Socio-cognitive approaches to corporate discourse

ComunicaçãoPolítica

e EconómicaDimensões Cognitivas e Discursivas

OrganizadoresAugusto Soares da SilvaJosé Cândido Martins

Luísa MagalhãesMiguel Gonçalves

Publicações da Faculdade de FilosofiaUniversidade Católica Portuguesa

BRAGA 2013

O conteúdo dos artigos e a norma ortográfica usada são da responsabilidade dos autores.

Ficha Técnica

Título: Comunicação Política e Económica Dimensões Cognitivas e Discursivas

Organização: Augusto Soares da Silva . José Cândido Martins Luísa Magalhães . Miguel Gonçalves

Edição: ALETHEIA – Associação Científica e Cultural Distribuição: Faculdade de Filosofia e Venda: Universidade Católica Portuguesa Praça da Faculdade de Filosofia, 1 4710‑297 BRAGA Tel. 253 208 080 / Fax 253 213 940 www.publicacoesfacfil.pt

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Dezembro 2013

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Socio-cognitive approaches to corporate discourse 1

Veronika Koller

AbstractIn this paper, I show how central concepts from social cognition research, most notably social identity and categorisation, and specifically in-group favouritism and self-enhancement, can be applied to the critical study of corporate discourse. To that end, I differentiate between discourse goals, e.g. self-enhancement, discourse strategies such as evaluation, discourse features, e.g. attribution, and linguistic (and, in some genres, conversational) devices, e.g. adjectives. Also, I will elaborate on how in-group and self-construction in texts can be reflected in discursive processes of their production, distribution, reception and appropriation. This further demonstrates the interface between discourse and social cognition.I will point out some particularities of corporate discourse and exemplify the socio-cognitive approach to it by analysing a 2003 after-dinner speech by the then CEO of Corus Steel. The analysis will focus on how the speaker realises the discourse goals of defence, persuasion and in-group favouritism/self-enhancement, up to the point where he constructs senior management as synonymous with the company and himself as a leading representative of the industry. These findings from the textual analysis will finally be compared to how the audience is positioned in this text, and explained with recourse to the wider economic context at the time.

Keywords: CEO speech, corporate discourse, critical discourse studies, socio-cognitive representations

1. Introduction: Problems with corporate discourse

In this paper, I will link insights from social cognition research with discourse theory to see how producers of corporate discourse seek to meet their goals of defence, persuasion and self-enhancement. To clarify, I adopt a rather narrow definition of corporate discourse here, which sees it as language use as social practice by and within for-profit organizations. As my background is, at least partly, in critical discourse studies, it seems appropriate to first identify the social – and, ipso facto, ethical – problems that I seek to address in my research relating to this particular discourse domain. Firstly, then, there is the problem of corporations having accumulated remarkable power over institutions and individuals, with no democratic control on

1. I would like to thank Bertie Kaal and Karin Verduijn, members of the Amsterdam Critical Discourse Community, for the data. The ACDC group can be contacted at http://acdcweb.tk/.

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corporate decision-making and little public accountability. It is sometimes claimed that consumers can ‘vote with their wallets’ and thus ultimately put a company out of business; however, this argument only pertains to one stakeholder group and not others, such as employees or the general public, which are equally affected by corporate activity. In addition, it is by no means the case that competition guarantees better quality of products and services, as the consumer is all too often faced with a ‘race to the bottom’. The second social and ethical problem operates at the material level and is constituted by the accumulation of disproportionate corporate and individual wealth, and a concomitant sense of self-importance, as we shall see from the analysis in section 5. Thirdly, corporate discourse often enacts a specific form of discrimination. In this domain, we are not so much dealing with direct discrimination along some demographic dimension, such as gender or ethnicity, but an evaluation of people on the basis of their of labour market value and disposable income. Whoever is not available as an employee, customer or investor is not so much discriminated against overtly, but simply does not exist in the logic of corporate discourse – which is of course the ultimate discrimination. Finally, the fourth problem with corporate discourse presents itself at the discursive level, in that corporate discourse colonizes (Chouliaraki & Fairclough 1999) other parts of society, including the private sphere. It does so not only linguistically but also by exporting its underlying socio-cognitive representations and by superimposing a corporate logic onto areas that are not amenable to it and where this logic can distort relations (Illouz 2007), curtail opportunities, destroy material and non-material value, and generally lead to suffering.

