From servant to survivor: multimodal public service media narratives and restaurant industry identity during the COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this research is to explore how an industry is represented in multimodal public media narratives and to explore how this representation subsequently affects the formation of public sense-giving space during a persisting crisis, such as a pandemic. The question asked is: how do the use of multimodality by public service media dynamically shape representations of industry identity during a persisting crisis?

Design/methodology/approach

This study made use of a multimodal approach. The verbal and visual media text on the restaurant industry during the COVID-19 pandemic that were published in Finland by the public service media distributor Yle were studied. Data published between March 2020 and March 2022 were analysed. The data consisted of 236 verbal texts, including 263 visuals.

Findings

Three narratives were identified– victim, servant and survivor – that construct power relations and depict the identity of the restaurant industry differently. It was argued that multimodal media narratives hold three meaning making functions: sentimentalizing, juxtaposing and nuancing industry characteristics. It was also argued that multimodal public service media narratives have wider implications in possibly shaping the future attractiveness of the industry and organizational members' understanding of their identity.

Originality/value

This research contributes to sensemaking literature in that it explores the role of power – explicitly or implicitly constructed through media narratives during crisis. Furthermore, this research contributes to sensemaking literature in that it shows how narratives take shape multimodally during a continuous crisis, and how this impacts the construction of industry identity.

Citation

Nyqvist, F. and Lundgren-Henriksson, E.-L. (2023), "From servant to survivor: multimodal public service media narratives and restaurant industry identity during the COVID-19 pandemic", Journal of Organizational Change Management, Vol. 36 No. 8, pp. 1-28. https://doi.org/10.1108/JOCM-06-2022-0166

Introduction

In this study we examine the multimodal narratives authored and distributed by public service media during the COVID-19 pandemic to increase understanding on how public service media can modify given industry characteristics during a persisting crisis. The news media ‘manage the public debate and perform the role of the critical watchdog, revealing problems, threats, failures and scandals’ (Vasterman, 2005, p. 511). In times of change, the news media's sense giving role extends from constructing particular issues, outcomes and actors' voices as more necessary and legitimate than others (Hellgren et al., 2002; Vaara and Tienari, 2002), framing organizations as a moral problem (Budd et al., 2019) to shaping how an entire institutionalized field (Höllerer et al., 2018) or a nation (Berry, 2016) during crisis is portrayed to the public. Moreover, news media holds a powerful role not only in shaping the public's positive or negative view on organizations (Rindova et al., 2007); media representations can shape how organizational members make sense of themselves, their organization and their surroundings as news media acts as a ‘mirror’ and a site for comparison (Dutton and Dukerich, 1991; Kjærgaard et al., 2011).

We acknowledge public service media as an aggregation of journalistic texts that are governed by editorial policies (cf. Höllerer et al., 2018). We thus treat public service media as the mediator of different actors' voices to the public. This presents a situation where power relations are skewed and the organizations or actors subject to media representations are not in charge of the construction or distribution of texts (Fairclough, 1995). Although public service media is an unbiased actor free from economic incentives aiming to report a variety of interests and give voice to different actors, evidence shows that impartiality is not always prevailing (Berry, 2016; Budd et al., 2019). As such, what and who is represented in public service media and the construction of legitimacy of phenomenon is always governed by journalists' argumentation (Kuronen et al., 2005) and can thus not be regarded as ‘free’ from editorial incentives.

A crisis context makes it particularly interesting to study public service media (e.g. Berry, 2016) as a sensemaker and sensegiver of change (Höllerer et al., 2018) for two reasons. First, crisis of big magnitude, such as the financial crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic, which are “complex and spatially dispersed” (Höllerer et al., 2018, p. 1) becomes objects for sensemaking in the public through efforts to create a collective understanding of the unfolding context. Media also forms a suitable site for analyzing the meaning-making functions of multimodality. For example, Höllerer et al. (2018) studied the coverage of the financial crisis by business media focusing on multimodal compositions of verbal and visual text in the printed format to unravel how objectification can be facilitated during these extraordinary conditions. Second, during crisis, public media reporting intensifies given the assumed role of a trustworthy site of reporting (Schifferes and Coulter, 2013). This strengthens public service media's sensegiving role and power to frame events to the public (Berry, 2016).

The focus of our study complements earlier research on multimodality and sensemaking in two ways. First, studies have been done on the shaping role of media representation on organizational identity (e.g. Kjaergaard et al., 2011). Second, studies have established that organizations might use different multimodal discursive strategies to express legitimacy of organizational identity (Zamparini and Lurati, 2017). We extend this focus to how an external actor, the public service media, holds power to shape identity representations of organizations and how this takes place multimodally. Visuals, such as photographs, holds a different ability to express physicality and affect (Slutskaya et al., 2012), as well as of attributes of categories (Hardy and Phillips, 1999). Considering industry identity, multimodality offers an alternative as well as complementary function to effectively communicate enduring and persisting characteristics (Albert and Whetten, 1985, p. 269) of an industry. Thus, we shift focus from the definition of industry identity by actors making sense of ‘who we are’ and ‘what we do’ (Stigliani and Elsbach, 2018) to sensemaking and sensegiving by public service media regarding ‘who they are’ and ‘what they do’. We ask: how do the use of multimodality by public service media dynamically shape representations of industry identity during a persisting crisis?

Our case study focuses on the issued restrictions towards the restaurant industry during the COVID-19 pandemic. Our findings demonstrate what particular features of an industry are emphasized and communicated by public service media during crisis. This advances understanding of how public service media can, using multimodality, dynamically shape the range and scope of meanings assigned to an industry during crisis, and accordingly control the definition of industry identity by sentimentalizing, juxtaposing and nuancing industry characteristics.

We contribute to the sensemaking literature by illustrating how public service media, as a significant sensegiver, multimodally provides the boundaries for the (re)shaping of industry identity, which ultimately might shape organizational and public conceptions of an industry. As such, our contributions have wider implications for the understanding of how multimodal narratives presented in public service media can have implications for the industry's future attractiveness and organizational members' sensemaking in terms of understanding their own identity as organizational members.

In the coming section, we introduce the theoretical concepts of sensemaking, sensegiving and narratives in the context of an ongoing crisis. We then introduce our empirical context, material and our chosen method of analysis. Lastly, we present our analysis and conclude by discussing our findings and contributions to sensemaking literature.

Theoretical framework

The role of sensemaking and sensegiving narratives in the context of a persisting crisis

To understand how actor groups and their present and future agency are discursively constructed in the media during a crisis we draw on sensemaking and narrative literature. Sensemaking is defined as a process of interpreting and bracketing environmental cues to make sense of and create coherence in a situation characterized by high levels of uncertainty and ambiguity (e.g. Weick et al., 2005; Maitlis and Christianson, 2014). Inherent to sensemaking is also attempts to shape the meaning making of others through sensegiving, which is generally defined as intentional attempts to influence the sensemaking-processes of other actors (Gioia and Chittipeddi, 1991; Maitlis, 2005). Sensegiving is thus argued to be a vital element of sensemaking, so much that they are ‘two sides of the same coin – one implies the other and cannot exist without it’ (Rouleau, 2005, p. 1415). Furthermore, sensemaking and sensegiving play a key role in change and crisis management, as a stabiliser and as an emotional glue that holds the organization together during challenging times (Ernst and Jensen Schleiter, 2019).

