What Is the Environment Doing in My Report? Analyzing the Environment-as-Stakeholder Thesis through Corpus Linguistics

Abstract

This paper seeks to explore whether business organisations' claims to regard the natural environment as a stakeholder are consistent with the way in which the environment is represented in their corporate social responsibility reporting. It applies corpus linguistic methods to analyse statistical regularities and differences in the discursive construction of core stakeholders, such as customers and employees, and that of the natural environment. Results show that the representation of the environment is not characterised by the agency and capacity for engagement that characterises other stakeholders. While organisations overtly acknowledge a duty towards the environment, the dominant lexical and grammatical patterns in which it is represented tend to obscure the organisation's responsibilities and emphasise its mitigating actions instead. Although the argument for regarding the environment as a stakeholder is based on the fact that it places objective and compelling demands on our actions, we look in vain for recognition of such demands in organisational reporting.

Change But no Climate Change: Discourses of Climate Change in Corporate Social Responsibility Reporting in the Oil Industry

“…Thus, the enthusiasm for technological solutions and CCS conceals alternative solutions, does not challenge existing practices and in doing so, further serves to reinforce the business-as-usual mode (Milne et al, 2006). Similar to the term 'sustainability' (Alexander, 2009) or 'environment' (Lischinsky, 2015), climate change becomes an elusive concept and a rhetorical mean of discursive grooming in the mechanics of impression management, which simulates commitment and simultaneously averts any (public) criticism. This in turn contributes to the perpetuation and naturalisation of the neo-liberal agenda (Alexander, 2009).…”

“…The rise of voluntary CRS reporting and the discourses disseminated in the reports have received considerable research interests in business, accounting and management as well as language and communication studies. Particular attention has been paid to discourses around environmental sustainability (Livesey, 2002a;Livesey and Kearins, 2002;Milne at al., 2006;Laine, 2010;Ihlen & Roper, 2014;Lischinsky, 2015) showing how companies strategically utilise the categories of 'environment and 'sustainability' to create a positive image of themselves, increase legitimacy and competitive advantage. Yet, with some exceptions (e.g.…”

“…The rise of voluntary CSR reporting and the discourses disseminated in the reports have received considerable research interests in business, accounting, and management as well as language and communication studies. Particular attention has been paid to discourses around environmental sustainability (Ihlen & Roper, 2014; Laine, 2010; Lischinsky, 2015; Livesey, 2002b; Livesey & Kearins, 2002; Milne, Kearins, & Walton, 2006) showing how companies strategically utilize the categories of “environment” and “sustainability” to create a positive image of themselves, increase legitimacy, and competitive advantage. Yet with some exceptions (e.g., Ihlen, 2009; Jaworska & Nanda, 2016; Livesey, 2002a; Pollach, 2016) little is known about the extent to which corporations attend specifically to climate change in their CSR reporting and how climate change is rhetorically and discursively built into the discourses of environmental sustainability.…”

Analysing the environmental websites of the world’s greatest polluters: a multimodal ecolinguistic approach

“…Interestingly, Ihlen and Roper (2014) perceive an evolution in sustainability corporate discourses, which have started to discard the 'journey' metaphor, implying that companies have already arrived to the desired destination of being 'sustainable', which allows them to 'balance' their business with environmental care. Lischinsky (2015) explores the use of the natural environment as a stakeholder in CSR reporting and concludes that the environment is represented as an entity without agency, unlike other stakeholders, in an effort, once again, to obscure company responsibilities. Wright and Nyberg (2017), for their part, argue that corporations use framing (orienting the debate on an issue in a certain way), localising (making the conceptual frames relevant for local contexts) and normalising (realigning practices and activities with dominant organisational discourses) to prevent climate change concerns from altering 'business as usual'.…”

Engaging with the Natural Environment

“…However, we recognise that non-human stakeholders are not analogous to humans as sentient freewilled agents. Thus, their engagement and interaction needs particular scrutiny (Orts & Strudler, 2002;Lischinsky, 2015).…”