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The purpose of this paper is to examine how Malaysian CEO Statements represent corporate social responsibility (CSR).

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.

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.

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.

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.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how Malaysian CEO Statements employ language and image to convey interaction between the CEO and stakeholders.

The paper examines an archive of 32 Malaysian CEO Statements. The archive is analyzed with Systemic Functional Multimodal Discourse Analysis (SF-MDA), where several interpersonal systems can establish how language and image features articulate interaction. The analysis identifies who the stakeholders are, and how these stakeholders and the CEO interact.

There are four stakeholders, who are the community, customer, employee and environment, and these stakeholders are sub-categorized by type or activity. The stakeholders and the CEO share multisemiotic interaction through contact, reaction and equality. These three strategies mimic a face-to-face conversation (contact) and the CEO is depicted to reveal some positive emotions (reaction) to social equals (equality). These strategies reflect synthetic personalization, through which the CEO and stakeholders seem to interact because the CEO speaks directly to stakeholders in friendly conversation about CSR. CEO Statements are part of the quest for social legitimacy and designate corporations as agents of positive social change. Their ideology can be stated as a general principle: corporation A recognizes problem B and proposes solution C, which has positive result D for stakeholder E.

Previous research has not emphasized interaction in CEO Statements. The paper also utilized SF-MDA, which may enhance the discursive competence or a systematic way to decipher language and image for people who practice or teach corporate communication.

Research on corporate social responsibility (CSR) reporting highlights an increasing lack of transparency in the information reported along with concerns surrounding overall reporting practices. One area that needs exploration is how chief executive officers (CEOs) convey messages in relation to CSR. This paper aims to investigate the linkage between CEO’s statements (words and images) in relation to CSR and the performativity of such communication.

The study analysed CEOs statements from five Malaysian companies contained in 2016, 2017 and 2018 standalone sustainability and annual reports. The texts and visuals are analysed by using discourse analysis.

The findings uncover three main discourses (economic, environmental and social) along with other discourses (achievements and recognition and challenges). The texts and images are found to be lacking in clarity and consistency and in many ways leave the stakeholders to make their own conclusions about the reported information.

The research indicates that while the leaders can be more direct to their stakeholders, however, the opportunity is not always capitalised. Overall, the analysis suggests an increasing scientism in CEOs messaging in relation to CSR as a tool to enhance perceived accountability of the business. The study also suggests avenues for improvement. This paper contributes to the emergence of different types of discourses that are being upheld by CEOs in their statements on CSR in Malaysian context. The discourses identified provide interesting insights into how CSR is perceived by the leaders.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the statements by the chairman and CEO in BP plc’s Annual Report 2010 for linguistic evidence of reader positioning. This is based on the premise that reputational fallout from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill would have heightened the need for such positioning to repair the company’s legitimacy.

Applying Halliday’s systemic functional linguistics (SFL) framework, a comparative register analysis was undertaken of the respective statements of the chairman and CEO of BP plc. This was informed by corpus analysis of these statements, of comparative statements from industry competitors and of two larger-scale corpora constructed from the chairman and CEO statements extracted from the annual reports of 25 FTSE100 companies.

The findings suggest that readers’ perceptions are likely to be shaped by the statements of the chairman and CEO of BP plc in the company’s 2010 annual report, but similarities and differences are apparent in the way this positioning is engineered. Broader corpus analysis hints that these similarities and differences are not localised to BP plc.

The analysis relies on the assumptions that the chairman and CEO are the writers of each piece. As with prior research, questions of intent on the part of the corporate authors and impact upon target readers remain unanswered.

This paper demonstrates and highlights the issue of reader positioning through lexico-grammatical choices in corporate disclosures.

This paper makes a contribution to the literature by demonstrating how reader positioning may be engineered through lexico-grammatical choices in corporate disclosures. This paper further responds to a call from Sydserff and Weetman (1999, 2002) for interdisciplinary approaches to investigating corporate narrative reports involving linguistics, through foregrounding Halliday’s SFL framework as an analytical tool.

The purpose of this paper is to study the influences of corporate governance on intellectual capital disclosures in chief executive officers’ (CEOs’) statements in annual reports.

Index score, word count and overall tone of CEOs’ intellectual capital disclosures are calculated to represent the extent, amount and tone of these disclosures, respectively. With a sample of 78 FTSE 100 companies, this paper uses content analysis and empirical analysis to examine the impacts of board size, board composition and shares concentration on the above three measures of CEOs’ intellectual capital disclosures, controlling for company size, profitability and leverage ratio.

Empirical results demonstrate a significant positive relationship between board composition and the extent, amount and tone of CEOs’ intellectual capital disclosures and a significant negative relationship between shares concentration and the amount of these disclosures.

This paper focuses on the impacts of corporate governance on CEOs’ intellectual capital disclosures. It also groundbreakingly measures the tone of CEOs’ disclosures.

Using agency theory and impression management theory, this study examines the impact of financial performance (FP) and corporate governance (CG) mechanisms on the extent of intellectual capital disclosures (ICDs) and the three components within the CEO statement – human capital (HC), structural capital (SC) and relational capital (RC).

This study employs a sample of non-financial SPF-120 French listed firms to capture the relevant variables; it collects data for 2010–2017, using a panel data technique to run the random effects regressions.

