In today’s technologically advanced society, where companies rely on the internet for their externally and internally addressed information, texts on websites have come to be essential for the construction of a positive and... [ view full abstract ]
In today’s technologically advanced society, where companies rely on the internet for their externally and internally addressed information, texts on websites have come to be essential for the construction of a positive and attractive company image. It is by means of texts that the organization disseminates a picture of its history, its visions for the future, and its current goals, policies and ideas. It is also by means of web texts that the company describes and promotes their available jobs. On the career oriented websites, we find job advertisements and also stories featuring individual employees.
In my paper, I analyse career stories published on the websites of eight multinational companies: ABB, AstraZeneca, Bosch, Electrolux, Ericsson, IKEA, Nokia and Siemens. The stories feature individual employees, with one or several photos, a narrative and sometimes also a video. The narrative includes data concerning their career, what their job is like and how they perceive the company as an employer.
Using a methodological framework which combines text linguistics and narratology, the analysis is structured around “foregrounded content”, “voice”, “salient elements” and “model reader” (Eco 1984, Gunnarsson 2009, 2014; Mishler 1987).
The stories reflect the modern working life, thus contributing to an update of the multinational’s “organizational memory” (cf. Linde 2009). My analysis explores which common values, and key words, are used to describe an attractive workplace and a good employer, and how success and employability are constructed. Gender, ethnicity and status are also focused in the analysis.
References
Eco, Umberto. 1984. The role of the reader. Explorations in the semiotics of text. Bloomington Indiana University.
Gunnarsson, Britt-Louise. 2009. Professional Discourse. London and New York: Continuum.
Gunnarsson, Britt-Louise. 2014. Business discourse in the globalized economy: The construction of an attractive workplace culture on the Internet. In: Discourse in Context, ed. J. Flowerdew, 91-112. London, etc.: Bloomsbury.
Linde, Charlotte. 2009. Working the Past: Narrative and Institutional Memory. New York: Oxford University Press.
Mishler, Elliot G. 1987.”The interactional construction of narratives in medical and life-history interviews. In The Construction of Professional Discourse, eds. B.-L- Gunnarsson, P. Linell, and B. Nordberg, 223-244. London and New York: Longman.
