Existential rationality and the dialectic of entextualized voices in companies' vision, misison, and strategy statements
Keywords:
evaluation, intertextuality, metadiscourse, rationality, voiceAbstract
This article examines a process called existential rationality in visions, missions, and strategies
on companies’ websites. The aim is to understand how the companies publicly define and
idealize their identities, intentions, and social relations in these texts. The article focuses
on the explicit modelling and controlling of relationships between recognizable discursive
voices. The analyses look at a set of morpho-syntactic constructions that denote or presuppose
intertextual relations (e.g., reported speech, quotation marks, questions, negations) with
the aim of understanding how such constructions are used in textual structures to signal
the functions, sources, and mutual relations of entextualized voices. The main types of voice
mediation identified in the article are the transmission of traditional and authoritative voices,
the metalinguistic reflection and reconciliation of diverging voices, the dissemination of
positive voices, and the invalidation or neutralization of negative voices.
