Construction Of Amazon’s Corporate Identities-A Study Based On Letters To Shareholders

Corporate identity is the way in which a corporation defines itself and presents itself.As a category of institutional identity,enterprise identity is of great significance to the enterprise itself.It not only directly affects the social evaluation of the enterprise,thus affecting the ability of the enterprise to profit taking and obtain resources,but also affects the employees’ recognition of the enterprise and their work involvement.Corporate discourse,as an important carrier to highlight corporate philosophy,culture and operation,plays an important role in building corporate identity.In recent years,many scholars at home and abroad have made research on identity construction,and the research framework used is also constantly innovative.This is also one of the reasons for choosing this research topic.This study explores the distribution and application of discourse strategies(referential strategy,strategy of prediction,strategy of perspectivization,and strategy of intensification and mitigation)in Amazon’s letters to shareholders,using the three-dimensional framework of discourse analysis of discourse historical approach and the combination of qualitative and quantitative research methods,it also analyzes the identity construction of Amazon’s letter to shareholders.Aiming at the interdisciplinary characteristics of corporate identity construction discourse,this study adopts a discourse history research approach to explore discourse at different levels,forming the current research framework.As the main direction of critical discourse analysis,discourse history research approaches hold that discourse analysis should be carried out from three dimensions: 1)the theme of the text;2)discourse strategies in discourse;3)the linguistic means by which a discourse achieves its themes and discourse strategies.Based on this,this article attempts to establish a research framework that integrates three-dimensional analysis with reference to the analysis framework designed by Chen Jianping(2017),using three levels of macro,middle,and micro analysis to address the above three dimensions;At the macro level,the core goal of discourse construction is corporate identity,while at the middle level,the discourse construction system is the discourse strategies for constructing corporate identity.At the micro level,the specific language application is the language means for achieving the theme and discourse strategy.The author draws the following conclusions:(1)The analysis results show that at the micro level,in Amazon’s 25 letters to its shareholders,the writers use four language means: referential analysis,presupposition analysis,citation analysis and modality analysis.(2)The four language means used at the micro level correspond to the referential strategy,the strategy of prediction,the strategy of perspectivization and the strategy of intensification and mitigation at the middle level.The relationship between language means at the micro level and discourse strategies at the middle level is mutually constructive.Language means are the basis for the formation of language strategies,and discourse strategies are the higher manifestation of language means.(3)Amazon has constructed three pragmatic identities in its official website letter to shareholders,namely “powerful enterprise”,“responsible enterprise” and“charitable enterprise”.Amazon enterprises attach importance to the use of reference strategies to build the identity of “charitable enterprises”.“Responsible enterprises”draws on two-way negotiation with readers through the use of prediction strategy and strategy of intensification and mitigation to show the true attitude of enterprises.