The business corporation is explored as a reflexive cultural form shaped through complex and ongoing sign processes. The concern specifically is with the dynamic whereby external representations become internal to the corporation, shaping its form and operations, and, correspondingly, internally produced representations get projected outward into the world, mingling with other representations to influence how the corporation is construed. Seven contributions to this Signs and Society supplement are organized along a continuum—from the point of what is metaphorically conceptualized as the origo to the terminus, that is, from those studying the corporation as shaped through external representations, on the one end, to those presenting a view of how the corporation emerges through representations it projects outward on the other end.

In focusing on “semiosis,” or sign process, the journal Signs and Society was established to advance through multidisciplinary research the theoretical work of Peirce, the founder of “semiotics,” and Saussure, the founder of “semiology.” This essay provides a brief “representation” of the history of the collaborative relationship between the Semiosis Research Center at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies and the Department of Anthropology at Brandeis University, a relationship that is itself a kind of “symbol” entextualized in the pages of Signs and Society.

Blood gains many distinct meanings from different modes of classification, some of which are calibrated by the representational capacities of sacrifice. The Priestly source from Hebrew scriptures and the early Jewish text Second Maccabees both reread ancient sacrifice traditions, articulating new meanings for blood as part of the transformation from a temple-based locative system of animal sacrifice to a utopian decentered model of human self-sacrifice. The Priestly writers created a new semiosis of blood as the purifying essence of temple sacrifice. Second Maccabees offers a temple-replacement ideology with one foot in the locative notion of temple, and the other in suffering and martyrdom—displaced animal sacrifice—as the path to an individual afterlife. Its new meanings for blood are stimulated by conflict over two competing locative systems (foreign and native) and the need to, even while renewing, ultimately replace the temple cult.

This article focuses on strategies of discourse processing for the relay of Vedic truth-statements (mahāvākyas) in the context of globalization and secular modernity. Of primary interest is situational representation of communicative events and educational reforms surrounding the transmission of brahmajñāna, that is, knowledge (jñāna) of nondual reality (brahman). Culminating at the end of the Vedas, Upaniṣads codify contextual properties of teacher-student successions (guru-śiṣya-paramparās) structuring the transmission of brahmajñāna. Despite ongoing interest in Advaita Vedānta, there is still a need to conceptualize the teaching tradition (sampradāya) as a matter for empirical observation and thereby to propose a set of cognitive hypotheses that make it possible to account for the referential basis of discourse production and situation models representing Upaniṣads as a verbal means of knowledge (śabda-pramāṇa). Consequently, genre expectations in the Advaita sampradāya provide the starting point for further inquiry into variant discourses of Vedānta.

This paper problematizes the feature of being barefoot that appears to be an idiosyncratic feature found in Rubens’s depictions of (milk)maids, mythical and biblical female figures. To appreciate oddities Rubens created, the paper starts with a discussion that enlarges on the merits that we may gain from contemplating allegories set against pleasant-looking landscapes. It then scrutinizes the heated debates over the validity of iconic signs, which enables us to recognize our application of certain laws and principles as the essential condition in carrying out semiotic cum hermeneutic inquiries. We, therefore, become empowered on the one hand to perceive oddities as manifestations of freedom and play and, on the other, to unify different approaches the painter adopted on the same horizons of judging. All in all, this paper argues for the urgency of our developing morally creative conditions in justifying and interpreting strange and deviant forms.

This essay draws on fieldwork conducted in a workshop organized in New York City by an innovation consultancy group and attended by representatives of different business corporations. In this workshop, participants are supposed to learn a set of innovation techniques for generating new products and services and to become convinced that there can be added value in buying the consultancy group’s services. The task of the consultancy group embodies a basic cultural contradiction because innovation is widely associated with notions that derive from a modern Romantic ethos of creativity, which itself connotes resistance to routinization. To overcome this contradiction the facilitators engage the participants in ritual semiosis. They orchestrate densely multilayered and multimodal discursive practices that reflexively consolidate a macrosociological order, which opposes a Romantic ethos and a professional ethos, and that dynamically figurate transformations in the microsociological context of the participants’ role-inhabitance with respect to innovation—from their role-inhabitance of a Romantic ethos at the beginning of the workshop to their entailed role-inhabitance of a professional ethos at the workshop’s end.

