Building a Trustworthy Corporate Identity: A Corpus-Based Analysis of Stance in Annual and Corporate Social Responsibility Reports

Trust-building strategies in corporate discourse: An experimental study

“…Therefore, corporations have considerable potential to strategically influence individuals' perceptions through the selective disclosure of information and discursive constructions of identity. Based on this premise, a substantial body of research within CDA has examined the discursive strategies that companies use across a variety of texts and genres to build a trustworthy brand or image and thereby legitimise their practices (Bondi, 2016;Breeze, 2012;Brei and Böhm, 2014;Fuoli, 2012Fuoli, , 2017Fuoli and Paradis, 2014;Hart, 2014;Koller, 2007Koller, , 2008Koller, , 2009bLischinsky, 2011;Lischinsky and Sjölander, 2014;Merkl-Davies and Koller, 2012;PAD Research Group, 2016;Skulstad, 2008). For example, in a case study of the online branding strategies used by the UK fruit juice producer Innocent, the PAD Research Group (2016) found that the company portrays itself as friendly, ethical and caring.…”

“…In the next section, we very briefly summarise the main findings from this corpus study as they relate to our experimental study, which we report in the subsequent section. Fuoli (2017) investigated the way stance-taking acts feature in annual and CSR reports to construct trustworthy corporate identities. The study was based on a 2.5 million word specialised corpus made up of 16 annual and 16 CSR reports published in 2012.…”

“…In this article, we offer a framework for empirically assessing the influence of trust-building strategies in corporate discourse that is based on experimental methods. Specifically, we use a scenario-based experiment to investigate the effects of trust-building strategies which, realised in particular forms of stance-taking act, have previously been identified as a salient feature of publicly directed corporate texts (Fuoli, 2017). We postulate that these strategies work by appealing to two particular dimensions of trust: benevolence and integrity.…”

The Expectation of TikTok in International Media: A Critical Discourse Analysis

“…The literature focuses a lot on corporate discourse, such as sustainability reports (Higgins & Coffey, 2016) annual reports (Fuoli, 2018) and corporate websites (Liu & Wu, 2015). These research articles generally focus on how companies construct themselves in the current economic and political environment so as to influence the wider stakeholders.…”

“You're Manchester United manager, you can't say things like that”: Impression management and identity performance by professional football managers in the media

“…Researchers from a range of theoretical backgrounds have attempted to understand the skills and strategies speakers employ or need to employ when attempting to manage their impressions (Berger, 2005;Bolino, Kacmar, Turnley, & Gilstrap, 2008;Bolino & Turnley, 1999;DuBrin, 2011;Landtsheer, Vries, & Vertessen, 2008;Metts & Grohskopf, 2003;Raghuram, 2013;Spencer-Oatey, 2000;Stapleton & Hargie, 2011;Tedeschi, 1981). For pragmatics researchers, the focus has been on exploring how micro features of language and interaction are implicated in this process (Bilbow, 1997;Fuoli, 2017;Gordon, 2004Gordon, , 2011Hobbs, 2003;Lorenzo-Dus, 2005;Simon-Vandenbergen, 1996).…”