A Pragmatic Study of Corporate Apologies for Impression Management: A Case of Chinese Food Industry

Abstract

Some of Chinese corporations in food industry have recently faced sharp criticism for their illegal operation or unethical behavior. To deal with such crisis, these corporations are inclined to manage their public impressions by issuing apology statements. Serious as these problems are, yet scarce research has focused on the impression management of Chinese corporations through apologies. This paper aims to make a pragmatic analysis of apology strategies employed by Chinese food companies for impression management, drawing upon the framework of Jones and Pittman’s (1982) impression management strategies and Blum-Kulka and Olshtain’s (1984) theory of CCSARP. Based on a self-built corpus of 50 apology statements issued by Chinese food companies, the paper identified different apology strategies and their accompanying linguistic features through discourse analysis. The results show that IFIDs and offer of repair are two of the most common strategies in Chinese corporate apologies, whereas taking on responsibility is less frequently used. The apology strategies are often accompanied with such linguistic features as person deixis, honorifics, intensification and repetition. Chinese companies adopt these diverse apology strategies and linguistic features for the sake of impression management, which is realized by using such strategies as ingratiation, self-promotion, exemplification and supplication. Finally, the paper provides insights into the understanding of crisis management and corporate communication practice online.

Firm performance feedback and organizational impression management: The moderating role of CEO overconfidence

“…For example, a study by Talbot and Boiral (2015) used six 'neutralization techniques' , including self-proclaimed excellence, promotion of a systemic view, denial and minimization, denouncing unfair treatment and deceptive appearances, economic and technological blackmail, and blaming others as proxies to organizational level impression management tactics. Further, past and recent work on OIM used various proxies, such as the use of corporate apologies (Zhou & Xu, 2023), presentational enhancement and obfuscation (Cüre, Esen & Çalışkan, 2020), cover images of inflight magazines (Martikainen & Adriani, 2023), corporate accounting narratives (Jaafar et al, 2018), and corporate stories (Spear & Roper, 2013) among others. Jaafar et al (2018) argued that firms with a greater tendency to engage in fraudulent financial activities have a higher motivation to use accounting narratives in their annual reports as an impression management strategy.…”