We regard sensemaking and sensegiving as attempts to assign meaning to a novel phenomenon, where actors ‘selectively draw on cues to make sense of incidents, and they engage in sensegiving when they externalize their own sensemaking’ (Höllerer et al., 2018, p. 618). In our reasoning, we move beyond the boundaries of sensemaking and sensegiving in an organizational setting and draw on Nigam and Ocasio (2010, p. 826) in that sensemaking and sensegiving can take place when ‘actors make sense not only of the event itself, but the broader organizational field’. This approach to sensemaking and sensegiving allows us to approach events that are spatially dispersed and temporally fragmented (Höllerer et al., 2018), one of which the pandemic is an illustrative example. We argue that media coverage on the pandemic offers a window into the dynamic re-framing of meaning (Hellgren et al., 2002) of the pandemic itself, of actor groups affected by the crisis and of the entire industry. News media impacts not only the way organizations make sense of an event but also the way that external actors perceive and make sense of the organization (Deephouse, 2000; Rindova et al., 2007), thus functioning as an important influencer for how organizations are positively or negatively framed (e.g. Entman, 2007; Street, 2010). For example, during coverage of the global financial crisis, BBC tended to report politicians' views more than bankers' (Schifferes and Coulter, 2013). This evokes questions of how actor groups become constructed and represented in media as a crisis persists, corresponding with the call for more research on the power aspect of sensemaking (Schildt et al., 2020).

The ambiguity surrounding the pandemic has been concentrated to the vague temporal boundaries of the situation; the nature of the crisis has shifted from ‘acute’ to ‘persisting.’ To facilitate our understanding of how narratives are used as sensemaking and sensegiving tools by the media to construct and convey particular ‘realities’ (Hellgren et al., 2002) during persisting crisis, we adopt a processual and prospective approach to sensemaking and sensegiving (Kaplan and Orlikowski, 2012; Hernes and Shultz, 2020). We thus regard these meaning making strategies as constantly ongoing processes, where meaning is created and recreated in the present moment, by drawing on past and possible future events (e.g. Schultz and Hernes, 2013). These processes involve a constantly ongoing re-evaluation of the situation.

We define narratives as ‘accounts of value-laden symbolic actions embedded in words and incorporating sequence, time and place’ as ‘one discursive practice by which organizations are continuously constituted’ (Brown et al., 2005, p. 2–3). We argue that past experiences and imaginations of future events shape how meaning, identity, potential future solutions, or consequences of a certain event are constructed and made sense of (e.g. Gioia et al., 1994; Gephart et al., 2010; Wiebe et al., 2010; Kaplan and Orlikowski, 2012). This perspective on sensemaking and sensegiving allows for a broader understanding of how an industry identity is (re-)created during a persisting crisis, including shifting constructions of power relations. In narratives of crisis, depending on the genre, different interpretations of realities and what is going on are communicated (Rosile et al., 2013), suggesting different answers to the question of “who are we?” (Corley and Gioia, 2004).

We define industry identity as the central, distinctive and enduring character of an industry (Albert and Whetten, 1985) comprising ‘central principles and practices denoting ‘who we are’ and ‘what we do’ as an industry’ (Stigliani and Elsbach, 2018, p. 1323). Industry identity is developed and re-developed ‘through a series of contested iterative collective sensemaking and sensegiving processes by organizational and industry stakeholders’ (Stigliani and Elsbach, 2018, p. 1324), when identity is threatened due to uncertain, novel or ambiguous events (Weick, 1995; Maitlis and Christianson, 2014). Narratives offer a structure to organize and assign meaning to events during ambiguous situations, including a means to maintain or to challenge organizational identities (Vaara et al., 2016). However, the literature has been relatively silent on how narratives related to an industry's identity during crisis emerge and shift as a crisis persists, as well as how this takes place through both verbal and visual text. We therefore suggest that sensemaking literature could benefit from multimodal investigations of crisis in an extra-organizational context (Höllerer et al., 2018).

Introducing a multimodal approach

Recently, Christianson and Barton (2021) highlight the possibilities that the pandemic opens for redefining the spatial boundaries of where sensemaking is studied. They argue for expanding the scope of sensemaking research by also broadening the methods used for studying complex phenomena such as a global crisis. The pandemic has given rise to numerous studies addressing sensemaking during the past years. Rubin and de Vries (2020) studied diverging sensemaking frames during the initial phases of the COVID-19 outbreak in Denmark. Their research highlights distinct sensemaking boundaries between significant actor groups (actors, health experts and political leaders), that is how actor groups that co-exist and are expected to cooperate draw on diverging sensemaking frames that subsequently affect their actions and can cause chaos and increased uncertainty. Högberg (2021), in turn, examined sensegiving and sensemaking in the hotel industry during the pandemic and its impact on the boundary work in this industry. While these studies focus on sensemaking, boundary work and the persisting crisis that the pandemic poses, they lack a multimodal focus and analysis.

Nevertheless, multimodality has been visible in sensemaking research during recent years when studying intra-organizational sensemaking (e.g. Nissi and Pälli, 2020; Aromaa et al., 2020). Apart from few exceptions (e.g. Ingardi et al., 2021), little attention has been brought to the role of sensemaking and multimodality in an extra-organizational setting. Within the management and organizational research field, a ‘visual turn’ has been witnessed during recent years (e.g. Meyer et al., 2013; Boxenbaum et al., 2018a, b; Höllerer et al., 2018; Quattrone et al., 2021). It has been argued that ‘visual organizational research is necessary for developing an understanding of contemporary organization’ (Quattrone et al., 2021, p. 3). Visuals serve a variety of functions, ranging from creating emotional resonance (Barberá-Tomás et al., 2019), to the expression of identities (Meyer et al., 2013). For example, Nissi and Pälli (2020) examined the role of discourse and textual artefacts in sensemaking as means to construct joint understandings, whereas Ingardi et al. (2021) approached narratives in the context of error and failure stories in organizational settings through verbal and visual texts. Ropo and Höykinpuro (2017) have explored and argued for the importance of visuality within narrative research, highlighting how visuals capture and reveal implicit matters such as emotions and symbolic meanings that are not visible in written text. Whilst these studies adapt a multimodal approach to sensemaking and narratives, these are set in an environment outside of the crisis context.

We follow Quattrone et al. (2021, p. 4) in identifying visuals as the ‘visual dimension of organizing and organizational reality’, which ‘enables meaning making in and around organizations.’ Meaning making is thus at the centre of multimodal studies, and how this is accomplished through interactions between text and image. Visuals allow for a space to be created where contradictions on realities might emerge and become re-negotiated, yet it is not only about what is, but also the interplay with what is not visible and thus what absence of visuals means for the creation of meaning (Quattrone et al., 2021). Visuals might materialize certain futures, whilst at the same time exclude other future scenarios (Comi and Whyte, 2018). Absence of visuals can thus both close and open meaning making spaces (Quattrone et al., 2021).

Visual and verbal text holds different affordances, that is different potential for meaning making (Meyer et al., 2018; Höllerer et al., 2018; Kress, 2011). This potential is dependent on the relation between the multimodal modes and its audience and affordances can be both enabling and constraining (Meyer et al., 2018). Modes refer to different means of meaning making, including verbal and written text (e.g. Jewitt et al., 2016). Visual text holds an important role in spatializing meaning by conveying information about a phenomena's physical location, multidimensional relationships of actors, combining a variety of elements through composition (Höllerer et al., 2013; Kress, 2011). Visual text holds the potential to captivate, by immediately drawing the attention of its audience, conveying strong emotional messages that are less apparent than in written text (e.g. Bloch, 1995). This affordance engages its audience by exceeding cognitive processes (Meyer et al., 2018) and by going ‘straight to the heart’. Furthermore, visual text holds the affordance to materialize meaning by anchoring a phenomenon in the present moment, giving it tangibility and ‘face’ by personalizing otherwise abstract situations (Höllerer et al., 2018). Last, one multimodal affordance of verbal text is the potential of visual text to convey meaning through narration (e.g. Ingardi et al., 2021). This affordance provides clarity and alignment to an event or situation, offers a temporal structure and is thus a crucial part of sensemaking (e.g. Weick et al., 2005; Brown and Humphreys, 2003).

