The narrative identity of "sustainable" and ethical banks: A discourse and semiotic analysis

Catellani, Andrea;Errecart, Amaia
(2018) 7th European Communication Conference - Centers and Peripheries: Communication, Research, Translation - ECREA congress — Location: Lugano, Switzerland (31.October.2018)

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  • Catellani, Andreaorcid-logoUCLouvain
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  • Errecart, AmaiaUniversité Paris 13 – Sorbonne Paris Cité
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Abstract
This article presents a discursive and semiotic analysis of the discourses and narratives proposed by two European banks whose identity is strongly linked to ethics and to social and environmental responsibility. We focus on the Crédit Coopératif (France) and the Triodos bank (Nederland, Belgium and other countries). These banks have a hybrid communicational identity. This means that profitability and business are linked and/or functional to ethical goals. These visions of the bank’s identity are not far from the theories of the economist Karl Polanyi (2001) on the submersion of economy into society: these banks’ discursive identity positions them as actors of a new form of submersion of the market into society, in which market and money are functional to society, and not vice-versa. This research focuses on the discursive presence of the bank as a narrative subject or “hero”. We are inspired by theories on narrative identities like the one by Paul Ricoeur (1984, 1985, 1988), translated to the field of corporate communication (Johansen 2012). Discourses of ethical banks try to propose a unified narrative. Our analysis is aimed at understanding how this narrative is constructed, in particular from the point of view of the management of potentially opposed values (sustainability and ethics on the one hand, profitability and earning on the other hand). We want to understand how the narrative is built to make the portrait of the bank as a factor of conciliation of different “orders” (Boltanski & Thévenot 2006), like the market and civic ones. The approach of this paper is interpretive and inductive. We rely on a corpus of texts from the corporate websites of the two banks and the last official activity reports; we also base on a semi-directive interview of the director of communication at Triodos Bank. The discourse analysis is mobilized to understand the argumentative and rhetorical dimension of identity-building. The semiotic analysis will be based on the contributions of the poststructuralist tradition, to analyze the multimodal devices present in the texts, which contribute to the identity-building (Floch 2001, Everaert-Desmedt 2007). The category of ethos apprehended as a "constitutive dimension of discourse" (Amossy, 2010) will be mobilized in discursive and visual terms. We will delve into the discursive and multimodal modalities of the establishment of a "hybrid ethos", capable of combining different registers of values to define a sui generis identity.
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Catellani, A., & Errecart, A. (2018). The narrative identity of “sustainable” and ethical banks: A discourse and semiotic analysis. 7th European Communication Conference - Centers and Peripheries: Communication, Research, Translation - ECREA congress, Lugano, Switzerland. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/124696