Although the above list of problems calls for critical research (and activism), the would-be researcher is soon confronted with a methodological and systemic problem. First and foremost, there is the issue of having only limited access to data: Not only do corporate decision-makers carefully control which of their texts are available in the public sphere, but they erect even greater barriers to internal data. To quote the Portuguese proverb, it seems indeed true that ‘silence is the soul of business’. The fact that the metaphorical division into ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ is particularly stark in the case of corporate discourse can of course be explained with the competitive nature of for-profit corporations, but lack of data also ties in with the above-mentioned lack of public accountability and as such constitutes a considerable source of power. The best way to overcome this problem is to adopt a pragmatic stance, make a case that discourse analysis has something to offer to business and thus gain access to internal data in the role of researcher-consultant. While doing so ultimately serves the company’s profit motive, my own consulting experience


suggests that it is not incompatible with a critical stance, even if the critique has to be presented in a somewhat oblique way, e.g. as aspects of a company’s discourse that are harmful to the company because they show a lack of understanding, respect or empathy with particular groups and their needs. There is another potential audience, namely influential stakeholders, i.e. customers and investors, who are (or can be) interested in issues beyond extrinsic self-interest (so-called “bigger-than-self ” problems, Crompton & Kasser 2009), meaning that they look beyond the cheapest deal or the highest dividend. Even so, another problem presents itself with regard to communicating the findings beyond academic settings to effect change, in that disseminating results to the general public is hampered by confidentiality issues.

The above seems like a rather gloomy outlook, but it is worth stressing that corporate discourse needs systematic critical analysis if we are to even begin to address the social and ethical problems that it poses. In this paper, I am suggesting one way of going about such an analysis. To this end, the paper is structured as follows: In the next section, I will introduce some concepts from social cognition research, focusing on self and identity, categorization and intergroup differentiation, and in-group favouritism and self-enhancement. This will be followed by some discourse theoretical considerations on levels of analysis and their cognitive aspects as well as a top-down model of analysis that encompasses discourse goals, strategies and features as well as linguistic devices. In section 4, I will give some background to the data by presenting the speaker and his company, and by elaborating on the genre of the text. Section 5 will include a summative analysis of the data, while section 6 closes the paper by outlining some implications for the study of corporate discourse. First, however, I will turn to social cognition research.

2. Social cognition: Self and identity

A mere look at introductory textbooks in social cognition (Augoustinos, Walker & Donaghue 2006; Fiske & Macrae 2012; Kunda 1999) shows the vast scope of this discipline. Combining social and cognitive psychology, social cognition research has, with different emphases, been flourishing in both Europe and the US since the 1970s. Researchers have not only proposed theoretical models of concepts and representations, but also amassed an impressive body of mostly experimental work on memory, affect and motivation, prejudice and discrimination, attribution, i.e. causal explanations for perceived events and behaviours, attitudes and, last but not least, self and identity. As I am most interested in the interpersonal function of discourse and language, I will focus on the latter.

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When looking at identity, we can draw a distinction between individual and collective identity on the one hand and personal and social identity on the other. However, this typology is somewhat artificial and it should be noted that “the notion of personal identity is a fiction [...] [a]ll forms of self-construal must be social” (Augoustinos, Walker & Donaghue 2006: 25). With this important caveat in mind, we can follow Tajfel (1981: 251, quoted in Augoustinos, Walker & Donaghue 2006: 309), the founder of social identity theory, and define personal identity as that part of one’s representation of oneself that is derived from individual experiences, characteristics and capacities, while social identity is the part of one’s representation of oneself that is derived from the social groups and categories to which one belongs or with which one identifies, together with the value attached to such groups. At the individual level, personal identity – fictitious as though it may be – pertains to the self-as-person, while social identity on the individual plane sees the self-as-person relating to other individuals. Social identity also operates at the collective level in the form of inter-group relations between the in-group on the on hand and affiliated and out-groups on the other.2 Finally, personal identity becomes relevant in collective contexts whenever we look, as I do in the analysis below, at relations between members of an in-group.