Multimodality, public service media and sensegiving

Taking a more critical stance on multimodality, power is assumed to surface through the conscious or unconscious choice dictating the creation of visuals (Kress, 2010), and to become (re)-negotiated, having implications for who is assigned ‘voice’ (Jancsary et al., 2016). In line with these reasonings, we regard visuals to construct and convey, possibly contradicting, present and future social realities (Boxenbaum et al., 2018b; Meyer et al., 2013). We approach the public arena as a discursive space (e.g. Hardy and Maguire, 2010) for meaning construction of crisis through multimodal media texts. News media can be considered a site for meaning making (Gamson et al., 1992), ‘understood as the public arena in which the sensemaking and sensegiving efforts of multiple actors coalesce and are evaluated and balanced according to editorial policies and agendas’ (Höllerer et al., 2018, p. 620). In our specific case, visuals (not) incorporated in media reporting on the pandemic and restaurant restrictions, we argue, represent discourse on industry identity – what the industry is and is becoming – that when integrated into a narrative as a meaning making structure (Höllerer et al., 2018) holds implications for power relations and constructions of agency boundaries.

Previous research has identified that processes of sensegiving and sensemaking are not constrained by organizational boundaries, and that news media have a framing role in how organizations and industries are perceived by society (e.g. Budd et al., 2019). Research has addressed the role of media as an important sensegiver (e.g. Höllerer et al., 2018; Kjaergaard et al., 2011) and as a shaper of industry identity (e.g. Zamparini and Lurati, 2017). This has been done through critical discourse analysis (e.g. Vaara and Tienari, 2002), or field studies (Kjaergaard et al., 2011), thus neglecting the visual aspect that forms an undeniable part of news media.

Studies on multimodal narratives with the aim of identifying functions of verbal and visual text within particularly equivocal contexts have likewise been addressed outside organizational boundaries. Examples are Christiansen (2018) and Höllerer et al. (2018) who studied multimodality in relation to field level issues, the latter during the global financial crisis. Christiansen (2018) scrutinized the visual framing of the issues of alcohol-related harm in an organization's campaign material and identified three multimodal functions: normalizing alcohol consumption, defining and delimiting the scope of the issue and establishing the organization's identity as an expert. Höllerer et al. (2018) found that multimodality can extend verbal text through theorization and enhance perceived validity by providing evidence for verbal text in visuals. Yet, the focus of these studies remains on how organizations are framed in relation to particular social issue(s), not taking dynamics of multiple actor groups and shifting power relations over time into in-depth account. Hence, multimodal studies on sensegiving during crisis (Höllerer et al., 2018) have not specified how the inclusion (and exclusion) of voices shift as well as how agency boundaries between actor groups become (re)-established over time. We suggest that narratives during crisis and how an industry is represented, thus need to be approached from a perspective of multimodal and multivocal construction of power and the discursive boundary work associated with it.

Consequently, we approach media narratives as a medium for sensemaking and sensegiving around the pandemic through which different and competing voices emerge and shift: ‘Sensemaking efforts by the media draw on the sensegiving of actors in the field (e.g. how experts explain what is going on) and vice versa (e.g. public figures refer to the sensegiving of the media to legitimize their actions)’ (Höllerer et al., 2018, p. 620). Drawing on these reasonings, we suggest that the public media engages in multimodal boundary work as a crisis persists, establishing who is in, and who is out, that is given sensegiving space, in the public discussion on the pandemic. Boundary work is defined in the literature on organizational space as ‘activities, practices, and material features that separate, mark, dissolve, or negotiate space’ (Stephenson et al., 2020, p. 801). We argue that approaching multimodal narratives as a form of boundary work regarding voice has implications not only for how the crisis is framed and power is (re-)distributed, but also how an entire industry's past, present and future conditions, and possibilities for agency, is (re-)established as a crisis persists.

Methodology

Research setting

We followed the restaurant industry in Finland during the COVID-19 pandemic, beginning in March 2020 until the end of March 2022. The restaurant, - and hospitality industry in Finland (which statistically are counted in the same category) employs approximately 54,000 people and constitutes of 12,000 businesses, the majority of these being small and middle-sized (>90% of active businesses). The restaurant industry has, prior to the pandemic, been struggling with staffing deficiency and a lack of experienced, professional personnel, something that stakeholders (e.g. the employee union MARA) have continuously addressed prior to the pandemic.

The COVID-19 pandemic in Finland has followed similar pattern to the pandemic globally, developing in distinct ‘waves’. These ‘waves’ have directly impacted the way the restaurant industry has been allowed to operate through lockdowns where no indoor service has been allowed or through restrictions limiting customer amount and service hours. As an attempt to save the situation, restaurants adjusted their business concept by starting up take away services, whilst awaiting ‘new orders’ from authorities on how to carry out their functions. An illustration of the pandemic and its development in Finland between March 2020 and March 2022 is provided in Figure 1. The dotted lines illustrate the diffuse temporal boundaries of the respective ‘waves’:

Data collection and analysis

We collected electronic media texts from the Finnish public media service company Yle in Finland published on their website between March 2020 and March 2022. As Yle operates in a bilingual country with Finnish and Swedish as the two official languages, we chose to collect data published in Swedish to geographically specify our research setting. Texts in Swedish cover the geographic area of South-West and Western Finland which is populated in majority by Swedish speaking Finns. Forwards, we use ‘media texts’ or ‘texts’ when referring to the published news article.

Media texts from public broadcasting services, particularly covering the pandemic, are suitable data as these are publicly available, aimed towards a broad audience and can due to their wide spread and availability be considered impactful sources of information. This media format is generally one that is considered trustworthy in times of crisis, as opposed to for example user-generated news content (Höllerer et al., 2018) and is one that provides representation for a broad set of actors and viewpoints and thus embeds a variety of actor narratives (Vaara et al., 2006; Höllerer et al., 2018).

Finland is one of the top leading countries when it comes to respect of freedom of the press and freedom of expression. The online news and broadcasting of Yle is one of the highest ranked news actors in Finland (Newman et al., 2020). One of the challenges during the pandemic has been the increasing amount of disinformation and distrust amongst media consumers. During the pandemic, the importance of public media as a reliable source of knowledge has become even more relevant, and surveys indicate that the population trusted Yle as a provider of trustworthy information regarding the pandemic (Horowitz and Leino, 2020; Matikainen et al., 2020). Public service media reaches a broad and diverse audience (e.g. Schulz et al., 2019), has a high degree of distribution whilst taking minorities into consideration by providing adapted modes of communication. Public service media thus provides structure and reliability in a context filled with a variety of media platforms (Horowitz and Leino, 2020). We therefore argue that public service media – for the purpose of our research – is an adequate source of data, whilst acknowledging that it does not address or represent all available media (e.g. privately owned media companies, social media platforms).

The texts were collected retrospectively in February and March 2022. We used the following search words when scanning the media texts: COVID-19, pandemic, restaurant, restrictions, restaurateur. After familiarizing ourselves with the data material, we excluded articles that were only informative by nature, such as texts regarding incidence rates. After excluding texts that were not of relevance, we arrived at 236 verbal texts and 263 visuals integrated into these verbal texts. Our data is presented in the Table 1 below.

The beginning of our data analysis was highly inductive. We first ordered the media texts chronologically. After an initial reading of the material, we identified and organized different actor groups explicitly or implicitly covered in the texts into clusters. We then performed an initial narrative analysis on the media texts to analyse how the actors were constructed and (not) related to the pandemic, and consequently (not) assigned agency. For each actor group, we coded how the media texts constructed 1) the present role of the actor group and the relations with other actor groups, 2) what specific actions were required and 3) responsibility over potential future consequences. We used the NVivo software as an aid throughout the analysis. We arrived at five themes which we found prominent in the texts and from which our emergent understanding of the shifts in the public portrayal of the pandemic over time, developed: responsibility, positive sentiments about the present moment and the future, negative sentiments about the future, consequences of the pandemic and the restrictions for the industry and lastly, actions.

