Dialogical approach to a highly controlled discourse

What is it about?

This research concerns a corpus of a dozen narrative interviews collected by students from certified accountants who work or have worked for a major international audit group (one of the Big 4). It uses a dialogical and enunciative approach to show how highly controlled discourses are employed to criticize the Big 4. This article shows how receivers (present as well as absent) shape the wording. Interviewees control their speech in different ways depending on whether they worked in small firms or in a Big. These differents ways are concretly described.

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Why is it important?

It appears that the interviewees position themselves differently in relation to the Bigs’ dominant professional model and that they express this positioning as much (if not more) by their way of speaking as by the contents themselves. Surprisingly, even those who have left the Bigs also take these norms into account strongly and criticize them in a controlled way. The analysis finally shows how strong the normative pressure of the Bigs is, since it is performed through the enunciative scene of all interviews. The analys also shows how the interviewees contribute to the circulation of the Bigs’ norms and to their perpetuation.

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