Disaster Capitalism within Aviation Industry: Putting Corporate Profits Ahead of Safety

It is predicted that Indonesian domestic aviation industry will soon serve more than 140 million passengers a year. However, its safety records have not shown a significant progress. Airlines have repeatedly experienced serious accidents killed hundreds of passengers and crew. The purpose of this study is to explore corporate communications related to safety culture. This study is concerned with the ideological role played by language in the discursive construction of safety culture. Using Thompson’s (1990) schema regarding the modes of ideology, this study analyzes annual reports of two airlines operated in Indonesia to establish the linguistic strategies used in their communications related to safety culture. The results suggest that the companies used particular linguistic strategies in their communication of safety culture to advance the worldviews of economic efficiency and cost control based on capitalist logic. The prioritization of business growth may contribute to avoiding allocating resources on aspect that is matter most. Given high expectation of safety standards of the industry, the findings have clear and significant implications for disaster management. It is recommended that aviation industry must improve their safety cultures to prevent unnecessary accidents in the future. It seems clear that changing the organizational culture especially within the context of safety will make a significant contribution to effective corporate disaster management strategies.

have defined it differently (see Cox and Cheyne, 2000;Lee and Harrison, 2000;Antonsen, 2009;Silbey, 2009;Edwards et al., 2013;Blazsin & Guldenmund, 2015;Amernic & Craig, 2017). The present research follows the definition of safety culture conceptualized by the following studies. According to Edwards et al. (2013, p. 77) safety culture is "the assembly of underlying assumptions, beliefs, values and attitudes shared by members of an organization, which interact with an organization's structures and systems and the broader contextual setting to result in those external, readily visible, practices that influence safety". For Amernic & Craig (2017, p. 63) safety culture is "the ongoing construction of underlying assumptions, beliefs, values, and attitudes shared by members of an organization in moving to an environment characterized by a quest for an absence of harm". These definitions guide and form the basis of the present research.
Previous research has studied safety culture through analyzing corporate discourses. For example, Amernic & Craig (2017) draw on the triptych of metaphor, ideology, and rhetoric to critically interrogate the discourse of safety culture in the speech of British Petroleum's CEO made before the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. Beelitz and Merkl-Davies (2012) analyze how CEO discourse was used to restore legitimacy after a major accident at a nuclear power plant in Germany. The present study adopts Thompson's (1990) schema regarding the modes of ideology to analyzes annual reports of two airlines operated in Indonesia. The researcher focused on annual reports published in the last fourteen years before the Covid-19 pandemic to establish the linguistic strategies used in their communications related to safety culture. This approach has been adopted by previous studies to analyze different corporate discourses. For example, Ferguson et al. (2016) used Thompson's (1990) depth-hermeneutic framework to explore how corporation that participating in UK ETS and CRC communicate about climate change.
Similarly, Makela and Laine (2012) analyze how corporate reporting (CEO letters) can be used to reinforce particular worldviews in the ongoing discursive debate over sustainability.
This study seeks to contribute to the existing knowledge on how corporation use different language and symbolic form in their discourse to advance certain worldview (see Eagleton, 1991;Thompson, 1990). This study will show that through rhetorical construction, airlines want to show that they actively promote a safety culture mindset.
The fact that through their discourse, they covertly and overtly advance the worldviews of economic efficiency and cost control. In other word, disaster capitalism mindset is at play here. Disaster capitalism occurs when business entities like aviation industry use marketing opportunities or as an opportunity to advance a particular target, mostly economic ones (Klein, 2007). In this case, aviation industry is using safety issues or concerns as media to advance their financial profit and economic growth. This discussion is the area of study towards which the present research aims to contribute to the existing literature on corporate discourse, safety culture, and aviation related disaster. Klein says that "I think there's no doubt that we'll continue to see disaster opportunism.
