Media Discourse Analysis

Media Discourse Analysis
Researching Cultural Meanings

from Inception to Reception
Kim Christian Schrøder
Abstract
Taking issue with some aspects of the methodology of “critical discourse analysis”, as exempli-
fied in the work of Norman Fairclough, Teun Van Dijk, and Ruth Wodak, this paper seeks to
show the value of exploring empirically both the encoding and the decoding discourse practices
that mediate between media texts and sociocultural practices, an approach that it names as a
holistic “discourse ethnography”. The value of such an approach is that it can contribute in a
genuinely critical manner to the debates about contemporary media culture. Focusing on a
“responsibility ad” from the oil company BP, the paper’s analytic method combines a careful
attention to textual detail with systematic fieldwork that explores the meaning processes of text
producers and recipients. In other words, it considers the whole communicative circuit of BP’s
“responsibility ad”, including its textual features, the purposes of its senders, and the meanings
generated by its recipients, using empirical ethnographic research. It concludes by turning to
the work of the German sociologist Jürgen Habermas on democracy and the public sphere in
order to theorize how public companies engage with “the politicization of market discourse”.
In the fall of 1997 a poster campaign was launched in all commuter

train stations in the Greater Copenhagen area to inform people that it was
possible to take a bicycle on the trains (see Plate 1). The dominant element
of the poster was a big photograph of a young man with a shaved head,
wearing a leather jacket, and with a pleased smile on his face. He is sitting in
a train next to a bicycle with a basket on his lap. “Ole is faster than Bjarne”,
says the headline, and the copy says that you can take your bike with you on
commuter trains free of charge on Saturdays and Sundays.
According to the manager of the railway company, “the poster shows a
picture of a nice and clean looking young man sitting in the commuter train
next to his bike with a basket on his lap. In the basket we can see part of a
78 | Kim Christian Schrøder
Plate 1: Greater Copenhagen commuter

rail station poster (autumn 1997).
book about wild mushrooms, in other words he is going out to gather mush-
rooms in the forest, taking his bike with him on the train”.
In addition to the informative content of the copy, giving the facts of the
campaign offer, the headline plays on the cultural knowledge of the Danish
audience that “Bjarne” is the bicycle hero Bjarne Riis, who won the Tour de
France in 1996. In other words the attempted joke is that “Ole”, the young
man in the picture, is faster than even Bjarne Riis when he takes his bike
with him on the train.
Not everybody experienced the poster in the way intended. Here is what
one passenger, an elderly man, got out of it: “The poster depicts a skinhead with
a basket full of stolen goods, ready to testify that Bjarne is a lot smarter than
Brian. The poster urges passengers to look carefully after their bags when trav-
eling on commuter trains because they may meet half-criminal hooligans”.
This interpretation plunges us directly into a number of issues that should
be of interest both to communicators whose job it is to address people in
their capacity of citizens or consumers, and to media researchers whose job
it is to analyze and understand mediated communication processes.
The first and very practical point is that the receivers of mediated verbal
and visual messages often get something completely different out of a message
than what the sender intended to communicate. We normally assume that
meaning is a fairly straightforward thing, but the example shows that we have
to consider carefully what we actually mean when we say that a text has a
Media Discourse Analysis | 79
message. We simply cannot take for granted that the meaning intended by
the sender is identical to the meaning actualized by the audience.
Secondly, and following directly from the first point, we will not get far
in our attempt to understand media discourses if we conceptualize mean-
ing as a fixed entity, looking for what the message “is”. In semiotic terms,
the meaning of media messages is a multiple and diverse product of the in-
terplay between signs and their users. To use the terminology applied by
Stuart Hall in his seminal paper from 1973 about encoding and decoding
processes, the main stages of this interplay are the “encoding” process tak-
ing place among the agents in media institutions, and the complementary
“decoding” process taking place among the agents of everyday life—what
we normally call the “audience” (Hall 1973). Media producers and con-
sumers alike bring with them many-facetted communicative repertoires,
rooted in their personal life histories and in the collective histories of the
social and cultural groups that they belong to, and they bring these reper-
toires to bear on specific communicative tasks. There is therefore no neces-
sary fit between the encoded and the decoded meaning.
In the case of the passenger’s understanding of the poster we can observe
how an elderly man responds with anxiety to the image of a young man
whose attributes of clothing and hairdo may be associated with often-en-
countered media representations of deviance and mugging on metropolitan
trains. His reading is probably anchored in an age-specific communicative
repertoire, which may be very “wrong” in relation to the communicative in-
tention, but which is nevertheless a fact of life that cannot be argued with.
In real life there are no wrong readings.
This passenger’s active communicative repertoires manifest themselves
in two supplementary ways: First of all they produce a meaning on the basis
of the visual and verbal signs of the image that are actually “there” in the
text. But they do more than that, as they imaginatively write something
into the text that is not “there”: they transform one of the names of the
poster’s narrative from Ole to Brian, and change the poster’s order of names
and the descriptive adjective. The passenger’s signifying process thus cre-
ates a scenario in which it is no longer Ole who is faster than Bjarne, but
Bjarne who is smarter than Brian!
These transformations may be explained by the anchorage in a Danish
socio-cultural context of the passenger’s communicative repertoires. For
people who grew up in Denmark in the 1950s the name Brian, which was
then an innovative working-class adoption from English, connotes “trouble-
maker”, and in popular jargon, for instance among school teachers, any ob-
noxious young male can be referred to generically as “a Brian”.
The second point arising from the example is therefore a theoretical one:
any investigation of media discourses must base itself on an adequate theory
of the social production of meaning. In today’s intellectual climate, dis-
course analysis—in one of its many garbs—is such a theory, building on the
development of semiotics into social semiotics, and on the ascendancy of
post-structuralist and constructionist theories of meaning and knowledge
(Halliday 1978; Potter & Wetherell 1987; Hodge & Kress 1988; Fair-
clough 1992, 1995; Kress & Van Leeuwen 2001; Jørgensen & Phillips
2002; Schiffrin, Tannen & Hamilton 2001).
The inspiration for the argument put forward in this article comes from
discourse analysis in a broad sense, especially from the particular congrega-
tion within discourse analysis that goes under the name of “critical discourse
analysis”, and which is associated with the names of founding fathers and
mothers like Norman Fairclough, Teun Van Dijk, and Ruth Wodak. In spite
of its many merits, however, critical discourse analysis also suffers from a
number of self-imposed methodological limitations, which prevents it from
obtaining sufficient explanatory power in its analytical practice.
The Half-Hearted Holism of

