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- Fuoli, Matteo, et al.
(författare)
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A model of trust-repair discourse
- 2014
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Ingår i: Journal of Pragmatics. - : Elsevier BV. - 0378-2166. ; 74, s. 52-69
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This article proposes a novel theoretical framework for examining trust-repair discourse. The model identifies two fundamental discourse strategies available to the trust-breaker when trust is at stake (i) to engage with and act upon the discourses that represent a potential source of distrust - neutralize the negative, (ii) to communicate a trustworthy discourse identity - emphasize the positive. These strategies are realized in discourse through the use of dialogic engagement and evaluative/affective language, respectively. The ultimate communicative goal of the strategies is that of promoting the addressees' positive (re-)assessment of the speaker's ability, integrity and benevolence. The model is applied to the analysis of the CEO letter published by BP one year after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. The analysis has the twofold purpose of demonstrating the viability of the model and determining the discourse strategies deployed by the CEO to repair trust in the company after the accident.
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| 4. |
- Fuoli, Matteo
(författare)
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Building a Trustworthy Corporate Identity : A Corpus-Based Analysis of Stance in Annual and Corporate Social Responsibility Reports
- 2018
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Ingår i: Applied Linguistics. - : Oxford University Press (OUP). - 1477-450X .- 0142-6001. ; 39:6, s. 846-885
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This article presents a corpus-based analysis of stance in a specialized corpus of annual and corporate social responsibility (CSR) reports. It investigates how companies use stance expressions to construct and promote a positive corporate identity in order to gain the trust of the stakeholder groups that these texts target. The results show that companies profile distinct identities in annual and CSR reports. In annual reports, they use stance resources to portray themselves as unbiased, rational, and competent decision makers. In CSR reports, they present themselves as committed, honest, and caring corporate citizens. These discursive identities are interpreted as strategic self-representations that optimize the persuasive appeal of the reports by addressing the specific expectations of the target readerships. This study sheds some new light on the identity work performed by companies in their public discourse. It also provides novel insights into the impression management strategies used by companies in annual and CSR reports. Finally, it provides both linguists and business communication scholars with a robust descriptive basis for critically assessing financial and CSR reporting.
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| 6. |
- Fuoli, Matteo, et al.
(författare)
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Combining corpus and experimental methods to study dialogic engagement in spoken discourse : an analysis of complement-taking predicates
- 2016
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- The main objective of this paper is to challenge the treatment of first-person epistemic and evidential complement-taking predicates (CTPs) in Martin and White’s (2005) APPRAISAL theory, and to offer suggestions for improving the model. Based on the combined results of a corpus-based analysis of CTPs and of a psycholinguistic experiment, we demonstrate that several co-textual and situational factors play a significant role in speakers’ interpretation of the dialogic function of CTPs. We argue that a flexible approach is necessary to account for the multifunctional nature of CTPs in discourse, and that co-text and context need to be taken into account for an accurate analysis of these expressions.According to Martin and White (2005), CTPs such as I think and I believe are used by speakers and writers to signal that they take into consideration the possible existence of alternative viewpoints, and to make dialogic space for possible subsequent arguments. These predicates are classified as instances of dialogic expansion within the authors’ APPRAISAL framework (Martin & White, 2005: 98). They are set in contrast to expressions of dialogic contraction (e.g. obviously, however, but), which are used in discourse to challenge, resist or reject alternative value positions. In spoken discourse, however, CTPs do not appear to always perform an expanding function. In (1), for example, I think co-occurs with the dialogically contractive obviously, which seems to override the functional content of the CTP, making the turn as a whole relatively contractive.(1) B: I think he was \obviously trying to steer us in that direction [əә] and sort ofA: yesB: dropping hintsMartin and White (2005: 103) recognize that the function of ENGAGEMENT expressions “may vary systematically under the influence of different co-textualconditions, and across registers, genres and discourse domains.” These conditions, however, are not discussed in detail by the authors, nor have they been systematically investigated in the literature. In this study, we combine corpus- based and psycholinguistic methods to investigate the effect of different contextual factors on the dialogic function of CTPs.The study is conducted in two phases. First, an exploratory qualitative analysis of CTPs in the London-Lund Corpus (LLC) of spoken British English is carried out. The aim of the analysis is to identify some factors that may play a role in determining the dialogic force of CTPs, and generate hypotheses about their effects. In the second phase, a psycholinguistic experiment is conducted to test the effect of three of these factors on speakers’ interpretation of utterances containing CTPs. The results indicate that CTPs not only serve to expand the dialogic context in which they occur, but may also function to inhibit dialogue. Participant status, intonation contour and the co-occurrence of a contractive marker are shown to have a significant effect on the function of CTPs.This study contributes to our understanding of the pragmatic functions of CTPs. It also offers suggestions for the development of the APPRAISAL model and concrete guidelines for implementing the model in corpus analyses of spoken discourse. Finally, it demonstrates the usefulness of complementing corpus and experimental techniques to gain better insights into linguistic phenomena.
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| 7. |
- Fuoli, Matteo, et al.
