Online engagement as a multimodal discursive practice: The case of Dubai Cares’ Facebook page

Abstract

The paper examines the role of social media platforms in public relations engagement, focusing on the case of a leading non-profit organization in the UAE, namely Dubai Cares. Drawing on multimodal critical discourse analysis (MCDA), the paper analyses the textual, paratextual, and visual modes of communication deployed by the organization, and investigates their role as (multimodal) discursive practices in constructing engagement and shaping power relations between the organizations and its publics. A key finding of the paper is that Dubai Cares’ online public relations efforts to promote its international recognition and legitimacy often come at the expense of addressing multiple power differentials between the organization and its stakeholders. The paper demonstrates how approaching engagement as a multimodal discourse, where power relations are at play, helps transcend the limitations of instrumental interpretations of the notion of engagement, thus obscuring its inherent discursive and social dimension.

Keywords

Dubai Cares engagement multimodal critical discourse analysis NPOs social media UAE visual communication

Introduction

Scholars agree that the Internet and social media have had a profound impact on the public relations discipline and profession. There is, however, little consensus on how this impact can best be theorized and analyzed, with some researchers criticizing what they identify as a lack of clarity surrounding the use of such key notions as dialogue and engagement to account for the relationship between public relations and the affordances proper to the Internet and social media (Kang, 2014). In fact, the concept of engagement, which has emerged as a foundational one in public relations research in recent years, is still shrouded in vagueness (Jelen-Sanchez, 2017).

Moreover, dominant paradigms in the field have failed to account for the power differentials between organizations and their publics, which prompted scholars to underline the need for more awareness of power distribution in public relations and its role in shaping expectations and communicative relationships (L’Etang, 2009). More importantly, and although pictures and videos are central to social media affordances, there is a dearth of research on how the visual mode contributes to online organizational rhetoric and interaction with stakeholders. Such research is necessary insofar as it would be difficult to understand engagement in online environments without reconsidering the role of visuals as a major communication mode.

To address these multiple lacunae and contribute to existing research on online engagement in public relations, the present paper examines the use of Facebook for public relations purposes by one of the major non-profit organizations in the Middle East, namely Dubai Cares. It seeks to answer four key questions: What verbal and visual discursive practices does the organization adopt to generate engagement? What key discourses emerge from the organization’s engagement with its various stakeholders? What power relations do these discursive practices maintain or create? Finally, and most importantly, to what extent does the use of such an interactive social media platform as Facebook allow for genuine engagement? Underpinning these questions is a belief that engagement is discursively produced through verbal and visual modes of communication, and that all forms of public discourse and communication are necessarily shaped by existing power relations which, in turn, impact (online) organizational rhetoric. To answer these questions, the paper draws therefore on multimodal critical discourse analysis (MCDA). Rooted in critical theory and social semiotics, this methodology attends to the discursive, multimodal, and social nature of online content.

Engagement: The “new” foundational paradigm

Engagement has emerged as a major concept in public relations research over the last two decades, one that has a “high potential to reshape and reconceptualize public relations” (Jelen-Sanchez, 2017: 935). Strongly equated with interaction and connection between organizations and their publics (Johnston, 2018; Wright and Hinson, 2014), as well as with empowerment and participation (Macnamara, 2016: 3), many scholars have come to see engagement as “the ultimate marker or maker of a good organization–public relationship” (Kang, 2014: 400). In fact, Taylor and Kent (2014) define engagement in public relations as:

. . . a two-way, relational, give-and-take between organizations and stakeholders/publics with the intended goal of (a) improving understanding among interactants; (b) making decisions that benefit all parties involved, not simply the organization; and (c) fostering a fully functioning society. (2014: 391)

This relational aspect of engagement prompted Hung et al. (2011) to argue that it is “inherently social” insofar as individuals “seek fulfillment of their relational needs through socializing with others in the community” (pp. 99–102).

Because it has thus been recognized as a major concept in the field, engagement has unsurprisingly been the subject of a growing body of literature trying to conceptualize it. It has, accordingly, been studied within different types of communication contexts, including social media, employee engagement, CSR and engagement, and dialogic engagement (Taylor and Kent, 2014). The concept has also been deemed useful in the examination of different public relations domains. These include employee relations (Lemon and Palencharb, 2018), community engagement (Johnston and Lane, 2019; Yudarwati, 2019), consumer and brand engagement (Brubaker and Wilson, 2018), corporate social responsibility (Dhanesh and Duthler, 2019), and crisis management (Du Plessis, 2018; Smith et al., 2018). But the domain where engagement has been the most used is research on online public relations (Tsaia and Menb, 2018).

In fact, the very emergence of engagement as a foundational notion in public relations is closely related to the global mass adoption of the Internet and social media over the last two decades. With such affordances as “visibility, editability, persistence, association, portability, availability, locatabiliy, and multimediality” (Chen et al., 2020: 2), social media platforms are deemed to foster a two-way symmetrical model of public relations, and enhance dialogical interaction between organizations and their publics and stakeholders (Cho et al., 2014; Morehouse and Saffer, 2019). These platforms are intrinsically structured to support “seemingly unlimited opportunities for publics to become engaged with organizations” (Jelen-Sanchez, 2017: 934), so much so, in fact, that they have become synonymous with relationship building between organizations and their publics (Anderson et al., 2016).

