Yi-Ru Regina Chen

Purpose: Drawing on expectancy theory, this study explores corporate volunteering (CV) motivations among state-owned enterprise (SOE) and private enterprise (PE) employees in China, as well as the communication strategies these corporations use to motivate their employees’ CV participation, generating social impact. Design/methodology/approach: Forty interviews were conducted with 20 employees from five SOEs and 20 employees from five PEs. Findings: The results indicated that SOE employees are primarily motivated by their current or potential future identity as members of the Communist Party of China (CPC) and work ethics, whereas PE employees are significantly motivated by personal fulfillment and the expansion of their social networks. Holistic engagement in life was a prominent shared motivation. Consequently, SOEs and PEs employed more distinct than similar communication strategies to boost expectancy, instrumentality and valence, thereby motivating CV participation. Research limitations/implications: This exploratory study’s limitation lies in its focus on the perspectives of employees from large and top-performing corporate social responsibility corporations in China. Practical implications: The study provides practical insights on strategic communication for increasing and sustaining CV participation among SOE or PE employees by enhancing motivations, ultimately resulting in community and social benefits. Social implications: The study enables corporations to maximize social impact by increasing employees’ participation in CV and enhancing employees’ well-being through CV involvement. Originality/value: The study advances the theorizing of CV for social impact by using SOEs in China as a contextual factor to examine CV motivations and strategic communication for driving CV participation.

The COVID-19 disease outbreak has seen mixed information flows comprising top-down communication from health authorities to the public and citizen-to-citizen communication. This study aimed to identify mechanisms underlying the sharing of official versus unofficial information during the outbreak. Survey findings based on a nationally representative U.S. sample (N = 856) showed that individuals’ predispositions affected their information consumption and affective experiences, leading to distinct types of information-sharing behaviors. While anger toward the U.S. government’s outbreak response was directly associated with unofficial information sharing, anxiety was directly associated with official information sharing. These findings enhance our understanding of the propagation of different kinds of pandemic information and provide implications for public education on information verification based on source authoritativeness.

With globalization, corporations increasingly have to consider both domestic stakeholders and overseas stakeholders (i.e., international publics) in their corporate social responsibility (CSR) practice. Digitalization empowers international publics to scrutinize and react to a (multinational) corporation’s CSR strategy, further affecting corporate outcomes of CSR practice. Drawing on the social media context and attribution theory, this study investigated international publics’ reactions to corporate disaster relief, an emerging type of mobile-enhanced CSR (i.e., mCSR) practice, in the United States and China by looking at individuals’ engagement with mobile social media during disasters, attribution of CSR motives, and level of CSR skepticism. Using structural equation modeling analysis, the survey data of randomly recruited Americans (n = 816) and mainland Chinese (n = 430) suggested that mobile social media engagement reinforces the values-, strategic-, and stakeholder-driven motives of mCSR in the United States and China. Egoistic-driven CSR motives elicited publics’ skepticism toward mCSR, while values- and stakeholder-driven motives inhibited skepticism in both countries. However, the effect of strategic-driven motives on skepticism was inconsistent internationally. Last, CSR skepticism triggered negative relational outcomes between the mCSR-performing corporation and various stakeholders in both countries. This study advances CSR and attribution theory and contributes to the practice of CSR, public relations, and international business in the social media and disaster response context.

As social media use on mobile devices has been integrated in people’s daily lives, corporations began to target the publics on corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities on mobile devices. In the context of a natural disaster, this study examines how publics respond to CSR-based initiatives by way of mobile corporate social responsibility (mCSR), including gratifications, social media engagement, perceived CSR motives, and the relationship outcomes as associated with mCSR practice. An online survey was conducted by sampling with 1,433 nationally representative adults in the United States. Findings indicated that four broad types of gratification, such as technological convenience, social interaction, recreation, and information exchange, significantly influenced relationship outcomes such as satisfaction, commitment, distrust, trust, and control mutuality. Results also demonstrated that perceived CSR motives and social media engagement on mobile devices were significantly related to relationship outcomes, providing empirical evidence for the important role that potential mCSR communications can play in engaging publics and cultivating relationships during natural disasters.

(2017). Introduction to the Special Issue. International Journal of Strategic Communication: Vol. 11, Strategic Communication in Greater China, pp. 361-363.