Sesinho magazine and the SESI’s speech for children: the appropriation of comics language for the institutional communication

Abstract

This study proposes the analysis of Sesinho magazine, a publication of SESI - Social Service of Industry, in the period of 2001 to 2011 to identify the use of the material as a communicative practice and how the discourse of the institute is revealed by the iconographic language of comics, inside the context of institutional communication. The reading of comics lies in the understanding of words and images, which together, delimit the content of the message sent and, in this context, the study questions the appropriation of language in the construction of SESI?s speech for children, target audience of the publication. In this work we will focus on concepts related to organizational communication, an area that covers the studies of communication phenomenon on organizations, with the relational perspective, that considers the relevance of all the actors in the production of the institutional speech. To this area has highlighted the aspect of institutional communication that represents the ways in which organizational speech is shared and understood by the public that directly or indirectly influence and are influenced by organizations. It is considered in this research, as an institutional speech, industry?s utterances, in its various forms of language, which aim to produce meaning among its interlocutors, referred here as the various publics with which SESI is related. The research adopts the qualitative method and occurs on two levels: descriptive, which aims to describe the characteristics of visual and verbal languages of the publications with the establishment of relations between them, and exploratory, with the aim of obtaining an overview of the ten years of production of the material. The methodological approach adopted in this study for data collection and data analysis is Content Analysis, a technique of hybrid feature that can be used in a systematic way for the content analysis of verbal and visual language, therefore, applicable to the study of comics images, which is intended to identify the discursive constructions that are embedded in the iconographic language. Considerations obtained show that the use of comics in the context of institutional communication can contribute to the production of meaning by the reader, when it recognizes the meanings and emotional impacts of image, thus being relevant and appropriate to the relational communicative practice in organizations. Thus, the study may contribute with new researches in the field of image and in its relation to the field of organizational communication, which is considered the convergence of comics with the prospect of interactive communication that sees organizations as discursive constructions.