Scholars have, however, questioned various assumptions readily linking social media and the Internet to engagement. For although social media actions, such as “liking” or “retweeting,” are forms of engagement, the realization of the latter requires other key conditions such as “the adoption of a human-like voice” on social media sites (Kang, 2014: 401). Several scholars have also rightly pointed out that social media affordances do not necessarily translate into dialogic interaction (Jelen-Sanchez, 2017; Yudarwati, 2019). These platforms may, in fact, reinforce the echo chamber effect, and maintain the inequality resulting from power-law distribution, whereby users who are already influential will gain even more followers and accrue more attention and more online activity (Kennedy and Sommerfeldt, 2015: 31).

Visual communication and engagement: A new frontier?

Despite this mushrooming of literature on the concept of engagement within the context of the Internet and social media, the role of visual communication in articulating it has yet to receive its due attention. Because the Internet, rooted as it is in multimedia, is multimodal par excellence, visual content constitutes a crucial part of communication in social media platforms. In fact, various studies have concluded that social media posts with visual content generate more responses than those based on verbal text only (Iyer et al., 2014). Visual content can capture the viewer’s attention and elicit a stronger response. In so doing, it can “incite emotions, ultimately influencing attitudes and impacting behaviors” (Brubaker and Wilson, 2018: 343). Despite this significance, there is a dearth of research bringing together public relations and visual communication insofar as existing literature mainly emphasizes the way organizations “use a social media tool, rather than the role of visuals and visual narratives in the larger scope of public relations theory and practice” (Pressgrove et al., 2018: 317).

More importantly, scholars who have examined the role of visual communication in public relations often reduce visuals to a secondary role, limiting their function to the enhancement of the message communicated via the verbal text, assumed to be the primary form of communication. For instance, in their study of the use of visual communication in corporate social responsibility efforts, Lee and Chung (2018) (p. 353) explain that “messages often use visuals, such as illustrations, photographs, animations, and videos, to reinforce the messages’ central content related to a CSR cause.” Not only does such a perspective relegate visuals to a secondary position, but it also fails to recognize what has been identified as an increasing transition toward multimodality on social media, where “communication has shifted from a primarily text-based practice to a form of multimodal, heavily visual communication” (Schreiber, 2017: 145).

Critical perspectives in public relations research

Finally, scholars have identified a number of limitations in existing research on the concept of engagement in public relations, chief among them the dominance of instrumental perspectives, which “perceive engagement as a tool to achieve organizational goals with outcomes related to their financial, social, and reputational objectives” (Yudarwati, 2019: 1). Scholars have also criticized the domination of theoretical and methodological insularity of research on engagement marked by a positivistic paradigm and quantitative research that follows a management/functionalist paradigm, and that shows “little engagement with social dynamics and culture” (Jelen-Sanchez, 2017). Equally important, little attention is paid to the issue of power in mainstream research on the concept. As Love and Tilley (2014) (p. 34) argue, engagement has the potential to legitimize “practices of engineering public consent.”

To make up for this lacuna, a growing, albeit still limited, number of scholars have been embracing alternative critical perspectives that attempt to situate public relations within a “sociological and cultural context” (Mcnamara, 2014: 72), thus initiating what has been identified as a “cultural turn” in the discipline (Edward and Hodges, 2011). This turn has opened public relations research to wider theoretical and methodological horizons, from digital media and network theory to feminism and the sociology of media (Ihlen and Verhoeven, 2015). Within this critical perspective of public relations research, engagement is understood as a concept shaped by its context, and embedded within a web of influences and power relations. This creates what Heath (2018) describes as the “ultimate relational decision-making tension,” one between organizations’ power and stakeholders’ empowerment, considered a more authentic form of engagement (p. 33). Despite the importance of these perspectives, however, they “still do not receive the same level of attention as normative research” (Jelen-Sanchez, 2017: 973).

Online public relations in the context of Arab countries

Despite a wide adoption of the Internet in public relations by corporate and public organizations in Arab countries, particularly in such Gulf countries as Kuwait and the UAE, thanks to an advanced ICT infrastructure (Ayish, 2005; Bashir and Aldaihani, 2017), scholarship on online public relations coming from this region has largely remained at the margin of the debate above (Al-Kandari et al., 2019). The few pioneering studies that have appeared on the subject over the past two decades mainly examined the role of political and socio-cultural factors in shaping public relations practices in Arab countries, particularly the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries. Researchers have found that the use of the Internet in public relations in the region is dominated by advertising and marketing practices (Ayish, 2005), and that the new media tend to be used as complementary to traditional media, primarily to disseminate one-way information about the organization (Bashir and Aldaihani, 2017; Bashir, 2019). These scholars have argued that PR practitioners in the region understand the importance of the Internet and social media in organizational communication, but that the existence of various barriers “pertaining to the practitioners themselves, higher management and the nature of the organization limited the potential for an effective use of social media” (Bashir and Aldaihani, 2017: 784).