Critical Discourse Analysis
On the face of it critical discourse analysis is holistic: it prescribes that dis-
course analysts must analyze three different dimensions of social discourses
and their interrelations, namely the text itself, the productive and recep-
tive practices surrounding the text, and the sociocultural environment that
surrounds all of them. This is usually modeled in a figure of embedded
boxes (see Fig. 1).
In the only book of his that has been devoted exclusively to media dis-
course analysis, Norman Fairclough makes the following programmatic
statement about the scope of critical discourse analysis:
Critical discourse analysis of a communicative event is the analysis of

relationships between three dimensions or facets of that event, which
I call text, discourse practice, and sociocultural practice. [. . .] By “dis-
course practice” I mean the processes of text production and text
consumption.
(Fairclough 1995, 57)
Fairclough argues that discourse practices are crucial for understanding

Text
DISCOURSE PRACTICE
(production, consumption)
SOCIAL PRACTICE
Figure 1. Dimensions of Critical Discourse Analysis (Fairclough 1995)
the media text/society nexus, because they mediate between the other two
levels of analysis:
I see discourse practice as mediating between [. . .] text and sociocul-

tural practice, in the sense that the link between the sociocultural and
the textual is an indirect one, made by way of discourse practice: prop-
erties of sociocultural practice shape texts, but by way of shaping the
nature of the discourse practice, i.e. the ways in which texts are pro-
duced and consumed, which is realized in the features of texts.
(Fairclough 1995, 59–60)
On the one hand, apparently, we must take the mediating discourse prac-
tices seriously—but on the other hand we don’t really need to, because the
last clause of the quotation adds, as a parenthesis, but with far-reaching con-
sequences, that after all we don’t have to study the discourse practices inde-
pendently or empirically, because they can be observed in the text!
While it may sound plausible at first sight that the circumstances of pro-
duction and reception somehow manifest themselves in the text and can be
deduced from it, second thoughts should lead to a different conclusion be-
cause, as social individuals situated in language, “in any instance of actual
communication we are multiply positioned within an indefinite number of
discourses [. . .] or within what we have called discourse systems” (Scollon &
Scollon 2001, 544). Due to this multiple positioning, the media text as it ap-
pears on the newspaper page, or on the TV screen, or on the website, reveals
very little about the multiple discursive constraints and opportunities af-
fecting, on the one hand, the team of people producing it in the complex di-
vision of labor of the contemporary media, and on the other hand the
multiple interpretive repertoires at work when the recipients make sense of
the verbal and visual features in contexts of everyday life.
In his analyses of actual media productions, however, Fairclough does not
hesitate to make quite far-reaching claims about the production and recep-
tion processes. On the issue of textual production, in the case of the TV
program Crimewatch UK, for instance, Fairclough asks a question about very
specific linguistic choices: Why “does the narrative [i.e., of Crimewatch UK]
have he grabbed the woman and dragged her into the bushes rather than just he
attacked the woman?” (Fairclough 1995, 163)—a question with the implicit
claim that the author of the television narrative was driven by a reprehensi-
ble desire to sensationalize the crime. It would not have taken an inordinate
amount of time to talk to some of the people on the Crimewatch UK produc-
tion team and clarify this narrative question, as well as more general ques-
tions about communicative choice which he himself asks in his analysis:
“[. . .] the program is nationally networked, and only a tiny fragment of the
eleven million viewers could conceivably be in a position to help. If the issue
is primarily helping the police, why a nationally networked program, why
not use local media?” (168). If asked this very simple question, producers
might have confirmed Fairclough’s suspicion that they pander to the lowest
entertainment needs, or they might have explained that in the local area
relevant to a particular crime the program reaches more viewers when
broadcast on a national channel.
If we now turn to the consumption of this TV program, Fairclough’s at-
tempts to second-guess the program experience of the audience are dubious
because audiences in a socially and culturally heterogeneous society are
bound to possess a kaleidoscopic array of interpretive repertoires and strate-
gies. Fairclough’s guesses about what pleasure audiences may get from a pro-
gram like Crimewatch UK are as good, or bad, as anybody’s:
It is a commonplace that many people get pleasure from watching vio-

