Coercive, mimetic and normative: Interdiscursivity in Malaysian CSR reports

Abstract

Malaysian corporations have to disclose corporate social responsibility (CSR), and a typical genre for disclosure is CSR reports. These reports incorporate other discourses which indicate the presence of interdiscursivity. The article examines interdiscursivity in Malaysian CSR reports. It selects the CSR reports of 10 major corporations and pursues an interdiscursive analysis which involves four sequential stages. CSR reports contain discourses of public relations, sustainability, strategic management, compliance and financial accounting. Although the discourses are often multisemiotic, language maintains primacy in content, while image tends to exemplify or simplify content. These discourses constitute an interdiscursive profile, and it has central and auxiliary discourses. The central discourse is public relations discourse, and it promotes corporations helping and not harming society. The auxiliary discourses are sustainability, strategic management, compliance and financial accounting discourses, and these discourses mitigate the promotional focus. Interdiscursivity enables the primarily promotional CSR reports to not seem overtly promotional. The choice of discourses is probably influenced by coercive, mimetic and normative reasons. These discourses enhance the reliability of CSR reports because their disclosure is anchored to various CSR aspects, international or reporting practices and professional domains. Interdiscursivity helps to build stakeholders’ confidence in disclosure and, therefore, in corporations. It joins other functions in CSR reports to convey corporations as agents of positive social change. The article also probes the relationship between interdiscursivity and intertextuality and advances a matrix of intertextual–interdiscursive use.

On the linkage between CEOs’ statements and CSR reporting: an analysis of visuals and verbal texts

“…The CEOs in Malaysian firms try to align argument of economic and technical efficiencies with CSR. The economic argument remained the strongest because Malaysian businesses primarily practice a capitalist economic model (Rajandran, 2018). Our analysis (Table 2) represent framings in the form of "long-term value commitments", "responsible economic growth" and "making our business sustainable".…”

Interdiscursivity in corporate financial communication: an analysis of earnings videos

“…The mixing enables hybridity (Bhatia, 2004; Fairclough, 2006), and it helps to achieve the communicative purposes of a discourse community (Bhatia, 2010), such as corporations. These purposes are grounded in the corporate context (Rajandran, 2018), which fluctuate in relation to sociocultural developments. Financial communication texts are designed to be a coherent whole, and their interdiscursivity is often taken for granted.…”

“…These discourses serve different functions, where public relations discourse emits predictions and projections, accounting discourse calculates profit/loss, economics discourse reviews performance, and law discourse details the implications of information disclosed. Similarly, Rajandran (2018) finds corporate social responsibility (CSR) reports to be highly interdiscursive because the discourses of public relations, sustainability, financial accounting, strategic management and compliance are available. Every discourse is functional because public relations discourse promotes CSR benefits, sustainability discourse describes initiatives, financial accounting discourse displays the monetary amount required, strategic management discourse depicts an overview of operations and compliance discourse confirms legal and ethical requirements.…”

Book review: Jan-Ola Östman and Anna Solin, Discourse and Responsibility in Professional Settings and Vijay K Bhatia, Critical Genre Analysis: Investigating Interdiscursive Performance in Professional Practice

“…There has been a proliferation of discourse studies on or related to professional responsibility in recent years, either investigating public communication by corporate social responsibility reports (e.g. Rajandran, 2018) or exploring local practices such as in-house consultants' codes of conduct (Ghadiri et al, 2015). However, the analytical perspectives and methodologies of such studies are usually constrained by the 'multiple and conflicting meanings' of responsibility (Harmon, 1995: 5).…”

“…Therefore, an informed analysis of professional discourse entails the examination of both detailed language uses and contexts. This informed analysis is particularly crucial to the corporate social responsibility involved in professional genres, revealing interdiscursivity by drawing on discourses from other domains to promote organizations as agents of positive social change (Rajandran, 2018). The interdiscursive practice in professional discourse is essentially the target of what Bhatia (2008Bhatia ( , 2012 refers to as critical genre analysis.…”