BP plc 2010 – a case of linguistic legitimation?

Abstract

Purpose The purpose of this article is to examine statements by the Chairman and CEO in BP plc’s Annual Report 2010 for linguistic evidence of reader positioning. This is based on the premise that reputational fallout from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill would have heightened the need for such positioning to repair the company’s legitimacy. Design/methodology/approach Applying Halliday’s Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) framework, a comparative register analysis was undertaken of the respective statements of the Chairman and CEO of BP plc. This was informed by corpus analysis of these statements, of comparative statements from industry competitors and of two larger-scale corpora constructed from Chairman and CEO statements extracted from the annual reports of 25 FTSE100 companies. Findings The findings suggest that readers’ perceptions are likely to be shaped by the statements of the Chairman and CEO of BP plc in the company’s 2010 annual report, but similarities and differences are apparent in the way this positioning is engineered. Broader corpus analysis hints that these similarities and differences are not localised to BP plc. Research limitations/implications The analysis relies on the assumptions that the Chairman and CEO are the writers of each piece. As with prior research, questions of intent on the part of the corporate authors and impact upon target readers remain unanswered. Practical implications This article demonstrates and highlights the issue of reader positioning through lexico-grammatical choices in corporate disclosures. Originality/value This article makes a contribution to the literature by demonstrating how reader positioning may be engineered through lexico-grammatical choices in corporate disclosures. This article further responds to a call from Sydserff and Weetman (1999, 2002) for interdisciplinary approaches to investigating corporate narrative reports involving linguistics, through foregrounding Halliday’s Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) framework as an analytical tool.