In this still scarce literature on public relations in the Arab region, the concept of engagement has yet to garner any serious scholarly attention. Equally important, existing literature pertaining to the region has rarely addressed public relations practices in the context of non-profit organizations (NPOs), focusing mainly on the corporate and government sectors.

Theoretical perspectives and methods

Multimodal critical discourse analysis

To fill in the gaps identified above in scholarship on engagement, in general, and in this scholarship in the context of Arab countries, in particular, the present paper examines the way Facebook is deployed by an NPO in the UAE to generate engagement. Subscribing to the critical perspectives in the field, it understands engagement to be discursively produced, enacted and negotiated within specific socio-cultural contexts. Accordingly, the study of engagement would require a theoretical and methodological approach that can account for the discursive, multimodal and social nature of online engagement. In line with this understanding of engagement, the paper draws on a methodology that is rooted in critical theory and social semiotics (Halliday, 1985), namely multimodal critical discourse analysis (Kress and van Leeuwen, 2006; Machin and Mayr, 2012). This model is premised on the belief that the main aim of the critical analysis of discourse is to investigate not only “relationships of causality and determination between (a) discursive practices, events and texts, and (b) wider social and cultural structures, relations, and processes,” but also the way “such practices, events and texts arise out of and are ideologically shaped by relations of power” (Fairclough, 1995: 132). It is also premised on two main concepts. The first is discourse, understood as “a mode of action, one form in which people may act upon the world and especially upon each other, as well as a mode of representation” (Fairclough, 1992: 63). The second is power, understood as access to and control of such social resources as “public discourses and communication” (van Dijk, 2008: 354–355), including through the control of what participants will or will not be included in the communication event, and what knowledge will or will not be shared.

Focusing on the textual and visual semiotic resources or “multimodal phenomena” and the in-relations between these resources described as “inersemiosis” (O’Halloran, 2013: 121), the model attends to the multimodal nature of social media texts which use at least three main modes of expression, namely the verbal, visual and paralinguistic features proper to online expression, such as hashtags. Before detailing the approach, however, an introduction of the organization whose online engagement is under scrutiny, namely Dubai Cares, is in order.

The case of Dubai Cares

For the purposes of this study, the paper investigates the discursive activities of one organization in the United Arab Emirates, namely Dubai Cares. This organization has been chosen for two main reasons. Founded in 2007 by the country’s Prime Minister and Ruler of Dubai as part of The Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum Global Initiatives (MBRGI), it is one of the major non-profit organizations (NPOs) in the region. It works through prestigious international partnerships, including with the UNESCO, to provide access to high-quality education for children around the world. The NPO draws on a strong culture of philanthropy, and on the state’s generous official development assistance (ODA), both of which have made of the UAE the world’s largest official development aid donor, relative to its national income for over five consecutive years (The National, 2017). As such, it is part of political efforts that seek to establish the UAE as a global hub of humanitarian aid (Johnson and Rahim, 2018: 7).

Additionally, a review of the social media accounts of more than 40 NPOs in the country revealed that Dubai Cares’ social media platforms are the most active and most followed in the country. With more than 205k followers, Dubai Cares’ Facebook page is by far the most followed platform of the organization itself (Twitter and Instagram only boast 124k and 25k followers, respectively), and of any other NPO in the country. It is, therefore, more likely to yield rich data for the purpose of the study.

On the other hand, focusing on one single platform was necessary to allow for the depth of analysis required by the methodology, insofar as multimodal critical discourse analysis involves a multilayered investigation of linguistic, visual and para-linguistic data. Accordingly, the Facebook page of Dubai Cares was observed for a period of 3 months between March and June 2018. The researchers used screenshots to record the 52 posts that were added to the page over this period. Other elements of the page were also examined, such as the “mission” and “about” statements, and the cover photo.

Analytical tools and method

To study the visual mode on the platform, the paper draws on Kress and van Leeuwen (2006) and Machin and Mayr (2012), and uses several categories to analyze pictures, namely narrative versus conceptual structure and denotation versus connotation, attributes (ideas and values communicated by objects and how they are represented), setting, salience, distance and angles of shots, and interaction.

To analyze the verbal mode on the platform, the paper will use three main analytical tools: transitivity, genre and engagement. Transitivity, according to Machin and Mayr (2012) (p. 104), can be simply defined as “the study of what people are depicted as doing and refers, broadly, to who does what to whom, and how.” There are six types of processes within the transitivity system, namely (a) material processes, which are concrete actions of doing that result in material consequences; (b) mental processes, which include processes of sensing that involve both a “senser,” that is, the one who does the action, and a “phenomenon”; (c) behavioral processes, which are verbs denoting both physical and psychological behavior; (d) existential processes, which signal existence without predicating anything else; (e) relational processes, expressing a stable relationship without any real dynamic action between two participants, and (f) verbal processes, which include verbs of saying (Thompson, 2014). Analysis of this category will help gain insight into how the organization understands and represents the world, including its own position and the position of its publics therein.

As to genre, it is “the specifically discoursal aspect of ways of acting and interacting in the course of social events” (65). Since genres are thus socially organized, they do not only reflect the world, they can also shape it by acting on social relations and interacting with social actors. Analysis of this category will, therefore, help understand the type of relations that obtain between the organization, on the one hand, and its context and stakeholders, on the other.

