The necessary balance between sustainability and economic success: An analysis of Fiat's and Toyota's corporate social responsibility reports

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) has recently become a fashionable item on the corporate agenda, and a central plank of corporate communication (Goodman, 2000; Christensen, 2002). Traditionally, companies have been involved in disseminating detailed information about their performance, goals, priorities and developments. Nowadays, however, firms have embarked on more frequent and ambitious initiatives focussed on issues such as sustainability, ethics and CSR (Lantos, 2001; Dahlsrud, 2006), which are commonly ascribed to the public, institutional and not-for-profit sectors. Firms’ pledge of support for economic development, environmental preservation and community welfare has evolved into a promotional strategy adopted in business settings to reinforce actors’ positive image, increase credibility, and gain consumers’ confidence. In the automobile industry two leading companies are exemplars of the integration of long-term social and environmental aspects into their business and (self-)promotional activities, Fiat and Toyota. The aim of the paper is to examine a small database of CSR reports and to identify some of the core sustainability-oriented values. With the support of corpus linguistics tools (Sinclair, 2003, 2004) and the software package WordSmith Tools 4.0 (Scott, 2004), the two subcorpora of documents published by Fiat and Toyota are analysed both quantitatively and qualitatively. The study of wordlists, key-words and their phraseological patterns (e.g. environmental, employees, safety, energy, training, recycling, research) highlights some argumentative strategies adopted by the two manufacturers to demonstrate their accountability to stakeholders, and sheds some light on the crucial role played by CSR in corporate communication.