Review

Corporate Discourse, Ruth Breeze. Bloomsbury, London (2013). 216 pp., US $140, Hardback, ISBN: 978-1-4411-2718-1
For the past century, companies have had a pervasive and overwhelming inuence on individuals, the economy and
society. As Ruth Breeze comments in the introduction to her book Corporate Discourse, we are so bound up with companies
in various ways and so affected by their actions that their language and practice are of pertinence and importance to us all.
This manifests itself in the increasing interest in research on business and corporate discourse. Research descriptions of
corporate discourse, unfortunately, are still elusive and unsatisfactory because of data accessibility, problem identication
and interpretability (Sarangi, 2002). Breeze makes her contributions to this eld of study by framing what genres, audiences
and activities are involved in corporate communication and demystifying how companies construct their activities,
identities and images through discourses.
This book includes seven chapters, which are mapped in a clear and heuristic sequence of conceptual bases, methodological
approaches and analytical applications. The rst chapter denes corporate identity, image, shareholders and their discursive
construction. Corporate identity is dened as the discursive representation of a companys self-understanding and its
independent legal personality, which is substantiated by corporate culture and values. In contrast, corporate image concerns
social impressions and the reception of a companys outward projection. Therefore, companies seek to construct their images
in line with their identities through their discursive, professional and social practices. In other words, companies want their
stakeholders to perceive them in a particular way and represent themselves so as to achieve this identity construction by
means of persuasive communicative resources and strategies. Breeze classies a companys stakeholders into four categories:
customers, investors, employees and wider public. More importantly, she explains the stakeholder groupings using a genre-
based approach to corporate discourse when she maps analytical applications in Chapters 36. For example, she addresses
company communication with investors through its reication into two genres: the Annual Report and the CEO Letter.
Explaining the link between stakeholders and genres not only highlights relationships between company and its addressees
but also foregrounds the communicative purpose of each genre.
Before moving on to analyses of specic genres, Breeze reviews different approaches to corporate discourse in Chapter 2
and her critical review revolves around the text-to-context continuum of discourse studies. When examining corporate
discourse, one can start either from texts or from the wider social context in which texts perform rhetorical actions. If
one is interested in language-in-use, various text-oriented approaches can be adopted, including genre analysis, corpus
analysis, multimodal research and critical discourse analysis. Breeze emphasizes that a key principle of genre analysis is
to validate the concrete discursive manifestation found in a genre of texts by supplementing the analysis with interview
data or ethnographic research about the context in which the texts are used. As also explained, corpus linguistics holds
considerable promise for corporate discourse studies but currently is employed only to investigate lexical frequency and
association. Even so, multimodal research into the role of semiotic resources in meaning-making is crucial to corporate
discourse and has been applied to studies of advertising and corporate websites. Finally, she argues that critical discourse
analysis could inform our interpretation of corporate discourse in a broader social, cultural and ideological context.
Chapter 2 also assesses two context-oriented paradigms for studying corporate discourse. On the one hand, ethnographic
approaches qualitatively develop an insiders view, usually through observation or interviews. The thick descriptions of
situation they offer can extend researchers understanding and conclusions beyond immediate context and shed light on
the nature of broader social context. On the other hand, intercultural approaches aim to describe and interpret cultural
variations through social anthropological and cultural theories, which help to demystify culture-salient corporate discourse.
Breeze adds that a fuller picture of corporate discourse would be obtained if studies integrated both text and context-
oriented approaches into a coherent vision.
When discussing communication between companies and their employees in Chapter 3, Breeze describes a genre chain
including the job advertisement, the job interview, orientation sessions and employee newsletters. Job advertisements serve
multi-faceted communicative purposes: they not only state the formal requirements for the position and promote a
companys positive image, but also build solidarity with recent hires, which can be evidenced by the frequent use of
positive-connotation nouns, adjectives and adverbs, as well as engagement recourses such as we and you. The job
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interview is taken as a tricky genre because candidates seemingly try to t their language and experience into companies
critical expectations. In this sense, Breeze suggests that Grices cooperative principle and Leechs modesty maxim are
useful frames for the study of job interviews. The orientation session genre is a process of socialization and assimilation
of recently hired employees in which discourse plays a key role in cultivating company loyalty and encouraging new
employees to buy into the corporate image. The genre of employee newsletters contributes to building and maintaining
community, which facilitates reciprocal identication between employee branding and employer branding.