As we proceeded with our analysis, we noticed that the use of visuals over time in the media texts related to the restaurant industry and issued restrictions differed substantially. We then turned to an extended multimodal discursive analysis on the media narratives to identify the meaning constructed and conveyed by verbal and visual text alone and in combination (Jancsary et al., 2016). Multimodal analysis ‘acknowledges the different materials and ‘meaning resource’ that people use to create and distribute meaningful signs’ (Jancsary et al., 2016, p. 2–3). Multimodal analysis recognizes ways of communicating that are not limited to written or verbal text, focusing on different modes of communication: e.g. image, layout, sound, moving image that are included in multimodal analysis (Kress, 2010). For this purpose, we adhere to the critical archaeological tradition within multimodal analysis. This approach takes power into account, looking at how groups or individuals are made visible or invisible through texts and visuals and what this indicates about how they are regarded on a societal level (Jancsary et al., 2016).

We noticed that all visuals in the media texts were photographs/photographic images (stock images or ‘real’ photographs). In the first step, we ordered the media texts chronologically into two main subgroups according to what we identified in the photographs; we clarified what or who was displayed in the picture: one group where actual individuals were in focus and one without individuals but with abstract objects in focus. After going deeper into the visual content, we arrived at more refined groups consisting of dualities: individuals-abstract, dark-bright, restaurant-nightclub, alcohol-no alcohol.

We iteratively adopted the steps for critical multimodal discursive analysis as proposed by Jancsary et al. (2016). First, we focused our attention on the verbal and visual texts alone across the above groups, analyzing for each mode what rhetoric and design were deployed and what realities these conveyed, such as who is expected to take responsibility? Who is delegating responsibility? What is (not) said about the current situation and the future and in what tone? How are the consequences of the pandemic and the restrictions depicted and by whom? For example, when we studied the visuals in detail, we asked ourselves how that person or object was portrayed, who or what was not portrayed and what the general ambiance of the visual was.

We turned to affordances of multimodal text (e.g. Höllerer et al., 2018; Meyer et al., 2018) when developing our integrated understanding of how the verbal and visual text interacted, that is how they supported and/or contradicted each other. Informed by theory, we searched for ways in which verbal and visual text together captivated, specified, narrated, spatialized or materialized meaning (Höllerer et al., 2018; Meyer et al., 2018). We considered what the implications were for representations of industry identity, that is ‘who they are’ and ‘what they do’. We arrived at the understanding that verbal and visual text in combination held three functions: sentimentalizing, juxtaposing and nuancing industry characteristics.

For example, one text was comprised by a picture (Visual 1) of a restaurant manager depicted standing in an empty restaurant, accompanied by the headline “The coronavirus emptied restaurants in the blink of an eye – Restaurateur in [name of city deleted] is hoping that home delivery will pick up.” When combined, the verbal and visual text strengthen and narrate a story that captivates strong emotions, whilst spatializing the effects of the pandemic into the physical location of the restaurant. Together, verbal and visual text serve to sentimentalize industry characteristics as these not only convey a story containing a strong emotional message, but also provide the emotions ‘a face’ in portraying managers in the above-mentioned way, which serves to strengthen the verbal message.

Another example of how we combined verbal and visual text can be seen in Visual 5 where three champagne glasses are depicted towards a bright background. The visual is accompanied by the text: “Now the restaurant restrictions are mitigated – dancing and karaoke are no longer forbidden”. The visual depicts joy and celebration, with alcohol in focus, whilst the verbal text refers to dancing and karaoke – services that are not generally considered core traits of a restaurant. The combined verbal and visual text narrate an ambiguous story to the audience regarding the key traits of restaurants, at the same time captivating the complexity of the situation and the dual reality that restaurants find themselves in: one where future prospects are dependent on the development of the pandemic and its subsequent restrictions. This use of multimodality generates a representation of the industry as one that consists out of a diversity of businesses serving a broad customer base with a variety of services – providing ambiguous messages on the core definition of a restaurant. The variegated way in which the industry is presented serves to juxtapose industry characteristics: presenting different and at times contradicting traits of the industry and different prospective scenarios the industry might be facing.

Ultimately, we moved between texts to create an in-depth understanding of the media material and to synthesize texts and visuals into coherent narratives. We asked ourselves what stories surfaced through the combination of text and the visuals. A narrative analysis incorporates the interpretation of stories and analysis thereof by studying how the story is constructed, what its function is and what the substance of the story is (Allen, 2017). We asked ourselves how the different multimodal representation of events and actors related to different narrative genres (e.g. Rosile et al., 2013). The narrative genres hence constitute the larger meaning making structures tying together past, present and future events and actors into a coherent plot (e.g. Höllerer et al., 2018).

Findings

Characteristics of the restaurant industry

One distinct character of the restaurant industry is its role as a ‘traditional’ industry, where human labour cannot be replaced by modern technology. It is generally considered a ‘low entry’ industry where formal education is not a prerequisite and has served as a springboard into work-life for many young adults. It is furthermore an industry characterized by a strong spirit of entrepreneurship, consisting to a great extent of small, - and middle-sized companies. The dependency upon human workforce and the small scale makes it an industry that is especially sensitive to societal and economic changes in comparison to more technically advanced industries. As such, it is the industry of ‘the common man and woman’, shaping its resonance among customers.

The core and distinct trait of the industry is to provide services; experiences that consist of the combination of food, beverage and personal service provided in a physical, often atmospheric, environment. This core principle became particularly evident during the lockdowns when restaurants were allowed only to serve take away food and forced to omit the two other elements forming the overall restaurant experience of customers – the serving of alcohol and personal service. Last, the industry is characterized by a struggle to attract new and maintain its workforce. Varying and challenging working hours and a relatively low wage are factors that have traditionally been distinct for the restaurant industry. This has presented challenges for the industry in building a long-standing workforce through its reputation of an industry of ‘revolving doors’ with a high employee turnover (e.g. Han et al., 2016).

Combining our findings from the verbal and visual text, we arrived at the understanding that the three identified multimodal functions –sentimentalizing, juxtaposing and nuancing industry characteristics – corresponded with different narrative patterns, each representing a different story about the restaurant industry during the COVID-19 pandemic as depicted by the public media. These narratives – ‘the victim’, ‘the servant’, ‘the survivor’ – convey social realities and meanings of the crisis and the actors within, as well as different views on prospects, and accordingly entail different constructions of power relations (Jancsary et al., 2016). We treat these narrative clusters as representatives of different sensegiving strategies; how different actors are given, or being deprived of, discursive space and how responsibility over potential future outcomes is depicted differently, as well as how the role of the restaurants varies, and what specific actions are depicted as necessary to fight the crisis as well as by whom. We emphasize that the narratives overlap regarding time. Whilst some narratives were more dominating than others during distinct phases of the pandemic, they were all co-existing throughout the pandemic.

Table 2 illustrates the affordances of verbal and visual text and the ultimate multimodal functions identified in the respective narratives. The blurred lines between the vertical columns illustrate the simultaneous existence of the different elements of the narratives and how these permeated each other. The horizontal lines illustrate how the narratives surfaced differently throughout the course of the pandemic.

The victim narrative: sentimentalizing industry characteristics

In this first narrative, the industry is framed as a ‘victim’ who is dependent upon and expected to adhere to the rapid decisions made by authorities regarding the pandemic. The present situation depicted in the verbal texts is characterized by struggle, uncertainty, fear and worry. The restaurants, due to restrictions, can no longer serve their customers in a normal way. Restaurants are left empty, and managers are forced to implement temporary layoffs of employees. Visuals illustrate this in that they are manager-cantered, illustrating empty restaurants with the manager left to ‘manage the sinking ship’. The ambiance in the pictures is one of ‘doom and gloom’, with dark colours and managers looking starkly into the camera.

