Developing Environmental Ethics: Discourse Analysis of Sustainability Reports

In recent years, there has been a growing awareness of the companiesʼ obligations towards the environment, the workers and the consumers. Two environmental disasters, the Gulf of Mexico oil spill (April 2010) and the Fukushima nuclear accident (March 2011), have drawn even more attention to the problematic issue of 66 sustainability. Yet, it has been argued that developing countries could follow an alternative path of growth, with lower levels of environmental pressure. For this research, a corpus of annual sustainability reports issued between 2008 and 2011 by oil and energy companies operating in emerging and industrial countries has been collected and processed by means of corpus investigation software. A corpus-driven discourse analysis of sustainability reports, an evolving genre combining informative and promotional purposes, can reveal how linguistic and textual choices are used by firms to build trust and reputation and to pursue their business interests. The paper will examine the texts in order to identify possible common discourses arising within the groups of countries selected. Furthermore, it will study how the companies communicate risks and try to keep their corporate and sector image following the two environmental disasters.