Irene Pollach

Aarhus University | AU · Department of Business Communication

Corpus linguistics studies real-life language use on the basis of a text corpus, drawing on both quantitative and qualitative text analysis techniques. This article seeks to bridge the gap between the social sciences and linguistics by introducing the techniques of corpus linguistics to the field of computer-aided text analysis. The article first d...

Purpose – News agencies are important stakeholders for large organizations, since the news they distribute will be adopted by other news outlets, which influence public opinion and hence corporate reputation. The purpose of this paper is to advance the understanding of how corporate earnings press releases are transformed into financial news by inv...

Issue cycles in media reporting and in the coverage of environmental news in particular have been studied since the 1970s. This study seeks to extend existing theory on issue-attention lifecycles from the news-media domain to the corporate domain by exploring how companies operationalize environmental sustainability over time. Using computer-assist...

Departing from agenda-setting theory, this paper explores whether environmental content in newspapers is related to corporate environmental agendas presented in corporate environmental reports and annual reports. Based on a sample of 1668 corporate reports published between 1997 and 2008, this paper compares corporate reporting against environmenta...

This paper examines critical success factors for ethics-related corporate communication with a view to helping companies communicate their ethical stance more effectively. We analyze this communication process from the company's point of view and discuss the implications of source credibility, attitude formation, audience involvement and media choi...

Purpose Social and environmental reports have become an increasingly regulated area of corporate reporting and communication. Nevertheless, the substance and level of detail present in such disclosures is largely at the discretion of companies, which has implications for the value of such disclosures to stakeholders. The purpose of this study is to...

The business and financial press plays an important role for capital markets, as it routinely reports on the financial results of large companies, thereby influencing how investors perceive the economic prospects of these companies. Despite the numerical and factualized nature of such news, financial journalists have considerable power in interpret...

Purpose This paper aims to investigate the transience of management fads in the academic and the practitioner-oriented communities to shed light on their roles in the diffusion of fads. Design/methodology/approach This study traces the lifecycles of the following fads in practitioner-oriented and academic journals over more than 50 years: balanced...

Recent years have seen a renewed focus on labor standards in the supply chain, prompted by legislation that requires firms to provide an account of their efforts to combat modern slavery. However, as a common problem of non-financial disclosure regulation, companies can decide the extent and content of their reporting, which could potentially resul...

Alleged organizational wrongdoings are often characterized by high levels of uncertainty about what happened, which can take years to be established judicially. In this study, we examine organizations’ efforts to manage their stakeholders’ impressions of their possible guilt in this period of uncertainty. The study examines the discursive guilt-man...

This article reports the findings of a comparative study of the financial news produced by companies, financial analysts, financial newspapers and news agencies about the same news events, including data before and after the financial crisis. We ground this study in second-level agenda-setting, according to which news producers select substantive a...

While there is agreement that privacy is an element of human dignity, it has variously been defined as a claim, a right, a value, a preference, a state, and a process, depending on the context and field in which it is used. Privacy is essential to one's development as an individual and to the formation of respect and trust in relationships. The mai...

Synopsis The case study outlines the strategic, marketing, and branding challenges faced by Gap, a brand within the Gap Inc. house of brands. The case contains a summary of Gap’s history, which illustrates the driving forces behind Gap’s previous growth, its status as an American iconic brand, and its struggle to stay relevant. This sets the stage...

Companies face the pressure to differentiate themselves from other companies, while simultaneously facing the pressure to work by the same standards as other companies in order to maintain their legitimacy. Firms that want to gain a differentiation advantage through their CSR activities need to match the practices of other firms, innovate and commu...

The aim of this article is to provide an overview of the field of sustainability in business communication by looking at it from five very different angles, which nevertheless form a comprehensive view of the field. The first part investigates how the use of lexical items which express the sustainability idea have developed in business communicatio...

Nachhaltigkeit ist in aller Munde. Das Prinzip ist dabei denkbar einfach – und auch denkbar einleuchtend: Der Verbrauch von Ressourcen darf niemals den Bestand an Ressourcen dermaßen gefährden, dass eine Nutzung der Ressourcen nicht mehr möglich ist.