In this narrative, the restaurant industry is given discursive space through interviews with restaurant managers. However, the dominating voice is still the government: implicitly omnipresent by being the actor responsible for the decisions that have put the industry in this novel situation. Hence, managers and the industry are ‘coerced’ into a reactive position, instead of being the ‘active’ voice in charge of their own faith. In interviews, managers reflect upon the current situation, but also retrospectively upon tough times that the industry has faced prior to the pandemic, and even more so prospectively upon the tough times that are to come. In addition to expressing thoughts and strong negative emotions such as fear and worry about the future, thematically, the focus in these interviews is on the consequences of the lock-down and the struggle with adjusting to the new restrictions. By portraying managers in this way, this narrative gives the crisis a ‘face’ and thus serves to personalize the crisis and accordingly sentimentalize the industry characteristics of the industry being a ‘traditional’ one, consisting of ‘hard working common men’ who are now faced with the challenges of the pandemic.

The way the pandemic is depicted in relation to the restaurant industry implicitly conveys that there is no room for questioning or debates, but that the industry is expected to accept the economic losses that the restrictions give rise to, accompanied with promises that they will be reimbursed for this further on (e.g. Svenska Yle, 2020). In addition, the industry is represented mainly by managers from SMEs; managers from larger business chains in the industry are given little to no space. This emphasizes the depiction of the pandemic as ‘the government's struggle’, where the industry is diminished to a cluster of entrepreneurs.

Verbal text specifies (Meyer et al., 2018) and defines the industry as responsible for controlling the spread of the virus. By adhering to the restrictions, the industry becomes an important ‘tool’ for the authorities in the fight against the virus. Implicitly this tells us that the industry – if not being closed – would function as a spreader of the virus, jeopardizing the safety of society. This strengthens the identity of the industry as a ‘victim’, left with no choice but to comply with restrictions.

Many will be forced to give up, restaurateurs fear. The pots and casseroles are still steaming in the cafés and restaurants, but customer flow has decreased, and things are not looking promising for the entrepreneurs. The government's decision to decrease the spread of the virus by closing indoor service in restaurants has forced restaurateurs to be innovative. But the consensus is that tough times await. Published online by Svenska Yle 25.3.2020

Verbal text further narrates (e.g. Meyer et al., 2018) ‘tough times’ that have been and are to come for restaurant managers. In interviews, some managers express fear and worry about the future, narrating ‘a struggle that is to come’ whilst some draw on past experiences and challenges they have faced framing this as a struggle among others. This gives tangibility and serves to capture the individual struggle of managers. The focus of the verbal texts is to portray the current situation of the managers – not to give room for questioning the reasons for the decision-making of the authorities.

[Name] that is one of the restaurant owners say that they in a brief time have lost 80% of their lunch guests and that half of the staff is temporarily laid off. - I think that many restaurants that have been struggling for a while will face bankruptcy, unfortunately. We will be fighting against that. Despite the struggles the manager believes that the closing of restaurants is the best measure that can be taken at the moment. Published online by Svenska Yle 26.3.2020

The verbal texts are accompanied with visuals of mainly two different kinds: either managers looking into the camera with stern gazes or abstract pictures displaying an abandoned restaurant with empty chairs. Colours are dark and gloomy and there is an overhanging sense of doom in the pictures. Photographs of actual restaurant managers captivate (Meyer et al., 2018) the negative outsets and collective misery of the industry. By portraying managers in their abandoned restaurants, these visual and verbal texts serve a humanizing function, they put a face on the suffering that the pandemic has caused. These visuals materialize the ongoing global crisis by anchoring it in the present moment (Meyer et al., 2018) and in a local context.

Visual 1

Headline: The coronavirus emptied restaurants in the blink of an eye – Restaurateur is hoping that home delivery will pick up.

Published online by Svenska Yle 21.3.2020.

Source(s): Wasström (2020)

Photographs of empty restaurants and bars powerfully captivate a dark and unknown ‘mystified’ future for the industry as well as implicitly spatializing (Meyer et al., 2018) the ‘virus site’ to the inside of restaurants and bars. The empty seats and the abandoned restaurants illustrate how dependent the industry is on human capital, in the shape of customers but also staff, contributing to victimizing the industry and strengthen the industry identity as a ‘traditional’ industry where operations cannot be replaced with technology.

Visual 2

Headline: “The government is discussing restrictions for the restaurants – regional restrictions are to be expected.” Published online by Svenska Yle 28.9.2020.

Source(s): Purhonen (2020)

Managers standing alone in empty restaurants and dressed in work wear embody (Meyer et al., 2018) how sudden the change has been: restaurants that a few days ago were filled with customers and employees are now empty, managers are left to restructure their business in a way that is compliant with restrictions. Pictures of empty restaurants with the lights still turned on give tangibility to the way business is left ‘on the backburner’ – restaurants are in standby, being left at the mercy of the development of the pandemic and the subsequent restrictions issued by authorities.

The social reality depicted in verbal and visual text (Jancsary et al., 2016; Meyer et al., 2013) is of the struggling manager, trying to find a way to manage a novel and chaotic situation. The verbal texts give concrete examples of how the pandemic has affected this restaurateur's operations by describing how order books have been emptied, how lunch guests have decreased to a mere few, and how the restaurateur on short notice has developed take away services to compensate the economic damage the restrictions have caused. Bruskin and Mikkelsen (2020) have identified emotionally charged metaphors as a characteristic of future-oriented sensemaking in a change context, a trait that we identified in the way that media texts depicted the situation.

The combined effect of the verbal and visual text, we argue, is to enhance features that serve to sentimentalize the characteristic of the industry being a ‘traditional’ industry dependent on human labour, and mainly consisting of entrepreneurs and small businesses. Verbal and visual text convey strong emotion and atmosphere that when combined tell a story of an industry marked by struggle, and where the personal struggle of individual managers become focal, providing a ‘face’ to ‘who they are’ and the challenges presented to established views of ‘what they do.’

Moreover, visuals have framing power that might also play a part in establishing and assigning responsibilities to actor groups (Christiansen, 2018). In this narrative, the interests of the government are accentuated, and the consequences of these are made tangible through the focus on individual managers' struggle. The function of multimodality in this narrative is thus to reinforce power relations (Jancsary et al., 2016): power is in the hands of the government and the industry is a mere receiver of decisions at the same time as managerial and industry ‘suffering’ is portrayed. By also giving the managers and their struggle discursive space the consequences of the exertion of power are illustrated, functioning to humanize industry identity in a more tacit way characteristic for visual text (Toraldo et al., 2018). Moreover, at the same time as restaurants and bars are being victimized in the media narratives, these are also assigned under the same ‘virus site’ label, which has implications for industry identity; a restaurant is not a restaurant if not serving alcohol. In the visual representations, industry identity becomes tied with this activity that is now restricted.

In sum, through media texts the government is depicted as the influencing actor. This narrative consists out of visuals of sole managers with stern looks, or abstract pictures of abandoned restaurants or take away boxes, captivating the rapid change that the restrictions have given rise to within the industry, and the way that the industry complies with and adjusts to the restrictions The restaurant industry is depicted as a victim but still compliant with instructions given by the authorities. This narrative is highly prevalent at the beginning of the pandemic, during 2020.

