data as a members’ phenomenon (Llewellyn and Spence
2009). And it has to be otherwise the members would not be able to intersubjectively accomplish
what it is they are doing in the first place. It follows that by following a CA methodology we
avoid the pit fall of framing an employer brand as the image that is constructed by employer
brand managers as it is customary in the literature (See table 1 in Appendix 1). Nor do we
assume that the employer brand resides only in the heads of the target audience as a stable
coherent impression. Instead we are able to empirically demonstrate how the employer brand is
continuously talked into being and ground the observation empirically in members’ interaction.

To summarise my argument: With a CA methodology employer brand co-construction should

be rendered observable in pre-hire mentoring conversations.

CA, however, is a sociological theory and it does not prescribe a specific ontology of the firm.
As mentioned above, the ontology of the firm must support the co-construction perspective and
the grounded in action metaphor and therefore we turn to the CCO paradigm.

3.3 Combining CA into the CCO paradigm

As demonstrated in a recent round-table article (Schoeneborn et al 2014), the CCO paradigm
covers three separate schools: The Four Flows Model inspired by Giddens’ structuration theory
(McPhee and Zaug 2000), Luhmann’s Social Systems Theory (Seidl and Becker 2006) and The
Montreal School (Taylor and Van Every 2000; Cooren et al 2006). I subscribe to latter for
reasons explained below. A full elaboration of the Montreal School is beyond the scope of this
thesis proposal and therefore I will emphasise the most important points.

The Montreal School (TMS) is arguably the most well developed branch of the CCO paradigms
(Kuhn 2008). As the name implies it originates from Montreal, Canada, and it was founded by
James Taylor, Elizabeth Van Every and Francois Cooren in the late 1990s and early 2000s. They
and those inspired by them draw inspiration from a vast and diverse number of sources including
Latour’s Actor Network Theory (Clifton 2015), Greimas’ Narratology (Bencherki and Cooren
2011), Garfinkel’s Ethnomethodology and Sacks’ Conversation Analysis (Bencherki and Snack

Page 17 of 36
2016; Cooren and Fairhurst 2004), Bakhtin’s notion of dialogue (Cooren and Stadler 2014),
Austin and Searle’s Speech Act Theory (Cooren 2004) and Weick’s Sensemaking (Cooren and
Fairhurst 2004). A common thread in all the TMS literature however is the communication is
organisation, and that communication is action. It follows that they share the same ontology of
the firm as Boden (1994), namely that organisations are actions performed by people in
communication. Since Boden was herself an ethnomethodologist and a conversation analyst and
both of these programs also subscribe to the communication as action perspective it seems that a
merging is possible.

TMS also insists on the importance of never leaving the terra firma of interaction in favour of
seemingly higher level abstractions such as employer brands or even “a company” as such
(Cooren et al 2013). This is very much line with CA although TMS is by no means as
empirically driven. I would argue that CA has a lot to offer to TMS in terms of sound
methodology for doing micro level analysis. Regarding the notion of levels, both very sceptical
towards the entire idea of distinguishing between “levels” and prefer the idea that the any macro-
level phenomenon is in the micro level of interaction (Schoeneborn et al 2014; Boden 1994;
Llewellyn and Hindmarsh 2010). This scepticism can arguably be traced back to
ethnomethodology which is a common source of inspiration.

In addition CA and TMS has been merged before (Cooren and Fairhurst 2004), and for my
particular purpose they form a very suitable combination for reasons explained in following.

3.3.1. The agency of things and ventriloquism

In addition to the agreement on communication as action (Cooren 2010; Schoeneborn et al
2014), CA and TMS also agree that communication is transactional. This means that a
communicative action demands a reaction which is essentially what conversation analysts call
conditional relevance as touched upon earlier (Schegloff 1968). However, TMS adds to CA a
broadened scope of agency, the ability to make a difference (Cooren 2006). TMS argues the
organizational world is a plenum of agencies with various ontologies all capable of acting which
makes up for the myopic focus on talk which CA may be accused of. This means that in a pre-
hire mentoring conversation there may be a number of agencies involved in addition to the to
interactants for example brochures, the furniture, the organisation’s strategy or a hiring policy.
However, in line with the strict empiricism of CA, it cannot be assumed a priori that either of

Page 18 of 36
these entities are relevant, they must oriented to and made relevant by the interactants. Simply
put, things can be made to do things in conversations.