lence and horror in films and on television. Perhaps Crimewatch UK
allows people to do that while comforting themselves that they are
doing something else. The ethical issue is whether the BBC should
tolerate and sustain the discrepancy—which they surely well under-
stand—between what is claimed to be going on and what is actually
going on.
(Fairclough 1995, 169)
What may give cause for concern here is that what starts out as a hypoth-
esis about audience pleasures (“perhaps”) slides very quickly into having the
status of established truth (“the discrepancy”, “what is actually going on”)
and leading on from there to what is virtually an indictment of the program
on ethical grounds. And though Fairclough may be right of course, we still
don’t know whether such indictment has any justification in the program
experience of any actual audience grouping. We would be wise to heed Fair-
clough’s own warning against drawing rash conclusions about the ideologi-
cal effects of TV programs on the audience:
Reception studies have also emphasized the variability of interpreta-

tions of, and responses to, television programs: any discussion of “the
meaning” of a television program needs to take account of the vari-
ability of the meanings that may be attributed to it by different catego-
ries of audience member.
(Fairclough 1995, 49–50)
One of the few discourse analytical studies to approach media discourse

from an ethnographic perspective is the study by Swales & Rogers (1995) of
corporate mission statements. In a similar vein to the argument of this arti-
cle they argue that textual analysis alone is insufficient for understanding
the meaning-generating process of mission statements and that ethno-
graphic fieldwork among text producers and recipients is necessary in order
to explore the context of discourse: “We find sufficient anomalies between
text and context to suggest that any interpretation of discourse that relies
principally on only the former is likely to be incomplete and perhaps sus-
pect” (Swales & Rogers 1995, 22).
Therefore they went on site-visits to the companies in question in order
to explore company history and policy through written and oral sources.
These visits proved decisive for their understanding of mission statements.
Through interviews with some of the people with whom the texts origi-
nated they realized that one mission statement was intended to prevent
change while another was designed to encourage it. They were then able to
relate these insights to their analysis of the mission statement texts: “It is
only by learning of these attitudes to change that we came to fully under-
stand the structural, discoursal and stylistic characteristics of the texts”
(Swales & Rogers 1995, 237).
The original design of their investigation also included a study of audi-
ence readings and uses of the mission statements, but the researchers met
with what they perceived as insurmountable obstacles to this stage. The
management of the two companies were simply not interested in having

employee responses to the mission statements critically analyzed.
To summarize, my point is that critical discourse analysts will have to
face the challenge of exploring empirically both the encoding and the de-
coding discourse practices that mediate between media texts and sociocul-
tural practices, if they wish to be able to contribute in a genuinely critical
manner to the debates about contemporary media culture. Otherwise their
critical cultural diagnoses—like Fairclough’s analysis of Crimewatch UK—
will be seen by the rest of society, and not entirely without justification, as
merely partisan verdicts from politically-biased academics.
No doubt there are some hardcore “critical” discourse analysts, who define
their analyses explicitly as “dissident research” aiming to “understand, expose
and ultimately to resist social inequality” (Van Dijk 2001, 352) who have
nothing against being perceived as partisan observers. But then there are oth-
ers who define the “critical” aim more broadly as the illumination of any
taken-for-granted social meaning and who wish to develop discourse analysis
as a tool for throwing light on all aspects of the discursive construction of so-
cial reality, without a priori political allegiance to suppressed social groups.
Cotter, for instance, with the journalistic “community of practice” as her
starting point, calls for a holistic and ethnographically oriented approach to
the study of media discourses, in contexts of production as well as reception:
“News texts have not been viewed particularly as an outcome of a discourse pro-
cess that comprises key communicative routines and habits of practice that
work to constitute the journalistic community. [. . .] This approach means
looking at the ‘community of coverage’—the audience, readers, listeners, con-
sumers, users—as well as the community of practice” (2001, 428).
The holistic discourse analysis presented below will demonstrate the
complexifying consequences of supplementing the analysis of the media
text with analyses of how this text is produced and made sense of in discur-
sive practices.
Holistic Inspiration from Media Studies
Media and communication studies have a long tradition of exploring media

production in media organizations and reception processes in everyday life.
In the area of media production a lot of work has been done on the journal-
istic production of news, but also the production of fiction formats for cin-
ema and television (Turow 1989; McNair 1994; Gitlin 1983).
In the area of media reception the focus has been on the empirical explo-
ration of polysemy, and on the illumination of the power relations between

