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Article published In:
Pragmatics
Vol. 31:4 (2021) ► pp.483–508

Understandable public anger

Legitimation in banking after the 2008 crisis

ORCID logo | Universidad de Navarra

In the ten years from 2008 onwards the banking sector was constantly in the spotlight. Blame for the financial crisis and concern regarding controversial government bailouts were followed by public outrage about inflated bonuses, money laundering and false reporting. Over this period, banks deployed a range of legitimation strategies to salvage their reputation. This paper proposes a modified typology of legitimation strategies based on previous research (van Leeuwen and Wodak 1999; Vaara, Tienari and Laurila 2006), and examines how these are used by in the “letter to shareholders” published by the chairs of the five main UK-based banks over the ten years following the crisis. The strategies are analysed in terms of their object, target and interdiscursive features, and the particular persuasive roles of narrative and emotion are underlined.

Keywords: legitimation, legitimation strategies, discourse strategies, narrative, metaphor, financial crisis, corporate communication, banking
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Theoretical framework: Legitimation strategies
  • 3.Method
  • 4.Findings
    • 4.1Normalisation
    • 4.2Authorisation
    • 4.3Rationalisation
    • 4.4Moralisation
      • 4.4.1Claims to virtue
      • 4.4.2Claiming solidarity and projecting empathy
    • 4.5Mythopoesis
      • 4.5.1Metaphor
      • 4.5.2Re-narrativisations
      • 4.5.3Future promise
    • 4.6Overview of strategies
  • 5.Discussion
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) 4.0 license.
Published online: 27 July 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/prag.20065.bre
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