Home / Regular Issue / JTAS Vol. 27 (2) Jun. 2019 / JSSH-2548-2017

 

Multimodal CSR Disclosure in Malaysian Corporate Websites

Kumaran Rajandran

Pertanika Journal of Tropical Agricultural Science, Volume 27, Issue 2, June 2019

Keywords: CSR, disclosure, interacting, multimodality, reading, websites

Published on: 28 June 2019

The article explores how Malaysian corporate websites employ multimodality, or language and image features to disclose corporate social responsibility (CSR). As previous research mostly analyzes disclosure in Malaysian CSR reports, and European or North American websites, the article studies Malaysian corporate websites. It examined the CSR webpages of the two largest Malaysian corporations: Malayan Banking and Tenaga Nasional. The article distinguishes two dimensions of reading and interacting, which explain what visitors 'do with' and 'do to' websites respectively. It inspects the language and image features in these dimensions using Systemic Functional-Multimodal Discourse Analysis (SF-MDA). While the information in the reading dimension emphasizes corporations and their CSR, the design in the interacting dimension emphasizes options to select to obtain changes in websites. The two dimensions are complementary because the design helps to navigate the information. Their language and image features constitute semantic motifs that indicate corporations as the source and stakeholders as the target of CSR. The motifs foster the ideology of corporate involvement bringing social improvement, which discloses the corporate perspective. The analysis of websites helps practitioners and academics in corporate communication to create persuasive CSR disclosure in websites, and it may encourage members of society to be critical of disclosure.

ISSN 1511-3701

e-ISSN 2231-8542

Article ID

JSSH-2548-2017

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