Using corpus-linguistic tools and methods, this article investigates the discourses of climate change in corporate social responsibility and environmental reports produced by major oil companies from 2000 to 2013. It focuses on the frequency of key references to climatic changes and examines in detail discourses surrounding the most frequently used term “climate change.” The analysis points to shifting patterns in the ways in which climate change has been discursively constructed in the studied sample. Whereas in the mid-2000s, it was seen as a phenomenon that something could be done about; in recent years, the corporate discourse has increasingly emphasized the notion of risk portraying climate change as an unpredictable agent. A proactive stance signaled by the use of force metaphors is offset by a distancing strategy often indicated through the use of hedging devices and “relocation” of climate change to the future and other stakeholders. In doing so, the discourse obscures the sector’s large contribution to environmental degradation and “grooms” the public perception to believe that the industry actively engages in climate change mitigation. At the methodological level, this study shows how a combination of quantitative corpus-linguistic and qualitative discourse-analytical techniques can offer insights into the existence of salient discursive patterns and contribute to a better understanding of the role of language in performing ideological work in corporate communications.

The lockdown imposed following the COVID-19 pandemic of spring 2020 dramatically changed the daily lives and routines of millions of people worldwide. We analyze how such changes contributed to patterns of activity within the household using a novel survey of Italian, British, and American families in lockdown. A high percentage report disruptions in the patterns of family life, manifesting in new work patterns, chore allocations, and household tensions. Though men have taken an increased share of childcare and grocery shopping duties, reallocations are not nearly as stark as disruptions to work patterns might suggest, and families having to reallocate duties report greater tensions. Our results highlight tightened constraints budging up against stable and gendered patterns of intra-household cooperation norms. While the long-run consequences of the COVID-19 lockdown on family life cannot be assessed at this stage, we point toward the likely opportunities and challenges.

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Using the novel technique of topic modelling, this paper examines thematic patterns and their changes over time in a large corpus of corporate social responsibility (CSR) reports produced in the oil sector. Whereas previous research on corporate communications has been small-scale or interested in selected lexical aspects and thematic categories identified ex ante, our approach allows for thematic patterns to emerge from the data. The analysis reveals a number of major trends and topic shifts pointing to changing practices of CSR. Nowadays 'people', 'communities' and 'rights' seem to be given more prominence, whereas 'environmental protection' appears to be less relevant. Using more established corpus-based methods, we subsequently explore two top phrases-'human rights' and 'climate change' that were identified as representative of the shifting thematic patterns. Our approach strikes a balance between the purely quantitative and qualitative methodologies and offers applied linguists new ways of exploring discourse in large collections of texts.