Metadiscourse In Chinese And American Corporate Social Responsibility Reports:A Cross-Cultural Perspective

As economic globalization continues to develop alongside technological evolution,social and environmental problems have become serious,which in turn have attracted people’s increasingly attention to the issue of corporate social responsibility(CSR).The disclosure of information pertaining to corporate social responsibility can help to increase visibility and improve audience perceptions of a company’s corporate responsibility performance,as well as play an important role in promoting a positive reputation and improving management performance.Previous studies on CSR discourse have investigated the use characteristics of CSR discourse itself,as well as its relationship with its economic and social environment.However,a closer look at these studies reveals that investigation into the relevance of this discourse and its relationship to audiences has long been absent,a deficit which can be filled by performing research from the perspective of metadiscourse.Moreover,past studies on metadiscourse has predominantly focused on its textual characteristics,with little attention paid to its multimodal features.Thus,this study combines the theory of metadiscourse,multimodal discourse analysis,and cross-cultural business communication to investigate the multimodal metadiscourse characteristics of the English CSR reports of Chinese and American enterprises.The metadiscourse analysis framework established in this study attempts to analyze the usage of metadiscourse in these reports with a focus on three aspects:textual,visual,and hypertextual.In addition,given the impact of corporate industry attributes and social environmental factors on CSR disclosure,this research will further investigate the overall characteristics,industry-specific characteristics,and diachronic changes of multimodal metadiscourse,and then conduct cross-cultural analysis.The corpus of this study is the English CSR reports of 20 companies in the energy industry and 20 in the manufacturing industry in China and the United States,for a total of 40 companies.The author adopted a mixed method that combined a qualitative and quantitative approach in the research.In terms of quantitative research,this paper first explores the textual,visual,and hypertextual metadiscourse characteristics of CSR reports by using corpus-based discourse analysis and content analysis.I then utilize Statistical Package for Social Sciences(SPSS)software to compare the industry and diachronic characteristics of two sides.In terms of qualitative research,in addition to the qualitative descriptive discourse analysis of the above characteristics,the researcher also interviewed and conducted field research on employees at Chinese enterprises who participated in the writing and translation of CSR reports so as to have a deeper understanding of the usage characteristics and motivations of multimodal metadiscourse strategies presented in the report.This study yielded the following research findings.First,both Chinese and American enterprises frequently use textual metadiscourse in CSR discourse,and the overall use by American enterprises is significantly higher than that of Chinese enterprises.Among them,in terms of interactive metadiscourse,its use by American enterprises is significantly higher than that of their Chinese counterparts.On the other hand,Chinese enterprises’ usage of interactional metadiscourse is significantly higher than that of American enterprises.Within the energy and manufacturing industry,Chinese and American enterprises use more interactive metadiscourse than interactional ones,while American enterprises use it with a higher frequency than Chinese corporations.Industrial differences do exist between China and the United States in terms of the usage of frame markers,code glosses,hedges,boosters,engagement markers,and self-mention.Where diachronic change is concerned,the use of textual metadiscourse in Chinese and American enterprises is increasing,while the use of these resources in American enterprises is always higher than in their Chinese counterparts.The discourse characteristics of Chinese enterprises in expressing their ability and contribution levels in CSR discourse are more prominent,which further reflects lower degree of identity awareness of enterprises in the report.Second,the overall usage of visual metadiscourse by American enterprises is slightly higher than that of Chinese enterprises,but both heavily rely on it to vividly display their company’s corporate image and enrich the content of the text.In terms of its usage within different industries,the manufacturing industries of both countries use more pictures in the report when compared with the energy industries.However,the use of visual metadiscourse in the form of pictures within the energy enterprise is much richer,as the pictures are used to realize more visual metadiscourse functions.According to our results,visual metadiscourse by Chinese enterprises in the energy and manufacturing industries is utilized mainly as a medium for expressing emotions or attitudes and seldom features strong,visually attractive characteristics like visual boosters or engagement markers that would allow the company to become more intimate with the audience.In terms of diachronic use and change,the use of visual metadiscourse in Chinese and American enterprises shows an increasing trend.The growth rate of interactional metadiscourse is notably large,whereby the growth rate of Chinese enterprises is greater than that of American enterprises.This indicates that the interpersonal function of pictures in Chinese and American CSR reports is more prominent.Third,concerning hypertextual metadiscourse,the amount of interactive metadiscourse used in English CSR reports of Chinese and American enterprises is far more than that of interpersonal resources,reflecting the main function of hypertextual metadiscourse,which is to corroborate the internal structure of the text and supplement its information.The use of hypertextual metadiscourse in the manufacturing industries in the US and China is most common in the energy industry,where it is still more often utilized by US companies.Still,though great diachronic differences can be found between the two sides,the overall use of hypertextual metadiscourse by Chinese and American enterprises is on the rise.Between the years of 2011 to 2019,Chinese enterprises began to use considerable QR code-based hypertextual metadiscourse in their reports.Although this is innovative to some extent,problems such as lacking corresponding translation and an excessive reliance on Wechat still remain to be solved,which may influence the overall effectiveness of CSR information on audience reception and the final effect of the communication.Fourth,it is found that the use of metadiscourse in its various modes in Chinese and American English CSR reports is affected by three main cross-cultural factors:culture,business,and communication.Cultural factors that are particularly impactful include power distance,high and low context,collectivism,Chinese traditional Culture,uncertainty avoidance,and long-term/short-term orientation.Impactful business factors include CSR history,CSR positioning,CSR systems,the nature of the enterprise,the size of enterprise,the nature of the industry,and the economic environment of both parties.Finally,the influencing factors that affect the communication aspect of discourses include communication technology,language features and usage conventions,translation strategies,communication policies/practices,CSR communication motivation/purpose,preferred communication channels,CSR genre awareness and audience awareness.From the theoretical perspective,this research helps to enrich and expand the existing perspective of corporate social responsibility discourse research and metadiscourse research and has important theoretical significance for the cross-cultural communication of corporate social responsibility discourse.In practice,this research is of great practical significance for the improvement of the overseas social responsibility discourse communication of Chinese enterprises,and it provides helpful information for teaching Business English.In the future,this research can be improved by improving the process of searching for and establishing the metadiscourse list,varying the type of sample pictures chosen,and expanding the scope of research objects.