| Ever since the 2008 “Sanlu Melamine Scandal”,the mainland Chinese dairy industry has been “under great depression”.The Chinese consumers are worried about the quality and safety of the dairy products sold in Chinese mainland.More and more young parents are purchasing milk powder from abroad.One important cause of this phenomenon is the asymmetrical information flow between the domestic dairy companies and the consumers.For,on the one hand,the domestic Chinese dairy product companies are not sufficiently publicizing their high quality products,which leads to the consumers' unawareness of the production improvement as well as the enhanced quality testing system.On the other hand,some companies' deficient crisis communication added to the consumers' misunderstandings and fear of some of the biased or false dairy crisis reports.Therefore,it is important and necessary to reflect on the dairy product company's crisis communication behavior.It should become not only an important approach to rebuilding the image of the domestic Chinese dairy companies,but also an urgent imperative to safeguard the reputation of the domestic Chinese dairy industry,publicizing the high quality of Chinese dairy products.Currently,most of the researches on dairy product crisis or dairy company's crisis communication are focusing on the crisis communication strategies and corporate image repairing strategies.Nevertheless,these studies tend to be western-centric in nature,lacking considerations of the non-western corporate crisis communication scholarship.To be specific,the western-centric theories are focusing solely on the corporate message options,overlooking the crisis communication process or the discourses delivered,lacking analyzing units beyond the corporate behavior,and missing a cultural dimension in reflecting on the corporate crisis communication behavior.Therefore,this thesis takes an interdisciplinary and intercultural perspective,introducing‘discourse' to the research field of corporate crisis communication.It aims to build a corporate crisis discourse studies' framework so as to amend the western-centric theoretical limitations and to provide discursive strategies for the domestic Chinese dairy companies to respond to the crisis more effectively and efficiently as well as to rebuild their reputations.Consequently,this thesis mainly answers the following research questions: 1)what are the discursive characteristics of the dairy companies' crisis communication in mainland Chinese market? How about their limitations? 2)What are the discursive characteristics of the Chinese mainstream dairy companies' image repair discourses? How about their limitations? 3)What could companies learn from the above research findings?From a Cultural Discourse Studies perspective,this thesis conceptualizes the dairy company's crisis discourses as a series of communicative events in which the affected companies are using language and other symbolic means to respond to the product quality crisis,communicating about the crisis information and rebuilding the corporate and industry's image and reputation.Thus,the study not only focuses on the written or spoken texts delivered,but also pays attention to all the speakers chosen by the corporation,the various media utilized by the corporation,the discursive themes and contents delivered and the goals or intentions it wanted to achieve,as well as the(inter)cultural differences and relations that affected this whole communication process.In this way,this research will give a multi-dimensional analysis of the corporate crisis discourses from a holistic,systematic and dialectic perspective,so as to identify the intrinsic nature and characteristics of the discourses and to unveil some of the discursive limitations.This thesis has on the one hand selected two different dairy product safety crises occurred in the mainland Chinese market after the 2008 “Sanlu Melamine Scandal”,namely the 2013 Fonterra Recall Crisis and the 2015 Huishan Dairy Product Safety Crisis,to give a systematic and in-depth study of the corporate discourses in responding to the crises.On the other hand,the research has selected the leading Chinese dairy company,Inner Mongolia Yili Industrial Group,as an example,to detect the company's image repair discourses delivered on Sina Weibo.Due to the differences of the three cases,the research has combined Cultural Discourse Studies theory with Global Public Relations Theory,Situational Crisis Communication Theory and Dialogic Theory of Public Relations respectively,to give an in-depth illustration and explanation of the corporates' crisis communication strategies and to reveal their limitations.The research found that the dairy companies' crisis discourses are greatly affected by the mainland Chinese socio-cultural conditions in the post “Sanlu Melamine Scandal” period.Consequently,they have shown the following characteristics: 1)the corporations tend to seek assistance from the authorities in responding to the crises.2)The corporations utilize multiple medium to spread the crisis information.3)The corporations tend to emphasize the safety of their products as well as the transparency in dealing with the crises.4)The western multinational corporations tend to act in professional manners in responding to the crisis,while the Chinese domestic corporations are slow in reaction.Meanwhile,the corporations are so eager to get rid of the crisis to maintain their profits that their discursive strategies have shown the following limitations: 1)the intrinsic nature of the corporate crisis communication is a one-way information distribution,lacking dialogue with the maimland Chinese media and mass public.2)Western multinational corporations are deficient in understanding the Chinese culture and Chinese way of doing business.3)The crisis communication information delivered by the domestic Chinese dairy companies are monotonous and discontinuous.Apart from this,the corporation's image repair discourses are greatly affected by the Chinese state-owned enterprise culture,tending to indoctrinate the corporations' information into the mass media,lacking systematic schedule for the corporate image restoration campaigns,resulting in low brand recognition.Therefore,it may be proposed that in response to the dairy product safety crisis,the corporations could adopt the following discursive strategies to make their discourses more efficient: 1)employing multiple speakers,especially the authorities,to spread the accurate information more broadly so as to reduce the consumers' fear and abate the asymmetrical information flow.2)Utilizing multiple discursive channels and adopting various discursive forms to make instant and effective two-way communication with the media and the mass public.3)In responding to the crisis,the corporations should not only clarify the related issues,but also efficiently respond to the issues and questions raised by the media and consumers.4)Multinational corporations should fully understand the societal culture and business culture of the target market so as to respond to the crisis more effectively.And the corporations should follow the crisis communication principles to shoulder the responsibility,to communicate sincerely,to respond instantly,to act professionally and to be assisted with the authoritative confirmation.Furthermore,the companies should change the original indoctrinating one-way information distribution pattern.Instead,they should make innovations to design a series of image rebuilding campaigns and adopt various two-way communication platforms to spread the information,so as to enhance the companies' competitiveness and promote the value of the brand.This thesis has followed the Cultural Discourse Studies paradigm,extending the definition of ‘discourse' from that of a linguistic unit to a communicative event.Therefore,the study pays particular attention to the intrinsic communicative nature of the socio-cultural phenomenon,which has provided a new approach to crisis communication research.The proposed corporate crisis discourse framework has modified the current crisis communication theory,adding the discourse analysis units as well as a cultural-reflection dimension,which will promote the interdisciplinary and cross cultural research development.The case studies on dairy company's crisis communication conducted in this research are attempts made to verify this proposed research framework under the Chinese socio-culture and China's national condition.It has greatly expanded the current government-and-media-oriented Chinese crisis communication scholarship.Moreover,the research framework constructed in this thesis is from an Eastern cultural and academic perspective,which not only greatly enriched the crisis communication research on the global scale,but also enlarged the discourse studies research area,promoting an intercultural and interdisciplinary research paradigm.In addition,the research has provided helpful discursive advice on dairy product companies' crisis communication strategies as well as corporate image restoration strategies.Practically,it will help abate the information asymmetry between the dairy company and the consumers so as to reduce the negative impact of the dairy crisis on the corporations' image and reputation. |
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