Legitimation in Corporate Discourse: The Case of Enbridge and the Northern Gateway Pipeline
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Despite interest in the genres of corporate discourse, and recognition of the role of corporations in shaping social knowledge and 'reality', critical discourse analysts have infrequently focused on investigating how corporate actors employ discursive strategies to represent and legitimate their activities.Widely studied in other disciplines such as political science, philosophy and law, legitimation is a necessary field of inquiry for critical discourse studies as it is through this discursive practice that corporations employ ideological arguments to influence and manipulate public knowledge and opinion.This thesis is a qualitative critical discourse and multimodal analysis of the oil corporation Enbridge's "Gateway Facts" website -an online discourse created to offer information to the public regarding their new Northern Gateway Pipeline project proposed in westernCanada.An extremely controversial project among the Canadian public largely due to its potentially devastating environmental impacts, Enbridge, like other oil corporations worldwide, has been forced to devote large amounts of time and energy to justify and promote this pipeline.This results of this study argue that a close analysis of the website's discursive strategies reveals the appropriation of four discursive themes to rationalize, justify and legitimate the NGP: economic development, scientific and technical expertise, environmental stewardship, and industry leadership.These findings suggest that this type of corporate legitimation may be a reflection of the broader ideology of late capitalism's struggle to justify controversial practices at a time when environmental protection is a priority and public attitudes and understandings of corporate responsibility are shifting.This thesis underscores the importance of critical studies of corporate discourse, especially that offered online, as it has the potential to highlight the ideological underpinnings of corporations and their actions.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.022 | 0.035 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.014 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".