Corporate Discourse and Underlying Cultural Dimensions: A Corpus-Based Comparative Analysis of Job Advertisements in Italy, Germany and the UK

In the contemporary era of globalization and digital transformation, corporate practices and discourses are increasingly converging towards uniformity, driven by the pervasiveness of English as Business Lingua Franca (BELF) and the broad diffusion of standardized global Human Resources Management (HRM) strategies. Within this framework, Job Advertisements emerge as a critical site of tension between globalizing discursive tendencies and persistent local cultural peculiarities. This study investigates whether recruitment discourse is shifting towards convergence (standardization), maintaining divergence (cultural peculiarities), or following the trajectory of crossvergence, consisting in the hybridization of local and global factors within the Job Advertisement genre. By adopting a Corpus Linguistics Approach, this research investigates a total of 450 job advertisements manually collected from popular e-recruitment platforms like LinkedIn and Indeed across the Italian, German and UK markets. The use of Sketch Engine enabled a quantitative analysis of the three national sub-corpora through specific tools like Concordances, Wordlist, Keywords and Word Sketch. Furthermore, a macro-analysis of the overall textual architecture was conducted on the Full Corpus in order to investigate how different cultures structurally and lexically organize the content of their Job Advertisements, shifting the focus from the analysis of individual lemmas to the sequential progression of information. The quantitative linguistic evidence was at a later stage mapped against Erin Meyer’s The Culture Map (2014), to test the validity of the divergence hypothesis across dimensions such as Communicating, Leading, Trusting, Persuading, Scheduling, and Deciding. The findings show that while Job Advertisements are increasingly structured around a standardized lexical core and permeated by Anglicisms and BELF terminology, a significant degree of cultural boundness persists. The investigation of the Cultural Dimensions theorized by Meyer’s framework displays a significant degree of divergence in the way recruitment discourse is linguistically structured across the Italian, German and UK markets with respect to explicitness, authority, trust, decision-making, time scheduling and persuading strategies, contradicting the assumption of the existence of a “global HR language”. In conclusion, the study claims that Job Advertisements are inevitably and intrinsically embedded in their culture of origin. Nevertheless, factors such as global corporate tendencies, constraints imposed by template-driven e-recruitment platforms, and the pervasiveness of BELF are increasingly shaping recruitment discourse. The results support the crossvergence hypothesis as the most accurate model to describe the current situation of contemporary recruitment discourse.