This research analyses the discursive construction of beauty through skin care advertisements and its visual representations in Indonesian women’s magazines. Indonesia is an industrialising and increasingly global country with a sizable emerging middle class that is the largest in Southeast Asia. We explore themes of whiteness, naturalisation and scientification as socio-cultural constructions of beauty as the products not only promise youthful, smooth and fair skin to affluent middle-class consumers, but promote the constant ‘upscaling’ of lifestyle norms related to the pursuit of higher economic and social status. In this research, we draw on existing scholarship in gender, beauty, ‘whiteness’ (Ariss, Ӧzbilgin, Tatli & April, 2014) and ‘colourism’ (Glenn, 2009) that examines the growing phenomena of skin whitening in beauty products and their relationship to particular cultural contexts and locations. This body of theory and research has shown how ‘whiteness’ and ‘colour’ are constructs related to, but not the same as ‘race’, that carry complex meanings generated by the intersection of gender, colonial history, ethnicity, class and globalisation (Rondilla, 2009). While it has been long argued that beauty is culturally diverse in different markets and is multidimensional (Englis, Solomon & Ashmore 1994), it is also highly globalised (Jones, 2011). The globalisation also increasingly standardises communications campaigns run by creative advertising agencies who are predominantly Western or ‘Western trained’. This has contributed to a ‘transnational look’ (Frith, Shaw & Cheng, 2005), a ‘reduction in the range of global variation in beauty ideals’ (Jones, 2008, p.150), and a ‘narrow representation of beauty’ (Yan & Bissell, 2014). We question the extent of this resultant homogeneity in a non-Western context that is under-studied

This paper offers a discursive perspective to studying corporate identity and brand. It extends existing scholarship that adopts alternative approaches to understanding corporate identity, seeing it as polysemic, rather than unitary; and constructed, rather than pre-existing. Using a case study of a contemporary global church that combines religion, marketing and popular culture, it shows how disparate and potentially contradictory cultural resources are combined in corporate branding. Church text and corporate communication materials were collected and analysed to identify the presence and combination of different discourses. Our analysis shows how Christian, market, popular and contemporary spirituality discourses were combined using three discursive strategies which we call: differentiation, spectacularizing and personalizing. The research demonstrates the process of how a corporate brand identity is ‘made’ as well as how disparate and contradictory discourses can be successfully combined. This approach can be practically extended to studying other types of organizations, corporate and non-corporate.