We now have more and more companies that see this as a growth sector" (Germain, 2021) The rest of the paper is structured as follows. Section 2 provides an overview of the research approach and methodology used to guide this research. This research employed Thompson's (1990) schema regarding the modes of ideology. Section 3 reports the findings by discussing the safety culture in the context of highly safety conscious aviation industry. The last section concludes this paper by providing notes regarding the implications of the study, acknowledging the limitations of the research, and reflecting on avenues for future research.

Methods
This study analyzed annual reports of two public airlines operated in Indonesia. The research focused on aviation industry because it is very sensitive to the issue of safety culture. Meanwhile, the two airlines, Garuda Indonesia (GA) and Indonesia Air Asia (AA) were selected because they are public companies publishing annual reports regularly, whereas other airlines in Indonesia are private businesses which do not publish annual reports. Basically, the narrative disclosures of the latter companies are very difficult to access for the purpose of this study which conducted textual analysis. Regarding selecting two companies, although this paper does not present the comparison between the two airlines, it is believed that having two companies from the same industry would provide a fruitful and rich dataset for textual analysis. Moreover, GA has had long history as the most important airline in Indonesia. It was established in early Indonesian independence by the Indonesian government. So, it has served the Indonesian public for a long period of time. Meanwhile, Indonesia AA is a low-cost carrier established in Malaysia, but it is very popular among the Indonesian public. Furthermore, the two airlines have had major accidents in Indonesia killed many passengers and crew. Therefore, it is intriguing to understand their discussive construction regarding safety culture within their annual reports.
This study applied textual analysis to the annual reports produced by GA and Indonesia AA published from 2005 to 2018, just before the Covid-19 pandemic hit badly the aviation industry. In total, twenty-eight annual reports produced in the last fourteen years excluding the pandemic period were analyzed. The reports were directly downloaded from their companies' websites or from the Indonesian Stock Exchange's website. In terms of textual analysis, Thompson (1990, p. 286) explained that its aim is to examine "the structural features and relations of discourse". In the context of this study, the text analysis examines the discursive aspects and linguistic features used within annual reports of the two airlines to understand meanings for certain concepts and phenomena (Mekela and Laine, 2011). In doing so, this study is guided by Thompson's (1990) Schema for analyzing the typical strategies of symbolic construction: modes and associated strategies of ideology. According to Thompson (1990) as shown in Table 1.1, there are five discursive modes through which ideology may operate: legitimation; dissimulation; unification; fragmentation and reification. Moreover, these modes of ideology are linked with several linguistic strategies, which represent typical ways by which the exercise of ideology is manifested (Thompson, 1990). Table 1. Thompson's (1990) Schema of Linguistic Strategies of Ideology. Adapted from Ferguson et al. (2009, p. 900 Thompson's (1990) schema differently to analyze the text to reveal the prevalent linguistic strategies employed by companies in their narrative disclosures, such as annual reports. For example, Ferguson et al. (2016, P. 285) employed a content analysis method introduced by Gray et al. (1995). They argued that the approach has allowed them "to capture, in a preliminary way, a measure of the importance given to a topic -in terms of the space allocated to it in the report". Mäkelä and Laine (2011) adopted an in-depth and conversational analysis, in which the researchers were involved in a deep and intent discussion between them regarding their interpretations of the texts presented in the CEO's letters. According to Thompson (1990, p. 287) "the key methodological principle of conversation analysis is to study instances of linguistic interaction in the actual setting". Meanwhile, when applying the schema, the other studies including Brasier (2002) andFerguson et al. (2009) used a qualitative content analysis approach. Brasier (2002, p. 250) stated that the merit of the method is that it permits researchers for obtaining "a deeper understanding of the underlying assumptions and cultural models used within the discourse". Ferguson et al. (2009) explained that the schema has helped them to produce a rigorous approach to help the coding process. It is important to note that the present study followed the approach adopted by Ferguson et al. (2009) in applying the Thompson's schema. This means when examining the internal structure of the two airlines' annual reports, the researcher used a qualitative content analysis approach and guided by Thompson's (1990) schema.

Results
This section presents the results from systematic analyses of the annual reports of the selected airlines regarding their discursive construction of safety culture. The results are presented and discussed in two separate sections.
