Ricerc@Sapienza

The recent explosion of competition and other issues on the market has upset the balance of companies and led to a crucial recognition: selling products or providing services it’s no longer enough. Market exchange today lies on a fragile and contradictory ground: the offering blowup has eroded value offering, and the impact of digital on consumers’ purchase intentions affected their indifference to advertising and gave them more empowerment (Füller et al., 2009; Spaid and Flint, 2014).

The paper investigates arguments brought forth by a big corporation in the pharmaceutical industrywhen dealing with bioethical issues. Apologetic strategies (or lack of thereof) and their discursive manifestations are investigated. More specifically, the paper focuses on press releases issued by Mylan, the pharmaceutical giant, when the company was strongly criticised in 2016 over hiking the price of one of its best-selling drugs.

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.

Despite the dramatic innovation brought about in the field of corporate communication by the advent of the World Wide Web, when it comes to annual company reports (ACRs), companies seem to introduce few innovative digital elements in the drafting and formatting of the narrative sections. The present study, as the last step of a long-term research project, aimed at investigating this genre from a diachronic point of view by concentrating on the transformations that ACRs’ corporate narratives undergo once they migrate to the Web.

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.