The knife, a synecdoche of slaughtering, is an important culinary tool that is charged with the power of religious speech acts and that has a significant semiotic function in Christian-Muslim encounters in Ethiopia. The slaughtering rituals not only transform the neutral natural animal into a sacred cultural food but also invest the meat with an intense aura of disgust among followers of the other faith. The slaughtering narratives continue to manifest themselves in other public signs, namely, in the Cross and the Crescent, on butcheries, and restaurants, for example. These two universal signs are the corollaries of an anterior sign, in other words, the knife that, in the discursive realm of food and religious identity in Ethiopia, implicates the different slaughtering rituals of Orthodox Christians and Muslims.

In this article I examine the practice of Bible translation and the underlying sets of Christian ideologies regarding the commensurability of linguistic forms. Based on ethnographic research conducted at a biannual Bible translation workshop in Mindoro, Philippines, in 2013, during which the Bible was translated into three Mangyan languages, I argue that the degree to which the actual linguistic forms in the scriptures are divinely inspired often exists as an irresolvable semiotic problem for Bible translators. To this end, I discuss the means through which the Holy Spirit is taken as an essential mediator between the fallible work of Christian translators and the Bible as a language-instantiated form of God’s presence. I show how the employment of “generic” language by Christian translators enables them to mirror and circulate the divine universality of scriptural meaning in earthly form. I propose that generic language can be viewed as a site in which multiple and often conflicting claims of language universality and purity are present.

This thirteen-year ethnography investigates how two Wall Street banks instantiated dualism in practice and what the evolving consequences were for bankers and the organizations that they joined after their careers at the banks. The banks dualistically split visible controls that targeted the mind, such as autonomy and work-life balance narratives, from unobtrusive controls that targeted the body, bypassed the mind, and intensified the pace of work in ways that bankers experienced as self-chosen. These practices caused evolving forms of dualistic embodiment. During the first four years, bankers identified with their minds and treated their bodies as unproblematic objects. Starting with year 4, body breakdowns occurred; the body imposed itself as an antagonist. Desperate to perform, bankers pushed harder, which caused more severe breakdowns that eventually forced some to treat the body as a knowledgeable subject that can direct action. The bankers implemented the banks’ practices in the organizations they joined subsequently, intending to enhance autonomy, but unintentionally replicating indiscriminate overwork for all participants. As they experienced more severe breakdowns, some bankers followed their bodies’ guidance into new ways of living. Dualism thus followed a dialectic pattern, first intensifying the body repression until breakdowns turned passive bodies into revolutionary forces.

This article addresses the social, material, and practical dimensions by which intertextuality is managed in a corporate setting. Managing intertextuality entails more than the circulation of entextualized fragments—it involves the everyday ways in which individuals come to negotiate with environments saturated and defined by textual objects. Based on fieldwork at a Korean brand consulting firm, I chart a range of ways that employees took different stances to intertextual practice—from how they defined relationships with their business partners to how they disciplined internal activities, even to how documents became “leaked” from within the office. This article advocates for a broader view of the practical and material dimensions of intertextuality, the diverse ways individuals can engage with texts, and the importance of considering intertextuality in the construction of managerial figures.

Pindar’s epinikia challenge their original audiences to play the role of the “savvy interpreters” of these complex choral praise poems. Their interpretive skillfulness enables them to overcome obstacles purposively set by the poet. The ideal interpretation, an “entextualized” and overarching “metapragmatic interpretant,” is not static since these odes invite their hearers to vicariously travel alongside the deictically calibrated narrative ego and, equipped with insight drawn from interwoven exemplary myths and gnomic maxims, to insure that momentary praise for victors leads to their widespread if not immortal “glory” (kleos). The central argument of the article is that the odes develop an extended analogy between athletic prowess/victory and poetic excellence/performance that links the generation of kleos with the potential for recontextualized reperformances. This semiotically mediated “pragmatic” process is originally modelled by the poetic ego and then sequentially constructed and enacted/performed by savvy interpreters, including later readers.

Like Peirce, recognized as the “father-founder” of modern semiotics, Welby too, although just recently (despite her influence on important contemporary scholars), is acclaimed as the “mother-founder,” thus entering the pantheon of the “fathers” of language and sign sciences. These great figures share a common approach to sign and language as exponents of what today is recognized as the major tradition in semiotic studies, “interpretation semiotics.” Meaning, understanding, signs, signifiers, utterers, and listeners are described as evolving in live communication, as part of signifying processes in becoming. Signs develop in ongoing interpretive/ translative processes with other signs, signifiers, and signifying processes. Signs are interrelated with values, consequently sense and significance emerge as major investigation areas for studies on meaning. Moreover, both Welby and Peirce evidence the public, social, and intersubjective dimensions of signifying and understanding, and hence also the importance of intercorporeality, dialogism, otherness, ambiguity for healthy communication, and interpersonal relations.

