Discursive construction of organizational identity in the hospitality industry A Corpus Assisted systemic functional multimodal discourse analysis

Abstract

v newlineAbstract newlineThe present study explores the discursive construction of organizational identity in the newlinehospitality industry by focusing on semiotic resources (language and visuals) deployed in newlinehomepages and hotel reviews to understand communicated and perceived identity, the interplay of newlinewhich embodies organizational identity as operationalized in the study. For this purpose, the study newlineadopted corpus-assisted systemic functional multimodal discourse analysis. Firstly, to understand newlinehow hotels communicate their identity, the homepages of ten hotels (domestic and international) newlinewere analyzed in terms of representational, interactive and compositional meanings using newlinemultimodality (Kress and Van Leeuwen, 2006) while the About Us texts of these ten hotels were newlineanalyzed in terms of their social purpose, register and ideational, interpersonal and textual newlinemeanings using Systemic Functional Linguistics (Halliday and Matthiessen, 2014). Secondly, to newlineunderstand how the organizational identity of hotels is perceived by people outside the newlineorganization, a corpus of hotel reviews built on Wmatrix5 (Rayson, 2021) was analyzed in terms newlineof keywords and key semantic categories. The findings indicate that the communicated identity of newlinehotels is constructed through discursive strategies realized as verbal and visual choices newlinecharacterized by the discursive culture of the hospitality industry whereas the perceived identity, newlinethough found to be positive with respect to the hospitality experience in general, has little newlinecongruence with the communicated identity. In addition, it was found that there are more newlinesimilarities than differences between the discursive strategies used by domestic and international newlinehotels, which can be attributed to factors such as the shared discursive culture of the hospitality newlineindustry at the global level, target audience being international guests and mode of communication newlinebeing digital on the World Wide Web. This study has implications for pedagogic and professional newlinepractices. newline