A Comparative Study of Chinese and American Corporate Homepages: A Hypermodal Approach

Abstract

The homepage of a corporation has become an unprecedentedly important promotional vehicle for advertising campaign nowadays. Given the cultural sensitivity of homepages, this paper, referring to the “two-dimensional genre analysis model”, compares how the corporate homepages of “Tsinghua professional manager training center” (Tsinghua) and “Harvard ManageMentor” (Harvard) simultaneously create their corporate identity as well as their official gateway to get their products and services promoted. The results show that the homepage of Tsinghua highlights a strong sense of authoritativeness and collectivism. Besides, the information density is less than that of Harvard. Harvard, on the other hand, presents as much information as it can and values the individual’s leadership cultivation greatly. The differences are interpreted from a socio-cultural perspective and the corporations’ involvement in marketization. This paper extends multimodal approaches to hypermodal analysis and takes the relations between hypermedia and culture as well as ideology into consideration.