Towards an understanding of corporate web identity

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Crossing the frontiers : peer coaching and self - managing in the process of the professional development in multicultural environment

Our effort focuses on the development of a process of cross-cultural peer coaching through which we have sought to grow as reflective practitioners and strengthen authentic conversations between two individuals, from Poland and the United States. By building a theoretical framework around peer coaching, intercultural interaction, and auto-ethnography we have worked to make explicit our development as educators working to enrich the process of the organizational learning and to make education more open, democratic and human. As Kottler [1997] claims, it is possible to find stages that a tourist goes through during the process of recognizing and knowing another culture that was used to mirror the sensation of the professional growth. The findings shed light on how peer coaching might be strengthened, as well as the development of an observation protocol to structure such reflective and, ultimately, life changing work

Constructions of Citizenship among Multinational Corporations

Using social contract theory as a foundation I examined the ways in which four multinational corporations use disclosures of corporate social responsibility to present themselves as good corporate citizens. Several factors influence a corporation’s use of CSR: size of the corporation, public visibility, personal commitment of high ranking executives, location of manufacturing operations, and types of stakeholders. There is a significant difference in the responsibilities and obligations Proctor & Gamble, Kimberly-Clark, and Colgate-Palmolive ascribe to themselves as corporate citizens compared to those of SC Johnson. I attribute this difference to one of stakeholder accountability, specifically public shareholders. The three publicly held corporations adhere to a social contract model of corporate citizenship wherein they accept a certain level of social responsibility as accruing to their powerful global economic position, whereas privately held SC Johnson, inhabiting a similarly powerful position, assumes no additional responsibility beyond that of increasing sales and maximizing profits

Social, cultural, and political constructions of Corporate Social Responsibility in China: A study of business discourses in the Fiberhome Technologies Group

Abstract This thesis focuses on corporate social responsibility (CSR), a vital issue for both business and academic researchers, and examines how the reality of CSR is socially constructed within a Chinese social, political and cultural context. In particular, this thesis examines understanding and practice of the discourse of CSR within a large Chinese State-owned enterprise (SOE), FiberHome Technologies Group (FHTG). It explains how cultural and political factors contribute to the production and development of CSR discourse in China. It also scrutinises social practices of corporate social performance, especially employer-employee relationships, within FHTG by investigating both the actual knowledge of CSR that FHTG publishes on its headquarters’ homepage and the research participants’ interpretation of management construction of CSR discourse. Website documents produced by FHTG’s headquarters from 2006 to 2008 were collected and 33 participants (managers and employees) from five headquarters’ departments and six subsidiary companies were interviewed for this study. Participants were selected according to the extent of their work experience with at least one year of work experience being a minimum requirement. Website information and interview transcripts were analysed using Fairclough’s (1992) three-step approach to CDA to examine how the knowledge of CSR is constructed and reproduced by organisational members and how it shapes the ways in which the social reality of Chinese CSR is constructed. The thesis argues that the reality of Chinese CSR is shaped by the Chinese cultural system of Confucianism focusing on human virtues, as well as government adoption of some Western CSR initiatives. The research findings suggest a hybrid form of business management model by embracing both a Chinese management and a Western management style into business practice. The Chinese management style constructs a discourse of Confucian entrepreneurship which forms a distinctive feature of Chinese CSR practices, focusing on the development of human virtues that guide companies to a new way of improving their CSR performance. Also, the adoption of a Western management style exhibits a giving discourse that considers the interests of stakeholder groups including employee, government, community and society. In addition, the research findings suggest that employees’ understanding of CSR is shaped by FHTG’s social performance and is similar to the management construction of CSR discourse. Their definition of CSR involves three key aspects: social harmony, employee welfare, and economic benefits. This thesis contributes to knowledge from three perspectives: theoretical, methodological and managerial. Theoretically, this thesis contributes to the development of Chinese CSR theory. This theory promotes economic productivity as a means of achieving social wellbeing and employee wellbeing. Methodologically, this thesis offers a benchmark for the study of CSR discourse by using a face-to-face interview method which has previously rarely been used in research on CSR in a Chinese context. Managerially, this thesis provides a guide for government officials and business managers to design the strategies based on their own countries’ cultural, political, economic, social and institutional frameworks

“Wolf Totem” – metaphorical narrative of sustainability reporting practice from a balanced ecosystem perspective: a longitudinal study of sustainability reporting by Chinese banks

This research attempts to explain and evaluate corporate sustainability reporting practices from an ecosystems perspective, through the application of metaphors. It argues that commonly held ideas of sustainable development, which many firms embrace to produce sustainability reports, narrowly focus on the sustainability performances of individual firms and fail to comprehend a broader systems view, that incorporates a holistic understanding of sustainability embracing ecological perspectives. The study draws on the work of Chinese intellectual Jiang Rong, author of a best-selling semi-autobiographical novel Wolf Totem, which documents the life experiences of a Beijing student sent to the Inner Mongolian countryside during China’s Cultural Revolution. Reflecting on his experiences, the author describes the powerful interrelationships between human beings, animals, nature and culture that work in harmony to sustain nomadic life. The novel is used in this research as a contextual landscape to construct a series of multi-tiered metaphors to make sense of corporate sustainability reporting through metaphorical interpretations. By narrating the Chinese banking sector as the “ecosystem”, various actors within the sector are examined to establish their roles and functions in the ecosystem. This is made possible by conducting a summative content analysis on sustainability reports issued by Chinese banks for the period 2008 to 2012 and a metaphorical narrative representation of the findings. This research aims to become one of the first studies of its kind to use a cross-disciplinary framework and application of metaphors to comprehend sustainability reporting practice with a focus on the context of a financial service sector in a strong, emerging economy

