ABSTRACT Corporations increasingly use Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) reports to articulate their commitments, priorities, and performance in sustainability governance. This study examines how Korean firms have configured and reconfigured their sustainability discourses across industries and time using 634 sustainability reports (2014–2024) from the 200 largest companies. Using Structural Topic Modeling (STM), this study identifies 13 topics and a phased shift in emphasis: corporate social responsibility and basic environmental management (2014–2018); workplace safety and digital transformation (2019–2022); and carbon neutrality and supply‐chain management (2023–2024). Sectoral analysis highlights differentiated patterns of discursive differentiation across industries: finance and energy show stronger concentration in governance‐ and climate‐related reporting, construction emphasizes safety‐related disclosure, and manufacturing places greater emphasis on environmental management and compliance‐oriented communication. Topic‐network analysis shows distinct ESG pillars but growing cross‐pillar linkages. Taken together, the study contributes to the literature by empirically mapping how ESG reports function as managerial instruments and communicative devices shaped by industry‐specific regulatory pressures and societal expectations.
Lee et al. (Wed,) studied this question.