This is the capstone of my Master's degree - an MSc, that is, no matter how often it is called an MA - and I just want to finish it properly. I am hoping for a Merit, as that would put me at a Merit degree, but at this point I would even be happy with a Pass, just so I can pass my degree. It is dreadfully scary to hand in a body of work consisting of 20,000 words which will determine whether you will receive a Postgraduate Diploma or that actual Master of Science-degree in January. But I suppose I must.
I very much enjoyed doing the research. Stuck behind a desk for hours on end, reading about corporate crime and tax law and corpus linguistics and critical discourse analysis? Yes please! Messing about with SPSS, trying to get results that make sense and then actually getting those? Hell yes! Reading articles, thinking "this looks quite objective, doesn't it?" and then, when looking beyond the surface, noticing that "oh hey, this isn't objective at all!". Noticing that news writing contributes to a vicious cycle of social stratification, finding out news is all economics and politics and dominant ideology. Realising that the language of news writing works to negotiate the social contract. Fascinating.
But that's all very abstract, and hard to put into words - therefore hard to properly maintain when you're trying to cut down from 28,000 to 20,000 - and then the fear that you've lost depth, strength, solidity, soundness, and gained flaws. I hope to put that right in my PhD, win back my depth and solidity, but 100,000 words is still not very many when you're dealing with something so interesting as this, which is both so abstract and practical. But let us focus on the practical findings of my dissertation for now.
My research question was how UK newspapers portrayed the tax avoidance of Facebook, Starbucks, eBay, and such companies - multinational companies - and the backlash. This is extremely recent stuff, as the story broke in October 2012 and has still not finished, and it struck me as odd for it was not actually a proper news story. It was big, true, but the general readerships could hardly be expected to *care* about multinational companies working within the bounds of international commercial regulations. A corporation's main goal is profit, and it will do everything it is allowed to do to get that profit. So there is no novelty in this, and no novelty should equal no news. Besides, even when corporations do break the rules of international commerce, the backlash is hardly as large as it was now. Cartels? An article in the finance sections of broadsheets, perhaps a follow-up, that's it. Child labour? Myeah, that'll generate some outrage, some people will turn to companies that aren't known for using child labour, and some politicians might say "shouldn't do that!", nothing big though. Environmental crimes? Difficult - Shell's crimes in Nigeria hardly make the papers at all, but the BP oil spill generated quite some fuss. But, you know, that was dead fish and the Gulf of Mexico and stuff. Proximate drama. But taxes?
Taxes?
No one gives a shit about taxes. If anything is written about taxes, it's about how you can save on your tax payments by minding this this and that category. And as no one knows how corporation tax works, other than that corporations have to pay a certain percentage of their profits, few people usually care. After all, some of these companies haven't been paying taxes for literally years and only now it generated outrage.
So that's all interesting, but that's all context. My question was, how did they portray it? Did the newspapers make a big fuss? Did they side with the outrage or with the papers? Judging from the fact that the OECD was considering changing regulations and that people kept being outraged, I hypothesised that yeah, these newspapers will be stirring up a fuss. But their reporting initially seemed quite balanced. Objective. As newspapers are supposed to report things.
So I did a corpus analysis of all articles and took 7 articles for a critical discourse analysis. I'll not go into the specifics here, email me for a PDF copy if you want one, but what I found was that yeah, these newspapers were kicking up as much as a fuss as the politicians calling Google 'evil' and those protesters calling for boycotts of Starbucks. In fact, they seemed to be the instigator of some of the outrage, by for instance only presenting those opinions which said that these "multinational corporations should pay their fair share of UK corporation tax" (this is a composite sentence of the main lexical items the corpus program showed me. Absolutely fascinating).
The next question, of course, is why. But I just spent 20,000 words detailing how UK newspapers to an extent criminalise the otherwise legal behaviour of not paying your taxes where you are not obliged to pay your taxes. The moral question of whether a company should be obliged to pay taxes in territories where they make billions of pounds of revenue, but where they do not technically, according to the OECD regulations of the taxation of multinational corporations, have to pay taxes, has been answered, by these papers, with a "Yes". But why? Why now?
This will have to do with the economic crisis, I hypothesise. So the next research question will be how the portrayal of corporate fraud (or crime, but that's perhaps too broad for 100,000 words) in the UK has developed over the course of the global economic crisis. But that's for my PhD. And something I can't wait to get started on.
*This is taken from a Starbucks-related pun in The Mirror. I loved it, and it has become the title of my dissertation. Tabloid puns are the best.
No comments:
Post a Comment