Representing Corporate Social Responsibility, Branding the Commodity as Gift, and Reconfiguring the Corporation as ‘Super-’Person

This paper discusses how a Hawaiian corporation planned to redevelop an existing town by using a community-based approach to urban design. It examines how local residents were enlisted into the corporate work procedures in the capacity of authors and how their ideas and beliefs expressed were semiotically transformed and inscribed into design renderings of the future town. Analyses focus on how the corporation discursively positions itself as a person relative to the locals, and how various ideas expressed linguistically regarding the town are used to visually draw specific town design features. What is shown is that in taking into account and synthesizing the views of both the corporation and the local residents (i.e., customers), a design of the future town emerges as representation of a corporate brand community. It is argued that developed in this manner, the town as a commodity is one in which it is prefigured as a sign of the corporate status and social role within the community, and also that which has the capacity to yield future returns to the corporation in both the metaphorical (i.e., brand mediation) and actual (i.e., leases and sales) sense.