Communicating Corporate Ethics on the World Wide Web

This dissertation explores how companies communicate their ethical stance on their Web sites. The author analyzed the Web sites of six companies: BellSouth, Lockheed Martin, Ben & Jerry's, McDonald's, Nike, and Levi Strauss. This sample offers both typicality and systematic variety as the six companies belong to three different ethics paradigms. The linguistic analysis of the Web pages draws on a functional approach to discourse analysis, focusing on the ideational, the interpersonal, and the textual function of discourse. Despite the fact that the companies selected for the dissertation project have adopted different approaches to corporate ethics, their communicative strategies turned out to be quite similar regarding content, persuasive appeals, self-reference, audience address, and message organization.