Strategic maneuvering by persuasive definition in corporate crisis communication

Abstract

This paper aims to explore the use of persuasive definition in a corporate weblog by examining how a blogger attempts to define the company’s role in response to criticisms in the cyber space. Making use of a pragma-dialectical research framework, corporate weblog is characterized as an argumentative activity type in the commercial domain in which the legitimacy of persuasive definition is contextually constrained. The paper first analyzes the institutional preconditions that restrict all the argumentative moves in a corporate weblog, and then investigates how the corporate blogger of Taobao, the biggest online shopping website in China, responds to criticism by redefinition to evade the burden of proof.