BRIC by BRIC – The CorSus of Corporate Social Responsibility: A Corpus-Assisted Discourse Analysis of Sustainability Reports (original) (raw)
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International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 2023
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Centre for Research in Language and Law RILL. Language and Law in Social Practice 3rd International Conference. 14-15-16-17 May 2014 Royal Palace Caserta Italy. Book of Abstracts, 2014
In the last decades, Corporate Social Responsibility reporting practices have grown exponentially, complementing the information disclosed in financial accounts and enabling stakeholders to estimate the intangible value drivers and the overall triple bottom line achievements. The emergent genre has an intrinsic hybrid nature (Bhatia 2004), combining informative and promotional purposes, partly disclosing data and partly trying to build an ethical corporate image and reputation in order to increase profitability. Reporting has been criticised for being a mere tick mark exercise and a whitewashing technique. Balance should nevertheless be among the basic principles ensuring a report transparency, publishing both positive and negative aspects of the company’s operations, admitting challenges and missed targets, poor performance or noncompliance with laws or regulations, issues causing conflicts or image damage. Such an honest presentation would enable a reasoned assessment of the overall performance and enhance corporate credibility (Gazdar 2007; GRI). The present study, part of a larger research project, is conducted on CorSus, a corpus of sustainability reports in English issued between 2008 and 2011 by oil and electric companies operating in emerging and industrial countries. Being energy production and use a sensitive industrial area, which is based on limited resources and still a major cause of risk of incidents and contamination, energy companies are subject to extensive legal requirements. A corpus-assisted discourse analysis is carried out on CorSus, with the aid of the analytical tool of the Appraisal Framework (Martin and White 2005). The paper focuses on the attitude adopted to communicate regulatory compliance, to report breaches and consequent penalties and to promote their commitments and activities going beyond the basic demands. In particular, the investigation aims at unveiling how words are non-neutrally used by the selected companies to construct discourses and views, to create and communicate a trustworthy and ethical image to stakeholders and ultimately to attract investors.
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A critical discourse analysis of English electronic news reports on environmental sustainability
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This research aims to discover the discourse features of English electronic news reports (EENRs) on environmental sustainability which are lexical, grammatical and textual features in light of critical discourse analysis (CDA) by Fairclough [3]. A combination of mixed research methods was applied with the qualitative method including a descriptive analysis and the support of the quantitative approach. 69 EENRs on the topic concerned were collected from the UN News website. The study results reveal that words and expressions related to the topic of environmental sustainability, formal words, content words and metaphors are typical lexical features of the discourse. The transitivity, passive and active voices, modes of sentences, relational modality, pronouns, expressive modality and cohesion are also recorded as grammatical features of the discourse.