Stories that banks tell: Narrative semiotics and the discourse of financial crisis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper combines a narrative-semiotic method and crisis communication theory to analyse the CEO and Chairperson’s letters in annual reports of international banks during the Global Financial Crisis of 2008. Its objective is to outline and apply narrative semiotics in identifying discursive patterns in banking strategies aimed at managing the crisis and addressing hostile audiences. As a benchmark to the narratives created in the annual reports, the paper examines reports of independent investigations to identify areas of agreement and dissent. Findings include a conflicting role attributed to regulation and bonus pay schemes between the narratives of banks and the narrative of the independent reports, a difference in tone in banks from different regions, and a prominent bolstering strategy across all banks. The paper’s significance lies in showing the value and relevance of narrative semiotics for crisis communication theory, a hitherto largely unexplored field.
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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 | 0.007 | 0.014 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.032 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.013 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".