hegemonic media content and resilient audiences (Hall 1973; Morley
1980, 1986, 1992; Jensen 1987, 1995; Schrøder 1987, 1994; Radway 1984;
Moores 1993; Lewis 1991).
But even in media studies—with a few exceptions (Corner et al. 1990;
Gavin 1998)—there has traditionally been a half-heartedness about holism,
a tendency to compartmentalize media research into either studies of media
organizations, media texts or media audiences.
In recent years a few research projects have been innovative in deviating
from such compartmentalization and trying to set up a holistic framework of
investigation. One such example is the work of David Deacon, Natalie Fen-
ton and Alan Bryman on news processes in connection with the communi-
cation of social science to the public through the print media. The title of
this article is indebted to their excellent article about the communication of
psychological knowledge to the news public (Deacon et al. 1999; Fenton et
al. 1998).
They argue that complementary theoretical developments in media pro-
duction studies and media reception studies have made it possible to include
both perspectives in discourse-analytical work, and thereby to achieve a
more balanced view of the interdiscursive power relations between journal-
ists and citizens, as mediated and negotiated through media texts. Briefly,
they argue that production and reception studies have come to share with
textual studies a social constructionist perspective, according to which
meaning production in media organizations as well as in everyday life must
be seen as a series of social practices characterized by what Giddens (1984)
would call the duality of structure, that is, the practices of the social produc-
tion of meaning are constrained by existing social structures, which are
however both reproduced and changed by those very practices (Jørgensen
& Phillips 2002; Schrøder, Drotner, Kline and Murray 2003; Schrøder
& Phillips, in press).
Discourse Ethnography:
An Illustrative Case Study
In the following I shall attempt to demonstrate the benefits of adopting a

holistic, empirical approach to media discourse analysis, an approach that
one might call “discourse ethnography”. My example will combine a careful
attention to textual detail with systematic fieldwork that explores the mean-
ing processes of text producers and recipients.
The case study inscribes itself into recent debates about marketization,
commercialization, and political consumption, and takes its point of depar-
ture in my at first unsystematic observation of what seemed to be the appar-
ent growth in Britain and Denmark of corporate image advertising,
particularly of an environmental and ethical kind, vis-à-vis more traditional
consumer advertising. My example here will be a “responsibility ad” from
the oil company BP, which appeared in The Green Magazine in 1991.
My curiosity directed itself towards the whole communicative circuit of
such “responsibility ads”: why would companies increasingly address such
ads at the readers of newspapers and magazines? How similar or different
were the ethical ads from ordinary consumer ads? And not least, how did
the readers of the publications in question make sense of such ethical ads?
The analytical endeavor consists in not just analyzing the communica-
tive circuit of these ads from corporate senders to ordinary citizens, but also
in integrating this analysis with a perspective of sociocultural discourses
about citizenship, democracy, political power and public opinion.
The project can be seen as complementary to one of the concerns of Fair-
clough’s work (1993) on the “marketization” of public discourse, in that I
wished to investigate the reverse process: the “politicization of market dis-
course” in which agents of the market (business corporations) seek to ad-
dress individuals as citizens by presenting themselves as responsible citizens
(see also Nava 1991; Smith 1990).
For instance, do such ads, which basically seek to justify the company’s
behavior with the general public, testify to increasing legitimation problems
for business in late capitalist society? How successful are they as an attempt
to enable business to navigate safely in a world of politicized consumption
and consumer sanctions?
The project as a whole analyzed many types of empirical data in both
countries: on the Senders’ side it analyzed different kinds of public relations
and advertising material from a number of large companies as well as inter-
views with corporate communicators about the internal and external
communicative tasks facing business today. On the Textual side it analyzed
a large number of print advertisements in order to arrive at the “distinctive
features” of corporate responsibility ads vis-à-vis traditional consumer ads.
On the Recipients’ side it analyzed qualitative interviews with sixteen infor-
mants in each country about selected print ads and about the informants’
perceptions of the ethical performance of business in the modern world. In
the following I will present a discourse ethnography of the BP ad, following
the critical discourse analysis model of analytical dimensions: text, discur-
sive practices, sociocultural practices.
The Text
BP’s advertisement with the headline “Oil companies tend to invite criti-
cism. At BP, we actively encourage it” appeared in The Green Magazine in
1991 (see Plate 2). It is a black and white corporate responsibility ad that
stresses both environmental concern and BP’s desire for dialogue with inter-
ested publics. The upper two thirds of the full page ad present a visual mes-
sage: In the middle, a large photo of a male figure holding a megaphone in
front of his head so that only his teeth and lips are visible through the mega-
phone. Eleven passport-size photos form a frame around the three sides of
the megaphone photo, whose lower edge borders directly on the copy. The
small photos show eleven different people, of different gender, age, and eth-
nicity, all facing the reader directly and holding an open palm behind the
ear indicating intense listening.
Textually, the ad is characterized by “absences”, that is, absences of many
of the visual and verbal features that are typically found in consumer adver-
tisements (see, for instance, Myers 1994). The first absence is color, which
differentiates this ad from the glamorous impression of consumer ads and
distances it from notions of “visual hype”, lending an impression of sober-
ness. The speaker with the megaphone wears a suit but no tie, so he is clearly
neither an Establishment figure, nor an environmentalist rebel. He is some-
one to be taken seriously, his visible teeth perhaps signaling a certain insis-
tence. He may be one of those people mentioned in the copy who lets BP
know “Loudly” what they think about the company.
. The copy of the BP ad has the following:
Oil companies tend to invite criticism. At BP, we actively encourage it.

