An Ecolinguistic Discourse Approach to Teaching Environmental Sustainability: Analyzing Chief Executive Officer Letters to Shareholders

Abstract

This article argues for using discourse analysis in business and management curricula to increase language awareness. To that end, an ecolinguistic discourse analysis approach (Stibbe, 2015a) for teaching sustainability is proposed. The article first explores sustainability discourse in two chief executive officer letters to shareholders followed by a classroom implementation enabling students to practise discourse analytical skills. Students examined vocabulary, hedging, modals, abstract and concrete representation, and social actors. Linguistic features were interpreted to reveal communicators’ underlying ideologies. This systematic analytical approach allows students to reflect on communication processes and how these processes can be used strategically when communicating in organizational contexts.

The Fear of the Known and Unknown in Being the Sustainable Business: Environmental Concern Reflected by Axfood (Sweden)

“…The fact that this is also a practice in some government institutions is deeply concerning. The communication mechanisms of corporate heads and overall corporation for socioresponsiveness is an element of concern for academicians and practitioners to understand the communication mechanisms in a better way that lead to enriched explanation of corporate-stakeholder relations [19][20][21][22].…”

Environmental sustainability in the online media discourses of Saudi Arabia: A corpus-based study of keyness, intertextuality, and interdiscursivity

“…Therefore, this study is significant as it highlights the very important issue pertaining to the discourses of environment embedded with eco-friendly ideologies and about environmental issues. These discourses can be viewed as linguistic strategies or “alternative ways” of constructing the world [ 32 ] (p. 391). This categorization scheme can also be linked to a distinction often made in discourse studies between critical analyses resisting the first two categories and positive evaluations of the third [ 8 ].…”