Layered framing: Warren Buffett’s shareholder letters, essays and four Korean editions

This study traces the framing of Warren Buffett’s shareholder letters across five phases in two parts: their compilation as The Essays of Warren Buffett (1997) and four Korean editions (2001–2022). Joining Baker’s account of framing to Bourdieu’s field concepts, it treats framing as a situated practice through which agents pursue symbolic capital, and the source text as itself a framed product. It compares source and target editions and draws on an interview with the translator of three editions. First, the compilation used labeling, selective appropriation and dechronologization to turn corporate reporting into essays, establishing premises — a genre, an authorship, a thematic frame — that later editions inherited without argument. Second, as value investing became orthodox, Korean agents used capital to reframe the book from popular guide to specialist reference work, contesting those premises. Within editions, naming, arrangement and lexis need not align uniformly, as each is oriented toward legitimacy under distinct, level-specific field expectations.