‘Made in Italy’: Local and Global Distinctive Traits

Over the past decades increasing attention has been paid to the construction of identity in academic, institutional and professional settings (Dyer and Keller-Cohen 2000, Benwell and Stokoe 2002). Specifically, identity has been analysed as a phenomenon which is dynamically constituted in discourse. In line with this approach, the paper investigates the discursive enactment of corporate identity or the articulation of what a company is, what it stands for, and what it does (van Riel and Balmer 1997, Balmer 2001). Among the strategic factors which contribute to a laudatory self-presentation of companies, the analysis focuses on the role that the notion of space plays in the shaping of corporate identities. Data for this study consist of a corpus of corporate webpages published by a sample of Italian companies working in the three sectors of 'Made in Italy' , i.e. Fashion, Food and Furniture. With the support of corpus linguistics tools and the software package WordSmith Tools 5.0, corporate webpages are analysed both quantitatively and qualitatively in their space-related keywords. The study of key-words (e.g. local, national, Italian, world, international, global) and their phraseology sheds some light on some of the most pervasive strategies which are adopted by the companies under study to reach a competitive position in the global economic scenario, to insist on their “Italianness”, and to gain support of local and international stakeholders.