Objectives
The project aims to analyze the manifestation of transparency in the English-language disclosure practices of corporations and institutional actors operating in international/intercultural contexts. The investigation will be undertaken from the theoretical, descriptive, and applied perspectives. On a theoretical level, transparency will be examined as a multifaceted construct that can take on different meanings depending on the context of usage. In corporate and institutional settings, transparency transcends the notion of openness when providing information to the public to also include more nuanced interpretations involving an organization’s overall reputation as a transparent actor, as well as its communicative efforts to be perceived as transparent and, by implication, as honest and ethical. Particularly the latter entails a strategic use of language to produce communications that are seen as efficient and reliable, but also committed to maintaining an ongoing dialogue with key stakeholders and the public at large. Moreover, given the implementation of normative documents (e.g., European Union Transparency Directives 2004/2007/2013) that in some contexts have institutionalized the concept of transparency, organizations may also view it from a promotional perspective as a means to convey a desired image and distinguish themselves from competitors.
On a descriptive level, the project will focus on how and to what extent transparency emerges in the public disclosures of corporations and institutions whose activities have implications for stakeholders on a global level. The analysis will be based on a wide range of disclosure genres available from corporate and institutional websites, as well as communicative events such as interviews and debates involving representatives or spokespeople of (supra)national institutions. These genres include various types of reports and informative documents, audiovisual presentations, interactive texts on digital platforms, Q&A sessions, and dialogues or talks broadcast for the general audience. Particular attention will be paid to features that may characterize—but also enhance or impede—the communication of transparency, including specific lexico-grammatical items, pragmatic devices to establish identities and relations, rhetorical strategies and structural patterning of texts, and multimodal features (including non-verbal communication). Aspects of intercultural communication—specifically those that facilitate or hinder sharing information effectively with people from other linguacultural backgrounds—will also be investigated. As culture heavily influences expectations of communication contexts, it will be important to explore how culturally-connoted linguistic choices influence the perceived transparency of utterances at the microlevel and of speakers at the macrolevel. The presence and function of interculturalism, communication strategies to pre-empt and solve comprehension problems as well potential conflicts, and interpersonal attitudes will also be taken into consideration.
On the applied level, the implications of the theoretical and descriptive investigations will be elaborated into practice-oriented applications and activities. For professional settings, the results can lead to a constructive discussion between academia and practice on the role of the effective communication of transparency to enhance relations with stakeholders. In addition, the results of the analyses of the corpora can be translated into recommendations or guidelines that promote the clear, consistent, and open disclosure practices that stakeholders desire, as well as engaging and innovative formats that reflect the nexus between transparency and issues of concern in an ongoing dialogue. For academic settings, the collected corpora will serve as a source for conducting research to inform the pedagogical settings targeting English for professional purposes and for developing data-driven state-of-the-art teaching materials that highlight the distinctive structural, linguistic, rhetorical, and multimodal features of disclosure genres that learners need to master for their future careers.
Methodology
The project is based on the systematic collection and analysis of written and oral texts encoding the disclosure practices of corporate and institutional discourse communities. The methodology relies on well-consolidated theoretical/analytical frameworks that reflect both qualitative and quantitative approaches capable of providing in-depth insights into how various types of discourse are used in particular contexts. Among these are:
- genre analysis to identify the linguistic, discursive and rhetorical features of discourse used by professional communities of practice to achieve their communicative purposes
- corpus-assisted discourse analysis that implements the empirical methods of corpus linguistics to retrieve linguistic features of interest for subsequent qualitative analysis within their context of usage in order to reveal distinctive patterns and themes
- pragmalinguistics to investigate linguistic forms used to carry out specific language functions (e.g., speech acts, evaluation) and to convey meanings associated with participant roles and interpersonal relations
- critical discourse analysis that addresses the dialectical relationship between discourse and the social environment in which it takes place, and thus particularly suitable for socially-charged issues such as transparency, that may also involve manipulation and discrimination multimodality to illuminate the role of multiple semiotic resources beyond verbal language (e.g. visual images, speech prosody, gesturing, body language), an aspect that takes on special importance when exploring the increasingly prevalent multimedia communications of modern organizations and actors
- intercultural communication to shed light on how speakers use verbal and non-verbal communication to convey content effectively in an international environment and on how culture influences linguistic choices and strategies of disclosure. Looking at the culturally-connoted features of discourse is of paramount interest in a world where mass media are increasingly globalized and accessible to widespread audiences.