The servant narrative: juxtaposing of industry characteristics

As the pandemic persists, there is a shift in how the industry is portrayed in media. The discursive boundaries shift towards including more actors than in the prior narrative and there is a clear dissonance between the realities presented through verbal and visual text. In both verbal and visual text, the restaurant industry and the individual managers become background figures. In contrast to the first single voiced victim narrative, in this narrative dominating during the beginning and middle of 2021, the voices of other actors are given more space in media texts. Experts – a cluster incorporating actors such as leading infection control physicians, representatives for the Regional State and Administrative Services, and representatives of the employee union MARA – are more frequently interviewed in the media. Notable is that these actor groups: the government and the experts, are not speaking in one unified voice, but in a multivocal, chaotic manner, presenting highly contradicting statements regarding their view on the pandemic. Through these contradicting statements a variety of simultaneously ongoing social realities are represented.

An example of this is when the Minister of family affairs and social services Krista Kiuru on the 16th of July 2021 declared that new, tightened restrictions for the restaurants were to be expected, after some months of more liberal restrictions (Svenska Yle, 2021b) The day before, on the 15th of July, Mikko Salminen, health security manager at the Finnish Institute for health and welfare was interviewed by the public media service company Yle (Svenska Yle, 2021a), where he stated that measures restricting the fundamental human rights need to be taken only after strong consideration, and that if there is not a direct threat towards the safety of the people, it will be difficult to legally motivate new restrictions. In the same article he states that the Finnish Society was in a ‘middle-mode’, with an ongoing spread of the virus but without an acute ongoing threat towards the people most vulnerable. This example is illustrative of the contradictory messages regarding the industry and the pandemic in verbal texts.

In the media texts constructing the ‘servant’ narrative, decision-making regarding the pandemic is portrayed as available to few exclusive actors. The industry is not included in this set of actors and is expected to adhere to the rapidly changing instructions that are being issued in the name of health care, and to ‘serve’ society by adhering to the restrictions. Power relations are thus strengthened from the perspective of the government and experts as restaurants need to ‘obey’ the restrictions to be able to continue their business operations. The future destiny of the restaurant industry is portrayed as being in the hands of customers ‘finding their way back’, complicated by restaurants not being able to offer the same service as before due to restrictions.

The media texts present an ambiguous social reality (Jancsary et al., 2016): on the one hand, industry actors are situated on a positive future trajectory being able to open again, regaining power over their operations. On the other hand, they are still constructed as dominated by the government, subject to a constant back-and-forth between restrictions and dependent on customers finding their way back to the restaurants.

In addition to the multivocality regarding the restrictions, the verbal text narrates (Meyer et al., 2018) a ‘neo-20's’ era of collective joy, celebration, and new beginnings to come, as society partially re-open. The restaurant industry functions as the spatial room where this future post-pandemic ‘celebration’ is to take place. Verbal texts further specify new working conditions for the industry through frequent reports on the restrictions, such as restricted opening hours and serving of alcohol that are now regionally directed and supervised. Because of a heavy focus on the serving of alcohol, restaurants are tied with activities commonly assigned to bars and nightclubs.

In the verbal texts, on the one hand, interviewed managers are depicted as ‘grateful’ and ‘happy’ that the restrictions to some extents are lifted and that they can serve their customers again, looking forward to a ‘normal’ life. On the other hand, friction between the industry and authorities emerges and competing discussions regarding the situation arise. Restaurant actors are given space to criticize the way restrictions are lifted and reimposed repeatedly, often with short notice and through unclear communication channels that complicate the everyday life of managers and makes long-term planning difficult. They also critique the extent of the limitations, claiming them to be unfair and too rigid. The industry is again – as seen in the victim narrative – placed in a reactive position in relation to authorities, instead of being invited to be part of the ongoing discussion.

- The most difficult is that there are such rapid changes. Everything changes so fast, and one has difficulties keeping up with the changes. [Name of restaurant manager] refers to the fact that she as late as in November was busy implementing the new covid-certificate into her business. The new restrictions that are valid as from Tuesday, disregard the use of the covid-certificate as a way for customers to gain access to restaurants and for restaurants to admit more customers, and the restaurants that are situated in the areas with confirmed general and comprehensive spread of the virus are now required to close at 18 pm regardless of the use of the covid-certificate. Published online by Svenska Yle 28.12.2021.

The ‘servant’ narrative is furthermore strengthened through the visuals accompanying the verbal texts. First, we identify dark images, which convey negative sentiments. In connection with verbal texts, these function to captivate (Kress and van Leeuwen, 1996; Kress, 2010) the collective fatigue and the longing for the ‘new normal’, and to materialize ‘what joy and freedom might not come into being’. This type of visuals accordingly spatializes (Meyer et al., 2018; Höllerer et al., 2013) the collective suffering from the pandemic and the restrictions in social life into the physical location of restaurants.

Visual 3

Headline: The leading restaurant chain Noho: “We will close all our restaurants if the opening hours are restricted

Published online by Svenska Yle 18.2.2021.

Source(s): Viitala (2021)

However, in most of the visuals, restaurant managers are rarely displayed, texts are illustrated with abstract pictures where the customer is in focus: people sitting at open-air cafés, friends cheering with raised glasses. This displayed positivity often includes alcohol in the images. Visuals displaying celebrating customers and abstract alcohol images materialize and captivate (Kress and van Leeuwen, 1996; Kress, 2010; Meyer et al., 2018) positive sentiments and hope for the future of society and the development of the pandemic, and spatialize (Meyer et al., 2018) the physical location of restaurants into a site for ‘the other side of the pandemic’. This bypasses the restaurants and managers by implicitly not acknowledging the ‘suffering’ of the industry. The restaurant manager – that has endured the struggle of the uncertainty of the initial part of the pandemic – is a background figure, an individual enabling the celebration of the ‘new normal’ for the customers.

Visual 4

The restaurant restrictions are relieved in the region of Nyland – new restrictions effective as from 18 pm this evening

Published by Svenska Yle 11.6.2021.

Source(s): Kivioja (2021)

Visual 5

Now the restaurant restrictions are mitigated – dancing and karaoke are no longer forbidden

Published online by Svenska Yle 30.9.2021

Source(s): Lyytikkä (2021)

This narrative recounts a positive future for the industry, with customers returning to the restaurants and operations returning to their ‘normal’ state. It narrates a social reality through which the industry identity (Albert and Whetten, 1985; Stigliani and Elsbach, 2018) becomes ambiguified – verbal texts reporting on and specifying (Meyer et al., 2018) ‘restaurants’ are illustrated with visuals depicting bars, nightclubs and abstract pictures with alcohol in focus. Verbal texts and visuals are in dissonance, contributing to an ambiguous representation of what a restaurant is and what is considered the central characteristics (Biggierro and Sammarra, 2003) of the restaurant identity.

The visual text provided a space for the increased inclusion of actors such as nightclubs and bars into the restaurant ‘category’, while excluding and diminishing the voice of actual restaurants. The multimodal function of these verbal and visual texts – we argue – serve to juxtapose industry characteristics. One of the distinct characteristics of the industry is found in the type of service it provides, that is customer experiences focused on a combination of food, beverages – in the form of alcohol – and being provided personal service in a physical establishment. The customer service provided is thus a combination of these three, differently emphasized depending on the type of business. In this multimodal narrative, through visual text, one of these elements – alcohol – is provided increased tangibility and becomes emphasized over the others. This serves to juxtapose the industry characteristic of providing mainly services – where alcohol is a part but not the main feature of what the industry does. This in combination with the strong focus on celebration and ‘new beginnings’ in the visual text as the pandemic seemingly decreases furthermore creates a juxtaposition, considering that the industry – dependent upon human workforce – is still struggling with staffing deficiency and financial uncertainty, which is conveyed through the frustration and suffering of the restaurant staff in the verbal text. This narrative thus juxtaposes and creates ambiguity with significantly different representations of the industry being a provider of culinary experiences, an entrepreneurial industry built around human workforce, and services as opposed to physical products.

