Ricerc@Sapienza

The study aims at investigating the use of codes of ethics in teaching EFL to students enrolled in a first-level master course in Marketing Management in an Italian public university. Ethical codes are expected to reveal their potentiality in “sensitising and preparing students to meet the communicative demands of disciplinary communication”, in Bhatia’s (2002) words.

With its relatively recent major role in corporate discourse, code of ethics is the expected privileged locus for a company to signal its ethical commitment to self-regulation. As underlined by Catenaccio and Garzone (2017), a legalistic approach seems to be distinguishable from a commitment-oriented approach. The present study aims to investigate if distinctive traits of the two approaches are identifiable both at a macro-textual level and at micro-textual (lexical and syntactic) level and, if so, if they are influenced by business sectors.

In Italy, as elsewhere, codes of ethics are an integral part of the development of an ethical business behaviour and of a corporate identity and culture. In the present paper, ten codes of ethics adopted by ten large Italian companies active in different sectors are analysed within the theoretical framework of discourse analysis. The scope of this study is to understand whether the selected companies opt for a legalistic or a commitment-oriented code type.