Resumen de Who “we” are: The construction of American corporate identityin the Corporate Values Statement genre
The aim of this paper is twofold: (i) to describe the corporate value statement (CVS)genre in terms of extant genre theories, and (ii) to describe how American corporateidentity is constructed therein. The descriptions of the genre and of the constructionof corporate identity are data-driven and based on examples of CVS extracted fromthe webpages of fifteen American corporations. Both the internal (geared toward thecompany’s employees) and the external (computer mediated and geared to thegeneral public) realizations of the CVS genre are analyzed. The last section of the paper is devoted to a quantitative analysis of the genre’s rhetorical strategies. Morespecifically, the analysis focused on the type of self-reference (epistemic or agentive)that was chosen to construct corporate identity. The results, although tentative,indicate that identity construction is not discourse-specific, but genre-specific, andthat identity is co-constructed differently depending on the specific community thegenre targets.