Whatever form of identity is at stake, however, we can maintain that identity is the product of the cognitive process of self-categorization, either by comparing the self to other individuals or by identifying as part of a social membership group. (It should be noted here that membership can be ascribed or acquired, where the former refers to largely fixed categories such as ethnicity, while the latter denotes chosen memberships such as one’s profession or industry.) Theorizing the categorization process, Moscovici (1984/2001) distinguishes between anchoring and abstracting: Anchoring means comparing an event, person or idea to a category and “readjust[ing it] to fit within it (Ibid.: 42), where the category in question can also be one’s identity, whereas abstracting is defined as “select[ing] a feature at random and us[ing] it as a category” (Ibid.: 44). Abstracting is therefore a form of metonymic conceptualization, with obvious discriminatory implications.3 A related

2. The category of affiliated groups has been largely overlooked in critical discourse studies and its focus on us vs. them patterns.

3. An example of this kind of categorization occurred at a previous, predominantly white workplace of mine a number of years ago: A colleague who wanted to know the extension of the department’s new IT expert, a man of British Asian descent, inquired about it by asking for ‘the number of our Indian’. Clearly, ethnicity had become the category feature in this instance, although the person’s professional background was contextually more relevant.


phenomenon can be observed when an instance of the category comes to stand in for the category itself, as is the case when someone constructs themselves as a leading representative of a whole group, as the speaker does in the text analysed below.

Returning to the somewhat arbitrary distinction between personal and social identity, social cognition research (Oakes, Haslam & Reynolds 1999: 58-9) has shown that personal self-categorization is salient when perceived intercategory differences are not much greater than intracategory differences, i.e. when the out-group is not seen as very different from the in-group. By contrast, social self-categorization becomes salient when perceived intercategory differences are indeed much greater than intracategory differences, i.e. a person is much more likely to identify as a group member rather than an individual personality when he or she perceives the out-group to be very different from his or her in-group. However, it should be stressed that such perceptions – known in social cognition research as the principle of meta-contrast – are subject to the so-called accentuation effect (Augoustinos, Walker & Donaghue 2006: 29), which describes the phenomenon that intra-category similarities and inter-category differences tend to be perceived as greater than they actually are. While this fosters in-group cohesion, it also results in and the “antonymy us vs. them, which is [...] part and parcel of ideological categorization” (Dirven, Frank & Pütz 2003: 8). Again, the discriminatory implications are obvious, and indeed, intergroup differentiation often entails in-group favouritism and/or out-group derogation (Augoustinos, Walker & Donaghue 2006: 34). It should be noted, however, that although the bulk of critical discourse studies focuses on the us vs. them distinction, it is less often realized in discourse and text than such work would suggest. Thus, I have shown elsewhere (Koller 2008) that negative out-group representation can occur without much positive in-group representation, and, vice versa, positive representation of the in-group need not be linked to denigrating an out-group. The former phenomenon can in that case be explained by an internalized negative self-image held by members of a marginalized group (Gee 1992: 109), while the reverse case is due to decreasing marginalization and social identities being mainstreamed over the course of a generation.

In-group favouritism finds its individual equivalent in self-enhancement and impression management, with the latter being the goal of much, if not all, externally, and partly internally, oriented corporate discourse. Whether the goal is to promote a positive view of the company or simply boost one’s ego, self-enhancement works through attributional asymmetry (Augoustinos, Walker & Donaghue 2006: 164), a phenomenon that involves people accepting credit for success, i.e. attributing it to internal factors, but denying responsibility for failure, i.e. attributing it to external

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factors. Other self-enhancement strategies are changing one’s attitudes to fit one’s behaviour (rather than vice versa, curiously enough), emphasizing attributes associated with success while downplaying the importance of abilities one does not have, and, again, derogating others (Kunda 1999: 484). We will see the linguistic realization of many of these strategies in section 5. Before looking at the data, however, it is necessary to elaborate on the notion of discourse and its analysis.

