Opportunities and risks of organizational weblogs: preliminary considerations

Beside the growing use of blogs by firms and employees, the specialised literature has neglecte the organizational uses of blogging (Ives and Watlington, 2005; Cortini, 2005; 2008; 2009), which does represent the thematic focus of the present chapter. In order to comprehend the neature of organizational weblogs, we propose to apply the pragmatics of human communication developed by Palo Alto School to the organizational context. Along the metophor of corporations as individuals (Larçon & Reitter, 1979; Albert & Whetten, 1985; Cortini, 2005), we may state that organizations always have to manage their image, playing on a front stage, carefully prepared on a backstage, trying to reach as many consumers as possible and, in this effort, they have to be conscious that they communicate all the time (Romani & Felicioli, 1992; Duterme, 2002; Cortini, 2005), even when they do not want to communicate in an explicit way.