Abstract
Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) annual reports are serving as an important communicative tool in building corporate legitimacy and maintaining close relationship with stakeholders. However, the question on how effective communication can be achieved through discourse design has been largely overlooked in the existing literature. This contrastive study examines the discourse differences between American and Chinese CEO Statements in CSR reports through the perspective of genre theory by adopting Swales and Bhatia’s Move-Step Model and Hassan’s Generic Structure Potential Model. Based on a self-built corpus of 60 CSR reports from Fortune Global 500 List 2015, we find that two types of CEO Statements share the similar obligatory moves, communicative targets, and fixed move-step structures, but the number of move and steps, focus of information, and topic areas vary greatly. The cultural differences may account for such disparities, which are found at the level of rhetorical structure. The results of this study offer theoretical and practical implications for future designing of CSR discourse.
Highlights
Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) annual reports are serving as an important communicative tool in building corporate legitimacy and maintaining close relationship with stakeholders
We discovered that two types of CEO Statements contain the similar obligatory moves, communicative targets, and fixed move-step structures, but the number of move and steps, focus of information, and topic areas vary greatly
While genre relates to the type and the structure of the language typically used for a particular purpose in a particular social context, cultural and social differences partly account for the different CSR discourse designs and the distribution of its themes (Michael et al, 2013; Branco et al, 2014; Tang et al, 2014)
Summary
Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) annual reports are serving as an important communicative tool in building corporate legitimacy and maintaining close relationship with stakeholders. The question on how effective communication can be achieved through discourse design has been largely overlooked in the existing literature. This contrastive study examines the discourse differences between American and Chinese CEO Statements in CSR reports through the perspective of genre theory by adopting Swales and Bhatia’s Move-Step Model and Hassan’s Generic Structure Potential Model. Based on a self-built corpus of 60 CSR reports from Fortune Global 500 List 2015, we find that two types of CEO Statements share the similar obligatory moves, communicative targets, and fixed move-step structures, but the number of move and steps, focus of information, and topic areas vary greatly. The results of this study offer theoretical and practical implications for future designing of CSR discourse
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