A Contrastive Study Of Identity Construction Of E-businesses In The Global Context

With the implementation of the national strategy of “Going Out” and “the Road and Belt” Initiative,the Chinese enterprises and corporations,with their increased participation in international cooperation and competition,are exploring and practicing new strategies,new channels and new models of internationalized management with Chinese characteristics.Meanwhile,the Internet,which is universally beneficial,convenient and sharing,shapes every aspect of human life.The traditional business models are inevitably transformed into E-commence and cross-border E-commerce.The language use at on-line marketplaces,which are represented as the world of texts,facilitates the communication and improves the relations between businesses and consumers,elevates the trust and loyalty of customers,and hence plays a key role in the construction of corporate identity.Corporate identity is multifaceted because it integrates consumers' overall sensations and impressions of a marketer.In order to investigate the construction of corporate identity in the on-line community of Word-of-Mouth,this thesis,applying the methods of text mining and corpus linguistics,makes a contrastive study of interactions and language use at Taobao VS eBay,Tmall VS Amazon,when the negative messages are communicated between businesses and consumers.This thesis reveals the correlation between the language use and the corporate identity construction by probing into the three dimensions of corporate identity such as“relation”,“attitude” and “competence”,and their realizations with the employment of language devices,including personal references,attitudinal resources and transitivity processes when the service failure occurs.The thesis collects and utilizes dyadic data of publicly available negative reviews and their replies,including 17,534 sets from Taobao,19818 sets from eBay(Taobao :Corpus 1;eBay(with China-registered sellers): Corpus 2;eBay(with U.S.-registered sellers): Corpus 3).Moreover,Corpus 4 and Corpus 5 are established,enclosing 377 sets of negative text comments from Tmall and 262 sets from Amazon respectively.Based on the qualitative and quantitative analysis of the above-mentioned text comments by applying WordSmith and SPSS software,the thesis investigates the construction of corporate identity from the perspectives of “relation”,“attitude” and“competence for service recovery”.The study yields the following findings.Firstly,regarding the relation construction and reconstruction in the context of negative on-line comments,sellers at Taobao and at Tmall tend to employ more personal references,especially the relative-type or guest-type of nominal references.Compared with the buyers at Taobao,or buyers at Amazon,the buyers at Tmall have the tendency of using zero references.The “invisibility” of buyers at Tmall gives clues to the influence “power”imposes on the relation construction at B2 C marketplaces.At Amazon,the frequent use of “I” and “you” indicates the frequent interactions between buyers with other potential buyers.At Taobao,the use of offensive references in the negative text comments is correlated with their use in sellers' replies.Therefore,compared witheBay and Amazon,the selection and employment of personal references is more likely to serve as a service recovery strategy at Taobao and Tmall,manipulating the relations between buyers and sellers.Secondly,the attitude is addressed with attitudinal resources distributed differently at different marketplaces to express writers' point of views and positions in order to establish alliances with potential readers.At eBay,buyers,when negatively commenting on the U.S.registered sellers,tend to invest more passive resources of affect,appreciation and judgement,whereas the China registered sellers tend to employ more positive resources of judgement or appreciation resources to reduce contradictions when responding to critical comments.At Amazon,consumers claim more attitudinal resources with corporate identity more exposed to the negative on-line comments.At Tmall,sellers possess more language devices such as attitudinal resources,which help with the corporate identity construction.The homogeneity in the buyers' complaint at Tmall assists in the sellers' adoption of service recovery strategies.Thirdly,the competence at the on-line marketplaces,in the context of negative commodity reviews,refers to the ability to conduct service recovery when service failure occurs.The competence constitutes an important role in the construction and reconstruction of corporate identity.“Return” serves as an effective service recovery strategy at both Taobao and eBay while “technical support” functions at Tmall and Amazon.Statistics shows that,at eBay,“return” is more likely to be used as“action-oriented process” in the material process,and that there exists correlation between buyers' and sellers' use of “return”.At Taobao,“return” is more likely to be used as “phenomenon” in the mental process,and buyers' and sellers' use of “return”is not correlated.At Tmall,Huawei,with the employment of the verbal process,utters its advice and recommendations in its after-sale service.However,at Amazon,Huawei is more likely to reduce the use of the verbal process,resulting in its failure in providing customers with effective support.The study continues to discuss the root causes of confrontations and challenges involving cross-cultural communication and the service recovery communication in different social and cultural contexts.This thesis concludes by proposing the management of corporate identity in the era of on-line commodity reviews,hoping to facilitate the interactions between businesses and consumers,improve the efficiency of service recovery,and assist in the construction of corporate identity in the global context.