As an oil company, we’re a natural target for environmental groups. But, in
our view, the more criticism we get, the better. Because being criticised is one of
the best ways to learn. So before we start work in an area, we invite the local com-
munity to take a look at our proposals and tell us what they think. And they often
do. Loudly.
The same with environmental groups. They’re experts on wildlife and the
countryside, so we ask their advice. In return we patronise them, in the best sense
of the word. We encourage them, by funding their activities, and offering market-
ing advice. That way, they themselves can continue to operate, and go on telling
us what we’re doing wrong or, when appropriate, right. We even support educa-
tion programmes for the young who are sure to criticise us in years to come. But at
least it’ll be well informed criticism.
Recognising our responsibility to the environment is one of the things BP is
doing today, for all our tomorrows.
BP. For all our tomorrows.
Plate 2: Advertisement for BP (British Petrolium) which appeared in The Green

Magazine in 1991.
The eleven listeners could be professionals or white-collar employees who

represent different social groups: men and women, different age groups be-
tween the 20s and the 50s, different ethnic groups (one Black man, one
Asian woman, the rest white). They may be BP employees who explicitly in-
dicate their eagerness to pick up what the environmentalist is shouting at
them, implying perhaps that there is no need to shout to attract BP’s atten-
tion. Since pictures are notoriously polysemous, however (Mick & Politi
1989), this reading is not necessarily the only one possible.
The language of the copy is straightforward, fairly colloquial, with no dif-
ficult or specialist terminology. It uses declarative sentence structures only,
apart from a few cases of independent sentence fragments. There is thus an
absence of the direct attempts actively to involve the reader often found in
consumer ads through imperatives and interrogatives (Myers 1994). Again
this adds to the impression of soberness, of the company simply putting their
case forward, leaving it up to the reader to pass the verdict of relevance or ir-
relevance, acceptance or rejection.
This feature of the sentence structure is supplemented by a complete ab-
sence of the second person pronoun “you”. The ad thus, without any sense
of intrusion, merely invites the reader to witness an account of a relation-
ship between the company (“we”) and different representatives of third
parties, that is, community and environmental groups (“they”). The “we”
used is an “exclusive we” denoting the company through most of the text;
however, it slides imperceptibly into an “inclusive we” in the last sentence
of the copy, which is repeated in the slogan “For all our tomorrows”. The
effect of this may be to involve the reader in BP’s objectives by instilling a
logic that may run something like this: If BP is doing all of this for our
(shared) tomorrows, BP is worthy of my support.
The text has two instances of wordplay. The headline plays on two mean-
ings of the phrase “invite criticism”: one, to attract unwanted criticism, the
other to welcome criticism, to even help create it. The effect may be one of
surprise that BP faces the myths about ruthless oil companies head-on, and
appreciation of the copywriter’s ingenuity. The other instance of wordplay
concerns BP’s “patronizing” the environmental groups that supply advice to
BP. Again BP faces a common myth about multinational companies, namely
that they “show inappropriate superiority”, then turns the myth around by
also exploiting the meaning of “patronize” which means “to enable someone
to develop their full potential”.
These instances of wordplay may also be seen as a kind of absence vis-à-
vis consumer ads: what is absent in the BP ad’s wordplays is the frivolousness
of the typical advertising pun, the cheap-joke impression. In the BP ad
wordplay is used as an intelligent, even sober, way of anticipating the read-

er’s objection to the claims of altruism. The social universe opened up by
this ad is one in which a global company and its traditional adversaries work
in harmony towards their mutual benefit, in an endless chain of “You help
us, we help you (help us), etc.”.
This unflawed impression of altruistic cooperation and dialogue is only
possible because of the absence of the past in the ad’s universe. As BP puts
it at the end of the copy, “Recognising our responsibility to the environ-
ment is one of the things BP is doing today, for all our tomorrows”. In the
ad’s universe there is no mention of “yesterday”, the time when oil compa-
nies did ruthlessly exploit the environment and when there was antagonism
between oil companies and environmentalists. The absence of a lexicalized
“yesterday” is supported by the absence of past tense verbs: most verbs are in
the present; two are in the future tense.
Discourse Practice 1: The Sender
The reason for exploring a variety of corporate documents and talking to

corporate communicators is first of all to be able to form an impression of
the corporate “communicative climate” in which specific texts are produced
and published. An additional purpose may be, if possible, to confront the
originators of corporate publicity material with the specific linguistic and
communicative choices they made during the editorial transformation pro-
cess. The account below belongs to the former type of data as I could not get
access to the creators of the particular ad analyzed above.
By talking to one corporate communicator, a public relations manager
from BP Oil’s corporate center (Interview, November 1991), and exploring a
variety of company publications not aimed at the general public, I was able
to establish that the policy of environmental responsibility and community
cooperation was “not just a current fad or fashion”, but dated back to the
1980s and before.
In 1991 the company had just undergone a major cultural overhaul,
“Project 1990”, a “culture change programme” initiated by then new chair-
man Robert Horton in order to make BP the leading oil company globally.
By the spring of 1992 tens of thousands of company employees worldwide
would have gone through a culture change workshop away from work, in
order to prepare them for a new situation in which there would be “a flatter
management structure” in which “the lines of responsibility are being
shortened quite dramatically”.
Under “Project 1990” the company would show special consideration of

