A Comparative Study on Image-Text Relations in Big Pharma’s Codes of Ethics

The study of image-text interconnections offers an interdisciplinary approach to understand and contextualise visuals. The present research explores imagetext relations in codes of ethics (CoEs), which are corporate documents issued by corporations. Drawing from a generalised system of image-text relations (Martinec & Salway 2005), quantitative and qualitative analyses are conducted to illustrate the type of image-text relation implemented in CoEs by companies operating in the global pharmaceutical sector, the so-called Big Pharma industry. Findings suggest that visual type does not necessarily determine a fixed pattern of image-text relations in CoEs. While pictures, drawings and tables display a clear, recurring trend, graphics do not.