A mise-en-scène epidítica na mídia de negócios: aspectos epidítico-argumentativos nos discursos organizacionais do Guia de Sustentabilidade da Revista Exame

Abstract

This study aims to analyze to what extent business media, more specifically Revista Exame (Exame Magazine), structures the production of the Guide to Corporate Sustainability through an epideictic-rhetoric mise-en-scène, promoting and improving organizational representations around the sustainability topic. Our corpus is composed of 14 articles present in this Guide, published in 2013. We focus on the thematic construction that surrounds the discursive object Corporate Responsibility and Sustainability. From an interdisciplinary perspective that groups Institutional Theories, New Rhetoric, Argumentation, and Semiotics, we performed a discursive-argumentative analysis of the discourse spread by the business media about model companies. Our hypothesis is that these publications show a rhetoric epideictic scene which sustains compliments and works as a strategy to construct and propagate a good image of these companies. In order to develop an analysis that contemplates aspects of both argumentation and discourse, we used theoretical discussions that take into account an approximation of these two areas, considering three axes: interactional, representational, modal/discursive. In our analyses and theoretical reflections, we noted that Revista Exame business media constructs compliments to companies by propagating sustainability-related instances, as suggested by the magazine title, based on a rhetoric that balances values precious to the organizational universe and related to its practices such as: responsible management, profitability, and competitive image. These practices respond to external expectations of the business milieu, such as employability, sustainability, and water management. These result from social demands and preoccupation with politically sustainable and correct issues (doxa), as well as from the need to emphasize values originated from competition demands, market tightness, and profit. Our results show that companies complimentary image are constructed through an argumentative orientation in the enunciative scene, observed through the implication of the enunciator, or lack thereof, in this construction. This argumentative orientation was observed based not only on the analyses of statements, constructed through designations and predications, pseudo-arguments which contribute to the construction of an epideictic mise-en-scène, but also on reported discourses, which contribute to the construction of compliments through an ad hominem and/or ad verecundiam argumentation. Such complimentary image triggers social representations, so that the discursive objects (i.e., the companies) become a role model for the business world, through a compliment reinforcing that organizational values are in accordance with social values.