“Let’s have that conversation on next quarter’s call”: (Dis)Engagement markers in Q&A sessions of earnings conference calls

Earnings conference calls have become the primary channel for oral financial reporting in today’s globalized corporate world (Tasker 1998, Williams 2008). These events consist of presentations of financial performance by company executives followed by Q&A sessions with financial analysts who participate via teleconferencing. The dialogic Q&A sessions in particular provide an interesting terrain for exploring interactional strategies in what may be described as high-stakes communication where both parties are under pressure to achieve distinct professional goals (Crawford Camiciottoli 2013). This chapter offers an in-depth analysis of engagement markers in earning conference call Q&A sessions, including questions, imperatives and deontic modals (e.g. should, ought, must), as well as inclusive proforms (e.g. Let’s, you, we, our). The study is based on two small specialized corpora that consist of the transcripts of earnings calls of US-based multinationals. One corpus comprises earning calls that took place prior to the 2008 global financial crisis (the Pre-crisis Corpus), while the other contains earnings calls from late 2009 when the crisis was in full swing (the Crisis Corpus). Text analysis software was used to produce descriptive profiles of engagement markers across the two corpora. The items that emerged were then manually examined within their context of usage to identify patterns of usage that may be linked to the more or less challenging economic environments, to the professional profiles of the discourse participants and to the ICT-mediated interactional setting. The results shed light on how the discourse participants used language not only to engage each other, but also to refrain from engaging, thus providing insights into the complex dynamics of this communicative event which involves strategic choices about which information to disclose. An enhanced understanding of engagement markers in earnings conference calls can find fruitful application in corporate communication courses to help aspiring executives and analysts become more successful interlocutors in this key form of oral financial reporting.