6 Positioning organisations as authorities
In the second part of the interview, Gill also talked about how some organisations, like financial service providers, were traditionally expected to construct themselves as authoritative and more powerful than their customers. The next activity explores this further.
Activity 6 Constructing the organisation as authoritative
Take a look at the following example sentences. In which sentences is the company presenting itself in a position of authority? How could you rephrase the text to suggest a more equal relationship?
- Our experts at Pension Quotes give detailed, personalised advice.
- We also help you understand how a state pension interacts with other pensions you may have.
- You choose where the money is invested and therefore the level of risk.
Discussion
You may have come up with different points, but you may have thought that these sentences are listed in decreasing degree of company authority. Looking at social actors (van Leeuwen, 2008), in the first sentence, the process of ‘giving’ is performed by a collective agent described as ‘experts’ working in a named company. In contrast, the audience or potential customers are excluded – not mentioned at all. At the other end of the spectrum is sentence 3, where ‘you’ is the agent and the company is excluded. Perhaps the most equal relationship is represented in sentence 2: both participants are referred to by personal pronouns and they are also both agents in different processes: the company ‘helps’, while the customer ‘understands’ and ‘has’.
The first sentence could be rephrased in a number of ways. One improved version could be ‘We give our customers the kind of detailed personalised advice they require’, but you may well have other suggestions.