Finally, and drawing on systemic functional linguistics, Martin and White (2005) propose engagement as a tool to analyze textual data. In this model, engagement is “all those locutions which provide the means for the authorial voice to position itself with respect to, and hence to engage with, the other voices and alternative positions construed as being in play in the current communicative context” (p. 94). The framework distinguishes between monoglossic statements, the “bare assertions” that present facts without recognizing alternative voices, and heteroglossic statements that recognize the voices of others. Within the heteroglossic category, Martin and White (2005) further propose a taxonomy with four major strategies of positioning oneself with regard to other alternative positions, namely: (a) Disdain (deny and counter), (b) Proclaim (concur, pronounce, endorse), (c) Entertain (use of modality auxiliaries, adjuncts and attributes), and (d) Attribute (acknowledge or distance).

Finally, the study applies Martin and White’s taxonomy above to examine the way affordances specific to social media, specifically hyperlinks and hashtags, contribute to the production and consumption of the online text and, thus, to the articulation of discursive representation on Facebook.

Analysis

The visual mode: An exercise of power

Representation in images can be realized through two main structures, narrative, and conceptual. Narrative structures present “unfolding actions and events, processes of change, transitory spatial arrangements,” while conceptual structures represent “participants in terms of their more generalized and more or less stable and timeless essence, in terms of class, or structure or meaning” (Kress and van Leeuwen, 2006: 79). Conceptual images are typically realized by “taxonomical structures,” while narrative images usually include participants who are represented as “doing something” (Kress and van Leeuwen, 2006: 59). Analysis of Dubai Cares Facebook page shows, however, that while narrative structures are dominant in the pictures, most of them involve non-transactional processes, that is, actions that do not have a goal and are not directed to any person or thing (Kress and van Leeuwen, 2006: 63). A case in point is the banner’s picture, a central element of Facebook page that is normally used to convey an organization’s identity and mission. The picture features two black boys smiling to the camera (Figure 1). The represented subjects are not engaged in any specific action as they merely gaze (a non-transactional process) at the camera. The dominance of non-transactional narratives in the pictures is reflected in another key visual element of the Facebook page, namely the pictures accompanying the “About” or “Our Story” section (see Figure 2).

Figure 1.

Cover picture.

Figure 2.

“Our story” picture.

Narrative structures also involve the circumstances of the processes. These include the settings or places (ranging from recognizable to totally unrecognizable), the means (the tools used to perform actions), and accompaniments (participants unrelated to the main action in the narrative structure). At the denotative level, the picture in Figure (1) shows school-age children. Their salience in the picture is foregrounded through size, centrality, and color saturation. But the photo does not provide any clues as to the context or setting since the background lacks focus, while the main image markers that could be used for interpretation are the children’s ethnicity, reflected by their skin color, and their poverty, reflected by the simplicity of their attire. However, although the background lacks focus, the viewer can still discern a large number of other children. At the connotative level, therefore, the picture refers the viewer to the recipients of Dubai Cares’ aid, namely children in developing and poor countries, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa. In this sense, the connotative dimension of the picture overrides its denotative function, a rhetorical choice that is dominant in the organization’s platform.

The use of unrecognizable settings or low modality or realism to create the connotative value of the images is also clearly present in the post on March 8th (Figure 3). At the denotative level, the picture features a teenage black girl in her school uniform. Taken from a frontal angle and a medium shot, against an unfocused background that offers no contextual information, the picture foregrounds the girl even further in a central position. The persuasive function of the photo is thus performed through an emotive representation built on low modality or realism where the “representation of depth is reduced or absent” (Kress and van Leeuwen, 2006: 88). For these reasons, the connotative dimension of the picture assumes more importance in that the attributes of the subject, that is, ethnic background and gender, become carriers of symbolic meanings representing the core mission of the organization, namely helping youth in need of education in developing countries.

Figure 3.

March 8th post.

Interaction in the visual mode

A key aspect of images is their capacity to generate what Kress and van Leeuwen (2006) call “interaction.” This aspect can be assessed by examining the use of angle and distance in pictures. Distance in pictures, Machin and Mayr (2012) explain, “signifies social relations (p. 97).” Different shots and different gaze directions connote different social relations: a close-up, for instance, signifies intimacy while a long shot signifies social distance. Likewise, a gaze off frame, coupled with a close-up, invites a more objective observation of the subject while a similar gaze, coupled with a long shot, would signify isolation (p. 97).

In a large number of the connotative pictures used on the page, particularly those featuring beneficiary subjects, close and frontal angles are dominant, serving to create an affectionate and personal relationship with the viewer. However, because representation in the majority of these pictures lacks context (unrecognizable settings), the use of distance and angle in the pictures serves to connect viewers to ideas and symbols more than to real people in their social environment and historical context (see Figures 1 –4).

Figure 4.

April 7th post.

