Statues and culture wars. How statues communicatively constitute organizational cultures in conflictual situations

Abstract Statues are said to speak to us, to communicate who we are, and who and what we value—our culture. However, prior research has not sought to investigate the in situ and active role that statues play in constituting organizational culture in general, and even less so in the struggle to constitute organizational culture in conflictual situations. To address this lacuna, using the Montreal School of Communication’s notion of ventriloquism and data drawn from debate concerning whether to remove the statue of Cecil Rhodes at Oxford University, or not, the purpose of this article is to demonstrate that statues can be weaponized in the struggle to impose or resist an organizational culture. We thus propose adding a critical dimension to ventriloquism to address the research question: how do statues speak to, and act on, us so as to communicatively constitute organizational culture in conflictual situations?