ABSTRACT

This chapter introduces the concept of styles from the sociology of Harrison White to organizational communication research. Styles represent a form of social organizing from disorder that reproduces from irritating and subverting established meanings, role expectations and sociomaterial affordances, respectively. Conceptually, we argue that styles can substantially inform recent organizational and political communication scholarship that share an emphasis on the constitutive role of disorder for contemporary forms of social organizing. Due to their notoriously ephemeral and clandestine nature, styles however present a challenge to empirical research. We draw on the example of Internet memes, which due to the merits of digital archiving and tracking are comparably easy to access. More specifically, we reconstruct the emergence and diffusion of two widely known memes, the Obama Hope meme and the Trump’s First Order of Business meme. We reveal recurring patterns of subverting established meaning, manipulating audience expectations and outwitting affordances and algorithms of the Web as basic modes of reproduction and hence present Internet memes as a digital style that subverts hegemonic meaning and media logics.