Discursive construction of ethical business leadership in China: A corpus-assisted ecological discourse study of online public mourning discourse

Inspired by Arran Stibbe’s (2024) proposal for an ecolinguistic approach to ethical leadership, this study aims to conduct a corpus-assisted ecological discourse study of online public mourning discourse following the passing of Zong Qinghou, founder of the Wahaha Group in China. An integrated analytic framework for ethical business leadership is established by drawing insights from related disciplines, such as critical discourse studies, eco-critical discourse analysis, and ecological discourse analysis. A specialized corpus was built by collecting public mourning posts on Weibo related to Zong Qinghou’s passing. Through incorporating text mining into ecological discourse analysis, this study explores the discursive constructions of an ethical business leader at multiple levels of discourse and the ecosophy behind these constructions. The findings reveal the understanding and construction of ethical business leadership in the Chinese context, and demonstrate the benefits of a corpus-assisted ecological discourse study.