A Study on Discourse Strategies of All-employee Letters Within a Model of Trust-Repair Discourse

The all-employee letter of the enterprise is the bridge of communication between the managers and the employees of the enterprise. At the same time, enterprises can rely on this kind of discourse to repair their corporate image in times of crisis and unite their strength in order to ensure their long-term sound development. This study builds a new framework model based on the trust repair discourse model constructed by Fuoli and Paradis (2014). By means of discourse analysis, this study selects all-employee corporate letters issued by Pinduoduo, ByteDance, Huawei and Jingdong Mall in response to negative public opinion from the top ten Internet companies in China as the corpus to explore their discourse behaviours and discourse effects. This study aims to provide new insights to promote the development of trust and discourse research, and to assist enterprises in crisis contexts to facilitate effective communication with the public, alleviate the trust crisis, and repair the image of trust.