From Green Hype to Green Action: An Integrated Discourse Analysis of Sustainability Reports

On the strength of the ever-increasing discourses surrounding environmental crises and the growing collective awareness of the climate challenges faced by individuals across the board, corporations are reshaping and readjusting their identities accordingly, with corporate environmental policies becoming a benchmark for gauging business efficiency, viability and sustainability. This shift has resulted in the rise of a new genre, in some respects similar to the financial report, namely, the sustainability report, which illustrates the strategies and moves devised by companies not to fall short of required environmental standards. Though potentially addressing a wider and less specialised audience than that of financial reports, sustainability reports still employ hard-to-read language and patterns not entirely digestible to lay readers (Smeuninx et al., 2020; Kang & Kim, 2022). In light of this, and building on the theoretical frameworks of Ecolinguistics (Stibbe, 2015), Critical Discourse Analysis (Fairclough, 1989; Van Dijk, 2017) and Appraisal Theory (Martin & White, 2005), my study aims to combine a quantitative and qualitative research approach to the investigation of a 455.269-word Corpus of Sustainability Reports (SRC) produced between 2022 and 2023 by 9 multinational corporations including Coca Cola and Johnson & Johnson, among others. The results show interesting common linguistic patterns across the corpus investigated: (i) a disproportionate use of first-person pronouns, analysed from the perspective of engagement (Martin & White, 2005); (ii) the occurrence of verbs and structures carrying a positive semantic prosody (i.e., support, advance, enhance, among others) to outline the environmental policies implemented by the companies; (iii) the self-construction of the company as a ‘leading example’ in inspiring ecologically-minded behaviour; (iv) the emergence of destructive frames (Stibbe, 2015); (v) the use of quantitative verbs (i.e., increase, reduce, among others) and evaluation verbs (i.e., assess, prioritise, among others); (vi) the occasional reference to ‘science’ as an abstract entity; (vii) the development of company-specific narratives to project an environmentally friendly image. The ultimate goal of this research is to provide a better understanding of the linguistic devices employed in sustainability reporting, including the construction of solidarity with the putative reader and genre-specific features.