Firstly, how the companies use disaster and safety or what is called in this paper as "disaster capitalism" as an opportunity to achieve their primary mission, which is the promotion of the worldviews of economic efficiency and cost control. Secondly, a narrative that overtly prioritizes business growth, "the growth imperative", is presented. This section shows how the companies advance the idea that safety is the ultimate criterion of excellent financial performance.
'Safety capitalism': an opportunity for the worldviews of economic efficiency and cost control Klein (2007) in her "Shock Doctrine" thesis explains how disasters and potential disasters have been employed as marketing opportunities and an opportunity to promote capitalist worldview. She calls it as "disaster capitalism". Having examined the annual reports of the two airlines, this section reveals the language strategies adopted by the two airlines to promote the worldviews of economic efficiency and cost control. Basically, these organizations legitimate their approach to dealing with safety culture as way to promote radical pro-corporate measures, the profit making. Indeed, their annual reports overtly emphasis on efficiency and cost control ideology. Although they constantly emphasized throughout the reports that they have never compromised on safety, it can be said that, with the help of language, they were able to use safety notion as a brutal tactic to disorient the public who use airlines' services. The argument here is that they repositioned the perceived "threat" of airline safety into an "opportunity" to increase profits for their shareholders through the inculcation of cost cutting worldview. In brief, they are doing it through the legitimation of efficiency goals. Of course, this is in the expense of maintaining their patchy safety record. For example, although AA experienced a major crash killed hundreds of people in 2014, they were not ashamed of putting these lines in that year annual report. According to Thompson (1990) schema, this is a strategy of rationalization employed by the airline in the report.
"We operate at the highest level of efficiency to offer our guests the most affordable flights that are also comfortable, convenient, and fun! All without compromising on safety." (AA, 2014).
Similarly, although throughout the report GA stressed that they have never compromised on safety, they also rationalize the efficiency and cost control as their best commitment of running the corporation: "In response to growing fleet as well as route and network expansion, Garuda Indonesia strives to improve its operating performance indicators through various efficiency and improvement programs, including in safety aspect." (GA, 2012).
The same strategy of rationalization also appears throughout annual reports in the last fourteen years in both airlines. It can be seen in the two excerpts below that they did not hide in any way that they really strive to operate efficiently and make better profits: "The new strategy going forward focuses on three main areas: high yield revenue generation; cost savings; and greater efficiencies through a closer working relationship with the AirAsia Group." (AA, 2014).
"Garuda Indonesia implements appropriate strategies to always record profit with better operating margin than that of the average industry and gain reputable and respected reputation." (GA, 2016).
Meanwhile the passage below reveals that the order of explaining efficiency, cost control and safety indicate that the first two are more important than the last one.
"The Company strives to gain a greater achievement through efficient and effective organization implementation by cutting down on operational costs while sustaining consistency in terms of operation, safety, and security." (GA, 2017).
Beside rationalization, the airlines also naturalize the cost cutting modality as a natural thing to do to increase the company's profits. The fact that that practice has huge impact on safety. However, they ignored to acknowledge that efficiency does not only affect positively towards profits, but also reduce the safety reliability of the airlines.
The excepts below show how they employed the strategy of naturalization.
"The Company will also strive to reduce the production cost per unit at US6.00 CASK level so that the growth of operational cost will not be bigger than the growth of operating income. With these assumptions, the Company is committed to book a profit of US$8.70 million in 2018." (GA, 2017).
"Ultimately, the digitalization journey will help us drive down costs through process efficiency while increasing revenues through new verticals as well as more targeted, personalized marketing based on data collected from guests' previous purchase." (AA, 2018). This argument does not suggest that the acceptable level, prioritize safety as a core business element, and the phrases of the God Almighty as euphemization. However, in the linguistic sense, they strategically used the language as an attempt to put a positive spin on their unreliable safety culture.
