Annals of the University of Oradea: Economic Science (Dec 2016)
MISE EN THÈME DE L’IDENTITÉ ORGANISATIONNELLE : LE CAS DU SITE WEB
Abstract
The current study analyzes how the company's website can help shape and express its identity. We consider organizational identity as a collective discursive construction, which can be updated thanks to various communication media such as brand’s name, logo, slogan, presentation brochures, company’s newspaper or magazine, catalogs, websites. As during the last 25 years the development of the Internet has favored the presence on the web of the most varied organizations, even the emergence of new types of companies - active only in the virtual space, the creation of an own website has become mandatory not only for large companies, but also for the very small ones. The website is a platform for information and communication, a strategic tool to attract customers and make them loyal, a true indicator of success. To study how the company’s identity is constructed and reflected, we chose a corpus of sites from the French cultural space and presented as an example the website of the famous handmade jewelry brand, Gas Bijoux. We used methods of discourse analysis and the concept of theme design, observing mostly the selection of data that deserve to be presented, how information is organized and hierarchized, the layout, the titration, the connection between text and photography or audio-visual documents. The theme construction of the website gives important clues on how the organization shapes its identity and formulates its discourse, being a factor of differentiating from other organizations and can influence the decision of an internaut to become a client or collaborator of the company.