While the page also features a large number of pictures that are primarily denotative, most of these pictures do not try to establish affective connection and identification with the viewer. The posts on March 17 (Figure 5) and on May 31st (Figure 6) are two cases in point. The first one is a call for participation in an auction at the van Gogh Alive Exhibition in Dubai. The post features two pictures. While one picture has no represented participant, the other is a medium oblique shot of a black Abaya-clad woman standing with her back to the camera and contemplating the painting at an exhibition in an undisclosed location. The woman looks like an Emirati national, representing the main target of the fundraising event, but the oblique angle and the back shot from a medium distance contribute little to engaging viewers with the experience. The picture serves mainly to provide a visual “support” to the text in the post.

Figure 5.

March 17th.

Figure 6.

May 31st.

Although oblique or side shots might convey social distance and detachment, when “combined with closeness, [they] can, depending on the circumstances, index togetherness” (p. 99). This is not the case of most of the pictures on the page. In the picture in Figure 6, for instance, while the shot tries to document subjects—in this case volunteers in the middle of action, and thus provide insight into the organization’s work, the side angle and medium shot do not help establish affective involvement and engagement with the viewer. The choice of angles in these pictures does not so much reflect an attempt to engage viewers/users as provide them with “useful” information about the organization and its actions.

The interactive structure in the images reflects, in fact, power dynamics between users/viewers and represented subjects in pictures, and between represented subjects themselves. A case in point is the example in the post in Figure 7. The manifest objective of the post is to celebrate the organization’s CEO’s achievement, namely his selection as one of Dubai’s most influential personalities by Arabian Business magazine. At the denotative level, the picture shows the CEO posing with a young black girl in front of a building featuring the logo of Dubai Cares on its wall. At the connotative level, the picture refers to the CEO’s direct involvement in and contribution to the organization’s fieldwork, which might account for his selection. The picture, however, also reflects power relations between the aid provider and the recipient insofar as the girl stands passively while the CEO is the one to bend over her and put his arm around her in a protective way, highlighting his strength and generosity against her vulnerability.

Figure 7.

May 31.

The verbal mode: Discursive construction of stakeholders

The mission statement genre

The mission statement is one of the most important texts produced by organizations. Bart (2001) defines the mission statement as “a formal written document intended to capture an organization’s unique raison d’être (p. 360).” Researchers contend that the mission statement can play diverse roles, such as guiding strategic planning, motivating employees, conveying a sense of organizational purpose, and enhancing the organization’s image and legitimacy (Blair-Loy, Wharton and Goodstein, 2011). As a genre, the mission statement should cover some key elements, such as goals, target populations, and values and beliefs. The statement should make reference to the primary stakeholders and the organization’s commitment to social responsibility (Blair-Loy, Wharton and Goodstein, 2011: 429). Organizations may also attempt to use diverse combinations of these elements to try to find a useful balance between priorities, such as product innovation, profitability, and value of employees (p. 441). Research studies have confirmed that striking a good balance between these priorities in mission statements has a “significant positive relationship with financial performance” (Barktus, Glassman, and McAfee, 2006:93).

Organizations do not always use the term “mission statement,” and may use other labels, such as “core values” or “vision and values.” On Facebook, organizations often employ default categories provided by the platform to convey their statements, such as the “About” page. Accordingly, it is in the “About” page that Dubai Cares provides its mission statement, divided into two different texts. The first one, entitled “Mission,” is very brief and states:

We believe education is an irrevocable asset and an essential right of every child. We uphold this belief by delivering integrated evidence-based quality education.

The second, more elaborate and entitled “About,” states:

Dubai Cares is playing a key role in helping achieve the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 4, which aims to ensure inclusive and quality education.

Education is more than a human right, it is an irrevocable asset. It is also one of the most effective tools to break the cycle of poverty, a belief held by our founder His Highness Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Vice President and Prime Minister of the UAE and Ruler of Dubai. It was from this belief and the desire to give children - regardless of their gender, nationality, race or religion - the opportunity to become positive contributors to society, that His Highness established Dubai Cares on September 19, 2007.

Since its inception, Dubai Cares, part of Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum Global Initiatives, has been working toward providing children and young people in developing countries with access to quality education through the design and funding of programs that aim to be integrated, impactful, sustainable and scalable. As a result, the UAE-based global philanthropic organization has successfully launched education programs reaching over 16 million beneficiaries in 45 developing countries.

The two texts cover many elements of the mission statement genre by highlighting what the organization seeks to achieve (education for all), the beneficiaries (children and young people in developing countries) and the organization’s key values (human rights and inclusiveness). Since a genre, as defined above, is but the discoursal aspect of a social activity that aims to achieve specific actions within its context and to create particular social relations between the addressor and the addressee, it is clear that the specific social action that both texts seek to achieve is legitimization of the organization. Through the repetition of the word “education” as an “essential” and “human” right in both texts, the textual foregrounding of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 4, and the multiple references to developing countries in both texts, either directly or indirectly (“underprivileged privileged children globally,” “situation of”), this legitimization is clearly anchored in the organization’s commitment to human rights and subscription to the international development discourse.

The texts also places the organization in a hierarchically superior position to its beneficiaries. Indeed, they both equate being in developing countries with being “underprivileged” and living in places of “crises,” and therefore being in need of the organization’s aid. In so doing, these texts, much like the pictures analyzed above, subscribe to a narrative that Naylor (2011) maintains is dominant in the international development discourse, namely “political pity” which (re)produces unequal power relations between aiding organizations and the recipients of aid (p. 188).

