Comparative Mechanisms and Relations in the Dissemination of Institution-centred Financial Knowledge

Abstract: The chapter examines the discursive shaping of the annual financial reports published by the European Central Bank and the Bank of Greece from 2010 to 2015. In particular, it explores how this written communication resorts to the use of comparative constructions in order to contrast and parallel banking performance and build different realizations of authoritative institutional identities. Specifically, by analysing the different types of comparative structures associated to specific discourse strategies such as narrative, evaluative patterns and metaphors, the study highlights the relations that are established between national and supranational institutions and the ways in which institutional identities can be legitimized and channelled into public credit or discredit. In other words, the analytical focus of comparison considers the degree of discursive convergence and divergence between the Bank of Greece and the ECB in their ways of distributing information, through a quantitative approach integrated by a qualitative investigation. Together, they enable us to identify in what ways and to what extent specific rhetorical choices in the two corpora shape distinctive degrees of variation and variability in reporting.