Craig E. Mattson – författare

Social entrepreneurship increasingly assumes a position of strength in the dynamic milieu of late-modern democratic societies. A plethora of companies have now arisen—everything from mighty social enterprises like Warby Parker and TOMS to tiny outfits like Clean Slate and Bright Endeavors—whose business-focused approach to social problems is not merely additive but integral to their missions. These companies respond not only to a felt proliferation of humanitarian and environmental predicaments, but also to enormous shifts in in public feelings and technological sensibilities. These predicaments and make social entrepreneurships urgently needed and remarkably complicated. But if social entrepreneurs deal with that complexity with a business-as-usual approach to making the world better—imitating, for example, corporate social responsibility initiatives by transnational companies—they will lose their vital distinctiveness and efficacy. Drawing on a transdisciplinary perspective, close rhetorical analysis, and qualitative interviews with social entrepreneurs, this book argues that one good way to keep social business disruptive is to rethink how organizations model their communication. Instead of assuming a conventional theory of communication, neatly organized around the relations of senders and receivers, social entrepreneurship should enact a performative model of communication in which messaging and action are affectively woven. This book offers suggestions for making this performative model sustainably disruptive in relation to questions that pester social entrepreneurs: how to tell the company story, how to raise awareness, how to address complex audiences, and how to solve problems.

Social entrepreneurship increasingly assumes a position of strength in the dynamic milieu of late-modern democratic societies. A plethora of companies have now arisen—everything from mighty social enterprises like Warby Parker and TOMS to tiny outfits like Clean Slate and Bright Endeavors—whose business-focused approach to social problems is not merely additive but integral to their missions. These companies respond not only to a felt proliferation of humanitarian and environmental predicaments, but also to enormous shifts in in public feelings and technological sensibilities. These predicaments and make social entrepreneurships urgently needed and remarkably complicated. But if social entrepreneurs deal with that complexity with a business-as-usual approach to making the world better—imitating, for example, corporate social responsibility initiatives by transnational companies—they will lose their vital distinctiveness and efficacy. Drawing on a transdisciplinary perspective, close rhetorical analysis, and qualitative interviews with social entrepreneurs, this book argues that one good way to keep social business disruptive is to rethink how organizations model their communication. Instead of assuming a conventional theory of communication, neatly organized around the relations of senders and receivers, social entrepreneurship should enact a performative model of communication in which messaging and action are affectively woven. This book offers suggestions for making this performative model sustainably disruptive in relation to questions that pester social entrepreneurs: how to tell the company story, how to raise awareness, how to address complex audiences, and how to solve problems.

Why does doing your job feel so flooded and so pointless at the same time? Nobody knows better than millennial and Gen Z professionals how rapid technological development has inundated post-pandemic work. Organizational researcher Craig Mattson listens to their stories and builds a framework for coping with digital overwhelm at work. This book won''t tell you to declutter your digital life or to end capitalism now. But what you can do, suggests Professor Mattson, is change how you attend to zones where technological disruption meets emotional pressure. Calling these zones modes of communication, this book urges you to practice mode-switching. Addressed to millennial and Gen Z professionals, Digital Overwhelm draws on biblical wisdom literature to offer a primer on organizational communication. Each chapter is followed by a short Mode Switch Workshop addressing questions such as how to survive the Zoom room, how to write an email that sounds like you, how to get unstuck when tools break down, and how to get people to do things--so you can, too. Even technologically disrupted organizations are more navigable than they feel--if you know how to switch up your modes of communication.