Merja Koskela

• Professor
• Professor at University of Vaasa

The ways and forms of presenting expert knowledge are constantly changing. For example, such media formats as podcasts, i.e. audio or video recordings available online, are increasingly being used to convey expert information. Podcasts tend to have multiple episodes, can be listened to at any time on any device suitable for the purpose, and are cha...

The aim of this article is to explore the discursive and communicative choices made in the United States’ government crisis communication during the COVID-19 pandemic (2020–2023). The article investigates government crisis communication from the perspective of the rhetorical arena theory (RAT, Frandsen & Johansen 2017). In our analysis, we ask whos...

This study examines which topics climate-wise housing is connected to in public speech. Climate-wise housing stands for housing choices that take social, ecological and economic perspectives into account. The data of the study consists of a variety of journalistic texts and online discussions collected in a larger research project. Content analysis...

Digitalisaation myötä asiakaskokemus syntyy yhä useammin vuorovaikutuksessa digitaalisen sovelluksen kanssa. Tavanomaiset, arkiset pankkipalvelut eivät ole tästä poikkeus. Saavutettavuudella pyritään varmistamaan, että palvelu on tasa-arvoisesti kaikkien asiakkaiden käytettävissä heidän mahdollisista tiedollisista, taidollisista tai muista rajoituk...

Financial communication is a form of organizational communication that links strategic and managerial views on the firm with the surveilling gaze of investors and the financial market, thereby functioning as a practice of transparency. In this article, we focus on the interaction between corporate managers and market analysts in an institutionalize...

Drawing from the Nordic tradition of sakprosa research, this chapter aims at analysing how generic and intertextual resources are used in Finnish companies’ corporate social responsibility (CSR) reporting. Longitudinally, we study the reporting format, that is, whether the companies are reporting about their sustainability issues separately or as p...

The governments of Finland and Sweden report annually on state-owned companies. The reporting aims to motivate and legitimize state ownership and thus constitutes an example of sustainable public communication. In this article, we compare how the impact of the covid-19 pandemic showsin the sub-genre company overview, i. e. the parts of the reports...

This article examines the branding of the new Tampere University in Finland and the reactions it evoked in Finnish social media and news media between 2018-2020. The merger of the University of Tampere and Tampere University of Technology into a new foundation-based university provoked considerable public debate and sparked uproar over the communic...

Financial communication refers to the meaning-making practices by which listed companies interact with their publics to exchange information about issues that may have an effect on the share price. An important site for financial communication is the so-called earnings call, where companies present their quarterly or yearly results and engage in di...

This chapter explores how a shared understanding of the potential uses of new, abstract technologies is created in journalism. We analyse Finnish journalistic texts from 2015–2020 in which blockchain and artificial intelligence (AI) are introduced to the readers, conceptualized, and discussed. Drawing on the classic Technology Acceptance Model (TAM...

Transparency is a universally accepted communication principle for companies in the 2020's globalized world. Transparency is considered beneficial because it increases trust among stake-holders, and trust is crucial for the functioning of society and the economy. At the organizational level, transparency is manifested in company policies and practi...

Sijoittajaviestintä on vahvasti säännelty organisaatioviestinnän alue, jossa informaatiolla on usein välittömiä taloudellisia seurauksia. Sääntelyllä pyritään edistämään erityisesti informaation saatavuutta, läpinäkyvyyttä ja tasapuolisuutta. Tässä artikkelissa tarkastellaan tulosjulkistustilaisuuksia, joissa pörssiyhtiöt julkistavat osavuosituloks...

The Finnish government reports of the results of state-owned enterprises annually to the Parliament. During the years 2007 to 2016 this was done in an independent report, while starting from 2017, the report on state ownership steering has been an annex to the government annual report. This specific type of report represents the established genre o...

Tässä artikkelissa analysoimme Tampereen yliopiston organisaatiouudistukseen ja erityisesti sen uuteen brändi- ja viestintästrategiaan kytkeytyviä legitimiteettikamppailuja hybridissä mediatilassa. Aineistona käytämme sekä journalistisesta mediasta (n=39) että sosiaalisesta mediasta (n=9 303) kerättyjä puheenvuoroja. Käsitteellistämme Tampereen yli...

This paper investigates how companies seek to convey an image of transparency in their investor relations (IR) communication policy texts. It is based on two corpora compiled from texts describing the IR communication policies of companies listed on the Finnish OMX Helsinki 25 and the Italian FTSE MIB 40, representing two culturally different playe...

Artikkelissa tarkastellaan ajanhallintaan ja erityisesti deadlineen liittyviä käsityksiä ja käytäntöjä suomalaisessa pelistudiossa ja paikallislehden toimituksessa. Tutkimuksen aineistona on 11 asiantuntijahaastattelua. Analyysimenetelmänä käytetään kehysanalyysia, jota täydennetään vuorovaikutuksen sekventiaalisuuden analyysilla, jotta saadaan aja...

