Daniel Wolfgruber

Daniel Wolfgruber is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Culture and Language and a Fellow of the Danish Institute for Advanced Study (DIAS) at the University of Southern Denmark. He holds a PhD in Communication Studies from the University of Vienna, where he was part of the Corporate Communication Research Group. During his doctoral studies, he received the Marietta-Blau Scholarship for a one-year research stay at the Université de Montréal and later joined HEC Montréal as a postdoctoral fellow in the Top Executives and Strategic Management Research Hub (Pôle D) for about 2.5 years.

Daniel’s research examines how communication shapes organizational life by focusing on the communicative nature of ethics and responsibility, diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), identity formation, culture, and the multimodal practices of strategizing and decision-making. He is particularly intrigued by the role of humor in these processes: how jokes, laughter, and irony can both enable and complicate collaboration and (moral) sensemaking.

Drawing on the communication as constitutive of organization (CCO) perspective, sometimes in combination with strategy-as-practice (SAP) thinking, he studies organizing as an inherently communicative and performative endeavor.

Committed to bridging research and practice, Daniel launched The CommUnity Lab podcast in January 2025, a platform that brings insights from professional communication scholarship to fellow researchers, students, practitioners, and the wider public. Through this and his broader work, he seeks to advance understanding of how communication not only reflects but actively shapes organizations and society.