American pet-loving culture has permeated people’s daily lives, and its influence has extended to the workplace. In 2022, Amazon’s Amazon Web Services (AWS) launched the Dogs at Work program, with more than 8,000 dogs registered to come to work. We were motivated to answer the following question: Why and how do organizations promote the pet-friendly culture? From a discourse analysis perspective, we analyzed stories related to Amazon’s pet-friendly culture and identified the key script elements. We argue that storytelling, as a discursive device, is the strategy that organizations instrumentally deploy to form a collective construct. We found that these stories integrate the functional, interpretive, humanism, and structuralism paradigms to help organizations fulfill symbolism management. We further discuss how symbolic management building upon collective stories could be constructive or destructive in nature.
