Inspired by Austin’s work on the performativity of speech acts and Goffman’s notion of speaker positionings, this paper explores how annual general meetings are propelled by and interwoven with a corporate genre of professional communication. While observing more than thirty corporate annual general meetings for listed companies at Nasdaq Stockholm in Sweden over three years, we identified that the corporate elites populating the stages at these meetings act as meeting-professionals. Being meeting-professionals, the corporate elites have acquired knowledge of how to conduct a formal meeting by learning the genre, identifying which positions are available during a meeting and, based on these two pieces of knowledge, utter speech acts. Our concluding discussion points to the need for future studies of how corporate elites learn and use the genre of corporate communication to utter speech acts that ultimately form these kinds of formal meetings and perpetuate capitalist relations.

This book deals with the Nordic tradition of sakprosa studies, and the role of complex written texts in an increasingly diverse and dynamic society. Since 2009, the journal Sakprosa—a Nordic publication based in Oslo—has been publishing articles on different aspects of applied linguistics, rhetoric, textual studies, discourse analysis, literature studies, educational studies, communication and adjoining disciplines. The word sakprosa is a compound noun, where the first part sak is a rather polysemic word which means ‘thing’ (or ‘issue’, ‘case’, ‘subject’) and the second part means ‘prose’. Thus, the literal meaning is prose (texts) about things. Common translations are non-fictional prose, subject oriented texts or subject-oriented prose as well as non-literary prose. We use the Scandinavian noun sakprosa as it incorporates all these meanings. The six chapters of this book bring forth different aspects of the concept sakprosa—the text-theoretical framework for Scandinavian sakprosa research, CSR-reporting, changes of sakprosa culture because of the digitizing of communication, a study of a master programme for sakprosa writing, crisis information from a public authority and a concluding summary which re-visits all the chapters and reflects on their contributions to the field of sakprosa studies.

This open access book deals with the role of written texts in an increasingly diverse and dynamic society, bringing together a series of studies anchored in the Scandinavian research tradition of sakprosa, which roughly translates as ’subject-oriented prose’ or ’professional communication’. The authors examine the written text’s capacity to transcend contextual boundaries, as a crucial factor in the importance of capturing and maintaining content as a manageable entity. The chapters each deal with a text type that manages complex content in a specialized way, including genre shifting in CSR reports, discourse networks in modern digital culture, digital and social media crisis communication, and epistemic positions in non-fiction. This book is relevant to fields such as text research, professional/digital communication, discourse analysis and literacy studies, and may also be of interest to disciplines such as history, rhetoric, organization studies, media studies/journalism, and linguistics.

In this paper legitimation of targets for state-owned enterprises (SOEs) is studied. In particular the study is focused on how conflicting targets are legitimized in consolidated government accounts before and after Agenda 2030 was signed. At a UN summit in 2015, representa-tives of most countries signed an agreement to adopt 17 global goals on sustainability. This is to be realized by 2030, which explains the term Agenda 2030. SOEs are hybrid organizations which are guided by combinations of different principles i. e. from private companies and the public sector. Their operations are monitored and their performance is associated with the government which also serves as the active owner. A discourse legitimation approach is used (van Leeuwen 2007, 2008) to study Swedish consolidated government accounts. The report is considered ex-emplary and the goals are ambitious. Since the introduction of Agenda 2030, the ultimate goals of SOEs have been rephrased and a configuration of the targets developed. The consolidated accounts become more political while other targets than economic ones gain prominence. This shift is legitimized by references to international corporations and commitments that are expect-ed to serve as role models, implying that they are morally good companies contributing to a better world. The Swedish government is constructed as the responsible parent who ensures progress. Hence, the global goals of Agenda 2030 are legitimized, while they in turn legitimize state ownership with the government as an active owner of companies.

This issue of the AILA Review focuses on transdisciplinarity as the key to developing shared languages in and across domains and professional settings. The relationship and collaboration between researchers and practitioners have long been discussed within and across applied sciences and theoretical disciplines, mainly in the framework of transdisciplinarity (see AILA Review 31, 2018, for a recent overview). However, research approaches that claim to combine theoretical and practical needs and expectations often lack either solid grounding in empirical data or thorough reflection from theoretical perspectives. This special issue aims to take the discussion further by rethinking transdisciplinarity systematically from theoretical and practical angles. In so doing, we focus on developing shared languages that facilitate communication and mutual learning in multistakeholder discourses – with the ultimate goal of sustainably solving socially relevant problems. In the introduction, we present working definitions of our topic’s key terms (Part 1). We then go through the topics, results, and main interconnections of the six approaches examined in the papers included in this issue (Part 2). Based on the insights from the discussion so far, we set up a framework to systematically analyse three dimensions of developing shared languages: negotiation process, interplay of key drivers, and seizing opportunities (Part 3).

This paper argues that the corporate annual report is not only a document comprising retrospective accounts of financial position and performance, but also a text that points to the future by means of presenting dreams, aspirations and fantasies. However, these dreams are not to be seen as irrational deviations from the rationalistically oriented discourse of accounting. Quite to the contrary, the three corporate dreams identified in this study-the colonial dream, the evolutionary dream and the efficiency dream-are part of the ongoing self-narration of the company, in which it tries to display an allegiance to a set of appropriate aspirations that are considered legitimate in contemporary global capitalism. Drawing upon ideas from narrative theory, annual reports from 2005 to 2010 collected from NASDAQ OMX Stockholm have been analyzed with the purpose of understanding how corporate dreams are used in financial communication. These corporate dreams contribute, the paper argues, to the construction of legitimacy and trust.

This paper explores focus group discussions of registered nurses in municipal palliative care for older people, using data collected by researchers with an interest in health sciences. The linguistically based discourse analyis builds on a combination of Bakhtinian notions of dialogicity, the Other and addressivity, the use of quotations, and also van Leeuwen’s framework for legitimation in discourse. The aim is to investigate strategies of addressing and legitimizing palliative care. Three types of narrative are discerned: The cautionary tale, fictionalization of professional experiences and the enactment of a fictive dialogue. The other professions involved (physicians, assistant nurses) are positioned as the Other as a means of legitimizing the perspectives of the registered nurses. As the patients and their next of kin are the objects of professional activities, the notion of the Third (connecting to the Other) is proposed. The objectification is a manifestation of commitment with routinized and professional distance to the patients.

The aim of this article is to compare general assumptions about newspaper reading with eye-tracking data from readers’ actual interaction with a newspaper. First, we extract assumptions about the way people read newspapers from socio-semiotic research. Second, we apply these assumptions by analysing a newspaper spread; this is done without any previous knowledge of actual reading behaviour. Finally, we use eye-tracking to empirically examine so-called entry points and reading paths. Eye movement data on reading newspaper spreads are analysed in three different ways: the time sequence in which different areas attract attention is calculated in order to determine reading priorities; the amount of time spent on different areas is calculated in order to determine which areas have been read most; the depth of attention is calculated in order to determine how carefully those areas have been read. General assumptions extracted from the socio-semiotic framework are compared to the results of the actual behaviour of subjects reading the newspaper spread. The results show that the empirical data confirm some of the extracted assumptions. The reading paths of the five subjects participating in the eye-tracking tests suggest that there are three main categories of readers: editorial readers, overview readers and focused readers.