The survivor narrative: nuancing industry characteristics

The survivor narrative is the one that has the strongest anchoring in a distinct phase of the pandemic: the ‘end’ of the pandemic as it stands, starting at the end of 2021 and moving into the beginning of 2022. The discursive boundaries shift yet again. Media texts that are produced and distributed during this time are more inclusive, giving space to the government, the formerly mentioned ‘expert’-group, but also to the restaurant industry which is represented by managers and union representatives.

The industry becomes depicted as a ‘survivor’, overcoming the struggles that the pandemic has presented. With society opening and restrictions being lifted, media texts narrate (Meyer et al., 2018) a favourable trajectory for the industry, not only due to the increased opening hours and customer flow, but also thanks to ‘lessons learnt’ by the industry during the pandemic resulting in a positive industry development in terms of new products and business segments. The creativity, solidarity and willingness to adapt that has been seen in the industry during these challenging times – without neglecting the hardships that the industry has gone through during the pandemic – is frequently portrayed. This survivor narrative builds on emotion: media texts distribute emotional stories of restaurant managers that creates sympathy for the industry and facilitates reclaiming its reputation and status after being labelled as a ‘super spreader’ during parts of the pandemic. Restaurant managers are given space in verbal texts when describing their experience from the pandemic. The following quote by two restaurateurs active in the Western part of Finland is illustrative of how media texts portray the industry as a ‘survivor’ of the pandemic, yet highlighting the distinct challenges and possibilities that the industry has faced:

As many other within the restaurant industry, [name of two restaurateurs] feel that the hardest part with the pandemic has been the uncertainty. - That you really didn’t know what’s going on and how it will end, when will we close, what will the restrictions look like? That was the worst, says [name]. - And how many weeks would we have to wait. Will it take months, years, days? How will we manage to keep our staff? We did temporary layoffs in the beginning, but had to withdraw them quite soon, which we are happy about. And they [the staff] have come through for us 110 percent, [name] points out. But these restaurateurs look towards the future with reassurance and the corona pandemic has also come with some positive sides. - We have worked hard on our takeaway and that has become our salvation. It has developed so much that almost 20–30 percent of our sales come from take away today, says [name].

Published online by Svenska Yle 16.3.2022

Media texts narrate optimistic prospects for the industry, but not without caution. The lack of workforce has been a central attribute (Biggierro and Sammarra, 2003) of the industry prior to the pandemic, which is strengthened as the pandemic persisted. As restrictions are alleviated and businesses are allowed to re-open, this shortage in labour becomes tangible. The favourable future of the industry is thus contingent on it being able to attract workforce. Hence, through media texts, the industry is not constructed as a ‘thriving survivor’, but as a ‘struggling survivor’, which despite being relieved of the struggles caused by restrictions, still faces challenges. This is illustrated in the following quote by Timo Lappi, CEO of the employee union for MARA, the restaurant and hospitality industry in Finland.

- It will be particularly difficult when the pandemic is over. Restaurants will not even be able to keep open as much as they want and others might not be able to continue their operations due to lack of workforce, says Lappi. We put our hope in the workforce immigration. - We need to do everything in our power to attract workforce. The competition is big also between the Nordic countries. If we open, it does not mean that there will be a cascade of people looking for jobs, says Lappi. The most important thing would be to alleviate restrictions, according to Lappi.

Published online by Svenska Yle 26.7.2021

We identify two sets of visuals: first, restaurant managers standing in front of bars or tables starkly looking into the camera. Visuals are dark in their composition, despite the positive outlook on the future that is described in the verbal texts. We argue that this has multiple functions. First, close ups of individuals construct and communicate a different inter-personal meaning with the reader than when a longer perspective is utilized (Kress and Van Leeuwen, 1996). Second, the placement of the manager standing in front of the bar or tables, ‘owning the space’, has a symbolic value (Gagliardi, 1990; Yanow, 2006), symbolizing the reclaiming of their ‘space’, that is their businesses. Third, the dark composition and stark facial expressions function to materialize, in a captivating manner (Meyer et al., 2018), the struggle and collective ‘suffering’ the industry and individual managers have endured during the pandemic. This serves as a reminder that the struggle is not completely overcome, and that the industry is still struggling with labour shortage and persisting economic struggle caused by the pandemic.

Visual 6

“Restaurateur about being allowed to be open until midnight: “This means a lot”

Published online by Svenska Yle 2.2.2022

Source(s): Siirilä (2022)

We identify abstract visuals that materialize (Meyer et al., 2018) ‘normal’ business operations – without ‘doom and gloom’ – taking the restaurant rather than the customer perspective. Pictures of restaurants convey a more ‘traditional’ idea of what a restaurant is, portraying activities normally expected to take place in a restaurant site: people sitting by tables enjoying dinner. By putting the ‘traditional’ restaurant service in focus and adopting the perspective of the manager – without celebrating customers and alcohol – these visuals serve to strengthen and reclaim ‘original’ identity of the industry, as establishments providing culinary experiences, where alcohol is an important but not a crucial part of the services. This visual text can be argued to represent the social reality (Höllerer et al., 2019) of a society moving into a post-pandemic era.

Visual 7

Will the restaurants be completely closed? The corona-ministers meeting in the new restrictions was closed and is not to be continued until Friday.

Published online by Svenska Yle 13.1.2022.

Source(s): Takkinen (2022)

In the victim and servant narratives, the industry was depicted as being compliant with restrictions. In this narrative, media text portrays an industry that is criticizing the restrictions, seeking to reclaim their voice and past ‘right’ to stay open. Hence, the dominating voice in this narrative is the restaurant industry dominating the discursive space, now also including more statements from industry actors such as employer union representatives. There is yet another shift in power relations, empowering the individual manager. This is strengthened by visuals of managers photographed in their own ‘arena’, materializing the ‘survivor’ reclaiming one's space. In comparison to prior narratives, the role of the customer is given less discursive space, and whereas the industry was depicted as ‘the receiver’ of messages in the victim narrative, it is now the government that is depicted as the receiver (i.e. critique) from the industry.

Different trajectories of the pandemic and the industry's future are addressed in verbal texts whereas visuals present diverse perspectives of the restaurant industry with a focus on managers and customers as well as culinary experiences, including but not solely limited to, alcohol.

The combined effect of verbal and visual text thus serves to nuance industry characteristics by communicating a variety of perspectives and materialization of actor voices, (re)shaping ‘who they are’ and ‘what they do’ as an industry. It provides a representation of the industry where food, alcohol and personal service are recognized as part of ‘the whole service package’ that the industry offers, as opposed to the prior narrative where only alcohol was in centre. Furthermore, it offers a perspective to the industry being a ‘traditional one’ relying on conventional concepts regarding what kind of services they provide by illuminating how the industry (successfully) has tackled the challenges of the pandemic by developing new service concepts. Managers are, in both verbal and visual text, granted increased ‘voice’ and assigned more agency. This becomes evident when restaurant managers and union representatives are given more discursive space in criticizing the restrictions imposed on the industry and the subsequent effects. Through this diversity of industry voices in the narrative, we suggest that multimodality serves to nuance the characteristic of the industry being a traditional one consisting of a set of ‘struggling entrepreneurs’, instead providing a representation of an industry that now and in the future, is a significant actor on a national scale.

Discussion and originality

We have followed the public service medias' at times contradictory representations of an industry identity based on how it was multimodally narrated during a persisting crisis. We argue that our empirical context advances research on visuals around organizations as well as research on sensemaking and sensegiving during crisis. We believe that this is particularly valuable in the challenging times we have and are presently witnessing and living through. We identified three narratives - victim, servant, survivor - and argue that the visual incorporation and combination with verbal text held three meaning-making functions: sentimentalizing, juxtaposing and nuancing industry characteristics, which provided competing representations of industry identity. The multimodal narratives presented in our findings section shifted between specifying and abstracting the people of the restaurant industry, created narrative ontological boundaries for present and future agency of different actor groups, that is ‘who we are and what we do as an industry’ (cf. Stigliani and Elsbach, 2018), and accordingly shifted representations of industry identity as the crisis persisted. Overall, we argue that the role of visuals during the crisis served to create ambiguity regarding industry identity and power relations.

