‘Metaphoring’ people out of this world: A Critical Discourse Analysis of a chairman's statement of a UK defence firm

We introduce Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), an interdisciplinary approach to analysing written and spoken texts, which provides accounting researchers with a range of resources to analyse corporate narrative documents more systematically and in more detail from a linguistic perspective. CDA addresses how the content and the linguistic features of texts influence, and are in turn influenced, by the contexts of text production, distribution, reception and adaptation, and by the wider socio-economic context in which texts are embedded. We apply Fairclough's (2003, 2006) Dialectic-Relational approach to the analysis of a chairman's statement of a UK defence firm. The focus of analysis is on the grammatical devices used to represent organisational activities and outcomes in ways which obfuscate social agency (impersonalisation) and to evaluate social actors, entities, and social events (evaluation). We find that impersonalisation and evaluation are used strategically to guide organisational audiences’ interpretations of financial performance and to legitimise and normalise violence and destruction by depicting it in an abstract and sanitised manner.

► Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) constitutes a methodology for analysing corporate narrative documents more systematically and in more detail from a linguistic perspective.
► We apply Fairclough's (2003, 2006) Dialectic-Relational approach to the analysis of a chairman's statement of a UK defence firm.
► Impersonalisation (the obfuscation of social agents) and evaluation (the attribution of qualities to social actors, entities, and social events) are used strategically to guide audiences’ interpretations of organisational activities and outcomes.
► Impersonalisation also plays a major part in legitimising and normalising violence and destruction by depicting it in an abstract and sanitised manner.