Doing the Locomotion Aspects of Trust and Transparency in Railway Communication

In the last few decades, Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) has become a priority on the corporate agenda and a pillar of corporate communication. Firms have been increasingly called upon to behave responsibly and disclose information about their ethical values and ‘values translated into action.’ Recently, the growing distrust towards businesses and their CSR practices has prompted companies to reengage with stakeholders and disclose information in a way that is perceived by the general public as transparent and trustworthy. While extensive research on transparency has been conducted in fields such as management, organisational studies and marketing, little work has been done on the role of language in the creation of transparency and as a consequence, of trust. Set against this background, the study focuses on a particular industry sector in which public perceptions of transparency need to be carefully managed and maintained, namely transportation. Specifically, the analysis sets out to investigate how transparency and trust are linguistically and discursively constructed in the CSR reports belonging to a selection of rail companies operating in different geographical areas across the world (Europe, North America and Asia). Special attention is paid to the discussion of issues relevant to the sector, namely environmental impacts. With the support of quantitative and qualitative analysis tools, the sections of the reports covering environmental topics are examined in a variety of lexico-grammatical items and their phraseology. The study sheds light on the discourse strategies adopted by rail companies for trust creation and transparent reporting of information relating to environmental issues.