Corporate Environmentalism: A Critical Metaphor Analysis of Chinese, American, and Italian Corporate Social Responsibility Reports

Abstract

Background: Environmental reporting is an indispensable part of the corporate social responsibility (CSR) report, which has become a main genre of nonfinancial disclosure for corporations. The present study explores how companies use metaphors to construct their role in the relationship with the environment. Literature review: Previous studies tend to focus on environmental metaphors in genres such as newspapers, blogs, and scientific discourse, but rarely attend to the genre of corporate environmental reporting. Research questions: 1. What metaphors are used by banking and energy companies to represent their role in the relationship with the environment? Are there similarities or differences across cultures? 2. What are their representations in terms of the corporate role, and what impacts do they have on the environment from an ecolinguistic perspective? 3. Why are these metaphors used for environmental communication? Research methodology: The study investigates a corpus of 180 CSR reports published by Chinese, US, and Italian companies with the framework of critical metaphor analysis combined with genre analysis, so as to approach metaphor use from a cross-cultural perspective. Results and conclusions: The study highlights both universal metaphors (manager, protector, and traveler) and culture-specific metaphors (the bee metaphor in Chinese, the steward metaphor in English, and the fighter metaphor in Italian) across three languages, which are used to represent the company's good intentions, caring attitude, and responsible behavior, contributing to building an environmentally responsible corporate image. Some of the metaphors seem useful in inspiring eco-constructive behavior, while others may bear eco-destructive connotations.