A Close Textual Analysis of Corporate Layoff Memos

All employers occasionally must deliver bad news to their employees, but few bad news situations can compete with the delicate task of announcing layoffs. In an electronic age, when layoff notices delivered via email are quickly leaked to outsiders, CEOs must take into account not only the employees who will be affected by the layoffs, but also the reporters, bloggers, and stock analysts who will undoubtedly see the emails. In an attempt to please these multiple audiences, employers—like the three CEOs who wrote the memos that are the focus of this column—often downplay the negative news or sandwich it between hopeful predictions about the future. While this strategy may mitigate the short-term effects of announcing bad news, it can also backfire, angering employees who feel they have been deceived.

A multi-pronged approach to studying these memos (and others like them) can reveal a multitude of rhetorical features that will be useful to academics and practitioners alike. In this article, I discuss and apply close textual analysis (CTA) to the three corporate layoff memos, focusing particularly on the use of euphemism to mask bad news messages.

Close textual analysis: A brief overview

Close textual analysis as a method of rhetorical criticism, advocated by scholars such as Michael Leff (1986, 1988) and Stephen E. Lucas (1988, 1990), asserts that a “close reading” of a text can “reveal and explicate the precise, often hidden, mechanisms that give a particular text ... rhetorical effect” (Burgchardt, 2005, p. 563). Employing this method can make explicit how a text can affect its audience in particular ways. Proponents of close textual analysis suggest that its power lies in its simplicity, which nonetheless leads to importa...

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