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- 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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| 2. |
- Hommerberg, Charlotte, 1960-, et al.
(författare)
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The construction of knowledge, values and identities in present-day consumerism discourses : the case of perfume reviews
- 2014
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Ingår i: CADAAD5. - Budapest : Eötvös Loránd University.
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- This paper presents ongoing critical research staged against the backdrop of global consumerism, which is of continuously escalating importance, both for humanity at large and more concretely in the daily lives of individuals, where consumption choices are increasingly associated with lifestyle and identity. In order to develop an adequate model for our investigation, we focus on a limited and strategically selected material, perfume reviews, which are analysed by means of a combination of argumentation analysis and Appraisal analysis. Consumer reviews in different domains of luxury consumption are of particular interest since they concretize the ambiguity of the concept of consumerism: From the addresser perspective, consumption reviews explicitly function to protect consumers’ rights by providing advice concerning the appropriateness of consumption choices, while also, at least in the range of domains that are not immediately related to the basic necessities of life, implicitly encouraging ever-growing consumption of such excessive products. Consumption reviews also construct ambivalent recipient identities: On the one hand, seeking consumption advice construes a critical persona that is rightly sceptical of the value of products and information from producers. On the other hand, the very existence of consumer reviews in the luxury domain simultaneously invokes an uncertain consumer persona, reluctant to rely on personal taste and therefore in need of guidance. Importantly, these ambivalent identities operate in an environment where what is seen as the basic necessities of life is an ever-changing construction, constantly renegotiated in accordance with both explicit and implicit socio-cultural norms and expectations. The analytical model developed for the current project is subsequently intended to be applicable to a larger corpus of consumer reviews from different domains with the ultimate goal of being able to generalize across present-day consumerism discourses and thus contribute to exploring what we see as a human identity crisis of the 21st century that leads to increasing commodification of our identities.
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