More significantly, the texts position the organization in a similar hierarchical relationship vis-à-vis its local and regional stakeholders. Indeed, conspicuously missing from both texts is a clear reference to key stakeholders such as volunteers, employees, and donors. Only in “Mission” is “the local and global community” being summarily referred to. This very brief reference is further backgrounded as it occurs in the form of a prepositional phrase in the very last sentence of the “Mission,” and is immediately followed by an exclusive “we,” which marks exclusivity, and signals that the addressees are not part of the social activity/event (Fairclough, 1995). This significant exclusion is a stark example of how many organizations use their mission statement primarily “to signal their alignment with forces in the external environment” on whom they depend for legitimization and/or resources (Blair-Loy et al., 2011: 430).

Verbal processes and transitivity

Analysis of transitivity in the verbal texts on the page reveals the same representation of the organization and its publics/beneficiaries as the one found in the pictures above. Indeed, the verbal texts in the studied posts (see Table 1) are heavily marked by non-material processes. Thus, example (a) uses a mental verb process (to highlight), while (c) uses a relational one (to be) and (d) uses a mental process (to like), followed by a verbal one (to thank) in the infinitive. Even when a material process verb is used, the force of the verb is often reduced through the use of the passive voice, as in examples (e) (has been selected), and (h) (will be donated). While mental processes, especially emotive ones such as “thank,” are useful in establishing emotive commitment with users, their rhetorical function does not affect the deeper power structure underpinning communication between the organization and its publics.

Table 1.

Examples of verbal posts.

	Examples	Posting date
a.	On the occasion of International Women’s Day, #DubaiCares highlights the importance of education for women all over the world.	March 8th
b.	Our partner, the Varkey Foundation, just released their Global Parents Survey which is the biggest and most comprehensive survey of parents’ hopes, fears and aspirations around the world. #VFParentsSurvey	March 9th
c.	Universal health coverage is about ensuring all people can get quality health services and when they need them, without suffering financial hardships. #WorldHealthDay #HealthforAll #World Health Organization (WHO) #DubaiCares	April 7th
d.	We would like to thank all our volunteers for responding to our call for volunteers for Back to School edition of Volunteer Emirates so enthusiastically. We are currently at full capacity and regrettably are not able to welcome further applications.	May 22nd
e.	Our CEO Tariq Al Gurg has been selected by Arabian Business among the most 100 influential personalities in the Emirate of Dubai. http://www.arabianbusiness.com/lists/dxb-100	May 31st
f.	AED 35 can provide three textbooks to a school giving children the chance to learn and progress in life. Donate now. http://www.dubaicares.ae/en/donation	April 17th
g.	Subway is teaming up with Dubai to provide quality education to children. Your purchase can help them achieve that goal (May 29th).
h.	10% of the sale price of select items from the Ramadan collection by OUNASS will be donated to #Dubai cares.	May 27th
i.	For every video shared on their social media channels about how the power of being kind and gentle has either impacted their lives or others, Johnson’s Middle East will make a donation to Dubai Cares https://www.instagram.com/johnsonsmiddleeast/?hl=en	May 27th
j.	Lulu Hypermarket is rolling out a Point of Sale (POS) campaign across its hypermarkets in the UAE. You will be invited to make an AED 1 donation or more toward #DubaiCares’ Water Sanitation and Hygiene in School programs in developing countries.	May 23rd

Monoglossic versus heteroglossic: Agency and empowerment

Equally important, analysis of the verbal mode in the posts reveals the predominance of monoglossic statements and a quasi-absence of alternative voices or modality. In the verbal examples above (Table 1) the actors in the propositions are distributed as follows:

(a, d): the organization

(b): International NPO (Varkey Foundation)

(e, g, I, j) Businesses/companies (Arabian Business, OUNASS, Subway, Johnson Middle East)

(f) passive voice (anonymous donors)

These propositions refer to a variety of actors, which, prima facie, suggests inclusiveness and orientation to difference. They also adopt an informal language characterized by the use of the second person pronoun “you,” the possessive pronoun “your” and the imperative form (examples f, g), which serves to establish an informal relationship that suggests social closeness between the organization and its publics. The use of these pronouns, however, remains sporadic, thus serving what Fairclough (2001) labels “synthetic personalization,” that is, “a compensatory tendency to give the impression of treating each of the people “handled” en masse as an individual” (p. 52). In fact, the propositions do not promote real heteroglossity since most of the actors mentioned therein are either related to the organization or representing resource-providing businesses. This reflects a prioritization of the organization’s own legitimization through a quasi-exclusive association with external stakeholders that provide either symbolic or financial resources. In fact, even when the propositions call for the help and donations of users/general public, the agency of the latter is supressed through various discursive choices. One of these is the passive voice, as in (i) where the grammatical subject and semantic doer, that is, the donor, is completely suppressed. The other discursive choice is nominalization. According to Fairclough (2004),

Nominalization characteristically involves the “loss” of certain semantic elements of clauses (. . .). It also may involve the exclusion of Participants in clauses – so in this case none of the process nouns or nominalizations has an agent (what would most commonly be the grammatical subject in a clause). (p. 143)

In example (g), for instance, the nominal phrase “your purchase” is used instead of the verb “to purchase” or “to buy.” Although the possessive pronoun in the statement “your purchase” acknowledges the public’s contribution, the nominalization of the act of “purchasing” leads to a semantic loss that dilutes the public’s agency, since it is the action, not so much the actor, that is foregrounded. Likewise, in example (f), the nominal clause “AED 35” replaces the presupposed agent who is the user/donor.

