“We have to weather the storm and ensure that we emerge stronger after the crisis”: The Impact of the COVID Pandemic on CEOs’ Letters to Shareholders.

The COVID-19 pandemic has dramatically affected our world and our way of living, bringing along the third and greatest economic, financial and social shock of the 21st century together with 9/11 and the Global Financial Crisis of 2008 (Jackson, Schwarzenberg and Nelson, 2020; Padhan and Prabheeshb, 2021). Unavoidably, this sudden crisis which has interrupted normal business activities, affecting organizations, as well as their public, products and services, has also hit some sectors more seriously than others. This is for instance the case of the airline and tourism industry: during the lockdown period airplanes were on the ground, hotels were closed as travel restrictions had been put in place in virtually all countries around the world. In such dire situation, it was of paramount importance for airline and tourism companies to communicate effectively with their stakeholders to let them know how the company was reacting and was going to react, both during and after the crisis. Thanks to the evolution of the World Wide Web and the new technologies, the company's corporate website represents a strategic way to disseminate corporate information, enhance the company's corporate image and reputation, while strengthening the relationship with all types of stakeholders. This is particularly important when organizations have to respond to crises and present and promote the company's vision and strategy to their investors. Presently, the most popular means through which a company is able to communicate its financial performance and initiatives is by issuing the Letters to Shareholders contained within the Annual Report. In critical times, letters to shareholders may prove useful to influence the stakeholders’ perceptions of corporate performance (Săndulescu, 2019), and increase or restore their confidence in the organization by evoking positive scenarios (Yan, Aert and Thewissen, 2019). The letter to Shareholders allows the business leader to present his/her personal perspective on the company. Through different strategies, managers can “control and manipulate the impression conveyed to the users of accounting information” (Hadro, Klimczak and Pauka, 2017; 306). This small-scale study focuses on two specialized corpora, which contain 59 Letters to Shareholders written in 2019 and 59 Letters to Shareholders written in 2020 belonging to tourism and travel companies, with a view to uncovering the rhetorical strategies used by corporate executives. In the first place by uploading the two corpora to a concordancing software, it was possible to identify the most frequently employed metadiscourse markers, among the ones listed by Hyland (2005). Then, following Hyland’s 1998 study, the different interactive and interactional markers were classified according to the persuasive function they play. The contrastive analysis of the results reveals an extensive use of interactional markers which outnumber interactive ones. In particular, Corpus-2020 presents a higher frequency of metadiscourse markers, which result in affective and credible appeals and contribute to portraying the companies as responsible and caring and above all able to manage the present economic crisis.