Communication · Executive Insight Brief · 080
Follow the stories people keep alive
Shared dramatizations become strategic when they chain, recur, and create a common symbolic world—not merely when a slogan is repeated
Premise
Formal values rarely explain organizational culture as powerfully as the stories people repeatedly tell about success, failure, betrayal, rescue, and identity. Ernest G. Bormann’s Symbolic Convergence Theory explains how dramatizing messages can be repeated, elaborated, and connected until participants share a recognizable symbolic reality about who ‘we’ are and what the situation means.
For executives, convergence concerns shared narrative meaning rather than unanimity of opinion or factual validation. A story can coordinate action, preserve memory, and create belonging while oversimplifying causes or excluding dissent. Leaders should identify which narratives employees and stakeholders keep alive together and what behavior those narratives legitimize.
What the model is: Symbolic Convergence Theory in Knowledge →
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- FamilyModel
- CategoryTheories & Explanatory Models
- DomainGroups & Decisions
What these mean
Editorial orientation · Family
Model
In this series, Model names the editorial family primarily used to understand and explain communication: theories, frameworks, effects, traditions, principles and other conceptual resources. It is an umbrella for a route into the field, not a claim that every included object is a predictive model.
Editorial orientation · Category
Theories & Explanatory Models
Explains how or why a communication process works by relating mechanisms, conditions or variables. Its value is an account that can guide inquiry into what produces an outcome, rather than a name for the outcome alone.
- KnowledgeSymbolic Convergence Theory