In times of crisis: a corpus approach to the construction of the global financial crisis in annual reports

Abstract

Although both academics and policy-makers still debate its exact causes and the extent of its consequences, the ongoing financial crisis is doubtlessly the most distinctive economic event of the late 2000s. But despite the importance of such large-scale economic phenomena, there has been little research on their discursive construction. This paper presents some empirical data to show how the crisis is identified and its boundaries construed in corporate communication, seeking to understand how economic actors selectively shape public perceptions of critical events by routinely emphasising the role of certain agents and stakeholders while ignoring others. Terms for the crisis, their collocates and their discourse preferences are drawn from a 1,500,000-word ad hoc corpus of annual reports.

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