Discursive Construction Of Huawei’s Corporate Identity Against The Background Of China’s "Going-Global" Strategy

Identity is not a fixed,pre-set,one-way attribute,but a specific historical and cultural product.It is constructed dynamically and actively in social interactions.Organizations also have identity,which is the way that organizations define and present themselves.The discursive construction of corporate identity focuses on the relationship between corporate discourse and corporate identity.Enterprises,as a kind of organizations,participate in social practice by issuing social responsibility reports and construct their own identity and image as well as social relations with stakeholders.Corporate social responsibility(CSR)reports play an important role in establishing and enhancing corporate reputation and constructing corporate identity.Based on Huawei’s CSR reports and following the Discourse-historical Approach,this thesis explores discursive construction of Huawei’s corporate identity from three levels: discursive strategies and linguistic characteristics,interdiscursivity as well as social-cultural context.With the help of corpora,this paper analyzes linguistic features from the investigation of high-frequency key words,keyword list,collocations and modal verbs.At the micro level,it is found that Huawei’s social responsibility reports use strategies of nomination,predication,argumentation,intensification or mitigation and perspectivation or framing.The strategy of nomination constructs the identity of alliance with stakeholders by using intra group self-references.By using the predicative strategy,a pragmatic,enterprising and responsible corporate citizenship is constructed,with a large number of material processes.With the help of various topoi,the strategy of argumentation highlights the strong strength of the company,attaches importance to management and technological progress,and actively constructs multiple comprehensive identities,such as the leader in the industry,the guarantor of network security,the practitioner of green and low-carbon environmental protection concept,the contributor to the society.Through the strategy of intensification or mitigation,CSR reports construct not only a low-key,peaceful and people-friendly corporate identity through low and medium value modal verbs,but also a better vision with modal verbs “will”.In the strategy of perspectivation or framing,direct speech is used to make the reports more authoritative and acceptable to readers.In terms of interdiscursivity,the study finds that Huawei’s social responsibility report is a mixture of different genres.From the perspective of different purposes,there are mainly informative discourse and promotional discourse.From the perspective of different professions,it mainly involves technological discourse,accounting and financial discourse,management discourse,public relations discourse,environmental discourse,philanthropic discourse and legal discourse,all of which are integrated to construct Huawei’s identity more comprehensively.Finally,at the macro level,the essence of corporate identity construction is a kind of social and historical practice.Huawei participates in social reality through identity construction,while its identity construction is subject to social-cultural context at the same time.