Argumentation and socially questionable business practices: The case of employee downsizing in corporate annual reports

Summary In spite of the fact that the viability of private companies depends on their ability to make profit, CSR research has paid little attention to how questionable business undertakings are discursively constructed in corporate economic/financial disclosures. This paper investigates these processes in the context of employee downsizing. It identifies a range of argumentation techniques which form a basis for broader strategies: rationalisation, normalisation, inevitability and emotional/moral distancing, which corporations used to (re)construct a contested business practice as a positive, routine management strategy or something that cannot be avoided. The paper maintains that the scale and frequency of the questionable undertaking may have an impact on whether the company applies the moralisation strategy, in terms of making an effort to discursively integrate expressions of feeling or a sense of ‘duty’ in the text. Moreover, the paper goes on by suggesting that, even if references to these elements remained succinct, their presence in the text can still be seen as opening up the potential for dissension and change, as they place the elements of duty and caring in the proximity of the ‘natural laws’ of neoclassical economics, such as, the need for profit, unlimited growth and norms of efficiency.