The research units will collect and investigate a series of interrelated specialized corpora consisting of written and oral texts used for purposes of corporate and institutional disclosure in order to explore the common theme of transparency and how it emerges across diverse sectors of operation and communicative events. Towards this end and drawing on the theoretical/analytical frameworks indicated above, the corpora will be analyzed to understand how transparency is manifested in:
- rhetorical patterning to identify distinguishing generic features of texts, especially new forms that exploit digital resources and channels,
- intertextuality and interdiscursivity that show how texts are related to and build upon each other,
- particular lexico-grammatical items associated with meanings salient to the communicative context
- interpersonal elements that encode identities and relationships between producers and consumers of texts,
- the synergistic relationship between multiple semiotic modes in the construction of meaning by means of multimodal discourse analysis.
- intercultural aspects to establish relationships between linguistic and paralinguistic expressions and cultural contents.
Moreover, for enhanced interpretive insights, the research units will seek contacts with professional informants involved in the disclosure practices of the organizations represented in the corpora, whose real-life experiences can provide valuable knowledge in relation to research results (Hyland, 2000), while also offering a better understanding of how the analyzed texts align with the aims and processes of the larger communicative context.
Project phases
The project is articulated into three main phases:
A) Review of the relevant literature followed by the design, collection, and editing of the various corpora;
B) Analysis of the corpora to tease out and interpret the linguistic/extra linguistic expression of transparency;
C) Results and applications of the research conducted on the corpora.
A. Review of the relevant literature and collection of the corpora (12 months)
The literature review phase of the project will include a focus on the notion of transparency and how it relates to the ongoing dialogue between organizations and their stakeholders that, in turn, leads to the establishment of trust. Because transparency is a complex construct linked to interrelated notions of openness, honesty, and accountability, it is important to acquire a solid theoretical foundation in order to understand how transparency is constructed in written and oral communications on the linguistic, discursive, rhetorical, and multimodal levels. In addition, building on the experience of the research units in relation to the analysis of corporate and institutional discourse and genres, the literature review phase will also entail a survey of recent relevant studies in these areas. Particular attention will be paid to how traditional forms of communication are evolving thanks to digital affordances and how new ones are emerging, as well as their role in addressing ethical issues involved in transparency-related disclosure in ways that are both comprehensible and relevant to stakeholders. Finally, to further expand the expertise of the research units in the area of corpus linguistics, potentially new methodological approaches and tools will be explored in the literature. The project foresees the compilation of a series of modular corpora collected across the research units according to pre-established corpus design criteria to facilitate subsequent analysis and ensure comparability. Although the various corpora will include texts that represent different disclosure genres, discourse domains, professional settings, and communicative modes, the common theme of transparency will result in an appropriate tertium comparationis. The compilation process will entail the collection of entirely new data or build on a base of already existing corpora that can be extended with new modules. Each research unit will identify sectors and/or communicative events of interest with publicly available resources containing written and/or oral disclosure genres (e.g., corporate and/or institutional websites, interviews, debates, talks) to be downloaded for inclusion in its corpus. This process may also involve editing to prepare the texts for elaboration with corpus tools, transcription, or annotation with metadata, according to the specific research objectives of the unit. The results expected from this project phase include: the review of the relevant theoretical, descriptive and methodological literature; the formulation of criteria for corpus compilation to be applied across the research units; and the preparation of preliminary corpus samples to assess adequate alignment with project aims and make any necessary adjustments. During this phase, two internal workshops will be organized to share insights from a) the literature reviewed and b) the data and methodological approaches identified. Moreover, a website will be set up to enable shared access to documentation of interest to the project and to serve as a repository for the collected corpora.
