1,720,992 research outputs found
Discourse, Communication and the Enterprise: Where Business Meets Discourse
No full textThis volume collects research studies that investigate various aspects of corporate communication from the viewpoint of language and discourse, giving special attention to emerging issues and recent developments in times of rapid sociotechnical evolutions.
“Discourse, Communication and the Enterprise (DICOEN)” is the denomination of a global informal research network, comprising scholars from all continents working in a variety of disciplines – linguistics, discourse analysis, communication studies, organisation and management studies, economics, marketing, accounting, etc.– who are interested in the relevance of discourse and communication to the world of business and organizations. Researchers belonging to this informal network meet every two years to discuss the results of their investigations, exchange views on research methods and analytical tools in light of the latest developments, pinpoint topical issues and research themes to which the attention of the discipline is currently addressed, and debate them collaboratively. The chapters of this book are loosely based on a selection of the papers presented at the DICOEN VI Conference, held in Naples in June 2015.
The choice of the aspects to be dealt with in the various chapters was made with a view to covering a range of issues and topics that is as wide and representative as possible, providing a broad outline of ongoing research in the area of business and corporate communication.
The resulting collection includes studies that are diverse in their outlook, analytical procedures, and objects of enquiry, spanning across various areas of corporate communication, both external and internal: corporate image and reputation management, various forms of corporate behaviour, branding at different levels including employer branding, recruiting, consumer reviews, etc. Similarly diversified are the settings, genres and media analysed (from face-to-face interaction to communication through the press, from traditional websites to social networking sites). But, in broad terms, all the studies presented in this volume are set in a discourse-analytical framework and share the ultimate purpose of providing new insights into the evolution of communication and discourse practices in the corporate environment, taking account of the most important issues that have attracted researchers’ interest and are still open to debate
Genre hybridization in annual reports: the case of Walmart
No full textAnnual reports typically include a letter to the shareholders signed by the CEO of the company. The reports are usually well crafted, printed on glossy paper and enriched with photographs and coloured images in the narrative section. It is indeed common knowledge that while being a required financial document, they also work as marketing material with the double aim of offering business/financial information and presenting the best qualities of the company. This dual character is also reflected in annual reports’ discourse, which has been widely acknowledged as an instance of hybrid genre (Bhatia 2010; de Groot 2013; White and Hanson 2000; Zanola 2009). The dual aim and target of annual reports have prompted scholars to analyse them through linguistic, multimodal, and semiotic approaches to define the contours of the interdiscursive nature (Bhatia 2010) of this textual genre. Hence, annual reports are both simultaneously and ambiguously, required financial documents and marketing tools to advertise businesses. Such ambiguity reflects on the communicative content of these reports. In this paper, we carried out a diachronic analysis of Walmart’s annual reports. The study integrates visual, lexical, and syntactical analysis of annual reports over an eight-year time span. Our objective was to describe discursive aspects of annual reports at multiple textual levels and to observe whether and toward what direction the discourse has developed. In order to achieve this aim, we identified Walmart’s annual reports as an ideal corpus. Firstly, they are freely available online, encouraging this way the attraction of both technical and non-technical audiences; moreover, older reports are also available for consultation and comparison. Secondly, Walmart is a huge American multinational business, which operates in 28 countries and is considered the world's largest company by revenue. It turns out that Walmart is inherently global and serves a very diversified audience.
This study may contribute both to the characterization of annual reports as a hybrid genre, and to the compilation of an anthology of textual and interdiscursive strategies for annual report writing.
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Discourse, Communication and the Enterprise: Developments and Issues. An Introduction
No full textThis Chapter is the Introduction to the volume “Discourse, Communication and the Enterprise: Where Business Meets Discourse”, which collects research studies that investigate various aspects of corporate communication from the viewpoint of language and discourse, giving special attention to emerging issues and recent developments in times of rapid sociotechnical evolutions.
“Discourse, Communication and the Enterprise (DICOEN)” is the denomination of a global informal research network, comprising scholars from all continents working in a variety of disciplines – linguistics, discourse analysis, communication studies, organisation and management studies, economics, marketing, accounting, etc.– who are interested in the relevance of discourse and communication to the world of business and organizations. Researchers belonging to this informal network meet every two years to discuss the results of their investigations, exchange views on research methods and analytical tools in light of the latest developments, pinpoint topical issues and research themes to which the attention of the discipline is currently addressed, and debate them collaboratively. The chapters of this book are loosely based on a selection of the papers presented at the DICOEN VI Conference, held in Naples in June 2015.
This introductory Chapter outlines the rationale underlying the topic and structure of the book and illustrates the contribution to the overall design of the collection given by the various Chapters, all set in a discourse-analytical framework and sharing the ultimate purpose of providing new insights into the evolution of communication and discourse practices in the corporate environment, taking account of the most important issues that have attracted researchers’ interest and are still open to debate
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dear Readers, Dear Fellow shareholders: De-specialization in CEOs' Letters to Shareholders
No full textGenre hybridization in annual reports: the case of Walmart
No full textAnnual reports typically include a letter to the shareholders signed by the CEO of the company. The reports are usually well crafted, printed on glossy paper and enriched with photographs and coloured images in the narrative section. It is indeed common knowledge that while being a required financial document, they also work as marketing material with the double aim of offering business/financial information and presenting the best qualities of the company. This dual character is also reflected in annual reports’ discourse, which has been widely acknowledged as an instance of hybrid genre (Bhatia 2010; de Groot 2013; White and Hanson 2000; Zanola 2009). The dual aim and target of annual reports have prompted scholars to analyse them through linguistic, multimodal, and semiotic approaches to define the contours of the interdiscursive nature (Bhatia 2010) of this textual genre. Hence, annual reports are both simultaneously and ambiguously, required financial documents and marketing tools to advertise businesses. Such ambiguity reflects on the communicative content of these reports. In this paper, we carried out a diachronic analysis of Walmart’s annual reports. The study integrates visual, lexical, and syntactical analysis of annual reports over an eight-year time span. Our objective was to describe discursive aspects of annual reports at multiple textual levels and to observe whether and toward what direction the discourse has developed. In order to achieve this aim, we identified Walmart’s annual reports as an ideal corpus. Firstly, they are freely available online, encouraging this way the attraction of both technical and non-technical audiences; moreover, older reports are also available for consultation and comparison. Secondly, Walmart is a huge American multinational business, which operates in 28 countries and is considered the world's largest company by revenue. It turns out that Walmart is inherently global and serves a very diversified audience.
This study may contribute both to the characterization of annual reports as a hybrid genre, and to the compilation of an anthology of textual and interdiscursive strategies for annual report writing.
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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