A condensation symbol is a complex and relatively discrete bundle of icons, indices, and symbols, in the Peircean sense, that calls up affect and directs that affect toward social ends. This article analyzes a corporate motivational video produced by Harley-Davidson, Inc., an American motorcycle manufacturing company, as a condensation symbol. In addition to analyzing the formal features of the video, the article furnishes evidence, in the form of interview data, that the symbol is capable of influencing the orientations of individuals who view it. The “symbolic force” of the video is the force of interest that causes the orientation to the company carried by the symbol to be transmitted to its viewers. In this sense, the video resembles the dominant ritual symbols described by Turner. The present research also suggests, however, that the video summons distinct kinds of affect in different individuals, exerting a differentiating effect within social space.

This article describes a class of speech varieties whose members have traditionally been called “slang” or “argot” in a large and long-standing literature. Despite the size of this literature, the characteristics of these speech varieties have remained obscure to those who purport to study them. The thing called “slang” has traditionally been reduced to the repertoires that count as samples of the thing without attention to either (a) the reflexive processes through which samples of the thing come to be differentiated from other discursive behaviors or (b) the social-interpersonal processes through which slang expressions undergo change in form and significance for different members of a language community. This article examines these reflexive social processes by considering examples from a large number of languages and historical periods. It offers a comparative framework for studying the forms of social life that such discursive behaviors enable or displace.

This article explores the conditions, possibilities, and meanings of the concept “winners’ generation” in Estonian art in the 1990s. Some of the artists who were labeled by this name had their triumph in the freedom to express ideas that did not serve the dominant discourse, that is, discourse that captured only the interests of those who became successful during the period of change while shutting down realities not in line with their newly constructed norms and values. The ideological transition from socialist to capitalist ways of life in the course of the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 was an opportunity for these artists to become successful via visualizing failure, thus bringing out, but also questioning, the variations within the “victorious” discourse.

I use interactional sociolinguistics to explore how participants in a thirteen-month-long executive master’s program focused on leadership navigate leadership identities within the classroom, focusing on narratives of professional experience. As I will argue, narrators claim a professional identity semiotically by constructing a corporation and then claiming a position within or relative to it. Whereas in a related project I explore such work through the concept “discursive othering,” in this project I focus on narratives. Specifically, I examine how agency is accomplished in these narratives at several levels: first, within the world of the story, second, at the interactional level, and, finally, at the intertextual level. Ultimately, I will consider what implications all of these processes have on the discursive construction of leadership.

Mainland Japanese middle-school teachers working on Chichijima Island encounter an address pattern they describe as unusual. While students address teachers using last name and honorific title, teachers call students by their first names only. Some of the teachers experience the indexical relationship between the exchanged forms as a nonreciprocal disjuncture, describing it as “too hierarchical;” others experience it as a reciprocal disjuncture, saying it creates a “too close” atmosphere in the school. Many who do not fall back on the culture-internal stereotype are teachers who struggle to maintain authority in the classroom. Here, these teachers’ “misreading” of the indexical meanings associated with the address forms invokes a trope of misunderstanding where a theoretical repair is summoned as a means to fix a problem. Silverstein’s model of indexical orders provides a means to understand the metapragmatic dissonance that characterizes teachers’ discourse.

The multimodal video meme of the ice-bucket challenge raises a “bucketful” of questions for media and cultural studies. This article focuses narrowly on unearthing who speaks in this message and what is ultimately communicated. By unpeeling the multiple layers of message structuration with view to discerning the formal structure of the concerned multimodal message, the analysis proceeds with an exploration of the function of the message in the context of a cultural predicament where networking and connectivity constitute overarching cultural values. The argumentative thrust deploys against the background of the assumption that the ice-bucket challenge constitutes a meme as minimal unit of cultural reproduction that functions on both ontic and ontological levels. The offered analysis aims at demonstrating that the enunciator of this unit is the meme itself that summons hosts or enunciatees to legitimate the prereflective memetic mode of cultural reproduction and propagation as overarching mode of communication.

This essay is about the relation between meaning and materiality. It offers careful and coherent, albeit noncanonical, readings of particular themes in Aristotle, Marx, Heidegger, and Peirce. And it does this in order to draw together some classic understandings of value: use value, in particular, but also exchange value, truth value, and moral value (and much else besides). Originating as a series of lecture notes offered to students interested in theoretical archeology, it culminates in a theory of embedded interpretants (as opposed to enminded, embodied, or entextualized interpretants), with an emphasis on semiotic grounds (as opposed to semiotic processes). It is meant to offer a relatively accessible summary, synthesis, and extension of four seemingly disparate, and often quite difficult, theorists.