B. Analysis of corpora (12/18 months)
The research units will conduct analyses to identify the linguistic/extralinguistic expression of transparency across the various corpus components by means of qualitative and quantitative analyses of a range of features relating, for example, to discursive structure, linguistic forms and functions, pragmatic meanings, rhetorical strategies, and nonverbal semiotic resources. Quantitative linguistic analysis will make use of corpus methods such as word frequencies; concordancing for contextual insights; analyses of keywords, collocations, clusters, and phraseological features; grammatical and semantic analyses by means of corpus annotation tools; and lexico-grammatical patterning. Qualitative analysis aiming to distinguish structural organization and generic features will be conducted on smaller samples extracted from the corpora. The contribution of other modes beyond verbal language will be investigated through methods for multimodal discourse analysis, as applied to both static texts combining visuals with written language and dynamic texts, such as streaming videos, also using software for the annotation and simultaneous display of multiple communicative modes (e.g., speech, gesturing, gaze direction, body positioning). In the initial period of this phase (6-12 months), the focus will be on selected corpus components as they are collected, also including case studies of particular datasets within the corpora. These analyses will then lead to larger-scale studies in the remaining months of this phase as the corpora are completed, as well as comparisons with other corpora collected within the project and external reference corpora for benchmarking purposes. The expected research products are: the development of modular corpora of corporate and institutional disclosure genres; national/international conference presentations and scientific publications based on preliminary analyses of the corpora. In addition, two internal workshops will be organized to share results and monitor the progress of the research units.
C. Results and applications (6/12 months)
The final phase of the project will be dedicated to 1) writing up the results of further research conducted on the completed corpora for publication in national/international scientific journals and 2) encounters with other researchers and/or research groups with related interests during national/international conferences to present and discuss the project results. In this phase, we also intend to develop practical applications (i.e., recommendations for disclosure practices in professional settings and teaching materials for English for professional communication) to be made available on the project website.
Contribution to the advancement of knowledge and dissemination of results
The outcomes of the project will contribute to the existing body of knowledge on the concept of transparency as construed in organizational and social contexts across multiple disciplinary areas (e.g. organizational communication, management studies, business ethics), but will offer important insights deriving from the linguistic expertise of the research units. Indeed, although this timely concept has been studied extensively in communication, public relations, and management research, the emphasis has been on what transparency is and what it does, rather than how it is manifested, which requires the language-oriented approach that will be implemented in this project.
The results of the ongoing analysis of the corpora will be presented at national and international seminars and conferences dealing with professional communication and related topics (e.g., Applied Linguistics and Professional Practice (ALAPP), Discourse, Communication and the Enterprise Conference (DICOEN), Discourse Approaches to Financial Communication (DAFC), Association for Business Communication (ABC)). Research articles reporting key project results will be submitted for publication in edited volumes of international publishing houses, as well as leading scientific journals such as Journal of Applied Linguistics and
Professional Practice; Discourse & Communication; Intercultural Pragmatics, Discourse, Context and Media; English for Specific Purposes; and International Journal of Business Communication. In particular, research products will address topics such as:
- the contribution of multidisciplinary theoretical approaches for insights into the notion of transparency in corporate and institutional settings
- the technology-driven evolution of traditional disclosure genres and the introduction of new ones used to promote transparency
- the description and critical examination of lexical, discursive, pragmatic, and multimodal features of transparency in disclosure genres
- the role of English in the disclosure practices of organizations that operate in international and intercultural settings
- the training of learners of English to successfully engage with disclosure genres in professional settings
The dissemination of the results as outlined above can also represent a first step in bridging the gap between research and practice. This is seen, for example, in the work of specialized journalists who closely follow and contact academics for interviews in order to report the findings of their studies in publications aimed at professionals and practitioners.