GA also employed the strategy of expurgation of the other in their annual report. They were blaming other things as major factors causing accidents. The fact that their ideology of focusing on lowering the cost to increase profit was the main risks to aviation safety. Basically, through this rhetorical tool, thew wanted to create the impression that sometimes accidents occur beyond their control.
"Aside from internal factor, external conditions also play important role in determining the performance of the aviation industry. The first challenge is weather. In the aviation industry, weather becomes one of the determining factors to the safety and security for the passenger." (GA, 2014).
The analysis indicates that the airlines also adopt a particular type of linguistic strategy, in which they not only try to protect themselves from blames in case of safety failure, but also pointed out that other constituency also have responsibilities in relation to aviation safety. In the excerpt below, through the strategy of differentiation, they wanted to highlight that the aviation authorities play a significant role in ensuring the safety of aviation. Basically, they will use any opportunity to blame others. The fact that they did not pay enough attention on their companies' safety culture because their efforts were devoted to satisfying shareholders by creating profits through efficiency and cost control. For example, GA's annual report of 2017 stated about Indonesian aviation authority that: "The Directorate of Airworthiness and Aircraft Operation (DKPPU) under DJPU holds the jurisdiction over flight safety, maintenance, and training standards that are applicable to all airlines operating in Indonesia.
DKPPU is also the body that issues regulations concerning aviation operations and flight safety".
Overall, the deep analysis of the annual reports of the two airlines indicates that they have adopted various linguistic strategies to promote efficiency and cost control ideology as a rational, natural, and acceptable objective of corporate activities. It has been found that the language used contributed rhetorically to an ideology of economic efficiency and cost control, in a manner that was inconsistent with an enduring safety culture. Given the strong embodiment of this belief, public is left to guess at their motivations, agendas, and states of mind., especially for a better disaster management within the companies. However, it seems clear that they are using the rhetoric to justify and manipulate their ever-increasing pursuit of continuous increased of profitability.
Basically, safety is made rhetorically subservient to improve operational performance. The ultimate criterion is apparently "the bottom line" (the profit performance). However, public benchmarking in general can be dangerous in the sense that the general public cannot be expected to understand the limitations and the prerequisites under which the results should be interpreted. Public cannot be expected to be blind that they are sacrificing the safety of their operation, which at the end affect the safety of them as the airlines' passengers.

A narrative that prioritizes business growth
The disclosures published in annual reports by the two airlines were not only used to provide legitimacy to for the worldviews of efficiency and cost control, but also served to emphasize business growth. Indeed, the findings reveals that there is evidence within the annual reports of the airlines of the explicit employment of typical modes of operation of ideology identified by Thompson (1990). This was performed to show explicit mission of the companies to grow and bolster business operations, just the same as they are hoping of operating efficiently and profitably. Indeed, the results highlight that the airlines communications reinforced notions of growth imperative.
However, through linguistic rhetoric the airlines did construct the assumption that they are doing something about improving safety culture. The fact that they establish and sustain the existing power social relations through linguistic strategies that inculcate traditional business paradigm that prioritizes growth. For example, through the strategy of rationalization, GA wrote the following in 2014 although a series of small accidents experienced by GA and major crash occurred to AA in that year: "Garuda Indonesia is committed to become one of the best airlines in the world in terms of ...safety, and convenience. This is because the growth of operational performance is continuously accelerated to improve financial performance." (GA, 2014).
Meanwhile in 2015 they attempted to convince audience that airlines' pilot also have duties of corporate business growth. Basically, it is logic for them that pilots not only have duties of safeguarding safety, but also company financial performance: "In order to have a professional pilot, the learning process for the cockpit crew is not the only regulatory aspects, safety and security, but also equipped with the knowledge of the aspects of business,...in the aviation industry" (GA, 2015).
"The company's business activity has full strict regulatory rules,... such condition encourages us to always be proactive and prudent in managing the various risks that impact on financial capability." (GA, 2017). The statement below shows how they use the strategy of naturalization: "The Board of Directors is committed to providing quick responses to accelerate Garuda Indonesia's growth" (GA, 2015).