In this paper, we study Investor Relations policies of Danish, Finnish, and Italian listed companies. In these publicly available policy texts, companies outline how they intend to communicate with their stakeholders in order to achieve their goals. The aim of this paper is to shed light on the roles given to the companies and their stakeholders in...

I artikeln granskas tyska och finländska bolags hållbarhetsredovisning och hur EU-direktivet 2014/95/EU har påverkat hållbarhetsredovisningen. Det nya direktivet trädde i kraft från verksamhetsåret 2017 och gör redovisningen av hållbarhetsaspekter tvingande för större bolag. Analysen visar att en majoritet av DAX30- och OMXH25-bolagen för verksamhe...

Tässä artikkelissa tarkastelemme käytäntöyhteisön näkökulmasta monivaiheista kurssitehtävää, jossa opiskelijat harjoittelevat liike-elämän vuorovaikutustaitoja asiakas- ja myyjäyrityksen välisessä neuvottelutilanteessa. Tavoitteena oli selvittää, miten käytäntöyhteisö tukee teorioiden oppimista ja viestintätaitoja. Tutkimuksen aineisto koostui kurs...

Inspired by the development of digital communication, listed companies are constantly developing new ways to serve and attract interested audiences on their Investor Relations websites. This paper focuses on the types and variety of multimodal semiotic resources employed on Investor Relations websites of Finnish listed companies with specific focus...

Drawing on appraisal theory, this paper aims to analyze how the attitudinal positioning of writers of the editorials of business newspapers can be construed by means of lexical metaphors. The focus is on judgment, the evaluation of human actors, because it indicates the subjective presence of a writer. Based on a dataset o3f 32 editorials of two Fi...

Drawing on appraisal theory, this paper aims to analyze how the attitudinal positioning of writers of the editorials of business newspapers can be construed by means of lexical metaphors. The focus is on judgment, the evaluation of human actors, because it indicates the subjective presence of a writer. Based on a dataset o3f 32 editorials of two Fi...

The purpose of this article is to provide a new perspective on how technical communication competencies can be supported by the basic ideas of LSP theories and LSP research in technical communication education. A multi-dimensional model of the linguistic variation of LSPs is developed and discussed. Based on the model, some examples for developing...

Tämä tutkimus tarkastelee laskentatoimen asiantuntijuuden näkymistä tulosjulkistustilaisuuksien esityksissä. Tätä tutkimme toisaalta selvittämällä toimitusjohtajan ja talousjohtajan välistä työnjakoa ja toisaalta erittelemällä laskentatoimen termien käyttöä. Aineisto koostuu neljän suomalaisen pörssiyhtiön tulosjulkistustilaisuuksien transkripteist...

Drawing on the concept of translatorial action by Justa Holz-Mänttäri, this article sets out to analyse the role of translation in a bilingual formal meeting without any professional translation or interpreting. The analysis reveals the central role of translatorial activities: 60% of the turns include some kind of translatoriality. The chair and e...

A functioning financial market requires transparency of listed companies. Transparency is a communicative practice ensuring that stakeholders have all relevant information about a company to make informed financial decisions. This article discusses how transparency is communicated through a genre specifically designed for this purpose, disclosure p...

Arvioitu teos: Eveliina Tolvanen: Myndighetskommunikation på två språk. Pensionstexer på svenska och finska i Finland och Sverige i ett systemisk-funktionellt perspektiv. Turun yliopiston julkaisuja. Annales Universitatis Turkuensis B 425. Humaniora. Turku: Turun yliopisto 2016. Johdanto 84 s., artikkelit 124 s. isbn 978-951-29-6663-9.

This study examines which languages are used on investor websites of Finnish listed companies, and considers what language choice reveals about the companies’ attitudes on language and on investors as a key stakeholder group. The data consists of 27 investor websites of Finnish companies listed on OMX Helsinki. The analysis shows that the most used...

Disclosure policy is a genre that describes how listed companies define their operating principles and procedures for communication with the capital markets. The focus of this article is on expressions describing the communicative purpose of these documents. In Finnish companies’ disclosure policies explicit expressions of the purpose of the docume...

This article explores how linguistic resources from two local languages, Finnish and Swedish, are used in expert presentations in bilingual formal meetings and how they function with respect to the three ideal criteria of professional communication: economy, efficiency, and precision. Based on the results, the article suggests a typology of bilingu...

Corporate disclosure policy is a genre in which listed companies declare their principles for informing stakeholders about, e.g., their financial situation and organizational changes. The policy forms an essential part of a company’s Investor Relations (IR) communication and is directed by regulations worldwide dictating what information companies...