five important stakeholder groups: customers, community groups, share-
holders, employers, and suppliers, among which the second (community
groups) was singled out as a “very important one”. This policy would be im-
plemented by, among other things, a greater reliance on educational effort
and communicative openness towards the public:
Interest in the community and in education stems from the fact that if
people don’t know what we’re up to, they’ll be more suspicious, [. . .]
and if people are suspicious that creates some problems in continuing
in business or expanding in business. It’s not a great philosophy, it’s
common sense [. . .].
(BP PR manager, November 1991)
Simultaneously, there was a decreasing fear of criticism and a corresponding

willingness to let the public know about less flattering aspects of the compa-
ny’s activities:
Many things are now being published by the company that would not
have been published a number of years ago. There’s a genuine and
fairly widespread feeling [. . .] that coverage of less positive items is now
being seen to be a good thing, and the managers who are responsible
for the parts of the company these stories may be coming from actually
perceive it as beneficial for these to be aired, to do it in public.
(BP PR manager, November 1991)
For this reason BP Oil would put virtually everyone who wants to on their
mailing list: “I would find it hard to think of any group we wouldn’t, you
know, would it be a pressure group, political group, or . . . Any group could
get their hands on it anyway, so we may as well make it easy for them”.
The impression one gets from this public relations manager is perhaps a
bit more pragmatic than the one left by the text of the advertisement. While
the ad presents a case of almost pure altruism, the PR manager strategically
realizes that even without an open communication policy the public will
know how to get access to most of the dirty details anyhow. So why not be
open and cash in on the goodwill this may create with the activist groups
and the general public.
BP’s manager of corporate advertising at the time, Ivor Gouge, said that
the objective of BP’s responsibility ads was to get across to the public that BP
has objectives beyond profit and that the company has a genuine wish to en-
gage in a two-way communication process (Ivor Gouge, quoted in Shepard

1993, 15). To him “corporate advertising is about reputation, about winning
the benefit of the doubt”. Consequently, this was the major question taken
to the informants in the reception study.
Discourse Practice 2: Recipients
The reception study carried out two series of individual depth-interviews

with sixteen English and sixteen Danish informants in their homes. The in-
formants were selected so as to equally represent gender, the age groups 20–
30 and 40–50, higher and lower educational levels, and political orientation
(Conservative vs. Labour/Liberal). The English informants, whose interpre-
tive responses are analyzed in the following, all lived in two London sub-
urbs, a 45-minute drive from the city.
On each occasion informants were given nine recent print advertise-
ments from general-appeal publications, comprising both corporate respon-
sibility ads and other types of ads. The informants were asked to put the
nine ads in the order in which they wanted to talk about them, and, for each
ad, to respond to its visual and verbal characteristics and to reflect on what
the ad wanted them to do. Each interview lasted between 30–60 minutes,
and was tape-recorded.
The analysis of the interview transcripts considered the multidimen-
sional character of audience signifying processes (Schrøder 2000), noting
such parameters as the audience members’ motivation towards the ads, their
comprehension and aesthetic awareness, their attitudes to the ads and to
the companies, and the extent to which the ads appeared to become a com-
municative resource for the informants affecting their behavior in some
small way. Here the main focus is on the informants’ attitudes to the ads and
the companies, and the purpose is to provide specific insights into, not to
account exhaustively for, the reception process.
The BP ad was often singled out by informants as one of the best ads in
the set of nine, although for different reasons. The informants’ perception
of each ad in the set was strongly dependent on their perceptions of the
other ads, and the BP ad was often discussed in relation to the other ads in
the set, or other ads that the informants had come across. This points to
the inherently intertextual character of all signifying processes (cf.
O’Donohoe 1997; Scollon & Scollon 2001).
Interestingly, the informants’ agendas may be quite different from the re-
searcher’s. People’s motivation to read an ad may have very little to do with its
“message”: “Another oil company, BP. Well, I don’t know. When I first opened
this, the first thing I did, the very first thing I did was that I went around and
looked at all the people to see whether there are any good-looking women
there to look at” (Man in his twenties, Labour oriented, low education). There
is therefore often an element of artificiality in confronting people with the re-
quirements of a research agenda, something that we shall have to live with if
we want to explore signifying processes in people’s life-world.
Quite a few of the informants were sympathetic, whole-heartedly or con-
ditionally, to the BP ad. Here is the immediate response of a man with high
education, in his forties, Labour-oriented:
BP’s next. [. . .] I think that out of all the oil companies BP do try and
do something for the environment. I mean they are very conscious
about it and their ads always strike you as being concerned. [. . .] They
say they listen to what people want and they invite criticism. I think
they could do a lot, a lot more, but . . . I have always been reasonably
impressed with what they do and what they offer as a service.
(Informant no. 2)
Extending the discussion to oil companies in general, he attributes this envi-

ronmental concern to the geographical base of companies like Shell and BP:
I think possibly because they are not American. [. . .] I think to a cer-