3. A model for socio-cognitive discourse analysis

Following Fairclough (2010: 133; see also Koller 2012: 23-7), discourse can be seen as operating at three embedded, mutually constitutive levels, i.e. the micro-level of text, the meso-level of discourse practice, which involves the production, distribution, reception and appropriation of texts, and the macro-level of the social or socio-economic context, which can be subdivided into the situational, institutional and societal context. This model is represented in Figure 1.

Figure 1. Levels of discourse analysis

In terms of analysis, the micro-level requires a detailed descriptive analysis of the text, for both content and linguistic and, more broadly, semiotic features, while the meso- and macro-levels ask for an explanatory analysis of context. As for the questions guiding each form of analysis, we can draw on categories from social cognition and


have the analysis centre on entities, events and, perhaps most importantly, social actors, especially where the analysis focuses on questions of identity. The latter can refer to representing the first person of the speaker and/or their in-group, positioning the second person that is addressed as the audience, or constructing an identity for any third parties that are denoted in the text. Content analysis at the text level then addresses the question as to what actors, entities and events are represented and investigates presences and absences, propositions and argumentation strategies.4 Although still descriptive, the semiotic text analysis shifts the focus to the question how actors etc. are represented. The focus is here on various linguistic, and in some genres conversational, parameters, the links between them as well as between linguistic features and other modes. Context analysis finally asks why particular actors etc. are represented, and why they are represented in a certain way. In doing so, it seeks to explain the results from the text analyses and takes recourse to social and discourse practice contexts, and their cognitive underpinnings.5 In fact, cognitive aspects are relevant at all of the three levels, but because of the indirect link between text and cognition, they are most important at the explanatory stage of the analysis. Thus, the macro-level of the social context is informed by situational scripts, socio-cognitive representations of any institution in which the discourse event is embedded, and relevant ideologies. At the meso-level, we can theorize procedural scripts as well as socio-cognitive representations of discourse participants and genres to be relevant, while the text level both reflects and, in a cyclical fashion, also shapes all of the above cognitive entities.

If socio-cognitive representations of genre and discourse participants as well as the social context are reflected in texts, they also inform the strategies and goals that text producers seek to meet. In a top-down model, we can distinguish between discourse goals, strategies and features, and linguistic (and, where relevant, conversational) and other semiotic devices. Discourse goals refer to the overall aim that the discourse producer pursues by using language as a social practice, e.g. out-group denigration or self-enhancement, and are both social and cognitive in nature. Those goals are realized by discourse strategies, 6 which are effects of language use, e.g. evaluation, while linguistic devices are defined as the concrete forms that discourse features take, e.g. adjectives as a means of attribution. After giving some background

4. It is a moot point whether argumentation strategies are part of the content or the language of a text and it may therefore be best to see them as straddling both.

5. The implicit focus of the model I propose here is the production of text and discourse; for a processing oriented model of discourse context, see van Dijk (2008).

6. Note that my definition here overlaps with, but is not convergent with, Reisigl and Wodak’s (2009) notion of discursive strategies.

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to the data in the next section, I will demonstrate the explanatory power of the above models − three levels of discourse and their cognitive underpinnings, and the distinction between goals, strategies, features and devices − by applying them to a specific instance of corporate discourse.