Expanding on this idea of hybrid ontologies and shares agency, TMS, most notably Francois
Cooren, has introduced the term ventriloquism. The concept describes the “actions through
which someone or something makes someone or something else say or do things” (Cooren 2015,
p. 476) and it has received considerable attention in recent years (Cooren 2010; Cooren and
Bencherki 2011; Bergeron and Cooren 2012; Cooren et al 2013; Sorsa et al 2013; Clifton 2015;
Jahn 2016). The concept implies that various human and non-human actants can make a
difference when they are invoked in local conversations as “dummies” or “figures”. However
this is a two-way relationship the ventriloquist talks through the dummy and vice versa. A
fundamental aspect of ventriloquism is that action always is shared (Cooren 2016), as it can be
seen in example 2 below:

Lines 1 and 2

Lines 3, 4 and 5

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This excerpt is from a pre-hire mentoring conversation between a marketing student (T) and the
marketing manager (B) of an engineering company that develops survey equipment and software
for the off-shore industry. In this excerpt the brochure3 is acting in collaboration with the mentor
B to show what their software does. She does so via pointing and gazing at it and thereby making
it relevant in the interaction. According to TMS theorising, B thus engages in a ventriloquizing
activity whereby she makes the brochure act while it, at the same time, makes her say certain
something about wind turbine foundations. Arguably, the brochure plays a very important role in
that it allows the mentor to show the technical nature of the company’s products in an
understandable way due to the illustrations contained within it. My preliminary analysis has
demonstrated that this mentor-brochure hybrid agent plays an essential part in the co-creation of
the company character as rather “geeky”.

3
The brochure is situated behind the cups and is thus out of view for the camera but in plain sight for both the
mentor and the mentee

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I will finish off this philosophy of science and methodology section with a few points on my data
collection.

3.4 data collection

Working with CA necessitates the use of video recorded data so that comprises the bulk of my
empirical data. So far I have just over 10 hours of video recorded pre-hire mentor conversation. I
have also supplemented my recording with examples of promotional material used in the
conversations if anything is used at all. Acknowledging the role of the physical surroundings I
have also seen the premises in which the recordings take place, thus enabling me to understand
possible references specific departments or products. The following excerpt shows the relevance
of such “talk-extrinsic” data (Waring et al 2012):

1: E: men i jeg sys i- skriv- (.) body:- bodyshoppen der (.)

but I think you- wri- (.) body:- the bodyshop there (.)
But I think that what wri- (.) The bodyshop there
2: I: j[a
Y[es
Y[es

Example 3

Here it is necessary to know that the bodyshop referred to by the mentee in line 1 is a specific
department of the company that they have just seen on their tour around the premises. In addition
I have also talked to all the participanst and gathered data on their backgrounds such as education
(mentor and mentee) and position in the company (mentors). I have also talked to the mentors
about the reason for doing pre-hire mentoring. As such I combine video-observations with
broadly ethnographic data (Daymon and Hollaway 2002).

I have gathered the data from three different mentor programs comprising students 3 different
universities: Copenhagen University, Copenhagen Business School, and Aarhus University. Two
of the three programs are arranged by the universities, and the third is arranged by a private
company as it is the case in the Spitzmüller et al study (2008). Since the study in exploratory in
nature, I follow a purposive sampling strategy and I have attempted to include different
institutions with different interpretations of pre-hire mentoring. Thereby I hope to be able to

Page 21 of 36
reach an understanding of the pre-hire mentoring process that cuts across institutional variations
of the concept.

On the company side I stuck to purposive sampling strategy in order to secure variety. In practice
however I had to rely on convenience sampling as well which is obviously not optimal but
consent from both parties was required for ethical purposes and thus I had to include those who
were willing to participate, and obviously exclude those who were not. The companies included
are:

Company Industry Size and Number of Total Mentee study

span of meetings Length
operations recorded
Manufacturing Electro- Large, 1 2 hours 6 Marketing
Company mechanical international minutes
products
IT IT and Medium- 1 1 hour 10 Marketing
entertainment sized, minutes
international
Public Governing Large, 1 1 hour 20 Philosophy
Institution Body national minutes
Engineering Off-Shore Medium- 2½ 2 hours Communication
Company sized, (Technical
international difficulty)
IT company IT Large, 2 1 hour 57 IT
infrastructure International minutes
and
consulting
Marketing Online Small, 1 1 hour 20 Communication
marketing national minutes
consulting
IT Company Websites and Small, 1 55 minutes IT

