Search results

Financial communication produces various texts, among which are earnings videos. The videos employ language and image in multimodal discourses to convey specific social meanings about corporate performance. The purpose of this paper is to select earnings videos and study their incorporated genres, styles and discourses.

Interdiscursivity permits hybridity because it mixes the choice of genres, styles or discourses. An interdiscursive analysis is conducted on earnings videos in English, French and Spanish from corporations in the global finance industry. It involved three sequential stages: (1) to detect the discourses, (2) to name the discourses and (3) to consider the function of the discourses.

Earnings videos are hybrid because interview and presentation genres, formal and casual styles and the discourses of financial accounting, strategic management and public relations are encountered. The genres, styles and discourses are interwoven to create an interdiscursive mix, which constructs earnings through a (pseudo)personal social relation and easified discourses. The multimodal discourses convey robust corporate performance in an interim, and their use is symptomatic of marketization. Corporations may “market” their performance to seem like a worthwhile investment to persuade (potential) investors.

The paper enriches existing research in financial communication because it studies how multimodal discourses in earnings videos are tailored for marketization. The videos have not been analyzed, and their analysis complements earlier studies on other financial communication texts. The analysis examines discourses through language and image features, whose co-deployment conveys meaning about corporations.

The purpose of this paper is to address the need to reconsider online external communication that integrates diversity management (DM) and corporate social responsibility (CSR) by examining the multimodal discursive strategies purposefully employed by organizations to reflect the symbiotic relationship between these two areas of management practice and to communicatively emphasize their corporate commitment.

Building on the recently emerged stream of literature linking DM and CSR, and adopting a critical perspective on discourse analysis, this study delves into the multimodal discursive strategies that help bridge DM and CSR in online external communication. The analytical approach proposed is used for the qualitative analysis of 43 web pages selected from Microsoft company’s “Global Diversity and Inclusion” website.

Findings highlight the discursive efforts made by the organization to strategically integrate DM and CSR communication into one single framework. The analysis reveals how the coordinates of social practices (social actors and social actions) are purposefully and multimodally recontextualized in the corporate discourse when communicating this integration.

This study extends the focus of critical discourse analysis from exclusively language to the interplay of different semiotic modes, offering a fine-grained exploration of the multimodal meaning construction performed by organizations in the context of online external communication.

Rational modes of decision‐making, followed by communication of the decision to stakeholders, leading to implementation of the decision is taken as a given in most management theories. The role of corporate communication managers in many cases is to support this process via standard communication tools. This study aims to challenge the efficacy of this model by drawing on discourse and strategy‐as‐practice perspectives in order to explain the link between managed communication and performance in terms of enacting decisions.

Following an ethnographic case study approach, the research analyses communication discourse at Intech, a major international conglomerate based in Germany. Data was collected over a period of 15 months, structured and thematic analysis conducted, supported by ATLAS.ti computer‐aided qualitative data analysis software. Methods of discourse analysis were applied in order to explain concrete practices.

A key contribution is to provide a framework that enables researchers and practitioners to understand in‐depth the setting in which decision‐related communication takes place, as recently demanded by Suchan and Charles (2006). Three critical fields of action for effective communication and strategy implementation are identified: giving decisions voice; facilitating the legitimisation process for decisions; and developing alternatives to cascading as a mode of decision implementation.

Researchers may adopt the alternative view of corporate communication proposed and test or apply it in further case studies or in more large‐scale, perhaps quantitatively oriented research projects across companies and cultural boundaries.

For practitioners, a key challenge lies in implementing modes of legitimisation into managed communication.

This paper makes the case for an alternative approach to enacting decisions via practices of managed communication, based on the insights gained from the Intech case.

This study problematizes the prevailing normative and managerial-dominated view of self-initiated employee ambassadorship on social media from a power perspective. The aim is to provide a more nuanced and critical understanding of the negative aspects of this phenomenon.

The empirical material encompasses qualitative interviews with employees from 14 organizations and Foucault’s concept of disciplinary discursive power to analyze which and how discourses exert power over employee communication on social media and what role visibility plays in it.

