Examining Corporate Communications of Environmental Responsibility on Corporate Websites: Main Themes, Linguistic Features, and Text Reuse

Abstract

The present study intends to examine environmental corporate social responsibility (ECSR) disclosure on official corporate websites within and across a collection of companies. Through an automated content analysis, the findings suggest two broad themes underlying corporate disclosure, and significant associations between personal pronoun usage/lexical diversity and corporate CSR performance were found. In addition, text reuse analysis illuminated certain communication patterns across different industries. Overall, the present study implicates not only theoretical research on ECSR disclosure, but also practical ECSR reporting on corporate websites.