Your Silence Speaks Loudly: A ventriloquial approach to corporate silence about commitment in argumentative polylogues

Abstract

Corporate social responsibility research often emphasizes the commissive effects of corporate discourse, ignoring silence or considering it a deliberate strategy to evade stakeholder pressure. From this perspective, only corporate discourse commits, and silence is the absence of discourse. This paper challenges this approach. Drawing on ventriloquial theory (Cooren, 2010) and the notion of metaventriloquism (Castor, 2020), this paper develops the concept of corporate commissive silence (CCS) to theorize how corporate silence on commitments operates as a malleable sign and a contested semiotic space. Specifically, it interprets CCS as an absence of message that different agents identify, attribute to a company, and imbue with meaning to promote their own opinions about what animates and/or should animate that company. As this concept highlights, not only words but also silence can generate commissive dynamics for corporations. The communicative force of this type of silence does not depend on corporate intentionality, but rather on the operations of appropriation and reinterpretation executed by other agents. To illustrate the utility of this concept, I describe several metaventriloquial practices executed by various agents in a recent controversy surrounding Disney’s silence on Florida’s HB 1557 law.