Image Repair Strategies And Motivations In Corporate Social Responsibility Discourse

As valuable intangible assets for corporations,corporate images are of great significance for corporate business practice and development.In actual reality,however,corporate images are often harassed by occasional reports of negative events,leaving corporations to mobilize different communication channels and resources to restore their tarnished images.Most previous studies in this regard have emphasized the strategies that corporations in the crisis could resort to,while few have accentuated the lexical-grammatical realizations of these image repair strategies.This study selects 57 corporate social responsibility(CSR)reports issued from 2016-2019 from 16 corporations of energy industries that rank top 500 globally.Utilizing the image repair resources in negative parts of CSR reports,it investigates the commonly-used discursive strategies for image repair purposes,systemizes their lexical-grammatical realizations and elaborates further on the factors constraining the selection of specific strategies.Analysis of extant literature on this topic indicates that current studies on corporate image repair are limited mainly in three aspects.First,in terms of the perspective of research,most of the studies on corporate image repair are organized from a multiple perspective of different disciplines.However,the research results are discrete and scattering,lacking a systematic and coherent framework to describe and analyze image repair strategies for different types of corporations.Second,in terms of the corpus for the research,most of present studies highlight case studies on crises happening to different types of corporations,ignoring the important role of CSR reports in the process of corporate image repair.Third,in terms of research approaches,most of present studies use qualitative content analysis,with scant studies using corpus-based quantitative research methodology,which makes it difficult to showcase the regularities and common features of corporate image repair strategies.Following the perspective of discursive construction,the analytical framework of this paper draws primarily on the discourse-historical method and Fairclough’s three-dimensional framework in critical discourse studies.Using CSR reports from Chinese and foreign energy giants as the research corpus,this paper systematically explores the discursive strategies in corporate crisis discourse for corporate image repair purposes.The analysis of repair strategies at the meso level is constructed as the main line,integrating with the micro level lexicogrammatical analysis and the macro level explanations for the motivations for the selection of image repair strategies.In this way,an image repair analysis framework with three component levels is proposed in the paper.Specifically,the meso level refers to the repair strategies identification,micro level refers to the lexical-grammatical realizations,and macro level refers to motivations for the image repair strategies.This analysis framework distinguishes three main image repair strategies,namely,denial strategy,evaluation strategy,and adjustment strategy.At the micro-level,this study specifies the linguistic realizations of different strategies,and constructs a systematic network for corporate discourse image repair.First,the realization of denial strategy is subdivided into explicit denial words,and implicit denial methods including nominalization and passive expression.Second,the realization of evaluation strategies mainly includes conceptual metaphor,intertextuality and argument.Specifically,the commonly used conceptual metaphors include travel metaphor,architect metaphor,war metaphor and theater metaphor.Intertextuality resources mainly focus on intertextual quoting,intertextual reference,and intertextual presupposition.The themes of argument mainly include four main topoi:reality topoi,benefit topoi,right topoi,and responsibility topoi.Third,the adjustment strategy is mainly realized by personal reference(i.e.the first personal plural,the third person singular,the third person singular used to refer to employees)and vague expression(vague items associated with ’quantity’,’time’,and ’degree’ respectively).At the macro-level,this study investigates the motivations that affect the use of image repair strategies from two aspects,namely institutional context(neoliberalism)and the situational context(the stakeholder theory).Particularly,the institutional context discusses the historical background and the characteristics of the energy industry.Situational context mainly addresses how CSR reports use different types of strategies to repair the corporate image within reports’communication with key stakeholders,including government agencies,the media,corporate employees,investors and partners.As such,the corporate image can be optimized for different stakeholders,which allow for the ultimate realization of the communicative purpose of corporate discourse.This study integrates corporate image repair,strategies for this purpose and their linguistic realizations,and proposes an analysis framework suitable for corporate image repair by systematically analyzing how to use different types of strategies to repair corporate image in corporate discourse.It highlights the discursive constructive characteristics of image repair,explores the meso level strategies and micro level linguistic realizations,and explicates the macro level motivational interpretations for corporate image repair.The proposed image repair analysis framework and research findings of this study are beneficial to the understanding of the nature and characteristics of CSR discourses.It is hoped that they are also of theoretical guidance and practical value for businesses in repairing their tarnished images and handling the image crises more effectively.