Ethics in Professional and Corporate Discourse : Linguistic Perspectives

Ethics. Whether explicit or implicit, it plays a key role in our lives, guiding our decisions and shaping our view of what the world – including the world of business – is or ought to be like. This volume provides a thorough description of the language that is used to encode ethics, to deal with ethical issues, and to express ethical values in business and professional discourses. It explores the relationship between ethics and ethos in a variety of professional and corporate texts and genres, and investigates the role and positioning of ethics in today’s cultural environment, shedding light on how it is negotiated vis-à-vis other values in the pursuit of business and professional goals. Thanks to its rigorous linguistic approach, the analysis fills a significant gap in the burgeoning scholarship on ethics in discourse, laying the ground for a better understanding of what ethical pronouncements do, linguistically and pragmatically.