We contribute to the multimodal sensemaking literature as well as to the literature on the role of public service media during crisis. First, we show how different narratives emerge in the public discursive space (Hardy and Maguire, 2010), and how these narratives shift power distribution between and within actor groups (Hellgren et al., 2002) during crisis. We suggest that public media narratives play a significant role in ascribing an industry agency and responsibility in the potential development of a crisis (Budd et al., 2019; Berry, 2016), but also in shifting constructions of power relations regarding who is (or is not) responsible for the future of an industry. We demonstrate how, in the public arena, the dynamic inclusion and exclusion of different actor groups and voices over the course of a crisis contribute to shaping the framing of an entire industry (Berry, 2016). As such, our findings show how the social construction and problematization of organizations in news media (Budd et al., 2019) can extend to an entire industry and how the use of multimodality can accentuate specific aspects of an industry and also reinforce contrasts (Höllerer et al., 2018) between perspectives that enable a switch from victimization to a problematization (cf. Hardy and Maguire, 2010), and vice versa, of the industry. The power public service media holds in governing whose side of the story is told to the public, becomes reinforced by multimodality.

Recent research on the pandemic argues that as a crisis persists, the public opinion becomes more critical, scrutinizing and questioning political leadership and restrictions (Abrams et al., 2021). Thus, in later stages of the pandemic, the battle becomes reframed, from a battle against the virus to ‘defending different group's rights’ (p. 205). We show that this is also the case with the public press. Our findings demonstrate how public media coverage becomes more inclusive of voices (and hence exclusive of others) as a crisis persists. Our analysis illustrates how media narratives of the industry became ‘humanized’ with power distributed equally, which stands in stark contrast to how power was centralized to one actor group in the early phases of crisis. This posits that as one actor group is discursively ‘abandoned’ voice is given to another group in the public discursive space, and discursive inclusion and exclusion shift throughout the crisis. This advances insights and adds to recent literature addressing the power aspect of collective sensemaking and sensegiving (Vaara and Whittle, 2022; Schildt and Mantere, 2020); who is given voice in the public and accordingly how present and future agency of actor groups in the public discursive space are multimodally constructed and communicated as a crisis persists.

Second, we believe that our research has broader implications for the role of public media during crisis (Berry, 2016; Budd et al., 2019). Our findings show that it is not only the powerful who are given voice and space in public media broadcasting during crisis (cf. Berry, 2016). The narrative analysis demonstrates how the same actor group can be victimized at one stage of a crisis and later valorised (cf. Hardy and Maguire, 2010). We suggest that public media also takes on an empathetic role towards marginalized actor groups that nuances the image of public media as the elite's voice, providing the foundation for a full debate to the public regarding the crisis, the measures needed to be taken and the potential outcomes.

Moreover, the multimodal nature of our analysis extends insights on the power of visuals utilized in public media in conveying specific social realities and actor perspectives to the public during a crisis. Multimodality is guided by cultural and institutional rules: norms that stipulate what is ‘normal’, what fits into our expectations on society and what does not (Jancsary et al., 2016). We show how the use of multimodality by public service media can also result in contradictory industry representations by public media, simultaneously enhancing or dampening certain industry characteristics (e.g. Christiansen, 2018). This was the case in many visuals where the verbal text was referring to restaurants, accompanied by visuals where alcohol was in centre. This strengthened the depiction of a restaurant not being a ‘real’ restaurant if not serving alcohol, while contradicting the message in the text that was clearly aimed towards sit-down restaurants, not nightclubs or bars. This shows how media narratives can, using multimodality, simultaneously sustain and challenge established traits of organizations part of the same industry, resulting in a general ambiguous representation of the industry identity. We draw on Taylor and Spicer (2007) in our approach to organizational space as a materialization of power relations that allows us to consider organizations as something being (re-)negotiated outside physical locations. We thus unravel the inherent power aspects of narratives for industry identity authored by an external actor, in this case the public media, during crisis.

As such, our findings have implications for theory on industry identity by illustrating how public service media multimodally provides the boundaries for external and internal conceptions of ‘who they are what they do as an industry’ (cf. Stigliani and Elsbach, 2018). We show that during crisis, industry identity follows a similar pattern as for an emerging industry, ‘a multistage, negotiated process that begins with distancing from existing collectives and ends with a coherent, if not consensual, definition of ‘who we are’ and ‘what we do’ as organizations and industries' (Stigliani and Elsbach, 2018, p. 1326), yet authored by public media as an external sensemaker and sensegiver (Gioia and Chittipeddi, 1991; Weick et al., 2005). Furthermore, our findings illustrate how public service media multimodally can function as a way to humanize and personalize an industry undergoing change and crisis by providing nuanced and multilateral narratives, highlighting different sides of what can be considered an industry's ‘central, distinctive and enduring’ character (Albert and Whetten, 1985). We show that multimodally, representations of organizational characteristics remain ambiguous and only later coalesce into coherent representations of distinct organizations, that is bars and nightclubs vs. food restaurants, part of the same industry. In addition, we show that this re-identification of the industry becomes enabled by multimodal affordances contrasting actor perspectives (Höllerer et al., 2018) and in a captivating manner providing tangibility to managerial life stories.

Our results should be approached within the boundaries of public service media. As already noted, we acknowledge the unlikelihood of impartiality. How a crisis and an industry become framed to the public, by public service media, is subject to the possible influence from various stakeholders. Nevertheless, whose voice and issues become reproduced and emphasized, positively or negatively, in the media by journalists (Hellgren et al., 2002) holds the power to shape the public's acceptance or rejection of organizational or industry events (Vaara and Tienari, 2002) and possibly even the reputation of an entire industry (Deephouse, 2000). We argue that this extends to an industry's attractiveness for potential future employees. Ambiguous or negative portrayal of an industry in public media might thus have serious implications particularly for an industry already marked by staffing deficiencies, such as the restaurant industry. Moreover, media representations might also affect organizational members understanding of their identity (Kjærgaard et al., 2011). As such, our findings suggest that organizational actors might be influenced by consuming, possibly daily, particular visuals from public media concerning the future of their industry, organization and even their roles, which needs to be explored in future research, within and beyond a crisis context.

Our results also have explicit implications for organizational change management. Kjærgaard et al. (2011) argues that organizational leaders might utilize news media to mediate their messages to organizational members. Our findings emphasize the power of the media over organizations and managers as mediators of change messages to employees. Together with the assumption that news media can shape representations of organizational identity (Dutton and Dukerich, 1991), public service media as a trustworthy ‘sensegiver’ of crisis might both support or challenge leaders' attempts to form or change an organizational identity internally in the organization.

The crisis brought distinct industry issues to the public's knowledge, providing a discursive and narrative space to raise past and present difficulties that the industry had been, and is currently, facing. We suggest that our research provides a springboard for stakeholders in industries undergoing challenges when seeking to profile the industry in a way that attracts new workers, and for managers when seeking to better understand the characteristics of the industry identity. We argue that media narratives during and beyond crisis could be approached as core discursive practices for negotiating the collective identity of an industry – yet not in terms of establishing common traits across organizations in the industry but in distinguishing these. We invite future research to explore this further, possibly extending the empirical scope to include other types of media outlets where different power relations might be at play, specifically steering the inclusion (and exclusion) of some actor voices and industry characteristics over others.

Figures

Figure 1

Timeline depicting the development of the pandemic in Finland

Table 1

Research data

Year	Verbal text	Visual text
2020	144	175
2021	70	76
2022	23	12
In total	236	263

Table 2

Multimodal narratives