Race, gender and sexual diversity in corporate websites: a critical multimodal discourse analysis

Abstract Summary

Abstract :

Corporate or business websites are the calling cards of an enterprise in our global, digital world. Increasingly multimodal, business communication has developed fast in the last decades, so in this kind of websites, more and more attention is paid to the different kind of elements presented in them, not only the information included, but also the photos displayed, colors and typographies, as well as the linguistic strategies used in order to attract potential customers and convince them of the company’s reliability. Extensive research has been done on gender and race in different genres but far less has been devoted to multimodal representation of gender, race and sexual diversity issues, where the different modes –textual and visual– interact and reveal power relations and ideologies. This paper pays special attention to participants, ideas, values, attitudes and activities revealed in corporate social practices.







This paper addresses two main questions: How do companies use these different modes to represent gender, race and sexual diversity issues? And how can all these modes be handled analytically? For that purpose, twenty corporate websites, selected on criteria of excellence, international scope and type of business, were examined following a multimodal critical discourse analysis perspective (Kress & van Leeuwen 2006; Lemke 2012; Machin 2007, 2013), combined with Djonov’s 2007 methodology for analyzing websites , focusing on homepages. Both approaches provided a more specific means to study the websites as cultural expressions and so revealed the way in which race, gender and sexual diversity issues are addressed in them . Multimodal cues (verbal, visual and aural) act as a complex discourse strategy, used consciously in different websites to embrace and be inclusive of their colleagues’ difference.







Findings presented can be of interest for web designers and discourse analysts interested in a more collaborative workplace.

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