Financial disclosure has become a crucial component of corporate communication. Through this process, companies aim to provide information and project an image of trustworthiness in response to on-going ethical concerns in the world of finance. Rhetoric in financial discourse provides new insights into how companies communicate with key stakeholders, not only to boost transparency, but also to attract investment. The book offers an in-depth linguistic analysis of the rhetorical dimension of financial communication. It focuses on two technology-mediated genres which are widely used, yet remain largely unexplored from a rhetorical perspective: earnings presentations and earnings releases. Using an innovative methodological approach, the book shows how corporate speakers and writers use distinctive rhetorical strategies to achieve their professional goals. It includes a practical discussion of how the findings can be exploited to develop state-of-the-art corporate communication courses and to improve the effectiveness of financial disclosure in professional settings. The book contributes to an enhanced understanding of the language of finance, representing a discourse community that involves and impacts the lives of many people around the world. It will be of interest to several communities of practice, including language researchers, discourse analysts, corpus linguists, finance and communication academics, students of business and finance, and professionals of financial communication. Belinda Crawford Camiciottoli is Associate Professor of English Language and Linguistics at the University of Pisa. Her research focuses on business discourse in both academic and corporate settings. She has published in leading journals, including Discourse & Communication, Business Communication Quarterly and English for Specific Purposes. She is the author of The Language of Business Studies Lectures (2007). She has taught business and organizational communication courses for universities based in Italy, the US and the UAE.

In recent years, household indebtedness in the United States reached its highest levels in history. From mortgages to student loans, from credit card bills to US deficit spending, debt is widespread and increasing. Drawing on scholarship from economics, accounting, and critical rhetoric and social theory, Kellie Sharp-Hoskins critiques debt not as an economic indicator or a tool of finance but as a cultural system. Through case studies of the student-loan crisis, medical debt, and the abuses of municipal bonds, Sharp-Hoskins reveals that debt is a rhetorical construct entangled in broader systems of wealth, rule, and race. Perhaps more than any other social marker or symbol, the concept of “debt” indicates differences between wealthy and poor, productive and lazy, secure and risky, worthy and unworthy. Tracking the emergence and work of debt across temporal and spatial scales reveals how it exacerbates vulnerabilities and inequities under the rhetorical cover of individual, moral, and volitional calculation and equivalency. A new perspective on a serious problem facing our society, Rhetoric in Debt not only reveals how debt organizes our social and cultural relations but also provides a new conceptual framework for a more equitable world.

This book demonstrates the importance of understanding how political rhetoric, financial reporting and media coverage of austerity in transnational contexts is significant to the communicative, social and economic environments in which we live. It considers how aspects of moral storytelling, language, representation and ideology operate through societies in financial crisis and through governments that impose austerity programmes on public spending. Whilst many of the debates covered here are concerned with UK economic policy and British social contexts, the contributions also consider examples from other countries that reflect similar concerns on the ideological operations of austerity and financial discourse. The multiple discursive contexts of austerity demonstrate the breadth of social concerns and conflicts that have developed in societies and institutions following the global economic crisis of 2008. Through its interdisciplinary focus on this topic, this book provides an important contribution across multiple subject areas, with shared interests in critical and analytical approaches to discourse, power and language in social contexts reflecting the healthy collaborative scope of critical discourse studies as a field of research. This book was originally published as a special issue of Critical Discourse Studies.

This book explores the American freemarket economy, espoused by Alan Greenspan, the longtime chairman of the Federal Reserve, through decoding the discourse of economics. Combining an analysis of both economics and language, the legacy of Reaganomics is examined in relation to economic inequality, fiscal policy, public discourse, and the moral economy. How notions of easy money, conspicuous consumption, and unlimited economic growth were harnessed to justify the Free Market revolution is also discussed. This book aims to highlight the drivers of modern inequality and economic distress. It will be relevant to students and researchers interested in the history of economic thought and economic discourse. Geoff Klinger (1966-2021) was Professor of Rhetoric and Director of Forensics at DePauw University. His research and teaching interests included the connection between rhetoric and social theory; political communication; presidential, civil rights, and business rhetoric; and Supreme Court decisions.

Types of knowledge - Ways of knowing - Types of rhetorical research - Knowledge society - Rhetoric of science - Evolution of scientific discourse - Genres of academic discourse - Argumentation - Science and ethics - Sociology of academic excellence - (C)overt knowledge

A classic in its field, this pathbreaking book humanized the scientific rhetoric of economics to reveal its literary soul. Economics needs to admit that it, like other sciences, works with metaphors and stories. Its most mathematical and statistical moments are properly dominated by comparison and narration, that is to say, human persuasion. The book was McCloskey's opening move in the development of a "humanomics," and unification of the sciences and the humanities on the field of ordinary business life.