"Taking on these roles, she was instrumental in shaping the development of AirAsia into one of the fastest growing and most highly acclaimed airlines globally." (AA, 2015).
According to Thompson's schema (1990), the employment of rationalization and universalization strategies above avoid any explanation for the logic behind the reequipment for business growth. In doing so, they are able to portray it as a common sense or it looks like a need and a natural state of affairs. However, although in many instances they were very straight forward regarding business growth, in other time they tried to hide and dissimulate it a little bit. For example, GA stated that: "The company core values (since 2016) -'SINCERITY' stands for Synergy, Integrity, Customer Focus, Agility, Safety." (GA, 2017).
In actuality, GA defines synergy as a commitment to support the company's growth. Indeed, the company has very early on focused on growth. For example, the annual report theme of 2007 was "Building foundation for growth" (GA, 2007) and at the same year, GA CEO, Emirsyah Satar launched FLY-HI, the new company core values or work culture. "FLY-HI" is suggestive of flying high or creating maximal growth. Nevertheless, as a matter of fact serious GA plane crashed in the same year. Instead of focusing on safety's concern, their theme at that year was satisfying shareholders through consistent growth. In this respect, it is noteworthy that they did engage in safety protection issues in their annual reports, but they did it through the schemes of linguistic strategies. In particular, the through the strategy of rationalization as shown above can produce a chain of reasoning in order to express their explicit desire of prioritizing business growth rather than promoting approaches that dealing well with safety culture. Indeed, the analysis reveal that in spite of the fourteen -year span, and cover two airlines, this study keeps seeing in their narratives a worldview that overtly exclusively prioritizes business growth. It is the researcher's contention that the organizational commitment to increasing safety culture is just a way to publicize it, which is simply a means to achieve the growth agenda that has been set.
Based on the discursive analysis of the annual reports, the predominant discourse of growth discourse discussed above is in line with rhetoric pertaining to the market and the positioning of the two airlines within this context.
For example, AA note that: "All the while we have also been planning our third chapter. This is to see the ASEAN Open Skies, also known as the ASEAN Single Aviation Market (ASAM), materialize. In essence, ASAM will facilitate operations of all airlines -low-cost carriers as well as legacy airlines -across the region, bringing down a number of barriers including the right to set up wholly owned operations in any country that's not their In brief, this section shows that the annual reports address the market through different notion by suggesting the company growth or potential growth. It can be legitimately argued that they did this to create positive impressions of their companies. They wanted to imply that they are able to compete for growth in free market. However, they did not justify the business growth and the potential impact of the growth towards, for example, safety culture.
Therefore, in the context of this study, business growth is often considered neutral and is thus taken for granted in nature. Thus, it can be argued that business growth should not be taken for granted goal, which is naturally depicted in accounting reports, but it should be manifested in change on business operation especially safety culture. Indeed, they must be explicit that growth should be manifested into safety culture improvement within their aviation operation.

Discussion
This study has offered a critical examination of annual reports of two airlines operated in Indonesia, GA and Indonesia AA. The analysis of the reports covering fourteen years from 2005 to 2018 provides a very solid base for better understanding of the companies regarding their communications of safety culture (Amernic & Craig, 2004). Overall, this study has shown that corporate reports can be used to inculcate particular worldviews (Ferguson et a., 2016). In this context, the researcher has drawn attention to a specific corporate-related matter of narrative reporting through employment linguistic strategies (Beattie, 2014;Arvidsson, 2023). In this paper, significant insights regarding the tension between economic efficiency and the desire for a strong safety culture has been provided. They acknowledged that the most important priority for airlines is safety. However, their annual reports hardly focused on safety, while cost control, financial matters, profit making, and organizational efficiency dominate. This is a clear notion of a dominating feature of capitalist logic within business context. The worldview recognizes and justifies that a responsible business is the one that maintains economic efficiency and creates significant profits for shareholders (Collison et al., 2010;Irsyadillah et al., 2021). This market-based notions are confirmed by the fact that the linguistic strategies of rationalization and universalization were very prominently used throughout annual reports (Thompson, 1990).
