ABSTRACT
Software has made it very simple to create diagrams, flow charts, and data graphics. They populate many of the instances of communication we come across, in news media, institutional documents, social media posts, on the side of food packaging, and in company branding where they show outputs, carbon footprints, and forms of performance management outcomes. Software comes with templates to facilitate such designs. They are used to illustrate the nature of processes, what is involved and how it happens, showing which agents are involved, or how parts of an organization or participants relate to each other and work together, or to show patterns of outputs and resources. They are thought to help visualization, simplification, and ultimately the process of understanding, planning, and management.
The appearance of diagrams, flow charts, and data graphics can bring a sense of clearity to explanations, that a process can be represented transparently and unproblematically as parts, processes, and units. But these representations can easily abstract, conceal, and substitute actual causalities, and relationships and shape processes and outcomes in the interest of the communicator. This chapter presents a model for analyzing diagrams, flow charts, and data graphics. Using the example of how organizations set out to demonstrate that they work in terms of sustainability, the chapter shows how to reveal the way that actual things, participants, and causalities are in fact never clear, even though there is a sense of clarity, of simplicity, and of being systematic.
