A Comparative Study Of Corporate Identity Construction In Corporate Social Responsibility Reportsof Chinese And American Pharmaceutical Enterprises

A company can gain great reward from a positive corporate identity.Given the growing concern for the negative impacts of corporate business activities on society and environment,it is becoming highly standardized practice for large enterprises to release corporate social responsibility(CSR)reports,aiming at communicating their social and environmental performance and then conveying a socially responsible identity to stakeholders.In this way,the CSR report can serve as a vehicle for corporate identity construction,which deserves to be further researched from a critical discourse analytical perspective.This thesis selects 18 CSR reports released by 9 top-ranking Chinese and 9 American pharmaceutical enterprises as the research data in the self-built corpora(CSR-CHN and CSR-USA).By incorporating the framework of Transitivity System into the analytical framework of Discourse-Historical Approach,this thesis adopts both qualitative and quantitative research methods to conduct a corpus-based contrastive analysis of the CSR identity construction of Chinese and American pharmaceutical enterprises from three dimensions,including major topics,discursive strategies and linguistic realizations.The research questions are as follows:(1)What are the major topics in Chinese and American pharmaceutical CSR reports? Are there any similarities and variations?(2)What are the commonalities and differences of discursive strategies and their linguistic realizations used in Chinese and American pharmaceutical CSR reports for the construction of corporate identity?(3)Are there any similarities and differences in the corporate identities constructed in Chinese and American pharmaceutical CSR reports? If so,what accounts for the similarities and differences?Through the comparative study of the main topics,discursive strategies and linguistic realizations in Chinese and American CSR reports,major findings are as follows:In terms of major topics,though an overwhelming majority of similar topics exist in two corpora,there are different priorities.Chinese pharmaceutical companies emphasize health and safety,sustainable development,innovation and employees career development,while American ones give prominence to customer services,global impacts and employee diversity.In terms of discursive strategies and their linguistic realizations,firstly,with regard to referential strategies,the result shows that there are significant differences between Chinese and American pharmaceutical companies in their self-referential expressions.Chinese enterprises often use third-person self-referential form,while American enterprises tend to employ first-person plural pronouns.Secondly,with the help of transitivity system,the analysis of predication strategy shows that,overall,the distribution of process types is similar in CSR-CHN and CSR-USA,and both of them tend to use verbs related to measures to show their active engagement in fulfilling social responsibility.However,there are also differences in high-frequency verbs related to material and mental process.Chinese companies are more likely to use verbs expressing improvement to show their emphasis on corporate social responsibility,while American companies focus more on multi-party engagement and collaboration.Thirdly,as for argumentation strategy,the topos of usefulness and the topos of number are commonly used in both corpora.But both of them have distinctive inclination in the use of topoi.Chinese enterprises attach more importance to the topos of law while American companies frequently use the topos of humanitarianism.In terms of the identities constructed by Chinese and American enterprises,for one thing,both of them portray themselves as competent doers and reliable dedicators.For another thing,Chinese enterprises are inclined to present themselves as authoritative groups and patriotic law-abiding citizens.But American enterprises tend to construct the identities of affiliative groups and inclusive global leaders.The identity construction of companies reflects not only their concern for social hot issues but also their specific cultural background(power distance and individualism vs collectivism).This thesis can offer novel insights into the research on corporate identity,corporate discourse as well as CSR reports and enrich the work on corporate information disclosure from the perspective of critical discourse analysis.Also,it might contribute to stakeholders’ and public critical understanding of the social responsibility disclosure of companies,driving companies to improve their quality of information disclosure and to construct an authentic corporate identity.