Description
In 2018-9, Boeing made headlines after two 737 Max aircraft were involved in fatal crashes. The same issue was to blame for both incidents: the Manoeuvring Characteristics Augmentation System, which is responsible for stabilising the aircraft, failed on both occasions. Boeing was charged with conspiracy to commit fraud and agreed to pay over $2.5 billion; a clear case of corporate wrongdoing and an instance where crisis communication was necessary to protect their brand.Taking this crisis as a case study, this talk demonstrates the utility of using corpus-assisted methods (Gillings et al., 2023; Baker, 2024) to analyse crisis communication. The dataset under analysis is a 31-872-word corpus of Boeing’s press releases related to the incidents. Using Wmatrix (Rayson, 2008), two techniques in particular (key semantic tag and concordance analysis) are used to identify the strategies the company used to protect their brand identity and restore trust in their aircraft. In particular, findings suggest that Boeing promote inclusivity, offer clarity and transparency, emphasise their safety record, and project confidence and knowledge. At the same time, they are clearly constrained in how much they can say due to potential legal repercussions. These key strategies are interpreted with reference to Coombs’ (2006) Situational Crisis Communication Theory, demonstrating how those seminal strategies are realised linguistically.
It is hoped that the talk achieves two main objectives. First, it will offer an insight into how companies accused of wrongdoing rely on specific linguistic techniques to protect their brand; and second, it will demonstrate how a corpus linguistic approach to analysis can allow us to identify crisis communication strategies in large datasets.
| Period | 7 Jun 2025 |
|---|---|
| Event title | ABC Regional Conference 2025 |
| Event type | Conference |
| Location | Bergen, NorwayShow on map |
| Degree of Recognition | International |