This study indicates that employee ambassadors’ social media communication is governed by two discourses that create complex tensions, where ambassadors constantly must negotiate between self-branding requirements and an authenticity paradox. These tensions intensify through visibility on social media, where employees strategize and situationally silence their communication through self-monitoring and self-surveillance practices. Conclusively, the findings also outline the need for further critical research to offer a deeper understanding of power relations that influence the communication practices of organizational members.

The paper contributes to a more nuanced understanding of self-initiated employee ambassadorship on social media and highlights disciplinary power relations that go beyond organizational borders.

The findings underscore that organizations need to address the critical aspects of self-initiated employee ambassadorship and act as facilitators to support employees in their navigation process.

This paper contributes a new critical power perspective on employee ambassadorship on social media.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how organizations can strategically frame their legitimate perspective on a specific issue in order to gain salience and public support in a social media context.

By means of framing theory and a critical perspective on strategic discourse in hypermodal spaces, the study examines in detail the discursive strategies and framing processes employed by a non-profit organization that faces local and global contestation of its corporate operations.

Through a critical discourse analysis of the organization’s 385 Facebook posts during two periods of time, the results not only show how the corporate perspective is strategically framed and legitimized, but also challenged and consequently adapted in this hypermodal issue sub-arena. In addition to legitimizing the organizational perspective by providing evidence-based facts and external expert views as reliable and neutral sources, and echoing supporters’ voices and actions as further endorsements, the organization also strategically manages the Facebook dialogue by delegitimizing counterarguments.

This study contributes to the corporate communication field by revealing how framing can be materialized in specific discursive strategies aimed to legitimize and delegitimize. It shows how such strategies are interrelated in hypermodal clusters in ways that sustain the organizational discourse, and can evolve across time and within the same actor’s strategy. Methodologically, this study expands the research toolkit by introducing hypermodality in exploring framing and strategic organizational discourse.

The chapter addresses the use of corporate social responsibility (CSR) as an indicator of social change and progress towards sustainability by analysing how stakeholders shift their CSR perceptions in different economic conjunctures between visions that are closer to communication or to governance as structures of network interaction. A matrix is presented that defines four models of CSR perception by integrating theoretical approaches of CSR framed by market or by society, by communication or by governance. Stakeholders’ perceptions are then positioned in the matrix through qualitative analysis of the diverse definitions, constructions and positions with respect to CSR made and adopted by corporate agents, social stakeholders and communicators in their discourses. The study proves that changes in how actors perceive and explain self-governed CSR do not depend so much on economic factors as on the networks of stakeholder interaction through communication and governance. Mapping CSR stakeholders’ perceptions indicates changes and limiting actors, but is not enough to isolate the triggers of those changes. The maps provide a starting point for further exploration of (de)politicization, framing, and understanding of CSR communication and governance, and for the analysis of the limitations of the current model of CSR self-governance. The theoretical approach and methodology provide a framework that integrates communication and governance as relational structures of network interaction in CSR.

The purpose of this paper is to show how the strategic selection of discursive and interactive strategies generates specific framings of an issue to advocate opposite positions, embodying a struggle of power between parties with their own agendas.

Drawing on literature within framing, digital issue arenas and critical discourse, this study analyses qualitative hypermodal data retrieved from two websites: Protect Mauna Kea, and Maunakea and Thirty Meter Telescope. These two websites frame the internationally renowned telescope’s construction on Mauna Kea Mountain in Hawaii from alternative perspectives.

On each website, frame articulation attempts to connect the event to specific concerns, values and beliefs in order to construct alternative versions of reality which can possibly fit with those of supporters. Simultaneously, this is reinforced by frame amplification concretized in selected discursive and interactive strategies that highlight or downplay the issue from particular perspectives.

The study offers a deep insight into the complexity and dynamic nature of framing, in particular into how framing can vary and compete across actors. It also responds to “the need for critical awareness of discourse in contemporary society” (Fairclough, 2010, p. 554) by revealing how the power positions of “challengers and powerholders” (Steinberg, 1998, p. 846) are discursively reproduced and reinforced through distinctive discursive and interactive strategies. Finally, this study adopts a critical approach to hypermodal discourse.