Corporate ethics and its discursive construction: an analysis of codes of ethics and conduct

The present dissertation focusses on the concept of corporate ethics and its discursive construction. Since the 1960s, society has witnessed a paradigm shift which revolutionised social expectations about the way in which corporations do business. As a result, contemporary corporate communications aim at reflecting the expectancies of stakeholders, shareholders and the society at large. After laying the foundations necessary to understand what corporations stand for in the contemporary scenario and how corporate ethics have developed over time, the Accenture, the Novartis and the Medtronic codes of ethics and conduct are examined through discourse analysis. A rhetorical approach permits to identify representations of ethos, pathos and logos in the codes under study, as well as comprehend what communicative functions they serve. Additionally, a corpus-based approach is used to confirm two observations: firstly, the presence of specific universal thematic areas in codes of ethics and conduct; secondly, the intuition that a further thematic area (i.e. “Diversity and Inclusion”) could be identified in the codes of those corporations committed to high standards of ethics.