The assumption of prospective responsibility in corporate social responsibility discourse from the garment industrya methodological proposal and discourse analysis of mechanisms for expressing responsibility assumption in CSR reports of some transnational clothing companies

Abstract

The practice of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) has been described as a (self)legitimisation exercise of corporations in society. This critical study of CSR discourse focuses on the reports by some transnational corporations of the garment industry. In order to provide an analysis tool, an innovative methodology in form of a 5-step coding system is developed and applied. The main interest lies in prospective statements in CSR reports. Such utterances are analysed for (i) the CSR topic they refer to, (ii) the as responsible presented social actor and their linguistic representation, and (iii) the force with which the corporation assumes its responsibilities. The objective is to reveal whether companies use specific linguistic mechanisms and content to dissociate themselves from their CSR responsibilities. The application of the method on an established corpus of CSR reports shows discursive patterns in which association mechanisms mainly emerge from who is presented as the responsible social actor, whereas dissociation mechanisms concern the supply chain, the linguistic representation of social actors, and the low amount of explicit responsibility assumption. Examining these findings from the textual analysis in their social context aids to understand how the corporation has become to be the dominant institution of today.