#CEOCarbonNeutralChallenge: a social semiotic analysis of collective sustainability leadership

As a result from corporate peer pressure, increased activism and consumer engagement on social media, and growing risks for reputational damage and financial impacts on corporations, corporations have shifted their communication strategies towards sustainability. In November 2019, Gucci’s CEO, Marco Bizzarri, launched the initiative ‘CEO Carbon Neutral Challenge’ by publishing an open letter to CEOs to invite them to take responsibility and “meet the reality of our global climate and biodiversity crises” (An Open Letter to CEOs). This study aims at examining the collective discourse produced and distributed (Kress & van Leeuwen, 2001) around the initiative through the open letter to CEOs and the texts connected through the Instagram hashtag #CEOCarbonNeutralChallenge. The study adopts a social semiotic approach (Bateman et al., 2017; Nervino, 2018) to analyse the multimodal construction of sustainability leadership and intertextual references building on the collective imaginary that places the Amazon Forest centre stage in any environmental discourse. Preliminary findings show that medium-specific features (i.e. tags) and semiotic resources such as colours and image composition work as cohesive devices to create a collective discourse about the corporations’ commitment to an environmental cause and the construction of leading figures calling for alignment between business and sustainable objectives. The study contributes to the literature on the discourse of sustainability and leadership with a focus on multimodality and is part of an overarching project focusing on multimodal corporate discourse concerning environmental, social, and governance commitments constructed by luxury companies and disseminated across different genres to address an increasing variety of stakeholders. The project aims at contributing to the methodological and theoretical advancements in the investigation of a wider multiplicity of modes available to construe the meanings in the new media and pushing the boundaries of digital communication beyond the developed strategies and the potentiality of computer-mediated genres (Hopearuoho & Ventola, 2009).