The discursive construction of trust through narration. The case of a semiconductor industry in Avezzano, Abruzzo, Italy

This paper uses the data provided by a sizable semiconductor company located in the Abruzzo region of Italy as recounted by one of its major figures and its current CEO. It analyses the use of storytelling as a tool for trust repair between the company and stakeholders through the construction of a shared discourse. By building on previous research into business narratives and organizational storytelling, leadership is seen to emerge through the process of managing the meaning of organizational events through talk and interaction. For this study, the multi-modal visual texts which accompany the CEO’s workshop presentations to a part of the Business Studies academe are used. The CEO, through his own “personal signature story”, recounts the troubled history of the company in a series of embedded and interlinked narratives. The discursive construal of trust is analysable, linguistically, through semantico-grammatical choices, speech functions, argumentation, word-image relationships and semiotic ensembles. On a micro-emic level, a discursive constructionist approach allows us to trace trust claims to credibility, legitimacy and authenticity throughout these strategic texts. At the same time, the study sheds light on the broader dimensions of rapid, often crisis-driven, transformation, revealing the embedding of “small stories” inside the “big stories” of contemporary business.