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In:Engagement in Professional Genres:
Edited by Carmen Sancho Guinda
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 301] 2019
► pp. 87–100

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Chapter 5
Rebuilding trust in the banking sector

Engaging with readers in corporate press releases

 | Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, United Kingdom
Published online: 24 April 2019
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.301.05mcl
Abstract
The financial crisis and various international scandals are widely viewed as having eroded trust in the banking sector, leading to calls for banks to act urgently to rebuild trust among stakeholders. This chapter examines one type of stakeholder communication, namely press releases on the subject of customer complaints, and aims to identify mechanisms by which the UK bank Barclays engages with customers as a means of regaining their trust. It shows that, through reader reference and transitivity structures in which readers (and writer) are projected into particular roles, Barclays seeks to demonstrate ability and benevolence, two of the three dimensions of an organisation’s trustworthiness (Mayer et al. 1995), and that the emphasis shifts from one to the other over time.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Trust and trust repair
    • 2.1Literature on trust
    • 2.2Defining and conceptualising trust
  • 3.Data and methods
    • 3.1Data
    • 3.2Methods
  • 4.Results
    • 4.1Reader reference
    • 4.2Role projection
      • 4.2.1February 2011 to February 2013
      • 4.2.2August 2013 to February 2015
  • 5.Discussion
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
  • Appendix
References (28)
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Dontcheva-Navratilova, Olga, Martin Adam, Renata Povolná & Radek Vogel
2020. Persuasive Strategies Across the Academic, Business, Religious and Technical Discourses. In Persuasion in Specialised Discourses, ► pp. 39 ff. DOI logo

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