Chapter 4 discusses how companies communicate with their stakeholder investors in terms of Annual Reports. This genre
rides on the balance between factual information and persuasive promotion, within which writers maneuver linguistically
and rhetorically. The Annual Report, consisting mainly of a review of the previous year as well as operation and nancial
reviews, serves the dual purposes of fullling the legal requirement to present accurate information and of forging a positive
company image in public relations. In this sense, it has wider audiences than shareholders and potential investors. For this
reason, Breeze identies various rhetorical strategies used throughout the report. In terms of multimodality, images, colors
and visual information are seen to be abundant in the rst half of the report, which focuses on public relations, whereas the
visual dullness of the second half of the report, which focuses on nancial information, highlights its factuality and
reliability. Linguistically speaking, stance features are frequently used, such as rst-person plural pronouns like we and
evaluation-charged adjectives like good. In addition, modal hedges appear to withhold statements for the sake of
disclaimers. In the remainder of the chapter, Breeze analyzes, as a separate sub-genre, the CEO letter found within the
Annual Report. In this letter, the CEO tends to legitimize the company and restore its reputation in the face of wrongdoing.
Communicating with the world of wider audiences is reected by generic and cultural complexity, as it involves both pres-
ent and potential customers and complicates public relations. Chapter 5 considers advertising, which is organizations most
emblematic discursive type and fullls a salient promotional function aimed at the public. Advertisings persuasive strategies
are made salient by a rich multimodality and the linguistic and rhetorical metaphors embedded in its discourse: associations
are built between images, words or sounds showing the positive attributes of the product or service advertised. However, such
associations are not transferable cross-culturally, so it is suggested that advertising be customized to local culture, particularly
in the case of global advertising. In addition, Breeze discusses howadvertisement colonizes the space and features character-
istic of informative genres, resulting in hybrid genres. A typical example given is advertorials, which appear as advertise-
ments but are written in the style of an editorial report. Even though the deceitfulness/two-sidedness of advertising poses
challenges to analyzing it, Breeze believes the trend toward combining promotional and informative discourse will continue.
Chapter 6 focuses on the Internet as a conduit for companies communication with a global audience, focusing in partic-
ular on company websites. Breeze describes how websites provide a reader/user-friendly platform for conveying corporate
information, for example through the use of about us sections, mission statements, social responsibility reports, annual
reviews and sponsorship. Company websites maintain interaction with readers on both vertical and horizontal planes,
which are presented multimodally through icons, titles, sound and hyperlinks. Although much of the information given on
websites is also present in annual reports, Breeze believes the audience is different. In that regard, about us sections are an
important tool for constructing and negotiating companies identities with linguistic and multimodal choices so as to head
off criticism, present positive images and achieve interactivity.
Chapter 7 concludes with an overview of the previous chapters, distinguishing corporate discourse from academic dis-
course, and proposing a critical reconsideration of corporate discourse. For Breeze, corporate discourse differs fromacademic
discourse in terms of collective undertaking, responsibility for claims and social function. Although the genres of corporate
discourse examined in the book differ in certain respects, they all have purposes in common: to provide appropriate
information and to enhance the companys image. In addition, the specicity of corporate discourse is closely related to
the highly promotional feature of epideictic rhetoric. In the end, Breezes views ideological mechanisms as a driving force
for causing corporations to act as they do, so a critical perspective is needed to reveal the political system and socio-cultural
conventions behind corporate discourses promotional pursuits and constraints.
Corporations powerfully shape our world and our lives. Examining corporate discourse, both internal and external, not
only benets society and individual well-being, but also advances our research and pedagogy in professional communication
(Bhatia, 2004). For this reason, it can be concluded that Breezes work usefully contains practical insights, proposes a
research methodology and provides applied references. Ultimately, understanding corporate discourse and the business
world would be more accessible if the critical perspective developed by Breeze were further broadened to incorporate both
social-political deconstruction and ethnographic recontextualization.
References
Bhatia, V. K. (2004). Worlds of written discourse. London and New York: Continuum.
Sarangi, S. (2002). Discourse practitioners as a community of interprofessional practice: Some insights from health communication research. In C. N.
Candlin (Ed.), Research and practice in professional discourse (pp. 95133). Hong Kong: City University of Hong Kong Press.
Feng Jiang
Centre for Applied English Studies, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong
Harbin Normal University, Harbin, China
E-mail address: kevinjiang@hku.hk
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