IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication Mar 2023

A Cross-Cultural Genre Analysis of Leadership Statements in Italian and American University Sustainability Reports

Danni Yu Beijing Foreign Studies University

Abstract

<bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Background:</b> Sustainability is becoming an increasingly important issue in higher education (HE). Leadership statements in university sustainability reports (LSUSR) represent a unique genre for university leaders to communicate sustainability. This study aims to demystify the genre so that future leadership statements might be crafted with a greater degree of reflexivity. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Literature review</b> : Sustainability discourse in HE has been regarded as a legitimacy tool and an opportunity for image improvement for universities. Some studies have examined university sustainability reports, whereas there is a lack of studies focusing on the section of leadership statements. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Research question</b> : Are there any cross-cultural similarities or differences in terms of rhetorical moves and communicative purposes between the Italian LSUSR genre and the American LSUSR genre? <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Research methodology:</b> Using cross-cultural genre analysis, this study investigates the rhetorical moves of leadership statements produced by Italian and American universities. A move scheme is established and is used to annotate the sample texts. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Results and conclusion:</b> The findings show that although the Italian and American LSUSR genres share the communicative purpose of establishing a sustainable image, the degree of discourse force exerting on this communicative purpose varies. The image-building discourse force appears to be more noticeable in the American leadership statements, which tend to use a wider range and a larger quantity of image-improving moves. The Italian subcorpus, on the other hand, seems to pay more attention to the genre function of report-introducing, which is not explicitly linked to image improvement. This article suggests that practitioners could consider the potentials of the LSUSR genre in developing an institutional culture of sustainability.

Journal
IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication
Published
2023-03-01
DOI
10.1109/tpc.2022.3228024
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Topics
rhetorical criticism genre theory discourse analysis
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Citation Context

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  1. Kim et al. (2020)
    Following the Leader: An Analysis of Leadership and Conformity in Business Meetings
    IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication
  2. Yu et al. (2019)
    A Genre-Based Analysis of Forward-Looking Statements in Corporate Social Respon…
    Written Communication
  3. Yu et al. (2017)
    The Generic Structure of CSR Reports in Italian, Chinese, and English: A Corpus…
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  4. Wang et al. (2016)
    Participatory genre analysis of statements of purpose
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