The study finds that FP, measured using both market (Tobin's q) and accounting (return on equity and return on assets) indicators, plays a vital role in the extent of ICDs and the three components in the CEO statement published by SPF-120 companies. This confirms its impact on the decision-making needs of stakeholders. Among the CG mechanisms, this study finds that cultural diversity and gender diversity affect some ICD components. Moreover, CEO characteristics such as age, education and role duality affect ICD, while institutional ownership drives the extent of such disclosures.

Our findings have comprehensive implications for managers of French listed firms, the Autorité des Marchés Financiers, and stakeholders in general.

This study provides significant insights by investigating the impact of FP, CG and company characteristics on the extent of the ICDs published in CEO statements.

This study aims to investigate the correlation between a CEO's business background and the readability of financial statement footnotes in Indonesia.

This study utilizes a sample period spanning from 2010 to 2018 and employs various statistical tests, including Propensity Score Matching (PSM), Coarsened Exact Matching (CEM) and the Heckman Model, to demonstrate that it can address issues of causality and endogeneity without introducing bias.

As a result, the findings of this study indicate a statistically significant negative relationship between CEOs with busy schedules and the readability of financial statement footnotes. This suggests that companies led by busy CEOs are more likely to have financial statement footnotes that are easier to read.

These findings hold significance for clarifying research related to the challenges of contextual analysis in financial statement footnotes, which are distributed by companies on a sentence-by-sentence basis.

The practical implications of the findings pertain to actionable steps that management can undertake and also offer regulators opportunities to monitor the potential for standard setting.

Based on the results presented, the authors are optimistic that the findings will pave the way for broader research on the impact of a busy CEO, encompassing not only financial aspects but also non-financial dimensions. The growing popularity of readability is driven by the proliferation of textual reports that pose challenges in analysis and raise numerous inquiries.

Chief Executive Officer (CEO) activism, i.e. executives, publicly weighing in on sociopolitical debates, is an area of increasing interest in academia and business. This young research field provides valuable insights, but it still represents a scattered discussion in a variety of disciplines. Thus, this paper aims to present a guiding framework, integrate current knowledge, aggregate published findings and outline avenues for future research.

The authors conducted a systematic literature review building on a sample of 36 publications. In consequence, 1,146 lead themes were derived and studied in an in-depth qualitative analysis by deploying a pattern-inducing method.

Research on CEO activism can be placed on a time-oriented logic, giving insights into the realisation of activism, stakeholder reactions, moderators and perception effects. These four aggregate dimensions can be explained by 15 second-order themes and 48 more detailed first-order themes.

Considering the risks and benefits of CEO activism, top executives and communication professionals should be aware of its implications. This paper provides an integrated view of the different mechanisms and potential effects of CEO activism. Thereby, it proposes communicative planning from activism’s realisation to its perceptual results.

The study provides a holistic view of CEO activism as a starting point for further discussion. To the latest of the authors’ knowledge, this work is the first integrated conceptualisation of the discussion of CEO activism. The proposed avenues for future research stem from a detailed examination of published knowledge.

Developing a mission statement has been considered a crucial factor in the formulation of business strategy in organisations. The mission statement promotes a sense of shared expectations in employees and, not surprisingly, it has recently been regarded as increasingly important in small‐ and medium‐sized enterprises (SMEs) in the electronic industry. One major reasons for this is the growing complexity and dynamic competitive environments in which these enterprises have operated and managed to find themselves. Mission statements have become a management tool most commonly used by chief executive officers (CEOs) over the last decade. One exercise that both academics and practitioners have deemed strategically critical to the success of an enterprise is the development of a meaningful mission statement. This article explores the perceptions of CEOs of their mission statement in SMEs. It is based on the findings of recent research in 508 firms in the electrical and electronic industry in the UK. The study, amongst other things, investigated the existence and content of the mission statements and, accordingly, it determines the relationships (if any) between a SME’s development of a meaningful mission statement and selected performance outcomes of the firm.

This study explores the framing of messages delivered by 105 Fortune 500 companies across 21 sectors in June 2020 in response to three social justice issues that took prominence that month in the United States: racial inequity, immigration laws and LGBTQ rights.

Researchers compiled a list of the top five companies in each sector on the 2020 Fortune 500 list, with a resulting list of N = 21 sectors and N = 105 companies. A database of corporate statements was compiled along with a comprehensive list of recurring themes. Quantitative framing analysis was used to examine each corporate statement.

Seventy percent of the companies examined made statements about the issue of racial injustice, 58% about LGBTQ issues and only 6% about immigration policy. Coders identified the most frequent message type coded on each social justice issue: racial inequity –“Working Together”; immigration policy – “Celebration”; LGBTQ rights – “Celebration.”

This study relied on a quantitative analysis of themes, but it did not analyze the specific language or media used. Further examination of rhetorical choices could uncover additional meanings in the messages.

Companies are increasingly called upon to speak out on controversial issues. This can be challenging for communicators who are deciding how to respond. This study sheds light on the common frames used in corporate statements.

No studies to date have adopted a content analysis approach to assess the content of corporate activist statements. Examining the messages is important because, as more companies become increasingly vocal about social issues, stakeholders utilize this information to judge the sincerity of both the company and the message.