The representation of CSR in Malaysian CEO statements: a critical discourse analysis

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine how Malaysian CEO Statements represent corporate social responsibility (CSR). Design/methodology/approach – A corpus of 27 CEO Statements was analyzed using Fairclough's three-dimensional critical discourse analysis (CDA) model, which proposes analyzing text, discourse practice and social practice. The analysis emphasized image and language features in text while it explored intertextuality in discourse practice and ideology in social practice. Findings – The analysis revealed that selected image and language features contribute to six themes about CSR, namely achievement, identification, aspiration, disclosure, recognition and appreciation. The analysis also revealed that policies, standards and studies are often cited to reduce a credibility gap. These analyses indicate that CEO Statements represent CSR as a corporation's philanthropic initiatives for stakeholders. This representation reflects the ideology of CEO Statements. It establishes corporations as an agent of positive change in society, which helps to improve the social legitimacy of corporations. Research limitations/implications – Since the corpus was limited to ten corporations in three years, the findings might not be representative of the genre of CEO Statements. The corpus could be extended to include CEO Statements from other years, countries and languages and it can launch a productive enterprise in intercultural studies. Originality/value – This paper demonstrates CDA as an approach to understand CEO Statements. It may be useful to people practicing and teaching corporate communication because it encourages them to consider the meaning implied by image and language features, which can influence the meaning of CEO Statements.