An Intercultural Case Study Of The Relationship Between Corporate Image And Corporate News

The present study provides a perspective of viewing the relationship between corporate image and corporate news from the interaction between culture, language and cognition. Corporate image is a mental reflection of corporate identity, which can never be exempt for the cultural influences. Corporate identity can be communicated to the public by a number of means, including corporate news. Therefore, the thesis delves into how corporate identity is converted through corporate news into corporate image, which is a process of revealing how culture is carried by language and perceived in human cognition.The tentative theoretical framework of the thesis is largely based on the one constructed by Jia Yuxin for the study of intercultural communication. That is to say, the tentative framework takes into account the combination of influences of broad and specific contexts of communication on information processing. However, the two contexts include numerous cultural and situational factors, which cannot be completely handled within a thesis. Therefore, a case study is employed, involving the corporate news of Haier Group from China and The Coca-Cola Company from the United States, and 30 Chinese and 30 American subjects respectively. The scale of the present study is then narrowed down to the contrasts of the outstanding cultural features of these two nations, the linguistic representation of the features in the news and the subjects' perception of them. In order to carry out the discourse and cognitive analyses, systemic-functional grammar and relevance theory are adapted into the tentative theoretical framework of the present study.The case study follows the format of hypothesis-testing. Four intercultural hypotheses are proposed, presuming that the corporate news of the two corporations represents linguistically the contrastive cultural patterns of high- and low-context communication, being-in-becoming and doing orientation, high- and low-power distance, collectivism and individualism, and meanwhile the more the linguistic representations of the corporate news conform to the cultural patterns, the more easilythe subjects perceive the desired corporate image. The hypotheses are then tested from the functional and relevance-theoretical perspectives subsequently. A total of 60 corporate news samples are selected on a random basis from the corporate websites of Haier Group and The Coca-Cola Company for the functional discourse analysis. The system networks of transitivity, mood, thematic and information structure are incorporated with the existing relevant findings of intercultural communication to categorize the linguistic features of the news samples and testifying them in line with the hypotheses. The relevance-theoretic analysis is oriented at identifying to what degree the subjects' cultural tendencies are identical to those reflected by the samples. Four questionnaires, two in Chinese and two in English, are responded to by 30 Chinese and 30 American subjects respectively to collect the data, which are processed by SPSS 12.0 and Chi-Square Test is applied to uncover the tendencies.The findings of the functional and relevance-theoretic analysis support all the four intercultural hypotheses, and suggest that enterprises involved in intercultural corporate communication between China and the United States should be well aware of the sharply contrastive cultural features of these two nations and make efforts to build up a third culture, which is favorable to the audience of the corporate news in the target culture while maintaining the uniqueness of its corporate image.