State-owned or Otherwise: Dialogic Construction of Corporate Identities by Chinese Banks on Sina Weibo

Abstract

The present study has attempted to examine the construction of corporate identities on social media across differential ownership in China. Two Chinese banks, the Bank of China (BOC) as representing the state-owned bank and the China Merchants Bank (CMB) as representing the joint-equity bank, have been selected for the study as they are epitomes of the enormous corporations of diversified ownership currently engaged on social media. A dialogic framework of corporate identity formation has been developed with an integrated sociolinguistics approach which draws upon thematic analysis and conversation analysis to investigate the common and differential means the BOC and the CMB have attempted to construct their corporate identities and how the followers of the banks have co-constructed their corporate identities on Sina Weibo. The findings have indicated that despite similarities, there are significant variances in the proportion of the corporate identities projected and in the interaction patterns of the followers’ co-construction of the corporate identities between the two corporations with diverse economic ownership.

Keywords

Corporate identity / dialogic communication / social media / Weibo / Chinese banks

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