Diversity, Inclusion and Transparency in Rail Companies’ Communication

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 public attention to the question of inequality and, for that matter, to Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI). Set against this background, the aim of the study is to investigate whether, and if so how, EDI is transparently framed in the CSR reports belonging to a sample of rail companies operating in different countries and continents. In an effort to explore the companies’ attitudes towards EDI as a consequence of the Covid-19 pandemic, the analysis examines a sample of CSR reports that were disclosed in 2018 (pre-Covid-19) and 2022 (post-Covid-19). In particular, the sections of the reports covering EDI topics are scrutinized quantitatively with the support of corpus linguistics tools to identify frequent lexico-grammatical patterns, and qualitatively through discourse analysis to verify whether the information provided is transparent, namely complete, understandable and reliable. The comparative and micro-diachronic study sets out to highlight similarities and differences in the discourse strategies adopted by the rail companies for (un)transparent reporting of information relating to diversity and inclusion issues.