Corporate Social Responsibility Reports: An Analysis of Dialogicity Across Sectors and Countries

The paper explores Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) reports in their dialogicity, i.e. as an interactive communication practice taking place between the company and a multifaceted audience of stakeholders. In particular, it investigates the linguistic and discursive resources used by a sample of companies in their CSR disclosures to articulate corporate values and performance, and voice stakeholders’ concerns. The analysis was conducted on a small collection of documents belonging to firms operating in three different sectors: Banking, Food, and Oil and Gas, and headquartered in three European countries: Italy, Switzerland and the UK. With the support of corpus linguistics tools, the CSR reports were examined in a selection of key dialogic elements and their phraseology. The quantitative and qualitative analysis was intended to map out the strategies (dis)similarly adopted by the firms across the sectors and countries to project themselves into the text, establish a connection with stakeholders, and address their needs and expectations.