Manufacturing paper crimes– merging genres, texts, styles and discourses in financial crime trials
Alexander Paulsson, Department of Business Administration, Lund University, Sweden
Henrik Rahm, Swedish Linguistics, Centre for Languages and Literature, Lund University, Sweden
Niklas Sandell, Department of Business Administration, Lund University, Sweden
Peter Svensson, Department of Business Administration, Lund University, Sweden
Selected symposium: Social cohesion at work: shared languages as mortar in professional settings
Presentation language: English
The aim of the presentation is to investigate the construction of social cohesion by the merging genres, texts, styles and discourses in court proceedings. At the AILA conference, examples of social cohesion in this text setting will be presented, both from minor and major crimes.
The paper is based on an ongoing multidisciplinary project on the construction of three types of economic crimes – bookkeeping crime, tax evasion crime and fraudulence. The four researchers from the disciplines of Business Administration and Swedish linguistics cooperate since several years in projects on economic discourse, representing research perspectives of discourse, ideology, genre, organization and intertextuality. An important point of departure is the curious, innocent and inquiring mind of the researchers as none of them is a law scholar. Thus, this ignorance is seen as a possibility to reach an unprejudiced understanding of paper crimes.
In financial crime, a potential criminal (a suspect) meets his/her accusatory – a white-collar suspect meeting white-collar law professionals. The white-collar suspect can be the owner of a small business, standing trial for not delivering the annual report on time to the Swedish Companies Registration Office. At the other end, the white-collar suspect could be a CEO standing trial for fraudulence or tax evasion crime regarding millions of euros.
The court proceedings serve as a mortar and a meeting place for genres, texts, styles and discourses. Genres used are reports of interrogation, testimonies and judicial decisions but also texts without a genre label such as transcripts of text message conversations and other typos of evidence material. Styles represented are legal language (legalese), colloquial language, business language, political language and administrative language. Discourses discerned are discourses of order, emotions, responsibility, accountability, being a human, incompleteness, moral and morality.
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