Paralinguistic features

Two of the most important features of online rhetoric are the hyperlink and the hashtag. Hyperlinks serve diverse functions, such as disclosing sources of information or expressing membership in or affiliation to a group or organization (Halvais, 2008: 45). They also act as references in traditional genres, allowing readers/users to fact-check. As such, hyperlinks are “a sort of ‘hyperconversation,’” occurring “across contexts and across time” (Halvais, 2008: 41). They thus contribute to engagement by adding a heteroglossic dimension or dialogic positioning, to use Martin and White’s (2005) concept, which can invoke or challenge other voices or point of views in the communication context.

Initial observation of the studied data indicated that hyperlinks were used in 27 posts, at a rate of 51.92%. About 22 of these links (42.30% of the posts) are outbound, linking to websites or social media platforms other than the organization itself, while 5 (9.62%) are inbound, linking to the organization’s website. These hyperlinks are either embedded within the verbal texts (example b) or added at the end (examples e and f). In both cases, the hyperlinks are an integral part of the proposition since, as metadata, they add another layer to its semantic structure. In example (e), for instance, although the linguistic text in the sentence is monoglossic, the link to “Arabian Business” adds an alternative voice to the proposition, and serves as a reference or an attribute, in Martin and White’s (2005) taxonomy, that users can check to ascertain the claim made by the authorial voice. Similarly, while the proposition in example (h) is monoglossic, the OUNASS hyperlink adds a non-linear dimension to the sentence and an alternative voice to the authorial one.

However, and although more than half of the posts use hyperlinks, the vast majority of these links are either connecting to international organizations associated with Dubai Cares, or to local corporate businesses that cooperate with the organization in donation campaigns. Napoli (2008) points out that hyperlinking is “perhaps the most significant mechanism of online gatekeeping. Through their decision about when and where to hyperlink and, most important, what to link to, content providers exert substantial editorial control (p. 63).” For Dubai Cares’ page, thus, and although outbound links contribute to constructing dialogism in discourse, these links serve mainly as a strategy to “proclaim” (Martin and White, 2005), that is, to support authorial voice, rather than to genuinely acknowledge alternative voices and perspectives.

The use of hashtags on the posts reflects a similar trend. Hashtags are among the native affordances establishing the emergent genre of the computer mediated communication (CMC) discourse. Like hyperlinks, they “operate in posts both as part of the linguistic structure and discourse semantics and also as metadata” (Zappavigna, 2015: 276). They are both texts and metatexts because they point not only to themselves but also and simultaneously “to any other information that becomes encapsulated by their contextual meaning” (Salazar, 2017: 30). A hashtag’s main purpose is “to ease the task of finding messages having a specific theme or content.” It serves as a tool of “indexing” and referencing, too (Salazar, 2017: 19). Scholars have pointed out that hashtags can play a role in building communities, supporting visibility and participation (Page, 2012), framing issues and movements (Ince et al., 2017), and functioning as “shorthand for complicated social, political, and economic issues” (Crandall and Cunningham, 2016: 29).

As metadata, hashtags can also function as grammatical and semantic units embedded in the linguistic data. For instance, in example (a) above, the hashtag #DubaiCares functions as the actor of the process “highlights,” while in examples (h) and (j), it serves as the goal of the processes “donate” and “make.” As metadata, hashtags also add dialogism to the propositions by “enabling information at higher or more complex orders of experience to be appended to the main content of a post” (Zappavigna, 2015: 276). For instance, the proposition in example (c) above is monoglossic, but the inclusion of several hashtags at the end allows several external voices in, which helps support the main claim in the proposition. Like hyperlinks above, hashtags in this case are again deployed to implement the “proclaim” strategy. In example (b), the proposition is heteroglossic, an attribution to the role and voice of the organization’s partner, and the hashtag merely reinforces this function. However, observation of the page over the studied period revealed that the number of hashtags used over 3 months remained significantly low with only 25% of posts featuring them. Almost half of those hashtags are “organizational,” that is, about Dubai Cares itself, while the rest make reference or link to international organizations (such as #VFParentsSurvey and #WorldHeathDay).

From the perspective of social semiotics (Martin and White, 2005), heteroglossia can serve either to expand and acknowledge other voices in the system or to challenge them, thus, restricting the dialogic space. From the analysis above, it is obvious that hashtags and hyperlinks are used mainly to align Dubai Cares with international organizations and corporate businesses, which results in the exclusion of other voices, namely local and regional NPOs, community and beneficiaries.

