Focus group research is used to examine how employees read corporate communications, supplying empirical evidence of an apparently resilient and shared anti-management discourse at the shopfloor level. The main contribution of the article lies in showing how such traditional attitudes are reproduced through employees' cynical readings of corporate communications. The article complements more conventional modes of discourse analysis by exploring how employees analyse text; how they identify discursive controversies and find evidence of ‘conniving’ management. Considering such processes reveals points of interest about how employees' folk linguistic competencies are locally deployed in ways that reproduce class-based logics and sentiments.
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