A Study On Corporate Identity Construction Through Attitudinal Resources In Corporate Profiles

As an important way of highlighting features of a corporation,corporate identity has been the focus of scholars in various fields,including psychology,linguistics and management research.Among these studies,discursive method has been widely employed and many linguistic features have been analyzed for the construction of corporate identity.However,there are few studies of corporate identity through the analysis of attitudinal resources,despite of its important role in constructing corporate identity.Therefore,this thesis intends to study the construction of corporate identity through the analysis of attitudinal resources in corporate profiles.After the construction,different fields also have different perspectives for the interpretations of corporate identity.In this thesis,the framework of Ecological Discourse Analysis is taken as the perspective to reveal the beneficial and destructive stories in corporate identity construction process.In summary,with the purpose of constructing corporate identity and revealing stories in the construction process,the attitudinal resources in corporate profiles are analyzed and interpreted from the perspective of Ecological Discourse Analysis.The specific research questions are as follows.1)What attitudinal resources are employed in corporate profiles and how are they related to the establishment of corporate identity? 2)What are the features of corporate identity constructed through the employment of attitudinal resources? 3)What beneficial and destructive stories are revealed in the construction of corporate identity?To answer the above research questions,in this thesis,a self-built corpus of 23 corporate profiles are randomly chosen from the list of Fortune 500,with a total of 22260 words.Firstly,10 profiles are annotated and analyzed in pilot analysis.The preliminary framework of annotation is mainly based on the attitudinal system from Appraisal Theory.The results of pilot analysis play a very important role in the improvement of the annotation framework,especially in the determination of the appraised system.After the pilot analysis,it moves to the annotation and analysis of the whole corpus.Firstly,the features of attitudinal resources are described.Then,the corporate identity is constructed through further analysis of the appraised system.Finally,the stories revealed in corporate profiles are judged as beneficial or destructive according to the ecosophy of this thesis,and some suggestions are put forward.The ecosophy of this thesis mainly contains three key words: “sustainability”,“cooperation” and “intrinsic value”.The results of this thesis are as follows.Firstly,among these three sub-categories of attitudinal resources,Capacity resources account for 56.31%,followed by Appreciation resources(42.46%)and Affect resources(1.23%).The focus of Capacity resources is to show how special,capable,reliable and appropriate a corporation is.The Appreciation resources are mainly used to evaluate the success and social values of corporations and Affect resources are used to show the corporations’ hopes.These attitudinal resources play a very important role in the construction of corporate identity.Secondly,a further analysis of the appraised system of these attitudinal resources identifies altogether six aspects: assets;position;products;mission;social valuation and norms.These components fall into three dimensions: competency,mission and values.Among them,competency dimension shows a corporate identity with large number of assets,great products and high reputation and position.The dimension of mission mainly focuses on their self-development.Through the evaluation of value dimension,the main feature of corporate identity include their concentration on selfdevelopment and competitive power.Among these dimensions,the most prominent features of corporate identity include large-scale,economically powerful,industry leading,competitive and popular.Only a small number of these attitudinal resources are used to construct a corporate identity of eco-friendly and community friendly.Last but not least,some typical stories are revealed during the construction of corporate identity.The first one is their identification of competition.The second one is their positive attitude towards extrinsic values.The last one is corporations’ concern for the environment and community.With reference to the ecosophy of this thesis,the first two stories are destructive and the last one the beneficial.As an important entity of society,corporations should focus on the development of intrinsic values and pay attention to the cooperation in their industry.These results imply that the corporate profiles which we are quite often exposed to in our life contain many destructive stories,such as stimulating over-consumption,competition and extrinsic values.We should be alert to these destructive stories,pay more attention to the cultivation of intrinsic values and advocate cooperation,so as to achieve sustainability and a win-win situation between human and nature.