A Cross-cultural Study On The Discursive Construction Of Chinese And American Banks' Online Identities

With the implementation of “One Belt,One Road” initiative and more and more Chinese companies “going out”,corporate websites have become an increasingly important platform for discursive construction of corporate identities.In the era of internet popularization,discursive construction of corporate identities is greatly important to the foreign stakeholders' perception of Chinese corporations' international image.Therefore,the present research focuses on the discursive construction of corporate identities on websites.Based on a systematic review of the current literature on the discursive construction of identities,the present study points out there exist some limitations as follows: 1)Current studies are mainly centered on the individual identity in oral interaction or written texts,with little attention to the institutional(corporate)identity.Most scholars focus on the corporate identity discursively constructed in annual report,corporate social responsibility report or social media,with scant attention to corporate official websites.2)As for the research method,current studies are mainly conducted in case studies,qualitatively exploring the discursive strategies present in a single website or a few business texts.The corpus-based approach to explore discursive strategies based on a large amount of business discourse online is under employed.3)In terms of the research perspective,most studies focus on several specific discursive strategies in monocultural context,while a systematic and cross-cultural research of the multi-layered discursive strategies employed in the construction of corporate identities is far less addressed.The present study,therefore,takes the perspective of Social Constructivism with pragmatic identity theory and corporate communication theory as the theoretical foundation to propose a systematic framework of discursive construction of corporate online identities and aims to probe into the following questions: 1)At the thematic and content level,what are the themes communicated by the textual and visual discourse on Chinese and American corporate websites? What types of identities are constructed respectively? 2)At the textual and pragmatic level,what are the features of communication style,pragmatic strategies employed by Chinese and American corporations on their websites? What types of identities are constructed respectively? 3)At the lexical and grammatical level,what are the characteristics of high-frequency words,referential words,verbs and the transitive clauses employed in Chinese and American corporate online discourse? What types of identities are preferred to be constructed by Chinese and American companies respectively? 4)What impact does culture have on the discursive construction of corporate online identities? What implications can be provided for Chinese corporate identity construction in website international publicity? Drawing on the corpus-based discourse analysis,multimodal discourse analysis,content analysis,etc.,this study explores the discursive strategies at content and thematic level,textual and pragmatic level,and lexical and grammatical level as its backbone,combining the investigation of linguistic realization of discursive identity strategies with the analysis of corporate identities.This study aims to compare the discursive construction of online identities by Chinese and American banks and explore the cultural influence.Discursive strategies at the content and thematic level mainly concern about the themes preferred to communicate in textual and visual discourse.Firstly,the corpus tool Wmatrix was employed to analyze the semantic domains in Chinese and American banks' corporate profile and further compare the prominent themes communicated and the identities constructed.Research findings indicate that Chinese banks favor the corporate ability strategy to communicate corporate development history,business distribution and industrial status to construct itself as a service provider with long history and well governance;as an industry leader with widely distributed business and comprehensive risk management;and as a responsibility-undertaker implementing national strategy and serving local economy.In contrast,American banks prefer corporate social responsibility strategy to introduce corporate inclusive and diverse culture,employees' volunteerism,environmental protection,and other social activities to construct itself as a service provider with competent capability;as a social contributor to serve employees,communities and protect environment;and as a cooperator to pursue sustainable development and maintain relations.Subsequently,the multimodal discourse analysis is adopted to compare the main themes communicated in the sampled pictures present on Chinese and American banks' websites and the corporate identities constructed.It has been found that Chinese banks' pictures depict more non-human participants like eagles,the Tripod,the Great Wall and other symbolic items to symbolize corporate spirit,industrial status and other themes to construct itself as a competitor.While American banks' websites entail more pictures,which depict more human participants like employees,customers,community members,etc.,to construct the identity of social contributors.The way of meaning making in the sampled pictures is also slightly different.As for discursive strategies at the textual and pragmatic level,the communication style on websites,communication perspective and speech acts are compared to reveal the relational identity constructed between banks and the public.Firstly,content analysis and corpus-based discourse analysis are adopted to analyze the interactivity of corporate websites and corporate discourse respectively.Chinese corporate websites are found to be less interactive with more informational discourse and tend to adopt one-way communication style to construct the banks as journalists.Whereas American websites with more interactive features and involved discourse prefer the dialogic communication style to construct banks as communicators.As for the pragmatic communication strategy,Chinese banks mainly adopt self-narrating to self-construct corporate identities,while American ones involve more participants like employees and customers in coconstructing and co-negotiating corporate identities.In terms of the speech act strategy,Chinese banks mainly use narrating,reporting and self-praising to build the “personal self”,while American banks use more speech acts like soliciting feedback,suggesting,requesting,sharing stories and expressing to construct the “relational self”,valuing building and maintenance of the relationship with publics.As for the discursive strategies at the lexical and grammatical level,the present study compared the high-frequency words,referential words,part of speech features and transitivity clauses employed.The findings show that Chinese banks tend to use “the bank” as self-reference,together with more numbers,superlative adjectives to emphasize their development history,leaders' working experience and industrial status,while American banks use more interactive referential words like first person pronoun,possessive pronouns,together with more performative verbs to positively communicate corporate social responsibility.Transitivity clause analysis shows that material processes are employed frequently in both corpora.Besides,American banks use more mental processes,personifying the banks to reduce the distance between companies and publics,while relational processes are more common in Chinese corporate discourse to illustrate the full range of attributes to emphasize the corporate competence.This study integrates the cross-cultural theories to account for the shared and unique features presented in Chinese and American banks' discursive construction of online identities.This study may provide practical implications for Chinese companies to improve their capability of discursive identity construction in their official English websites and international communication.Besides,the analysis of corporate discourse at different levels may offer educational implications for Business English teaching practice as well.