Matteo Fuoli

Assessing social responsibility: A quantitative analysis of Appraisal in BP’s and IKEA’s social reports

A growing public awareness of the potential negative impacts of corporate activities on the natural environment and society compels large companies to invest increasing resources in the communication of their responsible conduct. This article employs Appraisal theory in a comparative analysis of BP’s and IKEA’s 2009 social reports, each company’s record of their non-financial performance. The main objective is to explore how, through Appraisal resources, BP and IKEA construct their corporate identity and relationship with their stakeholders. The analysis reveals two markedly different approaches to the construction of a responsible corporate identity. While BP deploys interpersonal resources to portray itself as a trustworthy and authoritative expert, IKEA discloses itself as a sensitive and caring corporation, engaged in a continual effort to improve. These differences are interpreted in light of the legitimization challenges the two companies face.

Comparing two methods for crowdsourcing speech transcription

This paper presents the results of an experimental study conducted with the aim of comparing two methods for crowdsourcing speech transcription that incorporate two different quality control mechanisms (i.e. explicit versus implicit) and that are based on two different processes (i.e. parallel versus iterative). In the Gold Standard method the same speech segment is transcribed in parallel by multiple contributors whose reliability is checked with respect to some reference transcriptions provided by experts. On the other hand, in the Dual Pathway method two independent groups of contributors work on the same set of transcriptions refining them in an iterative way until they converge, and thus eliminating the need to have reference transcriptions and to check transcription quality in a separate phase. These two methods were tested on about half an hour of broadcast news speech and for two different European languages, namely German and Italian. Both methods obtained good results in terms of Word Error Rate (WER) and compare well with the word disagreement rate of experts on the same data.

Texturing a responsible corporate identity: A comparative analysis of Appraisal in BP's and IKEA's 2009 corporate social reports

In response to a growing public demand for corporate accountability and social responsibility, large companies are investing increasing efforts in the communication of their responsible conduct. Through corporate social reports, they voluntarily account for the social and environmental effects of their operations and document their efforts to implement sustainability principles. This paper presents a comparative analysis of BP’s and IKEA’s 2009 corporate social reports. The analysis combines Appraisal theory and corpus-linguistic methods to identify and compare patterns of evaluative language and modality in the two reports. The main goal of the analysis is to explore how, through these language resources, BP and IKEA construct their corporate identity and negotiate their relationship with their audience. The analysis reveals significant differences in the use of Appraisal resources between the two reports, which reflect broader differences in the relative emphasis the companies put on certain traits of their corporate persona.

Trust-building strategies in corporate discourse: An experimental study

This article presents a scenario-based experiment designed to test the effects of trust-building strategies, realised in stance-taking acts, which a previous corpus-based study found to be salient features of stakeholder-facing corporate communication. The experiment relies on a between-subjects design in which a target group of subjects are exposed to trust-building strategies while another control group of subjects are not. We apply this paradigm to corporate discourse in the form of an About Us webpage produced by a fictitious multinational pharmaceutical company that has been accused by a whistle-blower of corporate misconduct. The results of the study show that these strategies are indeed effective in fostering trust in the company and have an indirect positive effect on the perceived credibility of the company’s denial in response to the allegations made by the whistle-blower. The strategies are therefore able to mitigate the potential damage caused by public accusations of wrongdoing and help companies insure against future threats to their legitimacy and freedom to operate, as when their behaviour violates, or is said to violate, societal norms and values. Theoretically, the results provide insights into the psychological mechanisms of trust-building and reader response. Methodologically, the study contributes to the growing body of work using experimental methods in Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) by further demonstrating that experimentation can usefully complement more traditional discourse-analytical methods as a form of triangulation.