Discussion and main conclusion

The analysis above of both the verbal and visual discursive practices adopted by Dubai Cares to generate engagement has brought about the multimodal aspect of engagement that is enacted through representational, interactional and textual articulations that shape the studied organization’s interaction with its publics. At the visual level, there is a predominance of representations that bestow limited agency to represented subjects, and of connotative frames giving short shrift to the historical context of these subjects, which hinders any deep and egalitarian identification with them. It is true that many of these pictures draw on close and frontal shots in demand for the viewers’ involvement and sympathy. Nonetheless, the foregrounding of these pictures’ connotative function, the absence of context and depth, in addition to modality (realism), all conspire to impede the realization of emotional bonding or what Kang (2014) calls “positive affectivity.” When subjects are reduced to concepts/ideas cut from their specific historical context and setting, it becomes difficult for a deeper from of connection or engagement to take place.

What shapes such visual representations is subscription to one main discourse, namely the international development discourse and the narrative of political pity undergirding it. This discourse is predicated on what Naylor (2011) calls “the spectacle of suffering,” which dialectically positions aiding organizations and their beneficiaries in a hierarchical social relationship (p. 184). In the case of Dubai Cares, this “spectacle of suffering” was created through the stereotypical representation in the pictures of the black ethnicity as the primary target of aid, even though the organization targets people in diverse regions of the world. The use of this particular ethnicity as an affective “selling point” to engage the public subscribes to a dominant discourse in Western and global media whereby people in sub-Saharan Africa are portrayed predominantly as suffering, powerless and in need of help (Franks, 2010). It also sanctions what scholars have noted as the “feminization” and “infantilization” of the developing world because of the massive number of images produced and circulated in the West representing women and children in need in these countries (Dogra, 2012).

Subscription to these discourses is closely linked to the organization’s efforts at self-legitimization. In fact, scholars have pointed out that organization’s self-promotion efforts seeking to build an image of credibility, expertise and resourcefulness are necessary for engaging the public and for relationship building (Devin and Lane, 2014; Men and Tsai, 2014). However, in the case of Dubai Cares, self-promotion and legitimization come at the expense of paying attention to the voices and agency of diverse and important stakeholders, insofar as the organization highlights almost exclusively its association with international organizations and adoption of their discourses.

Analysis of transitivity at the visual, verbal and para-linguistic levels reveals little engagement with various stakeholders as forms of interaction remain superficial. At the visual level, the representative and transitive functions of the pictures reflect multiple forms of power relations underpinning visual communication on the page: between the various types of represented stakeholders/subjects (beneficiary people, volunteers, employees, and donors) and users/viewers, and between represented subjects themselves (beneficiary people vs representatives of the organization). Likewise, linguistic data is marked by the use of monoglossic propositions and, therefore, the dominance of authorial/organizational voice. It is a discursive structure that reflects weak engagement with alternative views and positions, and asymmetric power relations between the organization and its multiple stakeholders. Even when interactive features are used on the page, these visible affordances fall short of compensating for the deeper discursive imbalances shaping organizational engagement with its publics.

Additionally, the analysis above has demonstrated that Dubai Cares’ Facebook page deploys a wide range of interactive tools proper to social media. Nonetheless, a closer examination of the discursive enactment of public engagement at the visual and linguistic levels reveals serious limitations marked by the dominance of top-down corporate communication. These results seem to give credence to Kennedy and Sommerfeldt (2015) when they point out that despite the wide assumption in scholarship that social media can be used to enhance relationships, the new tools have, in fact, been appropriated in a way “to reinforce a systems model of public relations focused on maintaining the power of organizations and stability of their environments” (2015) (p. 32). Lemon and Palencharb (2018) succinctly remind us that engagement is more effective when it “allows organizations to become more cognizant of power dynamics and shift toward a more co-creational perspective (p. 143).” In this context, Dubai Cares’ endeavors to build a global status as a major player in the third sector, while legitimate, should adhere to a public relations strategy that reflects deeper understanding of power dynamics in its environment and the adoption of a type of engagement that embraces the multicultural and cosmopolitan values of the publics it targets.

This investigation of online engagement through the prism of multimodal critical discourse analysis has thus made it possible to bring out the complex discursive dimension of engagement. While such a multilayered analysis of multimodal texts can put a limit on the size of data that can be analyzed, particularly for the purposes of journal articles, this weakness of multimodal critical discourse analysis constitutes its very strength. Because it involves a multilayered analysis of texts, the method gives detailed insight not only into the different ways engagement is constructed and enacted as a social practice and regime of power relations, but also into the shortcomings of these ways. As such, studies based on multimodal critical discourse analysis can be very useful to organizations and public relations practitioners as they design public relations and engagement policies. These positive results should be an invitation for more research studies drawing on critical perspectives in the public relations field.

Footnotes

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Mohamed Ben Moussa

Author biographies

Mohamed Ben Moussa is an Associate Professor at the College of Communication, University of Sharjah, UAE. His research examines digital culture, mulimodal discourse, political communication and social movements in the context of MENA countries.

Sanaa Benmessaoud is an Assistant Professor at the College of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Sharjah, UAE. Her research interests include translation studies, critical discourse analysis, Maghrebi postcolonial literature and gender studies.

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