A Comparative Study Of Different Types Of Corporate Social Responsibility Reports Within The Framework Of Appraisal Theory

Corporate Social Responsibility(CSR) is a special and functional genre, which includes introduction of products and service and demonstration of previous social activities and performance.It plays a vital role in establishing social image as well as improving the relationship with stakeholders, thus delivering its pursuit for the interaction between company and all aspects of economy, environment and society from a higher level. Besides, it is of great importance in aligning stakeholders, guiding social comments and maintaining enterprise’s identity, and all of these functions are realized through CSR’s viewpoint, stance and attitude so as to influence and persuade potential stakeholders to share the common values with writers, resulting in the evaluative nature of CSR reports.Appraisal Theory is an extension by scholar Martin and his colleagues from the Interpersonal meaning located in Halliday’s Systematic Functional Grammar. Through the employment of Attitude, Engagement and Graduation resources, writers of CSR tend to deliver certain interpersonal relationship and appraisal positions with attemptions to negotiate their stances and opinions with actual or prospect readers. This lay a foundation to the current study.With an eye to the rare study on CSR from the perspective of Appraisal Theory, the present paper researches CSR reports released by state owned, private and foreign funded companies within the framework of Appraisal theory with the help of UAM Corpus Tool in order to provide similarities and differences among different types of corporations in building their images and relationships with respective stakeholders and offer tentative reasons. For the sake of validity and reliability, the author downloads all these reports from their official website according to the rank in CSR Cloud. Major conclusions are as follows:Firstly, in all of the CSR reports, Attitude occupies the largest proportion, among which Appreciation is more than Affect and Judgment due to reports’ informative and persuasive nature. The distribution of Judgment is similar in three kinds of companies, while Appreciation occurs more in state owned enterprises than private and foreign funded ones and Affect does the other way around. The fact accounts for such distribution lying in that the former enjoys certain privilege and main stakeholders are government and society, aiming to establish a leading and authoritative identity through adopting more positive Appreciation and less emotional bonds. The latter two, who value their consumers and suppliers most and in pursuit of profit, tend to align readers through Affect and set motivated images.Secondly, all writers’ of these reports are likely to express their respect to readers by using dialogistic negotiation with alternative voices, leading to Dialogistic Expansionoutweighing Dialogistic Contraction. Some verbs indicate distinctions of negotiating strategies among different types of companies, and in general, state owned ones endeavor to build advanced and infallible image while non-state owned ones present their tolerance to and control over future failures.Thirdly, in Graduation system, Force outnumbers Focus and up-scaling does the same way to down-scaling resources resulting from CSR reports’ seeking to favorable and positive images to their stakeholders. Yet down-scaling items are more frequent in non-state owned corporations to leave rooms for possible mistakes by showing some drawbacks. Such differences are also reflected by their deployment of superlative and comparative resources, which are of great importance in Graduation.In sum, CSR reports engross large quantities of Appraisal resources, which intertwine with each other to construe similarities and differences in identities and relationship with stakeholders among three different kinds of companies. State owned enterprises prefer a developed and canonical image while non-state owned ones lay more stress on solidity and further improvement. This paper examines the applicability of Appraisal Theory and shed light on the compiling and understanding if CSR reports.