Legalistic and commitment-oriented corporate codes of ethics. Distinctive macro textual and lexico-syntactic traits

With its relatively recent major role in corporate discourse, code of ethics is the expected privileged locus for a company to signal its ethical commitment to self-regulation. As underlined by Catenaccio and Garzone (2017), a legalistic approach seems to be distinguishable from a commitment-oriented approach. The present study aims to investigate if distinctive traits of the two approaches are identifiable both at a macro-textual level and at micro-textual (lexical and syntactic) level and, if so, if they are influenced by business sectors. In order to do that, a selection of codes from eight distinct industries of the top 100 FTSE companies will be investigated within the theoretical framework of discourse analysis.