CSR reports in our globalised era: balancing national culture and global trends

Nowadays more and more companies are being proactive in producing CSR reports which can enhance their reputation and image with the general public in the global marketplace. However, the need to engage in cosmopolitan communicative practices makes companies face the inevitable tension between global trends and cultural markedness. The present analysis has analysed the English version of CSR reports published between 2011 and 2013 on the corporate websites of Delta, Etihad and JAL, with a view to ascertaining how global carriers are currently engaging in global communication while at the same time trying to balance their cultural identity and global appeal. In the first place, the study has focused on the main semantic areas and key words contained in each corpus of CSR reports in order to highlight similarities and differences in terms of the values underpinning the airlines’ commitment to CSR. Secondly, the co-text and the collocations of the main keywords have been investigated with a view to shedding some light on the interplay between globalization and local culture. The preliminary findings seem to indicate that airlines still “fly the flag” when communicating globally through the English online version of their CSR reports. In fact, despite some common values underpinning CSR practices, divergences clearly outnumber similarities, particularly in the deployment of the discursive strategies contributing to the persuasiveness of a text.