(författare)
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Constructing trustworthiness through pictorial and multimodal metaphor : An exploration of corporate visual rhetoric
- 2014
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Ingår i: 10th Conference of the Association for Researching and Applying Metaphor, RaAM. ; , s. 27-28
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- Trust is a pervasive feature of social life and a basic element of both intimate and distant interpersonal relations. Every decision to trust other people, however, involves a certain degree of risk, as our ability to attain full knowledge of their intentions and motives is, in most situations, inescapably limited (Gambetta, 1988; Marková and Gillespie, 2008). Our decisions to trust others are thus influenced and guided by our subjective perceptions of their trustworthiness (Hardin, 2002; Linell and Keselman, 2011). These considerations apply not only to interpersonal relations between individuals, but also to those between business organizations and their stakeholders (Ingenhoff and Sommer, 2010).This paper investigates how large multinational corporations use images to construct a trustworthy corporate identity across different genres of business communication. We analyze a corpus of images collected from the websites of some of the world’s largest corporations operating in high-impact industries such as the oil and gas, banking and pharmaceutical sectors, where stakeholders’ trust is key to ensuring social legitimation and long-term viability. The goal of the analysis is to identify and describe the pictorial (monomodal) and multimodal metaphors (Forceville 1996, 2002; Forceville and Urios-Aparisi, 2009) employed by these companies to convey three fundamental attributes of trustworthiness: a) ability, which regards a company’s skills and expertise in a specific domain, b) integrity, which relates to its moral and ethical values, and c) benevolence, which refers to its care for and goodwill towards the stakeholders (Mayer et al., 1995; Ingenhoff and Sommer, 2010). Following Koller (2009), this paper emphasizes the centrality of pictorial and multimodal metaphor in companies’ discursive construction of their corporate identity, focusing on a specific and crucial dimension of corporate identity, i.e. trustworthiness. In addition, this study adds to the existing literature on metaphor by investigating how pictorial and multimodal metaphors are used, for persuasive purposes, in emerging genres of corporate communication. More generally, the study has the twofold aim of contributing to our knowledge of how trustworthiness is constructed through visual and multimodal resources, at the same time advancing our understanding of the discursive dynamics of trust, which is still limited and fragmentary (Linell and Keselman, 2011).
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| 9. |
- Fuoli, Matteo, et al.
(författare)
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Denial outperforms apology in repairing organizational trust despite strong evidence of guilt
- 2017
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Ingår i: Public Relations Review. - : Elsevier BV. - 0363-8111. ; 43:4, s. 645-660
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Previous work in the areas of organizational trust repair and crisis communication has provided conflicting answers to the question of whether denial can be more effective than apology in repairing stakeholder trust in a company following an integrity-based violation. This article reportsthe results of an experiment designed to (i) test the effects of these two strategies on individuals’ trust in a company accused of corruption, and (ii) determine whether and how evidence of the company’s guilt influences stakeholder reactions to its trust repair message. The results demonstrate that, when evidence against the company is weak, trust is restored moresuccessfully with a denial than an apology. Contrary to our hypothesis, denial was found to outperform apology in repairing perceptions of the company’s integrity and benevolence even in the face of strong evidence, and it was as effective as apology in restoring perceived ability and trusting intentions. These results provide empirical evidence for the ‘paradoxical effect’ that anopen and honest attitude can, in the short term, be more detrimental to organizations than a defensive strategy. More research on the factors that determine the credibility and persuasiveness of corporate denial is called for.
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| 10. |
- Fuoli, Matteo
(författare)
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‘I am proud to be on this team and believe that our best days are ahead’ : stance in corporate reports
- 2016
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- This article presents a corpus-based analysis of stance (e.g. Biber, 2006; Biber and Finegan, 1989; Biber et al., 1999; Conrad and Biber, 2000) in a specialized corpus of annual and corporate social responsibility (CSR) reports. Annual reports and CSR reports are key genres of business public discourse. Annual reports are primarily addressed to shareholders and investors, and include both legally-required and voluntary information about a company’s financial situation. CSR reports target a broader audience of stakeholders, and provide information about a company’s social and environmental performance.While a substantial amount of work has been conducted to describe the discursive features of these two genres, they have not, to date, been compared to each other. But how do companies present themselves to investors and stakeholders in annual and CSR reports? How do they use evaluative language resources to shape their identity and promote a positive corporate image to the specific audiences that these texts address? And, are there any differences in the way companies portray themselves in these two text types? This article seeks address these questions. Based on the assumption that “organisations can be viewed as subsuming a multiplicity of identities, each of which is appropriate for a given context or audience” (Gioia, 1998: 21), it examines how companies use evaluative language in annual and CSR reports to highlight different traits of their corporate persona, in the attempt to maximize the persuasive impact of their communication.To that aim, a comparative corpus-based analysis of stance constructions is carried out on a specialized corpus of annual and CSR reports recently published by a sample of large multinational corporations. Stance resources play an important role in how speakers express their opinions, negotiate their identity, ‘position’ themselves with respect to their interlocutors, and manage their own credibility and that of the information they convey (Du Bois, 2007; Englebretson, 2007; Hyland, 2005; Martin and White, 2005; Thompson and Hunston, 2000). They are, therefore, highly relevant to the persuasive goals of annual and CSR reports. In this study, corpus-based techniques are used to quantify stance expressions in the texts under study. Stance markers are automatically identified based on lists of stance words taken fromprevious studies. Concordances are then manually inspected to remove false positives from the results. The frequency and functions of these expressions in annual and CSR reports are then compared, and differences discussed in relation to the questions posed above.The results reveal significant differences in the frequency and functions of stance expressions in annual and CSR reports, which reflect two markedly different approaches to the discursive construction of corporate identity. In annual reports, companies foreground an objective and emotionally-detached self, and strive to show that they are far-sighted and in control of the situation. Conversely, CSR reports are more explicitly subjective and persuasive. In these texts, companies use stance resources to portray themselves as committed corporate citizens, and to establish empathy and alignment with their audience.
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