Page 22 of 36
 online national
marketing
consulting
IT Company Big Data Medium- Still Going ?? IT and Business
sized,
National
Logistics Logistics and Large, Not settled ?? Supply chain
company freight international management
and logistics

4 Analyses
In familiarizing myself with the data I have already discovered a number of topics which seems
to be relevant for the interactants. The main issue I face though is how to make the connection
between the observed micro phenomena of talk-in-interaction to the broader overreaching
concepts related to employer branding. In order to do so I will zoom in and be rather specific in
my focus. The general theme of all the three chapters is related identity negotiation in the
Goffmanian (1959) sense of “identity as performance”.

Having looked at my data, I have noticed that storytelling is ubiquitous. The concept is nothing
new in branding theory in general (Herskovitz and Crystal 2010) but has yet to receive
considerable attention in employer branding. It has been argued repeatedly in the storytelling
literature that stories are bearers of identity (Denning 2011) and as such they pose an interesting
way into the analysis of employer brand co-creation with a focus on both organizational identity
and the performance of personal identity in pre-hire mentor conversations. Storytelling research
however tend to limit its focus on the “story” which ignores the fact that stories in face-to-face
interactions are mutual accomplishments. A CA approach allows us to investigate how stories
are co-created by emphasising the telling aspect as much as the story content (Mandelbaum
2013). Through this investigation I hope to partially answer my problem statement by showing
how storytelling as a mutual accomplishment contributes to the co-creation of an employer
brand.

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The inspiration to pursue the next line of inquiry came from a couple of brilliant studies by Jan
Svennevig, who used CA to empirically demonstrate the doing of leadership style (Svennevig
2011; Svennevig and Djordjilovich 2015). These CA based studies show that it is possible to
identify abstract concepts such as leadership-style in thorough empirical analysis by
deconstructing it into analytically identifiable components. Following the same approach, I will
analyse how employer brand characteristics or attributes are co-created.

To this end the action of advice giving seems like a good starting point for an analysis since my
preliminary analysis has shown that they are quite frequent and that they are done by both
mentors and mentees. CA research has dealt quite extensively with advice giving in institutional
contexts (Couture and Sutherland 2006; Heritage and Lindström 1998; Heritage and Sefi 1992;
Vehvilainen 2001; Vehvilainen 2003; Waring 2007), and the research shows that it is by no
means a neutral, natural thing even when knowledge asymmetries are expected of the
institutional roles, quite the contrary. The act of giving advice assumes that the advisor knows
something relevant that the advisee does not know (Heritage and Sefi 1992). Therefore, I would
like to look at advice giving from the perspective of entitlement (Asmuss and Oshima 2012;
Clifton 2006; Heineman 2006); that is, who is entitled to give advice when and about what? By
analysing the negotiation of entitlement to give advice and I hope to be able to demonstrate how
some of the classic employer brand attributes such as “Recognition and Appreciation from
superiors” (Saini et al 2014) are co-created. For instance, how the mentor responds to a mentee’s
unsolicited advice might be quite telling whether new inputs are actually valued at the company.

In connection to this, a highly attractive attribute to graduates is the possibility to “use degree
skill” (Terjesen et al 2007). Indeed, a mentee’s interest in demonstrating competence would be
expected given the pre-hire nature of the mentorship and therefore this attribute deserves a
chapter of its own. But as with advice given, “doing being knowledgeable” is something that
happens in interaction and which is not neutral and problem free. The same goes for the mentor
who is doing being a knowledgeable professional which is also a negotiated identity. By
investigating how both parties come to demonstrate knowledgeability I hope to uncover how
they co-created the rights and responsibilities connected to different knowledge territories and
how this contributes to the co-creation of role distribution and expertise in the company.