The logic of a market-based approach was also used to frame safety culture discourse with the focus on business growth (Collison et al., 2011;Amernic & Craig, 2017). They attempted to address safety culture issues through the inculcation of the growth imperative of the capitalist worldview that prioritizes the interest of shareholders (Beelitz and Merkl-Davies;2012;Makela and Laine, 2012). Basically, they were repositioning the customers' expectation of safe flights as an opportunity to change the company's agenda by creating an illusory notion that aviation safety is a matter in which airlines as business corporation is in control. It means they may adjust and flip the safety program to be continuously in line with business growth agenda (Ambituuni et al., 2019). It shows how powerful the linguistic features adopted in annual reports in establishing and sustaining the social relation of power (Arvidsson, 2023). In this context, they used different linguistic strategies including dissimulation to conceal the social relations which they are inculcating. They focused on promoting business growth instead of paying full attention on increasing safety culture within the industry. Therefore, the lack of safety concern within the report including the deflection in the year when they experienced major accidents killed hundreds of people indicate that the issue is not a desired organizational objective. This accusation is made due to the fact that although they keep stating that they are really concerned with safety issue, the reality as shown in their annual report the word of safety was not mentioned much. Instead, they were too much focus on operational performance, cost cutting, operational efficiency, and business growth. In actuality, these organizations are expected to deliver the most excellent rank of safety integrity because the failures or malfunctions from it would lead to catastrophic incidents.

Conclusions
The aviation industry is unlike any other transportation service provider organizations due to its high sensitivity, severity, and devastating impacts of safety failures. This study has provided an understanding of how safety culture is communicated in airlines' annual reports through the effective communication and linguistic strategies.
The findings are suggestive that their annual report strategically use the discourse to manufacture, promote and indoctrinate the business worldview they believe in while talking safety at the same time. Thus, they still obtain consent from their audience and the public regarding continued operation while continuously making serious mistake. Their discourse signals that they have change their stance from prioritizing operating efficiently, cutting cost and sustaining business growth. Indeed, the analysis in this paper supported by the contextual realities of aviation industry in Indonesia highlight how their engagement with safety was greatly shaped by vested interests of disaster capitalism.
Indeed, the analysis continues to see the same narratives that overtly prioritizes the business and shareholders' interests. In other words, this study put forward an account showing that the airlines serve their ends first, rather than being responsive toward the demands from customer regarding safety requirements. It highlights the need to further develop corporate reporting practices regarding safety cultures and safety disclosure. They need to understand that corporate communication especially with respect to safety cultures cannot just be used as a means of placating antagonistic organizational audiences and manufacturing their consent. The use of discourse as a means of constructing reality in a way that benefits the company at the expense of society is an ethical issue, as it sustains relations of domination' (Beelitz and Merkl-Davies;2012, p. 115). It cannot be denied that in modern era where organizational audience can access many different things only on fingertips, they may also judge the safety and the reliability of their selected airlines based on such knowledge provided on annual report. They may examine how the airlines and aviation industry put forward the discourse regarding safety. Therefore, this study will make critical contribution towards critical discourse analysis on safety cultures of corporate narrative disclosures, which are tools to increase transparency and accountability. This paper has limitations by only including public airlines while the fact private owned airlines also serve millions of Indonesian passengers. However, it is still legitimate to suggest that the way airlines talk and discuss safety culture in their narrative reports convey that the Indonesian aviation industry must improve their safety cultures to prevent unnecessary accidents in the future. It is an undisputable fact that changing the organizational culture especially within the context of safety will make a significant contribution to effective corporate disaster management strategies. Therefore, this study suggests for more studies on safety culture especially in the context of aviation industry, so that disaster management will be improved. In the context of discourse analysis, future research might be beneficial to examine the CEOs' letter included within annual or sustainability reports to see how people on the top talk and envisage safety cultures in the industry, where lives are involved in every aircraft's operation. Future research could also explore whether staff training such as pilots are planned as part of the overall disaster management strategies of the airlines.