DIVERSITY, INCLUSION, AND TRANSPARENCY IN RAIL COMPANIES’ CSR REPORTS

Over the last decades Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR, Dahlsrud 2008) has become a sine qua non in the corporate world and a central plank of corporate communication. Firms have been increasingly called upon to behave responsibly and disclose information about their ethical values and performance. In particular, the recent events of the Covid-19 pandemic and the renewed upsurge of social movements in the late 2010s, such as Black Lives Matter and #MeToo, have brought attention to the question of inequality and, for that matter, to equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI). As such, companies have started not simply to intensify their engagement in Corporate Social Responsibility, but also to (re)consider and communicate their stance on these social issues. In the literature, great attention has been paid to EDI in the workforce from a management perspective. In detail, while equality assumes that all people should be offered equal opportunities irrespective of their race, gender and disability, diversity entails the recognition of the value of differences (e.g. age, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, education, religious beliefs to name but a few), and inclusion is concerned with the processes that support employees’ participation, empowerment and contribution in organizations (Oswick and Noon 2014). Nevertheless, although EDI has been widely explored in the management field, limited research has been conducted on how companies linguistically, discursively and (non-)transparently construct these issues in corporate disclosures.  In the current context of growing distrust towards businesses and their CSR practices, transparency has become a key priority for companies as it allows them to maintain their legitimacy to operate and build stakeholders’ trust. Following Stacks et al. (2013, 570), “Stakeholders ascribe strong reputation to the organization when it is transparent in the conduct of its affairs. On the contrary, if the organization avoids communication with stakeholders or provides only minimal, incomplete, or untruthful information to stakeholders, it loses ground in the court of public opinion (Fombrun and van Riel, 2004)”. In view of these considerations, the present study focuses on transportation: a particular industry sector in which public perceptions of transparency need to be carefully managed and maintained. Specifically, we aim to investigate whether and if so how, equality, diversity and inclusion are transparently framed in the CSR reports belonging to a selection of rail companies operating in three different geographical areas across the world: Europe, North America and Asia. More to the point, we will take into account the case study of three rail companies headquartered in three different countries, namely Deutsche Bahn in Germany, Amtrak in the USA, and West Japan Rail Company in Japan. Furthermore, in an effort to explore the language constructions of EDI not only in their variation across countries but also as a consequence of the Covid-19 pandemic, the analysis examines a sample of CSR, Sustainability or Integrated Reports that were disclosed in 2018 (pre-Covid-19) and 2022 (post-Covid-19). More specifically, we considered specific sections describing People and Employees (e.g. “Human Resources”, “Our People”, and “Social”). In the first stage of the study, transparency is examined along three dimensions: disclosure, i.e. amount, completeness and relevance of information; clarity or understandability of information; and accuracy, i.e. information reliability (Schnackenberg and Tomlinson 2016). The sections of the CSR reports covering EDI topics are explored with the support of corpus linguistics tools (such as word frequencies, concordances and keywords) to identify frequent lexico-grammatical patterns, and qualitatively through discourse analysis, to verify whether the information provided by the companies on their social impact is transparent, namely complete, relevant, understandable and reliable (Schnackenberg and Tomlinson 2016).The second part of the study investigates transparency as a prerequisite for trust, which is intended as the belief that a company will act in the stakeholders’ best interest, further their interests, and intentionally cause no harm. Fuoli and Paradis’ (2014) trust repair framework will be applied to our corpus in order to explore linguistic strategies adopted in the communication of equality, diversity and inclusion issues. The research, which provides a more qualitative perspective and an interpretative approach to the data, also looks at elements of multimodality (e.g. images, tables and graphs), taking into account paratextual elements, which might add information or reinforce/support the textual content. Our goal is to map the construction of transparency in rail companies’ CSR reports and to explore how it intertwines with trust building with their stakeholders. The cross-country and micro-diachronic study highlights similarities and differences in the discourse strategies adopted by rail companies for transparent reporting of information relating to social issues and strengthening stakeholder trust in the company. Results show how trust and transparency coexist and work on different levels, reinforcing and compensating one another.