Target's Corporate Identity and its Reflection in Employee's Anonymous Reviews of the Company
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Marta Mysakowska
Abstract
The purpose of this case study is to investigate the identity linguistically and cognitively presented by official Target Corporation’s discourse and to unveil any structures or elements that are prominent enough to be included in the employees’ discourse production. The assumption is that the particular language we speak and the structures we choose in various contexts predispose us to think and act in certain ways. As for the approach utilized in this research, it is rather data-driven than data-based. Methods of Critical Discourse Analysis (Wodak and Meyer 2001) are employed and they are supplemented by Critical Metaphor Analysis (Charteris-Black 2005). The sampling of the customers was opportunistic. The identity in and around organization can be effectively investigated through linguistic methods. The study has shown that the vision of the company’s identity is more integrated by the executives and team leaders than grassroots employees. The paper draws attention to the very basic level of communication and its potential of imposing certain conceptualizations – the actual building blocks of any narrative. Moreover, the methodology employed goes beyond mere content analysis and applies rigorous linguistic analysis of company discourse.
© 2014 by Walter de Gruyter Berlin Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Editorial
- Effect of Gender on Language Performance of American Speakers, Russian Native Speakers, and American L2 Learners of Russian in a Complaint Situation
- Gender Stereotypes in Media Business Discourse: Variations in Identities, Contexts and Cultures
- Language of Cyber-Politics: "Imaging/Imagining" Communities
- Deictic Representations of Person in Media Discourse
- Target's Corporate Identity and its Reflection in Employee's Anonymous Reviews of the Company
- Review of Proximization: The pragmatics of symbolic distance crossing by Piotr Cap
- Review of Developments in Linguistic Humour Theory by Marta Dynel
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Editorial
- Effect of Gender on Language Performance of American Speakers, Russian Native Speakers, and American L2 Learners of Russian in a Complaint Situation
- Gender Stereotypes in Media Business Discourse: Variations in Identities, Contexts and Cultures
- Language of Cyber-Politics: "Imaging/Imagining" Communities
- Deictic Representations of Person in Media Discourse
- Target's Corporate Identity and its Reflection in Employee's Anonymous Reviews of the Company
- Review of Proximization: The pragmatics of symbolic distance crossing by Piotr Cap
- Review of Developments in Linguistic Humour Theory by Marta Dynel
