BEYOND NUMBERS: AN INVESTIGATION INTO THE LINGUISTIC STRATEGIES EMPLOYED BY FIRMS IN SUSTAINABILITY REPORTING

Abstract

Firms are increasingly publishing sustainability reports, with stakeholders such as the government and their consumers pressuring them to be more active and transparent in their sustainability performance. With the field of sustainability reporting being a nascent one, scholars have been trying to establish a correlation between a firm’s language use and their sustainability performance. This thesis uses past research as a starting point to formulate a new approach for linguistic analysis of a firm’s sustainability report. It also investigates how firms use linguistic features of conjunctions and self-references to structure information and construct identity and its related values of authenticity, ownership, and responsibility. The firms selected for analysis are from the Food Products industry, which has been placed under the spotlight for greenwashing and being responsible for a third of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions. This thesis also investigates if there is a difference between the linguistic strategies of firms with declining sustainability performance and firms with improving sustainability performance. Results showed that firms from these two categories use conjunctions to structure information to evoke a positive identity and to also offset their negative information by reframing it positively. The firm with a declining score tends to caveat negative clauses with positive ones more than the firm with an improving score as the former has more sustainability-related transgressions to explain and justify. Both firms use self-reference to claim ownership of sustainability achievements, but also use them to distance themselves from incidents that put their reputations at risk. The firm with a declining sustainability score tends to use more self-references to highlight their achievements to detract attention away from their sustainability-related mistakes.