Students' Confessions Page as Spokesthing: A Ventriloquial Analysis

Abstract

This study used the paradigm of Communicative Constitution of Organizations (CCO) in examining an underexplored site of naturally occurring interactions - Students’ Confessions Page. It specifically used the Montreal School’s notions of sociomateriality, ventriloquism, agency, and spokesthing to reveal the various human and nonhuman agents that participate in organizational communication. This study utilized a 24-hour data collection through screen capture of confessions from the confessions page of students of a private higher educational institution (HEI) during the second semester of academic year 2023-2024. Nine confessions that are representative of student life in their HEI were analyzed using the methodological framework for ventriloquial analysis from Nathues, van Vuuren and Cooren (2021). Embedded links and page administrator posts were also examined. From empirical data, three main voices or agents that participate in the activities of a Confessions Page were identified– the voices of the Higher Educational Institution (HEI) agents, the voices of student agents, and the voices of technology agents. From analysis of figures and vents, a Confessions Page is revealed to be a university organization’s spokesthing of accountability, affect, and authority. A Confessions Page is thus theorized as a site where a university organization emerges from communicative interactions. This paper demonstrated how to pragmatically investigate organization as a dynamic of four translations by identifying figures, vents and spokesthings from informal text of an online communication platform of students. The study contributes to CCO research in demonstrating the richness of a confessions page as a research site for advancing studies on sociomateriality and in presenting data that can be further analyzed in future studies using affect theory.