Ethics and Ethos in Financial Reporting

Abstract

In response to ongoing concerns about financial ethics, this study analyzes the speech of company executives in quarterly earnings conference calls to understand strategic usage of ethics-related language. Against the backdrop of the recent global financial crisis, the Aristotelian concept of ethos provides a framework to investigate linguistic features that express ethical stance. Text analysis software was used to produce frequency profiles of features that were then further interpreted qualitatively. Results showed that the executives used a variety of more or less explicit terms to maintain a strong focus on trustworthiness and commitment to moving forward. The findings can inform the development of teaching materials that help learners become more effective communicators in the context of IT-mediated financial reporting.

Representation of the “business‐self”: Professionals’ construction of multifaceted identities in written business communication

“…Continuity is a theme that CEO's letters attempt to firmly imprint onto readers' minds with the verb "continue" being the most significant collocate of "we" (Table 7). This mirrors Crawford Camiciottoli (2020) in which "we continue" is found to be one of the most common two-word clusters and also in Crawford Camiciottoli's (2011) analysis of ethics-related language in earnings calls of US companies. The frequent use of "continue" in conjunction with "we" is suggested to build "an ethos of a company that is consistent and perseverant, and therefore reliable and trustworthy" (2011, p. 306).…”

An Investigation of Metadiscourse Features in International Postgraduate Business Students’ Texts

“…Text-based studies of metadiscourse in business texts have been confined to academic research articles (Cao & Hu, 2014;Dueñas, 2007Dueñas, , 2010Hyland, 2005c;Hyland & Tse, 2005a, 2005bKhedri, Heng, & Ebrahimi, 2013;Murillo, 2012;Pooresfahani, Khajavy, & Vahidnia, 2012;Sultan, 2011), master's theses and dissertations (Hyland, 2004;Samraj, 2008), and workplace contexts (Bargiela-Chiappini, 2009;Camiciottoli, 2010Camiciottoli, , 2011Carrió-Pastor & Calderón, 2015;Hyland, 1998a). Cao and Hu (2014) compared the use of interactive metadiscourse markers in 120 quantitative and qualitative research articles across three social science subfields: applied linguistics, education, and psychology.…”

“…Hyland (1998a), for example, investigated the rhetorical effects of metadiscourse in CEO's letters and directors' reports. Camiciottoli (2011) analyzed the speech of company executives in quarterly earnings conference calls to understand the strategic usage of ethics-related language. The findings showed that the executives strongly focused on trustworthiness and commitment to moving forward by employing a variety of ethics-related terms.…”

Review of Camiciottoli (2013): Rhetoric in Financial Discourse. A Linguistic Analysis of ICT-mediated Disclosure Genres

“…The first one is genre analysis, which the author rightly considers as particularly appropriate for the study of language uses in context: "genre analysis is a powerful tool capable of shedding light on the complex and dynamic processes involved in the production and interpretation of discourse found in professional contexts" (p. 41). Acknowledging the relation between the emergence of genres and the existence of rhetorical situations (Miller 1984;Hyland 2013), Crawford Camiciottoli singles out the macro-structural analysis of texts as a crucial stage of a rhetoric-oriented study. The generic macro-structure of a text reveals its rhetorical organization (p. 42) and guides the identification of rhetorical moves, as well as their interpretation and evaluation.…”