"Päättyykö Meritan viidakkoretki"

• Marja-Liisa Kuronen
• Janne Tienari
• Eero Vaara

Avainsanat: diskurssintutkimus, funktionalismi, pragmatiikka, tekstintutkimus

Abstrakti

Newspaper column: "Will Merita Bank's jungle trip come to an end?" (englanti)

4/2000 (104)

Marja-Liisa Kuronen ([e-mail]) Janne Tienari ([e-mail] / [e-mail]) Eero Vaara ([e-mail])

NEWSPAPER COLUMN: "WILL MERITA BANK'S JUNGLE TRIP COME TO AN END?"

Organisational change has become a necessity in todays society. Corporate restructuring, mergers and acquisitions illustrate well the avalanche of change occurring today. The social construction of reality, in this case of change, is (re)constructed by the mass media. However, the relationship between the media and the economy has not been studied as thoroughly as, for example, the relationship between the media and politics.

In the article, two research traditions are used to analyse the social construction of change. The example taken is a newspaper column published on April 16, 1996 in Ilta-Sanomat, a daily tabloid newspaper. The column, written by Antti-Pekka Pietil, was headed Will Merita Banks jungle trip come to an end? and dealt with the merger of the KOP Bank and the Union Bank of Finland to form Merita Bank. The content of the column is interpreted using the tools of systemic-functional linguistic theory and of constructionist and social discourse analysis. The study sought to examine not only the meanings conveyed in the text but also how the meanings are formed. The interpretation proceeds from analysis of the systems of language to discourse analysis.

The study concludes that journalists have an important role in the social construction of change based on rationalist discourse. By linguistic, textual and discursive means, the journalist presents himself as an expert. In the text of the column, change is portrayed as something unavoidable: threatening images are painted to justify to the reader the bright future that will be opened up by accepting change. There is thus an attempt to assure the reader of the benefit, legitimacy and necessity of change.