News discourses on distant suffering: A critical discourse analysis of the 2003 SARS outbreak

News carries a unique signifying power, a power to represent events in particular ways (Fairclough, 1995). Applying Critical Discourse Analysis and Chouliaraki's theory on the mediation of suffering (2006), this article explores the news representation of the 2003 global SARS outbreak. Following a case-based methodology, we investigate how two Belgian television stations have covered the international outbreak of SARS. By looking into the mediation of four selected discursive moments, underlying discourses of power, hierarchy and compassion were unraveled. The analysis further identified the key role of proximity in international news reporting and supports the claim that Western news media mainly reproduce a Euro-American centered world order. This article argues that news coverage of international crises such as SARS constructs and maintains the socio-cultural difference between 'us' and 'them' as well as articulating global power hierarchies and a division of the world in zones of poverty and prosperity, danger and safety

Representations of SARS in the UK newspapers

In the Spring of 2003, there was a huge interest in the global news media following the emergence of a new infectious disease: severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS). This study examines how this novel disease threat was depicted in the UK newspapers, using social representations theory and in particular existing work on social representations of HIV/AIDS and Ebola to analyse the meanings of the epidemic. It investigates the way that SARS was presented as a dangerous threat to the UK public, whilst almost immediately the threat was said to be ‘contained’ using the mechanism of ‘othering’: SARS was said to be unlikely to personally affect the UK reader because the Chinese were so different to ‘us’; so ‘other’. In this sense, the SARS scare, despite the remarkable speed with which it was played out in the modern global news media, resonates with the meanings attributed to other epidemics of infectious diseases throughout history. Yet this study also highlights a number of differences in the social representations of SARS compared with earlier epidemics. In particular, this study examines the phenomena of ‘emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases’ over the past 30 or so years and suggests that these have impacted on the faith once widely held that Western biomedicine could ‘conquer’ infectious disease

Texts Complying with Societal Pressures : Changing Genres in Finnish Companies’ CSR Reporting

Drawing from the Nordic tradition of sakprosa research, this chapter aims at analysing how generic and intertextual resources are used in Finnish companies’ corporate social responsibility (CSR) reporting. Longitudinally, we study the reporting format, that is, whether the companies are reporting about their sustainability issues separately or as part of their annual report. A comparable synchronic approach is applied to intertextuality between reports and sustainability pages on corporate websites. The data stems from companies listed in the Nasdaq Helsinki Stock Exchange (OMX25 index). It comprises CSR reporting from the financial years 2016–2020 and sustainability pages of three companies. The study shows a tendency of keeping the chosen reporting format irrespective of its kind. However, two types of variability occur: selective variability referring to one format change in the investigated time span, and hybridity, combining features of different formats. Three intertextual strategies between the texts of reports and web pages were detected: convergence, adaptation, and divergence. Our results show how choices of reporting format and intertextual strategies are governed by the company context and practices, and also by governance issues and regulation. In this way, the complexity of text-society relationships as postulated by sakprosa research is illustrated in the context of business texts.© Te Author(s) 2023. This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence and indicate if changes were made. Te images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the chapter’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the chapter’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.fi=vertaisarvioitu|en=peerReviewed

Mapping the Legal Landscape: Chinese State-Owned Companies in Australia

Australia has always relied heavily upon foreign sources of investment and financing and has in the past tended to draw mainly upon British, American and Japanese investment. In recent decades, Chinese state-owned enterprises (SOEs) have played an increasingly important role in the Australian economy with a rising level of investment taking place. Chinese SOEs have been more heavily involved in investments into larger Australian investment projects, such as in mining and infrastructure. Australia has seen an increase in the number of Chinese state-owned companies acquiring substantial domestic assets; this may continue following the ratification of the China-Australia Free Trade Agreement in 2015. Although Chinese SOEs operating in foreign countries such as Australia are required to comply with local corporate governance laws and principles, they also retain their unique Chinese corporate governance values and culture which they have inherited through their parent companies and from China itself. In Australia, there has been an ongoing debate over Chinese investment, with the business community being particularly supportive of such investment. Driven largely by the business community, this debate has been relatively narrow and has not explored the likely impact of Chinese SOEs and their subsidiaries upon the shape of corporate governance in countries in which they invest. This article seeks to examine the legal contours of Chinese-controlled investment in Australia with a view to acquiring a more informed understanding of the impact of Chinese SOEs upon the Australian legal landscape