Critical Discourse Analysis of Corporate Environmental Reports regarding Greenwashing and the Language of Sustainability

Abstract

Over the past years, companies have started to focus more on sustainability communication as a tool of expressing the environmental responsibility and improving the trust of the stakeholders. There is a big disparity between the corporate sustainability assertion and real environmental practice, especially through greenwashing. This paper will examine the linguistic practices used in corporate environmental reports in order to find out how sustainability is discursively produced. Based on the qualitative approach based on critical discourse analysis (especially the three-dimensional model by Fairclough), the study will consider a sample of 5-10 corporate sustainability reports of large industries. The analysis reveals some common characteristics like the use of ambiguous lexical decisions, modality and hedging, passive constructions, and positive framing, all of which lead to ambiguity and selective representation. The results indicate that corporate discourse is often more focused on image building as opposed to transparency. The paper ends with the necessity of more transparent, responsible practices of sustainability communication to decrease the difference between the discourse and the real environmental performance.