Nachhaltigkeit ist ein Schlüsselbegriff der heutigen Gesellschaft. Er durchzieht unternehmerische, soziale, umweltbezogene, ökonomische, politische und viele andere Diskurse. Die AutorInnen beleuchten Schnittstellen von Nachhaltigkeit und Kommunikation. Aus der Sicht unterschiedlicher Perspektiven und Disziplinen wie der Linguistik, Wirtschafts- un...

Purpose This paper aims to shed light on corporate practices regarding the integration of CSR into corporate communication in large European companies. Design/methodology/approach An e‐mail survey was conducted among large European companies in a total of 14 European countries. The questionnaire focuses on the organization of corporate communicati...

As a CEO’s reputation and symbolic power have been found to have positive effects on organizational effectiveness, corporate reputation, and financial analysts’ stock recommendations, companies have an interest in presenting their CEOs as competent vis-à-vis audiences, such as employees, the press, and the financial community. Departing from impres...

Information technology and the Internet have added a new stakeholder concern to the corporate social responsibility (CSR) agenda: online privacy. While theory suggests that online privacy is a CSR, only very few studies in the business ethics literature have connected these two. Based on a study of CSR disclosures, this article contributes to the e...

This study investigates people’s interest in the content of corporate websites based on a survey of 521 respondents from Asia and Europe. Four main findings emerge from this study: (a) People are primarily interested in recruitment information and product-related information on corporate websites but not in corporate social responsibility messages...

Companies collect a wealth of personal data about their customers in order to be able to target their promotional messages to customers' interests and demographics. Information technology and the internet in particular have created new opportunities for data collection, storage and processing. While technology enables companies to address customers...

Consumer-opinion Web sites provide people with unparalleled opportunities to articulate their opinions on products and services, read those of others, or interact with other consumers. The success of such Web sites is limited by three challenges: the quality of contributions, users’ motivation to participate, and readers’ trust in the writer’s comp...

Consumer-opinion Web sites provide people with unparalleled opportunities to articulate their opinions on products and services, read those of others, or interact with other consumers. The success of such Web sites is limited by three challenges: the quality of contributions, users’ motivation to participate, and readers’ trust in the writer’s comp...

This study investigates the coverage of solid waste management on 1142 websites maintained by companies, news media and non-governmental organizations to validate an automated approach to content and language analysis. First, a frequency analysis of waste management terms sheds light on the breadth and depth of their environmental discourses, revea...

Consumer-opinion Web sites provide people with unparalleled opportunities to articulate their opinions on products and services, read those of others, or interact with other consumers. The success of such Web sites is limited by three challenges: the quality of contributions, users' motivation to participate, and readers' trust in the writer's comp...

Consumer communities on the web provide people with unprecedented opportunities to articulate their opinions on products and services or read about the experiences of other consumers. This form of writing can be considered a truly digital genre, as consumers were not able to share their opinions with other consumers in a structured and written form...

Grounded in uncertainty reduction theory, the present study analyzes the content of 50 privacy policies from well-known commercial Web sites with a view to identifying starting points for improving the quality of online privacy policies. Drawing on traditional content analysis and computer-assisted textual analysis, the study shows that privacy pol...

Grounded in Uncertainty Reduction Theory, the present study analyzes the content of 50 privacy policies from well-known commercial Web sites with a view to identifying starting points for improving the quality of online privacy policies. Drawing on traditional content analysis and computer-assisted textual analysis, the study shows that privacy pol...

Grounded in Uncertainty Reduction Theory, the present study analyzes the content of 50 privacy policies from well-known commercial Web sites with a view to identifying starting points for improving the quality of online privacy policies. Drawing on traditional content analysis and computer-assisted textual analysis, the study shows that privacy pol...

Despite the overall economic and social importance of nonprofit organizations and the plethora of scholarly literature on electronic commerce, few authors have combined these two fields to tackle the issue of online donations to nonprofit organizations. In this paper we first present a framework that illustrates several antecedents of online donati...

Data privacy concerns among Internet users have grown, as technologies available for collection and analysis of Web data have become more elaborate. One way to combat the categorization of the privacy policies regarding computer data is to redesign their content, language, and presentation format. A Website must ease people's concerns about data mi...