4. Background to the data: speaker, company, genre

The data chosen for this paper is an after-dinner speech given by Stuart Pettifor, then chief executive officer at Corus Steel, at the Lincolnshire Iron & Steel Institute dinner, on 10 April 2003.7 At that time, the speaker had been chief executive officer of Corus Steel for a year and recently been appointed chief operating officer of its parent company, Corus Group. Truly a man of steel, Pettifor holds a BA in mettalurgy from Nottingham University and served on the boards of various mining and steel companies. At the time of writing (October 2012), he acts as independent director at a number of mining companies.8 The company that he represents at the occasion of the speech has its roots in British Steel, which was created by the British government in 1967. Reflecting the fate of manufacturing in Thatcher’s Britain, its workforce shrank by almost three quarters between 1979 and 1987, at which point it was privatized. In 1999, British Steel merged with Koninklijke Hoogovens (Netherlands) to form Corus Steel, then the world’s third largest steel producer. At the time of the speech, the company had experienced two very difficult years characterized by the loss of 13,000 jobs through plant closures and rationalization. The year before, it had tried to sell parts of Corus to CNS (Brazil) and to buy Pechiney (France); both attempts were unsuccessful. In 2003, it showed a desastrous financial performance, with high net losses and debt, a low share price and no dividend having been paid since 2000 (for details, see Dawley, Stenning & Pike 2008). However, it managed a turnaround by 2005, through the Restoring Success programme, which focused upon further employment reductions and the concentration of assets and investments in high-value added niche markets. Profitable again and with reduced debt, it became an attractive takeover target, and CNS and Tata Steel, part of the India conglomerate,

7. Although the speech is no longer available online (http://www.corusgroup.com/en/news/speeches, accessed on 12 August 2005), I have chosen not to include it in an appendix, as it is more than 2,000 words long. However, I am happy to make the data available upon request (v.koller@lan caster.ac.uk).

8. This information is taken from http://www.northland.eu/en-us/about-us/corporate-govern-ance/board-of-directors/stuart-pettifor and http://www.metinvestholding.com/en/about/govern-ance/supervisors, both accessed 29 April 2013.


both bid for Corus in 2006. The following year, Tata Steel took over Corus, whose name was changed to Tata Steel Europe in 2010.

This potted history goes to show that Pettifor gave his speech at a low point in Corus’ short history, a fact which directly impacted on discourse goals. The goals of the speech can also be seen as characteristics of the genre that the speech represents. Drawing on Reisigl’s work on classical rhetoric (2008: 245, 257-8), we can identify elements of the three oratory genres of the judicial, deliberative and epideictic speech in the text at hand. With the former two, it shares the main functions (or discourse goals) of defence and persuasion, both of which have also been discussed in the literature on corporate crisis communication (e.g. Coombs 1995, Benoit 2004). In the judicial genre, the speaker is prototypically a defendant, while the audience is cast in the role of those who judge the defendant’s past. In the deliberative genre, which focuses on the future, the audience represents decision-makers, and indeed, the audience for Pettifor’s speech is just that, comprising as it does stakeholders such as suppliers, customers and investors, as well as politicians. Finally, the speech also shows the epideictic genre’s focus on the present and some of its functions; these include praise and blame, and more generally the formation of attitude, opinions and will, as well as positive self-presentation, i.e. self-enhancement, alongside negative other-presentation, and as such are obviously socio-cognitive in nature. The following analysis will start out from the discourse goals that the speech takes from the different oratory genres and show how these are realized through discourse features and the related linguistic devices.

5. Analysis of the speech

As elaborated above, the speaker’s three main discourse goals are defence, persuasion and self-enhancement. The first two of these are related, in that defending management’s actions and decisions in the view of the company’s recent poor performance leads to persuading those present to continue to do business with, and invest in, Corus. Dealing with defence first, this goal is realized by the strategies of impersonalization, externalization, distancing and evasion of responsibility, all of which have been amply documented both in the literature on crisis communication (e.g. Coombs 1995, Benoit 2004) as well as in critical discourse studies (Merkl-Davies & Koller 2012). The linguistic devices employed by the speaker are equally familiar to critical discourse analysts: We find nominalization (e.g. ‘the aborted sale of our aluminium business’, ‘we experienced operational problems’) and agentless passives (e.g. ‘Our reputation has been damaged’) just as we do relational and existential

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processes with dummy subjects (‘it was not to be’, ‘that is the reality’). Neither will critical metaphor researchers be surprised to find metaphors with inanimate source domains such as difficulties are storms (‘turbulent months’), as these are routinely used to divert responsibility from human agents (see Charteris-Black 2006: 569 for a related point). The speaker does acknowledge some responsibility by using negative self-evaluation and self-directed deontic modality. It should be noted though that negative evaluation takes the past tense (‘we … forgot how to make things [and] how to sell them’), which establishes a safe distance between the past fault and the present situation. By contrast, self-directed obligation is coupled with positively connoted lexis and the present tense (e.g. ‘We also have to re-establish confidence’,9 ‘We … need to be resolute and determined’). This shift on the temporal axis phases in the discourse goal of persuasion, with shows a strong present and future orientation.

