The Role of Language in the Creation and Development of Corporate Culture: A Case Study of the Lululemon Culture

Abstract

Company culture is a prominent topic in the study of business (Frost et al 1985, Pfeffer 1991, Parker 2001, Wilson 2001, Schein 2010), but less so in the study of language. This research strives to bridge the two fields by demonstrating the role that language plays in the transmission of company culture with a focus on language's capacity for persuasion. Important aspects of this analysis include communicative strategy and intention, especially as they relate to choice of expression and the role of the receiver. The text will be studied in terms of its strategic function in the development of a culture to discover how its expression works to build a culture fitting with the company's ideology. The choice involved in the expression of propositional content and its reflection in the text is an important element in this research and accordingly, the prevalence of certain terms and semantic fields, as well as verb types, and the absence of others will be studied. The receiver is crucial to this analysis of linguistic expression as the successful interpretation of the communication and its impact on receiver behavior is what determines the extent to which company culture is transmitted. Therefore, the company's communicative intention plays an important role as it provides context for the exploration of the company's linguistic strategy in the establishment of its culture, which strives to influence the way people act. In section three, the concept of culture will be discussed, followed by the introduction of company culture specifically in order to establish an understanding of a central component of this research. Following that, the company whose text is to be used for the applied analysis in this research is presented. Then, the ways in which language can be used to analyze company culture will be explored. The linguistic analysis of the company's text will be carried out in using a lexical-semantic approach in section four, and pragmatic approach in section five, based on text linguistics and the theories of speech acts and courtesy, respectively. By analyzing a company's language use, this research will examine how culture that exists naturally in a human social context is constructed artificially through text, as well as the ways in which linguistic strategies are employed to affect its successful interpretation and application.