Riassunto analitico
Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) reports have become a fundamental tool through which companies communicate with their stakeholders and with the world at large. Through these documents firms inform people about their projects and their activities, together with their culture, history, values and principles. One of the most important aspects that CSR reports communicate is the firms’ commitment to social, ethical and environmental responsibility as well as the impact that the actions of the firms have on the environment and on society.
Among the social issues addressed in CSR reports, diversity and inclusion have been gaining increasingly relevance. The public attention and interest towards these social issues depends on multiple factors including social medias, recent social movements and globalization.
As people focus increasingly on diversity and inclusion, firms are demanded to address these social issues in their CSR reports and to communicate to their stakeholders what they do in order to ensure a diverse and inclusive working environment.
Together with the interest of society for diversity and inclusion, also scholars have showed interest for these themes conducting more and more studies on these social issues. The majority of analysis focus on the different approaches on diversity management. However, only a few studies examine the discursive construction of diversity and inclusion.
The present study examines the linguistic strategies that firms use when addressing the concepts of diversity and inclusion in their CSR reports. The goal is to understand how companies construct diversity and inclusion through discourse and to identify the main discursive strategies to express these social issues. The research employs a corpus-based approach making use of various corpus linguistic tools to analyze the corpora.
To be more specific, the present research illustrates how diversity is discursively constructed in the CSR reports of personal care companies of three countries, namely Japan, United States and United Kingdom.
The second goal of the study is to analyze the cross-cultural differences in the construction of diversity and inclusion. The aim is to examine the role of culture in the discursive construction of these social issues and to understand how it affects the perception that each country has of diversity and inclusion.
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