tain extent the British have always—you know this green and pleasant
land that we live in. [. . .] although they are very big multinational
companies they are not sort of American-based. American-based
companies tend to be a bit more, you know, ruthless.
(Informant no. 2)
Other informants, who may be called “skeptics” or “agnostics”, were less

inclined to give BP the benefit of the doubt, although they did not reject the
ad’s message out of hand either. Their hesitation was due to the fact that
contrary to the suppression of the past in the advertising text, they were
aware of corporate performance in the past. Here is an excerpt from an in-
terview with a man in his twenties, high education, Labour-oriented:
The first one, BP, I think [. . .] it’s an eye-catching image, because of
this interesting shape of the mouth it does draw you in, and you think
“oh, what is that about?” [. . .] It’s an apology they are making really in
this advert [. . .] . . . em . . . oil companies have had bad press for a long
time, particularly in connection with environmental disasters. It’s prob-

ably a damage limitation exercise to a certain extent, trying to make a
more friendly BP, a BP who understands the public’s concerns.
Interviewer: Do you buy it?
Em . . . it’s worded quite well I think. It’s very comforting the wording
of it: “Before we start working in an area . . .”. It’s suggesting that they
are not this big faceless corporation, that they do make efforts. [. . .])
But without knowing the facts it’s difficult to contradict them.
(Informant no. 4)
Many informants, irrespective of their acceptance or rejection of the ad’s

message, showed an implicit awareness of BP’s past performance: “I feel BP
is getting a lot of pressure from people saying, you know, ‘your product de-
stroys the environment. What are you doing about it?’” (Female, high edu-
cation, Conservative, in her forties).
The BP ad appealed enough to most informants to make them curious to
find out about what it was up to. When they read through the text they sub-
jected it to critical scrutiny, sometimes gleefully exposing what they saw as
the contradictory signals emitted by the linguistic choices made by the pro-
ducers of the text. Here’s the reading of a male informant in his 40s, low ed-
ucation, Conservative:
BP. Yeah, that’s again the lead line is quite good. [. . .] Again environ-
mental. But I think that the copy is somewhat . . . is a bit sophisticated.
“In return we patronise them”. [. . .] You’ve got to understand what “pa-
tronise” means and this has nothing to do with English working class,
but you gotta be able to read that and understand that in the best sense
of the word. [. . .] They have climbed over the fence and they’re sort of
climbing down on the other side: “We even support . . .”. [Interviewer:
Support what?] Education for the young. I mean, I would never have
put “We even . . .”, I would have put “We support education”. “We
even” is as if “Look! We’re doing . . .”, it gets back to being patronising.
You are patronising the reader. [. . .] So seven out of ten for that one.
(Informant no. 5)
The most frequently encountered experience of the BP ad was one rooted

in cynicism, although the informants were on the whole a lot less cynical
about the BP ad than about all the other corporate responsibility ads in the
set. Here is a typical cynical response, from a woman in her 40s, high educa-
tion, Labour oriented:
[. . .] this one . . . you know, my cynicism comes in again. They say

that they are actually inviting criticism at themselves, and they invite
the local community in to tell us what they think . . . I think that is
absolutely fine. But part of me says “Well, they’ll listen and then they’ll
go through and bulldoze exactly what they want anyway” (laughs).
What they don’t say in the ad, which, you know, the Volkswagen [ad]
did, is actually giving examples of where they have listened and what
happened as a result of that. I mean, I would be much more convinced
by that than by saying that they listen. [. . .] The ad is almost a re-
sponse to slightly being manoeuvered into a position where they have
to be seen to listen.
(Informant no. 10)
These glimpses of the reception experience—although they only show a few

