Recall Communications: Discourse Genres, Symbolic Charging, and Message Design

Abstract

Recall messages embody organizations' strategic choices to temper audience impressions and satisfy audiences' concerns about the existence of product defects, the rectifying of the defects, and the organizations' continuing focus on quality. This article presents a grounded approach to understanding and managing the rhetorical nature of recall announcements as a discourse genre for strategic communication. After brief discussion of genre theory applied to strategic communication, the essay places recall messages in the context of the relevant research literature. An analysis of product recall messages reveals the genre to be comprised of fear-appeal elements, stylistic choices related to language intensity, and pragmatic concerns for projecting an organizational image focused on quality. The essay concludes with implications for theory, practice, and future research.

Notes

¹Hereafter, the Institute for Crisis Management will be cited as ICM.

²We use the term, “discourse,” to refer to instances of texts that include both their form and content, not the more-restricted sense of discourse as only utterances in the tradition of Habermas (1981/1984; 1981/1989) or Austin (1975) and Searle (1969/1994).

³ Harrell and Linkugel (1978) posit a fourth approach to genre, the transcendent, but that approach is beyond the scope of this paper. However, a transcendent approach would yield, according to our reading, universal metaphors employed within messages, e.g., the characterization of the cause of a health-related product recall as “a deadly villain.”

⁴See Smudde and Courtright (2008) for a specific treatment of this matter and Smudde (2007) for a more general treatment of strategy.