Page 24 of 36
5 PhD Plan
Status on core parameters

Teaching I have taught strategic management and communication theory the past
two semesters. I will conclude my teaching in November
PhD courses I have completed 2 courses of 5 ECTS each, one in Conversation
Analysis and one in Philosophy of Science. Both have proven quite
helpful and will contribute to my final dissertation. Two more 5 ECTS
courses have been planned and they are Research Design in November
2016 and Advanced Qualitative Methods in May 2017.
Stay abroad I have contacted a representative from the Coaching and Mentoring
Special Interest Research Group at Sheffield Hallam University. I want
to focus my stay abroad specifically on mentoring since this is where
my current environment has the least to offer
Data Collection I have approximately 11 hours of video recorded pre-hire mentor
conversations with one more mentorship to be recorded from October. I
am also negotiating with an additional company but no agreement has
been reached yet
Conferences I have been accepted as speaker at the European Mentoring and
Coaching Council conference in Edinburgh in March 2017. This will
be self-financed. I have yet to decide on which conference to attend as
my main academic event, as I see this as a strategic career move that
cannot be settled yet
Dissemination I have held 3 workshops on mentoring with based on my data and
analysis already. These have been valuable experiences that confirmed
the interestingness of my findings. My experience so far shows that
mentors and mentees alike are very interested in the micro level finding
that CA can offer.

Page 25 of 36
Plan for the next 2 years:

The plan below includes 2½ months of slack, therefore the final revisions are set to be completed
in the middle of May. I also need to fit in one more conference, but I have yet to decide on
which. The decision will depend on a variety of career related factors as I see my conference
participation as an opportunity to work toward these ends.

• 1st August 2016 – 1st January 2017:

o 1st August – 20th September: Thesis Proposal
o 1st October – 1st January: Data collection
o 10th October – 20th November: Teaching
o 28th November – 1st December: PhD course in Research Design (5 ECTS)
o 20th September – 1st December: Finish theoretical framework
 Connect data and concepts: Bridge micro-macro gap
 Separate employer branding into analysable components
o 1st October – 1 January: Transcribe 2 hours of conversation
o 1st December – 1st January: Begin analysis of Storytelling sequences
• 2nd January – 1st July 2017:
o 2nd January – 1st of February: Finalise Storytelling analysis
o 1st February – 15th April: Complete my stay abroad in Sheffield
 Work with the Advice Giving analysis in the Mentoring and Coaching
special interest group
 Contribute to 3 Discourse and Rhetoric Group data sessions
 Work on publication for EMCC journal
o 15th February – 28th February: Prepare for European Mentoring and Coaching
Council conference in Edinburgh
o 1st March – 3rd March: EMCC Conference. Convince the mentoring community of
the value of CA micro analysis (a tad optimistic perhaps)
o 15th April – 1st May: Finalise Advice Giving analysis
o 1st May – 4th May: PhD course in Advanced Qualitative Methods (5 ECTS)
o 1st May – 14th May: Finalise paper for PhD Course
o 15th May – 1st June: Revisit analyses

Page 26 of 36
 o 1st June – 1st July: Begin analysis of Employer Brand characteristics
o Identify and complete a 5 ECTS PhD course.
• 1st August 2017 – 1st January 2018
o 1st August – 15th September: Finalise Employer Brand characteristics
o 15th September – 1st October: Revisit the entire analysis
o 1st October – 1st January: Write discussion and conclusion
o Identify and complete the final 5 ECTS PhD course
• 2nd January – 1st September
o 1st January – 1st February: First read through
o 1st February – 1st March: Major revisions
o 1st March – 15th March: Second Read through
o 15th March – 1st April: Minor Revisions
o 1st April – 15th April: Go somewhere nice and leave the Dissertation for two
weeks. No PhD thinking allowed!
o 16th April – 1st May: Final read through
o 1st May – 15th May: Final revision
o 1st September: Hand-in

7 Challenges
I picture those three chapters to comprise the bulk of my analysis. Yet I keep coming back to the
challenge that is looming large in background: Is it even impossible to empirically observe
employer brand co-creation in the micro level details of pre-hire mentoring conversation? The
fact that this may well not be entirely possible is a fairly large threat to my project, despite my
attempt to build a rigorous methodology. Another challenge I face is the question of whether my
methodology has anything to offer in terms of empirical investigations of employer brand co-
creation outside of pre-hire mentoring. If this is not the case a significant possible contribution is
lost. Essentially, what I am facing currently is how to bridge the macro-level abstractions
presented in employer branding theory and the micro-level activities that ought to constitute
them. As seen above, my solution for the moment is to deconstruct employer brands into fairly
small components such as single attributes and then identify these in my data. But I am certainly
open to suggestions regarding how to address the issue.

Page 27 of 36
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