A Study On The Identity Construction In The CEO Letters Of Chinese And American Corporate Social Responsibility Reports

Corporate identity serves as a way for enterprises to define and present themselves,thereby communicating with the public about their ideal selves.CEO letters,both informational and promotional,are released to convince stakeholders of the corporate social responsibility(CSR)deeds.However,few studies are carried out to explore the corporate identity construction in CEO letters.Based on that,this study investigates the corporate identities built in the CEO letters of top Chinese and American companies’ CSR reports on the list of Fortune Global 500 by examining the key discourse topics,discursive strategies and linguistic resources in the two corpora.The research orientation,in general,can be divided into the following four research questions:(1)What are the major foci in the CEO letters of Chinese and American CSR reports?(2)What are the differences in the discursive strategies highlighted by the key linguistic resources in the CEO letters of Chinese and American CSR reports?(3)What are the corporate identities discursively constructed in the CEO letters of Chinese and American CSR reports respectively?(4)What factors account for the observed differences in the corporate identity construction in the CEO letters of Chinese and American CSR reports?To address the above questions,the corpus of Chinese CEO letters(CCCL)and the corpus of American CEO letters(CACL)are built and analyzed with the help of Wmatrix and Ant Conc in an attempt to unveil the key domains and keywords adopted in the target texts.Besides,the study employs Carroll’s pyramid of corporate social responsibility to decode the corporate identities in the two corpora.The result shows that:(1)For the major foci,Chinese companies place more focus on business construction,national actions,reform,standard rating,and perseverance.American ones highlight opportunities for innovation,commitment to responsibility,confidence,and interaction;(2)For discursive strategies,Chinese companies attach greater importance to predication and argumentation strategies.With the prominent linguistic features including the specific collocation of “poverty”,topos of law,and attitude-related adjectives,the emphasis on the national policies and laws and the business construction and reform is crystal-clear.American ones have a more balanced adoption of discursive strategies.The society-caring,confident,and transparent attitude is supported by the employment of certain linguistic resources like self-mentions and their collocates,attitude-related adjectives,the specific collocation of “business”,reporting verbs,and specific boosters;(3)For the corporate identities,Chinese companies,therefore,tend to explicate a credible and law-abiding business explorer at the legal responsibility layer while American ones are more focused on the ethical and philanthropic layers to construct a confident and community-caring corporate citizen identity;(4)The differences result from the varied national cultures in the two countries including power distance and individualism versus collectivism,their distinct business cultures,and the writer or the translator’s language proficiency influence.This study provides a new research angle to CEO letters in CSR reports.Methodologically,it fills up the gap of employing discourse-historical approach and Carroll’s CSR pyramid to investigate the identity construction in CEO letters of CSR reports,enriching the analytical framework of previous researches.Practically,it depicts how successful Chinese and American behemoths form the companies’ positive identities in the CEO letters to realize specific purposes,such as persuading potential investors and building the readers’ trust in the companies’ future development,assisting Chinese companies to fulfill the mission of “going global”.