ABSTRACT
Even though foreign direct investments (FDI) from transition countries and the Global South have often proven beneficial for industrialized countries, the investors in many cases face patterns of resistance by the staff of the acquired firms and are confronted with diffuse concerns of the population of the investors’ target country. These observations can also be made in the case of Germany. The country has attracted an increasing number of both green- and brownfield investments from the BRIC countries for more than 20 years, often explicitly supported by business development agencies on different geographic levels; nevertheless, the climate for investments from these countries still is heavily affected by severe public reservations ranging from concerns about industrial espionage to fears about disregards of employment rights and job losses. While a variety of reasons influence a country’s investment climate, it appears that in the German case the fears of the population to a larger extent have been spurred by the country’s mass media. In order to understand the impact of the German media on the investment climate for BRIC investments, the empirical part of the study has been based on a discourse analysis as a systematic content analysis of major national newspaper. In particular, it aims at (a) analyzing the contents of newspaper reporting about FDI from the BRIC states in Germany, (b) elaborating how foreign investors from the BRIC states are portrayed by different stakeholders, and (c) finally at analyzing whether the reports’ tone has changed in the course of time and according to the investors’ country of origin.
