Twentieth International Conference on Diversity in Organizations, Communities & Nations

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to analyze if and to what extent ethnicity and race are used as stereotypes in Corporate Communication by leading companies on all continents around. Though there is a lot of research on stereotypes in ethnicity and race on one side and about international Corporate Communication on the other side, these subjects are only rarely put together for a joint, interdisciplinary effort. This paper combines the Stereotype Content Model of Cuddy, Fiske and Glick (2007) together with the approach to international Corporate Communication as proposed some years ago by Sriramesh and Vercic or Sievert. Based on these theoretical foundations, a mainly quantitative content analysis of website imagery of the five revenue strongest companies of one country on each continent (USA, Germany, South Africa, Australia and China) was conducted between May and July 2019. Within the research, the starting page and the first website level were analysed, leading to 564 research units (= images). A key finding, still the overpowering usage ‘white superiority’ was the stereotype of choice for most companies (50%), followed by stereotypes about the black race being ‘poor’ and ‘unintelligent’. However, also many differences between countries could have been made visible. As a practical implication, many useful hints for Corporation on how to avoid stereotypes in their communication can be given. Combining two fields of academic research (stereotype theory and international Corporate Communication) this paper is also contributing another field of innovation by interdisciplinary cooperation to the academic community.