Companies collect a wealth of personal data about their customers to be able to target their promotional messages to customers' interests and demographics. Information technology and the Internet in particular have created new opportunities for data collection, storage and processing. While technology enables companies to address customers directly...

Grounded in uncertainty reduction theory, the present study analyzes the content of 50 privacy policies from well-known commercial Web sites with a view to identifying starting points for improving the quality of online privacy policies. Drawing on traditional content analysis and computer-assisted textual analysis, the study shows that privacy pol...

Consumer opinion Web sites enable consumers to post reviews of products and services or view the experiences of other consumers. This form of writing can be considered a truly digital genre, as consumers were not able to share their opinions with other consumers in a structured, written format before the advent of the Internet. To identify rules an...

Although the critical role of the Internet for disseminating environmental information to achieve sustainability is widely recognized, academic research has not paid much attention to the functionality and accessibility of environmental Web sites maintained by organizations in the public or the voluntary sector. To fill this gap, the present study...

Grounded in uncertainty reduction theory, the present study analyzes the content of 50 privacy policies from well-known commercial Web sites with a view to identifying starting points for improving the quality of online privacy policies. Drawing on traditional content analysis and computer-assisted textual analysis, the study shows that privacy pol...

Despite the overall economic and social importance of nonprofit organizations and the plethora of scholarly literature written on online payments, few authors have combined these two issues to take a look at online donations. Accepting donations online helps nonprofits, which typically face budgetary constraints, to accomplish their tasks more effe...

Although the critical role of the Internet for disseminating environmental information to achieve sustainability is widely recognized, academic research has not paid much attention to the functionality and accessibility of environmental Web sites maintained by organizations in the public or the voluntary sector. To fill this gap, the present study...

The opaque use of data collection methods on the WWW has given rise to privacy concerns among Internet users. Privacy policies on websites may ease these concerns, if they communicate clearly and unequivocally when, how and for what purpose data are collected, used or shared. This paper examines privacy policies from a linguistic angle to determine...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to identify starting points for improving corporate self‐presentation on the world wide web (WWW) by enhancing site usability, message credibility, and information utility. Design/methodology/approach Content analysis, quantitative linguistic analysis and discourse analysis were used to examine the “About Us” s...

Although the Internet provides nonprofit organizations with unprecedented opportunities for fundraising, the volume of online donations has been miniscule. Since one reason for this may be people's distrust in financial transactions on the World Wide Web, we conducted a survey to gain insights into user trust in and attitudes toward online payment...

Although the Internet provides nonprofit organizations with unprecedented opportunities for fundraising, the volume of online donations has been miniscule. Since one reason for this may be people's distrust in financial transactions on the WWW, we conducted a survey to gain insights into user trust in and attitudes toward online payment systems. Th...

This paper examines whether classic ethical theories can solve the ethical dilemmas associated with user-controlled customization and system-driven personalization of Web sites. Based on the notion that data sensitivity is not a universal concept but comes in different levels of intensity, we conducted an Internet- based survey among consumers to d...

Web sites pertaining to both traditional and socially responsible investment (SRI) have emerged in recent years, seeking to help investors make informed decisions. This chapter illuminates how such information systems accommodate the particular information needs of their audiences and unveils ideological differences in the arguments put forward. Fo...

E-branding provides non-profit organizations (NPOs) with new opportunities to communicate their missions, which is of paramount importance in a market segment that competes for donations and voluntary labor. Since successful e-branding is determined by both internal and external communication strategies, we developed a framework which explains the...

The Web media monitoring methodology underlying this paper provides linguistic descriptives by automatically mirroring, processing and comparing large samples of Web-based corpora. Since May 1999, the database of the webLyzard project has continually been extended and now comprises more than 3,700 sites, which are being monitored in monthly interva...

This dissertation explores how companies communicate their ethical stance on their Web sites. The author analyzed the Web sites of six companies: BellSouth, Lockheed Martin, Ben & Jerry's, McDonald's, Nike, and Levi Strauss. This sample offers both typicality and systematic variety as the six companies belong to three different ethics paradigms. Th...

Companies collect a wealth of personal data about their customers in order to be able to target their promotional messages to customers' interests and demographics. Information technology and the Internet in particular have created new opportunities for data collection, storage and processing. While technology enables companies to address customers...