What Is the Environment Doing in My Report? Analyzing the Environment-as-Stakeholder Thesis through Corpus Linguistics

This paper seeks to explore whether business organizations' claims to regard the natural environment as a stakeholder are consistent with the way in which the environment is represented in their corporate social responsibility reporting. It applies corpus linguistic methods to analyze statistical regularities and differences in the discursive construction of core stakeholders, such as customers and employees, and that of the natural environment. Results show that the representation of the environment is not characterized by the agency and capacity for engagement that characterizes other stakeholders. While organizations overtly acknowledge a duty toward the environment, the dominant lexical and grammatical patterns in which it is represented tend to obscure the organization's responsibilities and emphasize its mitigating actions instead. Although the argument for regarding the environment as a stakeholder is based on the fact that it places objective and compelling demands on our actions, we look in vain for recognition of such demands in organizational reporting.