Green is the new black: re-purposing corporate narratives across genres

Although law and business scholars have pioneered studies on sustainability, such research fails to satisfactorily engage with sustainability discourse. While applied linguists focused on discourse, a bibliometric and systematic review conducted by the author on applied linguistics studies investigating sustainability discourse shows that majority of scholars have limited the analysis to textual features. In addition, the review sheds light on the diachronic changes in terms of topics and genres investigated following major events (e.g., Paris agreement). This study aims to determine how ESG commitments, efforts, and achievements are semiotically constructed across different genres, with particular focus on environmental constructs. Drawing upon author’s previous work (Wells et al. 2021), this study conducts a corpus-assisted multimodal discourse analysis (Kress & van Leeuwen 2006; 2001) on a set of data which reflects the communication practices of the two major conglomerates operating in the luxury industry, namely Kering and LVMH. The dataset includes webpages, press releases, reports, and social media posts construing the two companies’ environmental, social, and governance commitments, efforts, and achievements. Preliminary findings show how different semiotic resources are orchestrated to construct environmental discourse across different genres and how discourse changes to adjust to medium and audience. The study promotes the idea that sustainability transformation of businesses, like digital transformation, has spurred the proliferation of hybrid genres which reflect the need to comply to new regulations. This study is part of an overarching project which investigates sustainable corporate discourse and highlights how discourse enables individuals, public and private entities to advocate, influence, and drive change in the society.