Success in the dynamic and competitive global markets of the future cannot be guaranteed through fixed and slowly evolving network structures. Our objective with this publication is to present a new model of networking that enables companies to better respond to future challenges. We also intervene in the terminological discussion surrounding netwo...

Texts belonging to the same genre tend to share similar patterns of intertextuality and interdiscursivity. This article discusses how a communication strategy text presented in the form of a PowerPoint presentation reflects its genre system and how the form might challenge the established intertextual and interdiscursive features of the strategy ge...

This article examines the types of textual and discursive relations that can be found within a genre system and across the borders of such a system. Based on the results, the need for and possibility of drawing genre boundaries between texts with different genre labels is discussed. The study is based on four communication strategy texts from two F...

I denna artikel studeras hur ordföranden på ett tvåspråkigt möte förmedlar mellan de två språken, finska och svenska som används på mötet. Språkförmedlingen (eng. language brokering) har tidigare studerats närmast i immigrerade familjers tal med fokus på identitet och kodväxling. Materialet för undersökningen utgörs av ett möte av landskapets samar...

When authorities make decisions, the decisions form a part of an intertextual chain that runs from the preparation phase of an issue all the way until the public is informed and further when the public starts to discuss it (cf. Fairclough 1992). The chain consists of many types of texts with different communicative purposes. One concept that can be...

The goal of this volume is to examine academic discourse (AD) from cross-linguistic and cross-cultural perspectives. The adjective Cross-cultural in the volume title is not just limited to national contexts but also includes a cross-disciplinary perspective. Twelve scientific fields are under scrutiny in the articles. One of the unique aspects of t...

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http://urn.fi/URN:ISBN:978-952-476-233-5

Today tax authorities offer their services on their web pages, and in order to serve international clients the web pages are also partly multilingual. Typically, there is a substantial English version of the pages available in addition to the national language version. In the present article, results from a questionnaire directed to the web editors...

In this article we will study the rhetorical structure of editorials in English, Swedish and Finnish business newspapers, Financial Times, Dagen s Industri, and Taloussanomat. Our aim is to find out if there is a typical rhetorical structure for the editorials and if there are different types. Our analysis shows that the typical rhetorical structur...

This book (in Finnish) is about the methods of analysing images, often in connection with text. Tämä teos käsittelee kuva-analyysin malleja ja sovelluksia käytännön esimerkkien kautta.

The language used for official purposes has for a long time been under scrutiny for both in Finland and in Sweden. In spite of all the efforts made to make this form of language more understandable, complex and almost unreadable texts are still usual in official contexts. The present paper discusses different forms of reader-orientation on Finnish...

In science journalism the features of scientific discourse and journalistic discourse meet. From this meeting evolves yet another type of discourse, a popular scientific one. Popular scientific discourse on its part comprises different kinds of information on science that is directed to a non-professional readership. In the present paper ways of re...

In popular scientific texts, examples are a necessity. However, in popular science it is not always simple to decide what actually should be classified as examples. In the present paper, we discuss the examples that we have found in three Swedish and Three Finnish popular scientific articles that represent different fields of science.

Noun phrases are often used in academic writing to express the abstract character of the topics discussed. Nouns, especially nominalizations, make it possible to express complicated ideas in a condensed and compact manner, whereas the corresponding verbs make texts easier to understand and more dynamic. In this paper, a case study is presented that...

The use of color and illustrations in annual reports is an important tool in conveying the message. In the present paper we discuss color choice and the use of illustrations in nine annual reports from three countries, Finland, Germany, and Sweden. The results of the analysis show that color and illustration have a wide variety of functions in annu...

The language of multimedia is a rapidly developing and expanding area of language use, which in the Nordic countries is mainly based on translations. The language of multimedia forms a special challenge for a translator because there is a lack of commonly accepted conventions for the language of multimedia. It is the translator who plays the key ro...

Zusammenfassung In diesem Vortrag haben wir die Makrostruktur von neun Geschäftsberichten aus Finnland, Deutschland und Schweden studiert. Die Geschäftsberichte stammen aus drei Industrie- branschen: die Papierindustrie, die pharmazeutische Industrie und die Metallindustrie. Unsere Arbeit setzt sich zum Ziel, die möglichen Differenzen in den Konven...

The article presents the results of a quantitative study investigating features of plain language news in the online newspaper Selkouutiset [Plain News] published by the Finnish Centre for Plain Language. Comprehensibility and readability of plain language text are discussed on the basis of the results. Thirty online news articles were analysed qua...

Summary: Theme and rheme in scientific and popular scientific text. Diss. -- Vaasan yliopisto. Full text available at: http://urn.fi/URN:ISBN:951-683-611-9