Bankers communicating wrongdoing and failure: Apologies or apologetics?
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Ruth Breeze
Ruth Breeze is Principal Investigator of the Public Discourse Research Group at the Institute for Culture and Society, University of Navarra, Spain. She is coeditor of
Pandemic and Crisis Discourse: Communicating COVID-19 and Public Health Strategy (with Andreas Musolff, Kayo Kondo and Sara Vilar-Lluch, Bloomsbury, 2022), andImagining the Peoples of Europe. Populist discourses across the political spectrum (with Jan Zienkowski, John Benjamins, 2019).
Abstract
This paper analyses letters to shareholders by bank presidents in the ten years after the financial crisis to establish whether apologies for corporate wrongdoing and mismanagement are present, and if not, how these negative aspects are communicated. Apologies and quasi apologies are shown to be part of a wider repertoire of strategies including alignment with those affected, disassociation from negative events, scapegoating of perpetrators, and promises of future good conduct. These findings are discussed in terms of the banks’ ongoing relationship with shareholders, and their wider reputation management endeavours.
About the author
Ruth Breeze is Principal Investigator of the Public Discourse Research Group at the Institute for Culture and Society, University of Navarra, Spain. She is coeditor of Pandemic and Crisis Discourse: Communicating COVID-19 and Public Health Strategy (with Andreas Musolff, Kayo Kondo and Sara Vilar-Lluch, Bloomsbury, 2022), and Imagining the Peoples of Europe. Populist discourses across the political spectrum (with Jan Zienkowski, John Benjamins, 2019).
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© 2021 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Editorial
- Conative calls to animals: From Arusa Maasai to a cross-linguistic prototype
- Bankers communicating wrongdoing and failure: Apologies or apologetics?
- Anti-Chinese sentiment in the Czech public service media during the COVID-19 pandemic
- The ideological effect of pre COVID-19 metaphors on our perceptions of technology during the pandemic
- Metaphor in the written discourse of Arab students at a College of Education in Israel
- ZPD-based mediation of L2 learners’ comprehension of implicatures: An educational praxis framework
- Compliment Response (CR) patterns among English vs. Persian teachers: Cultural transmission of CR behavior?
- Madeiran emigration to South Africa since the 1960s: A sociocultural and linguistic perspective
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Editorial
- Conative calls to animals: From Arusa Maasai to a cross-linguistic prototype
- Bankers communicating wrongdoing and failure: Apologies or apologetics?
- Anti-Chinese sentiment in the Czech public service media during the COVID-19 pandemic
- The ideological effect of pre COVID-19 metaphors on our perceptions of technology during the pandemic
- Metaphor in the written discourse of Arab students at a College of Education in Israel
- ZPD-based mediation of L2 learners’ comprehension of implicatures: An educational praxis framework
- Compliment Response (CR) patterns among English vs. Persian teachers: Cultural transmission of CR behavior?
- Madeiran emigration to South Africa since the 1960s: A sociocultural and linguistic perspective