aspects of the multidimensionality of meanings which people generate from
one particular ad—may at least alert us to the dangers of making strong claims
about sociocultural meaning processes if our analysis has only explored the
media text. The analysis of the BP text, and the analyses of the discourse
practices of the senders and the receivers, seem to indicate that what appears
in the text as an altruistically motivated oil company turns out in the production
environment to be a more pragmatically and strategically motivated oil com-
pany. In the reception context, when faced with this ad, sixteen ordinary peo-
ple tend generally speaking to be quite cynically or at least skeptically oriented.
Very few are willing to give BP the benefit of the doubt.
Sociocultural Practices: Business and Democracy
The full reception study of all the nine ads on the whole confirmed the results
reported about the BP ad above (Schrøder 1997). In other words, with these
informants corporate responsibility ads were quite far from reaching the goal
of “winning the benefit of the doubt”; on the contrary, if these informants are
typical, companies wishing to pursue an ethical line of conduct and commu-
nication appeared at the time to be facing serious legitimation problems with
the general public in England, and ethical corporate advertising of the kind
analyzed here does not seem to be the way to overcome these problems.
The decisive variable here is education (not age, political affiliation, or
gender): it was mainly, but not exclusively, informants with low education,
which more or less corresponds to a working-class background, who tended
to be unequivocally negative towards the corporate claims of responsibility
and invitation to dialogue.
If we speculate why this is so, one possible interpretation leans on the
long history of deep-rooted class difference and class antagonism in Britain,
resulting in the British working class having a dichotomous consciousness
of the social structure: a social map characterized by a deep-seated “us” ver-
sus “them” perspective predisposing them to distrust or reject altruistic
claims from business, such as those appearing in responsibility ads.
We may then ask what the implications of an advertising study like this
one are for the future role of business in a democratic society? In order to an-
swer this question we may draw on the theory of democracy and the public
sphere developed by the German sociologist Jürgen Habermas ([1962] 1989).
In such a wider sociocultural perspective ads which present large companies
as responsible citizens spring from a growing corporate need to legitimate
their activities with the general public in order to preserve a space within
which they can operate and fulfill their corporate goals.
As we have seen, they do this by supplementing their communicative ac-
tivities in the economic sphere of the market, in the form of traditional con-
sumer advertising, with communicative activities in the public sphere where
citizens and media deliberate the political affairs of the wider society, in the
form of non-commercial messages such as the social responsibility ads ana-
lyzed here.
The corporate communicators thereby indicate that they will abide by
the rules that apply in the public sphere. Of particular importance here is
the rule that the political actors in a democratic society have always had to
follow, which holds that social power ultimately resides with the citizens and
that only that which is publicly sanctioned by the citizens can have
legitimacy.
The BP ad is a declaration to the effect that the oil company now defines
itself not just as an economic agent whose commercial behavior is essen-
tially its own business, but as a democratic agent whose freedom of action is
bounded by an essentially political deliberation with concerned publics.
What this may mean was made painfully clear to the management of
another giant player on the global oil stage, Shell, through the so-called
“Brent Spar” affair in the summer of 1995, when massive consumer pressure
spearheaded by Greenpeace in an impressive media campaign forced Shell
to give up its seemingly well-prepared dumping of a scrapyard-ready oil rig in
the North Atlantic. A couple of months after Shell’s spectacular defeat, its
UK director John Wybrew reflected on why consumer-citizens had not at all

been willing to give Shell the benefit of the doubt. Wybrew expressed his re-
vised views about modern corporate management. The defeat—according
to Wybrew—had happened because Shell had failed to understand public
opinion and had underestimated the power of a campaign organization like
Greenpeace, as well as the international nature of the issue. He went on to
say that in the modern world it was no longer sufficient for a corporation to
rely on following the letter of law and international regulation: “We have
constantly to earn trust and a licence to operate from the public” (Wybrew
quoted in Cowe 1995). In other words, business corporations who wish to
navigate safely in the modern world can only hope to be able to do so if they
reorientate their corporate discourse and their corporate practice in accor-
dance with “the politicization of market discourse”.
Similarly, media discourse analysts who wish to return from their explo-
rations with insights that will be perceived by the rest of society as trustwor-
thy insights about “the life of signs in society”, will have to align their
scholarly discourse and practice with a holistic “discourse ethnography” in
which the discourse practices that mediate between the larger sociocultural
practices and the media text are subjected to systematic empirical scrutiny.
Roskilde University
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Media Discourse Analysis

Researching Cultural Meanings

Kim Christian Schrøder

In the fall of 1997 a poster campaign was launched in all commuter

Plate 1: Greater Copenhagen commuter

The Half-Hearted Holism of

Critical discourse analysis of a communicative event is the analysis of

Fairclough argues that discourse practices are crucial for understanding

Figure 1. Dimensions of Critical Discourse Analysis (Fairclough 1995)

I see discourse practice as mediating between [. . .] text and sociocul-

It is a commonplace that many people get pleasure from watching vio-

Reception studies have also emphasized the variability of interpreta-

One of the few discourse analytical studies to approach media discourse

management of the two companies were simply not interested in having

Holistic Inspiration from Media Studies

Media and communication studies have a long tradition of exploring media

ration of polysemy, and on the illumination of the power relations between

In the following I shall attempt to demonstrate the benefits of adopting a

Oil companies tend to invite criticism. At BP, we actively encourage it.

Plate 2: Advertisement for BP (British Petrolium) which appeared in The Green

The eleven listeners could be professionals or white-collar employees who

wordplay is used as an intelligent, even sober, way of anticipating the read-

Discourse Practice 1: The Sender

The reason for exploring a variety of corporate documents and talking to

Under “Project 1990” the company would show special consideration of

Simultaneously, there was a decreasing fear of criticism and a corresponding

gage in a two-way communication process (Ivor Gouge, quoted in Shepard

Discourse Practice 2: Recipients

The reception study carried out two series of individual depth-interviews

Extending the discussion to oil companies in general, he attributes this envi-

I think possibly because they are not American. [. . .] I think to a cer-

Other informants, who may be called “skeptics” or “agnostics”, were less

time, particularly in connection with environmental disasters. It’s prob-

Interviewer: Do you buy it?

Many informants, irrespective of their acceptance or rejection of the ad’s

The most frequently encountered experience of the BP ad was one rooted

[. . .] this one . . . you know, my cynicism comes in again. They say

These glimpses of the reception experience—although they only show a few

Sociocultural Practices: Business and Democracy

UK director John Wybrew reflected on why consumer-citizens had not at all

Gitlin, Todd. 1983. Inside Prime Time. New York: Pantheon.

ŒŒŒ. 1994. “Audience Semiotics, Interpretive Communities and the ‘Ethnographic

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