Corporate Elites on Stage : Speech Acts and Genre Positionings in Professional Communication

Summary, in English

Inspired by Austin’s work on the performativity of speech acts, Goffman’s notion of speaker positionings and Swales’ notion of genre moves, this paper explores how annual general meetings as a corporate genre are governed and propelled by the Swedish Companies Act, the Swedish Code of Corporate Conduct as well as explicit and tacit genre expectations. While observing more than thirty corporate annual general meetings for listed companies at Nasdaq Stockholm in Sweden over three years, we identified that the corporate elites populating the stages at these meetings act as meeting-professionals. Being meeting-professionals, the corporate elites have acquired knowledge of how to conduct a formal meeting by learning the genre, identifying which positions are available during a meeting and, based on these two pieces of knowledge, utter speech acts. Our concluding discussion points to the need for future studies of how corporate elites learn and use genres of corporate communication to utter speech acts that ultimately form these kinds of formal meetings and perpetuate capitalist relations.

• Author: Henrik Rahm; Alexander Paulsson
• Department/s: Swedish; CIRCLE; Organizational Studies
• Publishing year: 2024-04-19
• Language: English
• Pages: 62-75
• Publication/Series: Fachsprache Journal of Professional and Scientific Communication
• Volume: 46
• Issue: 1-2
• Links: http://dx.doi.org/10.24989/fs.v46i1-2.2001
• Document type: Journal article
• Publisher: Facultas Verlags- und Buchhandels AG
• Topic: Communication Studies
• Keywords: corporate annual general meetings; genre moves; meeting professionals; genre moves, meeting-professionals, performative speech acts; speaker positionings
• Status: Published
• ISBN/ISSN/Other: ISSN: 1017-3285