Multisemiotic interaction: the CEO and stakeholders in Malaysian CEO Statements

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explore how Malaysian CEO Statements employ language and image to convey interaction between the CEO and stakeholders. Design/methodology/approach 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. Findings 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. Originality/value 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.