We can identify three different discourse strategies that the speaker uses to persuade the audience of the company’s inherent values. The first of these is re-assurance, with linguistic devices encompassing a range of tenses combined with positive lexis and often with continuous aspect to indicate that change is underway or imminent. Use of tenses shows an orientation either towards the future (e.g. ‘we will look after [the business] and ensure it remains in good order’), towards the present (e.g. ‘Corus is in the process of re-establishing and stabilising itself ’) or towards a recent past that has positive implications for the present (e.g. ‘we have seen our market share recover’). Again, we also find metaphoric expressions being harnessed to realize discourse strategies and meet discourse goals. Those intended to re-assure the audience once more show a strong future orientation by dint of instantiating the journey metaphor: ‘there are a number of positive things on the horizon’, ‘towards a strong united Corus’. The second strategy employed to persuade the audience of the company’s value is less direct than re-assurance but consists of involving the audience in a positive way, thereby creating an atmosphere that is amenable to persuasion. Thus, the speaker directly addresses and acknowledges those present (‘a matter of personal interest to many of you here tonight’, ‘with the help of the people in this room’) and does not shy away from ingratiation either (‘This place [Scunthorpe in North East England, where the dinner is held and where Corus has a plant] has a fantastic record’). The third strategy that the speaker uses for persuasive ends is

9. The speech as a whole shows a number of verbs and nouns with the re- prefix: re-establish(ing), review, recover(s), return, restoration; see also the Restoring Success pogramme mentioned in section 4. This particular morphological pattern has also been observed in other instances of (quasi-)corporate discourse (Koller 2007: 443) when the brand or organization in question was facing difficulties.


positive evaluation of the company. This can be done in a straightforward manner through attribution (‘the signs are most encouraging’, ‘the continuation of a strong Corus’), which echoes the devices used for the strategy of re-assurance, notably positive semantics and continuous aspect. A more subtle way of realizing positive evaluation of the company is to compare it to its competitors and present it as being ahead of them through the use of tenses; this feature also involves moving from generic to specific social actors. One example is ‘we will see a migration by integrated producers … Corus has already done so … Arcelor is in the process of doing so’. Here, the speaker first points out a perceived trend in the industry and then represents his company as having anticipated that trend, in contrast to its competitors.

The reader may have picked up on the fact that in the above examples, an exclusive we, probably referring to senior management at Corus, is used alongside and arguably synonymously with the company name. This exclusive we can be seen as a sub-group not only within the company, but also within the steel industry, the latter of which is denoted by an inclusive we. We can therefore picture concentric circles that start with the industry at the outer ring and move via the company and senior management to the speaker himself at the centre. Within these circles, senior management is metonymically equated with the company, being the most powerful group within it, while the speaker tends to construct himself as representative of the industry. This clearly serves the goal of self-enhancement and sits alongside other strategies to the same end, namely a focus on the speaker and presenting the speaker as an expert.

The speaker focuses on himself both quantitatively and qualitatively, by means of person deixis and agency. Of all references to social actors, the exclusive we accounts for a third, and while this shows a measure of corporate self-centredness (Koller 2009), such in-group references are followed by the first person singular at 22 per cent. Competitors make up just under 14 per cent of social actor references, while stakeholders, despite being powerful as well as physically present as the audience, are mentioned in only little more than ten per cent of cases. While the relative frequency of the I may be partly an effect of the speech genre, it is noteworthy that it also dominates qualitatively, being represented as active almost 97 per cent of the time. This even exceeds the exclusive we, which is active in just over 83 per cent of mentions, and all but dwarfs agency for competitors (30 per cent) and stakeholders (20 per cent).

