Representing Corporate Social Responsibility, Branding the Commodity as Gift, and Reconfiguring the Corporation as ‘Super-’Person

Corporate Sustainability and Responsibility 2.0: Moral Foundations and Implications

“…32 In another study, Kyung-Nan Koh explored the possibility of participatory management and how it can semantically shift the corporation's designatum to a social person capable of being a moral agent despite retaining its denotatum as a legal entity by internalizing CSoR discourse. 33 These arguments lead us to a serial relationship between two corporate worlds: the rigid, mathematical, and objective-oriented paradigm of thought for efficiency and effectivity; and the business decision as an extension of the decisions of persons as moral agents. Ethical academicians and management theorists must work hand-in-hand in determining the fusion of both horizons for a more adaptive business milieu.…”

Linguistic Anthropology in 2015: Not the Study of Language

“…The reflexive recognition of this fact—in particular, that ideologies (e.g., of language) are never limited to what they are putatively “about” (viz. language)—has, as an example of the very process it has theorized, generated its own lexical register within linguistic anthropology: namely, “______ ideologies” or “ideologies of ______.” In 2015, authors have elaborated the dialectics of graphic ideologies (Spitzmuller ), media ideologies (Eisenlohr ; Jones ), semiotic ideologies (Keane ), textual ideologies (Faudree ), and ideologies of authenticity (Wilce and Fenigsen ), of brand (Koh ), of communication (Nozawa ; Slotta ), of creativity (Wilf ), of mathematics pedagogy (Chrisomalis ), of race (Hodges ), of register (Jones ), of sexuality (Manning ), of translation (Gal ), and of voice (Weidman ).…”

“…We can parse this vibrant area of research into, on the one hand, the study of (meta)semiotic practices that constitute capitalist organizational forms such as corporations (Cohen ; Urban and Koh ) and the bearers of value to which they orient, such as commodities (Faudree ; Kockelman ; Wilf ) and brands (Agha ; Gershon ; Koh , , ; Shankar ; Urban ; Wang ), and, on the other hand, literatures on the commodification of language and other emblems of identity (Faudree , ; Heller ; Henne‐Ochoa and Bauman :144–145; Johnstone ) and neoliberal ideologies of subjectivity and language (Cohen ; Hall ; Holborow ; Park ; Urciuoli ). Much of the latter discussion has focused on the ways in which global English has increasingly been linked to expanding neoliberal market logics under conditions of globalization (Hiramoto and Park ; LaDousa ; Price ; Proctor ; Zentz ).…”

“…In addition to interrogating capitalist forms (commodities, brands, and corporations) as the ongoing achievement of semiotic practices of various kinds, a number of authors have also asked what novel forms emerge when such formulations are extended in new ways and in new domains. What happens to the brand form when nations, universities, ethnicities (Wang ), residential communities (Koh ), politicians (Reyes ; Sclafani ), and everyday persons (Gershon ) are formulated as brands (or vice versa; Koh )? As these ethnographic studies evince, such tropes of capital—be they on the commodity, the corporation, or the brand—are productive of much more than the ideological teloses of what they cite.…”

Moral Orders of Multinationals: Registers of Value in Corporate Food Production

“…Linguistic anthropologists examining corporations as "reflexive cultural forms shaped by ongoing sign processes" (Urban and Koh 2015, S1) have questioned the notion of corporations and the brands they sell as "unitary objects with inherent power" (Agha 2015, S174). These scholars have demonstrated how corporations emerge through ongoing metasemiotic processes both internal and external to a company (Urban and Koh 2013;Koh 2015;Prentice 2015;Urban and Koh 2015). Yet scholarship on corporations' ethical initiatives has largely focused either on externally oriented attempts to manage corporate reputations (Shever 2010;Benson 2014;Welker 2014;Chong 2018) or on internal efforts to encourage international employees to align with company values (Chong 2018).…”