This edited book is an enlightening and comprehensive exploration of various aspects of corporate communication. It covers a great deal of ground in corporate communication and is useful for both its topical content and inclusion of a variety of methodological and theoretical perspectives. The fourteen chapters are organized into sections on sponsorship, advertising, reporting, and organizational communication. Paola Allori & Giuliana Garzone begin with an introductory chapter describing how business practices have expanded systems of interacting with stakeholders, and the central role played by language and discourse in creating corporate identities. In the next chapter, Jane Lung briefly discusses some of the intercultural communication issues that may arise through management and marketing using a Hong Kong case study.
Chs. 3–6 deal with corporate sponsorship, beginning with Giuliana Garzone's illuminating analysis of the marketing tactics of Accenture in their sponsorship of Tiger Woods and other organizations. Through careful choice of sponsored individuals and events, the company portrays a “high performance” theme, skillfully using linguistic elements to promote values and create associations with events and individuals. In Ch. 4, Paola Allori examines the hybrid genre of the philanthromercial (82, 94), where companies embed a marketing message within the primary message of philanthropy. Her study of company websites during the 2006 Torino Olympics shows how corporate image and identity are constructed multimodally. In the following chapters, Francesca Santulli discusses strategies of sponsorship using the Volkswagen Group's intercultural sponsorship of large events, and Paola Catenaccio theorizes about corporate philanthropy through a linguistic examination of Arts & Business vignettes.
In the advertising section, Cecilia Boggio presents a multimodal analysis of a Volkswagen ad aimed at elite audiences, and Geraldine Hynes and Marius Janson compare two cell phone internet ads using semiotics. Erika Salsnik's study in Ch. 9 is a corpus-based analysis of translated and native-language advertorials in Italian media. The next section contains contributions that examine reporting, and both chapters concern the communication behaviors of banks. Using corpus techniques, Donatella Malavasi conducts an analysis of banks' annual reports (AR), while Chiara Degano examines the sustainable focus of corporate social responsibility (CSR) in banking policies. The authors find that both ARs and CSR policies employ linguistic devices to help advertise and construct corporate identities and images.
The final three chapters focus broadly on organizational communication. Elizabeth Saatci's chapter examines transcripts of conference calls from a CDA perspective to understand how such calls may serve as a site for corporate identity construction. Ulisse Belotti's study is a corpus-based analysis of eighteen Invitations For Bids (IFBs), which finds that the documents reflect an asymmetrical power relation between the bidder and the buyer. Similarly, Sylvain Dieltjens & Priscilla Heynderickx use a corpus-based approach to analyze the we pronouns ons/onze in Dutch business communications. The analysis specifically focuses on collocations, which the authors find serve to evoke company discourse and solidarity (314).