The qualitative focus on, and elevation of, the self continues in a strategy that presents the speaker as expert. This is largely achieved through the metaphor seeing is thinking, realized by the metaphoric expressions in ‘how I see the

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industry developing’ and ‘I see prices rising further’, which cast the speaker in the powerful role of a ‘seer’ or prophet.10 An interesting combination of this metaphor with argumentation is the following: ‘My view is that we will continue to see the consolidation of the industry. If you read the Financial Times supplement on Wednesday, this view was strongly endorsed.’ Unfortunately, the online archives of the Financial Times only stretch back two years, so it is not possible to verify whether the speaker’s view was actually quoted in the newspaper. In any case though, the argumentative strategy he employs here is an appeal ad verecundiam, or to a credible and authoritative source, in order to lend importance and authority to his opinion. The seeing is thinking metaphor also plays a role in the final strategy that Pettifor uses for self-enhancement, namely to conflate himself with a salient social group that he is part of, in this case the steel industry. The personal and individual representation of the self-as-person in ‘I see’ statements finds its parallel in a high number of ‘we see’ constructions, with the we being inclusive (e.g. ‘we will continue to see the consolidation of the industry’, ‘we see a … competitive euro rate’). We can analyze this parallel as enacting a strategy that positions the speaker as metonymically representing, and even leading, a larger social group, thereby enacting a particular personal identity at the collective level.

Despite the above ways of using language to enhance his personal individual self, the speaker is most consistent in elevating the social collective self that is the company and, by metonymy, its senior management, i.e. the exclusive we. Going back to the socio-cognitive strategies for self-enhancement listed in section 2, we find a number of examples of how some of them are realized linguistically, as follows:

– Attributional asymmetry: The exclusive we is given credit for (hypothetical) success while responsibility for failure is avoided through impersonalization; ‘this decision [to sell the business] … would have delivered excellent value … However, it was not to be’;

– Changing attitudes to fit behaviour: Management’s behaviour is evaluated as unproblematic and conducive to success, so the speaker claims consistency of, rather than change in, attitude; ‘The benefits [of selling the business] would have been substantial and … should the right opportunities arise in future … we would have to seriously consider them’;

10. For the gendered, i.e. culturally masculine, aspect of this metaphor, cf. Kiesling (2012: 377) and Koller (2004: 11).


– Emphasizing attributes associated with success: This is done through the discourse feature of positive evaluation; ‘we can be the lowest cost producer’;

– Derogating others: This is realized only once, with relation to the government and by means of inchoative aspect and diminutives; ‘A start was made in the budget on Wednesday, which, although it brought little relief, at least recognised the need not to inflict further tax imposition on Business’.

To summarize, the speaker uses the occasion to defend management’s decisions in view of the company’s difficulties, to persuade the audience of Corus’ sound fundamentals and to enhance his own self and the collective self of senior management. Overall then, the text presents the company, its management and not least the speaker in a positive light, while the audience only receives an occasional acknowledgement. Such self-centredness and self-enhancement signals pragmatic failure in that it risks undermining the discourse goals of defence and persuasion.

6. Conclusion and implications

The critical socio-cognitive study of corporate discourse, here and in previous work, shows persuasion and impression management as its predominant goals. These are achieved by strong in-group favouritism, but little out-group denigration, which can in itself be seen as a sign of self-centredness. While in-group favouritism relates to social identities, personal ones are equally, perhaps even more, at stake in corporate discourse. Thus, a (proclaimed) collective ethos, manifest in the exclusive we, is juxtaposed with a focus on the individual in terms of self-enhancement. That organizations are used as platforms for individual egos is of course not a new insight, but in this paper, I have shown the often subtle linguistic means by which this is achieved and have interpreted the findings in a socio-cognitive framework.

Self-enhancement is another problem that we can identify with corporate discourse. It is a business problem, in that it militates against speakers’ persuasive intent by disregarding and alienating the audience and thus risks losing the goodwill of stakeholders. However, and more pertinent to a critical study, self-enhancement also poses a social and ethical problem in that any decision taken with a view to boosting one’s ego impact on employees and other stakeholders, possibly adversely. Corporate discourse therefore needs critical and applied intervention to address this and other problems as well as critical socio-cognitive analysis to understand how it helps to perpetuate such problems.

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