A Corpus-based Critical Discourse Analysis On Corporate Social Responsibility Reports

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) essentially requires corporations to holdaccountable for their actions socially, ethically and environmentally. Typically, a CSR report iscomprised of environmental, social, stakeholder and voluntariness dimensions (Dahlsrud,2008). From a linguistic perspective, CSR reports constitute an interesting and readilyaccessed subgenre. However, only a few attempts have been made to study CSR reports in thelinguistic field, among which even less are discourse analysis.Critical discourse analysis (CDA), also known as Critical Linguistics, aims at revealingthe power relationships and ideologies underlying different language forms. Stubbs (1997), andBaker (2006), who seriously question the objectivity of CDA, advocate the application ofcorpus linguistics techniques in CDA studies. Corpus linguistics has great potentials instrengthening CDA, because these techniques help reduce bias, recognize the incrementaleffect of discourse, and lower the chance of leaving out interesting research topics. Acombination of quantitative and qualitative researches generates great methodological synergyin CDA studies.Informed by corpus techniques, this thesis aims to accomplish mainly three objectives.Firstly, to identify a series of interesting topics, thereby furthering researches on CSR reportsfrom a CDA perspective. Secondly, to reveal the hidden power relationships and ideologiesunderlying CSR reports and to make a comparison between U.S companies and Chinesecompanies. Finally, to testify the advantages of corpus linguistics strengthening CDA studies.To achieve the above objectives, a systematic analytical procedure is developed. Theauthor first compiles two corpora: CSR-CH consists of8CSR reports published by8reputedChinese energy companies and CSR-US comprises of8CSR reports issued by8famous U.Senergy companies. This thesis employs a corpus based approach, in which the keyword resultgenerated by Wordsmith tools sketches the roadmap for further concordance and collocationanalysis. By concording words representing stakeholders and studying their collocates, thisthesis reveals the corporate power construction against each type of stakeholders. Additionally, the seemingly legitimate ideologies are denaturalized by drawing input from thesocio-historical context. Then this thesis annotates the concordance lines of stakeholders byCLAWS and applies corpus techniques to identify social actions with each type of stakeholderas the initiator. Applying Van Leeuwen’s social action theories, the current study probes intothe power hierarchy formed by stakeholders. In addition, the author also performs concordanceanalysis on the modality system and other miscellaneous topics, including mainly ideologicalladen keywords and the key keywords; and then drawing from a collection of CDA theories tointerpret powers and ideologies encoded in CSR texts.The present study intends to contribute to linguistics studies in several ways. This thesisbrings CSR reports to the scope of Chinese linguistic field and highlights several meaningfulresearch topics for further investigation. The implicit power relationships and ideologiesencoded in the discursive practice of CSRs are demystified based on multiple CDA theories.From a methodological perspective, the present study proves the advantages of corpusinformed CDA studies and enriches studies conducted in this fashion. As for practicalimplication, this thesis attempts to enhance readers’ critical thinking in reading CSRs andstrengthen their sensitiveness to implicit powers and ideologies embedded in institutionaldiscourse.