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Speaking Of Corporate Social Responsibility, Hao Liang, Christopher Marquis, Luc Renneboog, Sunny Li Sun
Speaking Of Corporate Social Responsibility, Hao Liang, Christopher Marquis, Luc Renneboog, Sunny Li Sun
Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business
We argue that the language spoken by corporate decision makers influences their firms’ social responsibility and sustainability practices. Linguists suggest that obligatory future-time-reference (FTR) in a language reduces the psychological importance of the future. Prior research has shown that speakers of strong FTR languages (such as English, French, and Spanish) exhibit less future-oriented behavior (Chen, 2013). Yet, research has not established how this mechanism may affect the future-oriented activities of corporations. We theorize that companies with strong-FTR languages as their official/working language would have less of a future orientation and so perform worse in future-oriented activities such as corporate social …