This paper addresses eco-discourse by the corporate rhetor that emerged in the wake of two environmental disputes. While such green business rhetoric might be conventionally viewed as a category of crisis communication, it is treated here as an instrument of corporate sensemaking and discursive struggle. Specifically, I analyze the "language games" between the Royal Dutch/Shell Group and its critics that arose over Shell UK's plans to decommission the Brent Spar and Shell Nigeria's operations in Ogoniland, a tribal community in the Niger Delta. I demonstrate that Shell's rhetorical contests had constitutive effects on its environmental and human rights policies and practices and led to its cautious embrace of the language of sustainable development. Combining sensemaking and Foucauldian approaches, I argue that such local conflicts over meaning-making around the natural environment must be understood in terms of discursive struggle at the sociopolitical level where they both reflect and influence the dynamics of cultural and institutional change.

This paper analyzes texts published by ExxonMobil on the issue of climate change by employing the related, yet distinct methods that have evolved under the rubric of rhetorical analysis and discourse analysis, as influenced by concepts from Kenneth Burke and Michel Foucault, respectively. My purpose is to compare these two approaches to show their uses and potential value in business communication research. I show how both reveal the socially constructed nature of "reality" and the social effects of language, but are nevertheless distinct in their emphases. For the rhetorical critic, the analytic interest is in the purposeful acts of the language user and the ethical effects of language use. Rhetorical criticism thus considers the devices by which texts frame meaning, create understanding, and promote (or fail to promote) identification between rhetor and audience, thus facilitating co-operative action. The Foucauldian approach, by contrast, focuses on the interplay of texts (intertextuality) and discourses (interdiscursivity) in order to illuminate the nature of socio-political struggle and show the relationship between texts and macro-sociological issues. These alternative methodological approaches offer the business communication researcher complementary means by which to illuminate the role of corporate public discourse in maintaining organizational legitimacy and influencing social and institutional stability and change.

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Much green business literature, both academic and practitioner-oriented, views alliances between business and ecology groups as exemplifying a paradigm shift from command and control to a new kind of environmental practice, market environmentalism, and privileges the latter. This privileging occurs despite the claim made by the Environmental Defense Fund's (EDF) leader Fred Krupp, one of the early proponents of market environmentalism, that the new form supplements—rather than replaces-command and control. This paper, a case study, examines the public discourse of one such alliance between McDonald's and EDF. Rather than indicating a paradigm shift, the analysis shows that both partners drew, and had to draw, not only from the emerging discourse of market environmentalism, but also from the older, and purportedly displaced, paradigm of command and control. This rhetorical ambivalence is emblematic of a larger discursive struggle, namely, the contemporaneous socio-political conflict over how the ecological crisis was to be defined and what should constitute legitimate practice-by business, government and environmentalists-in its name. In my view, the McDonald's-EDF partnership was at once constrained by this discursive struggle over the environment and a constitutive element in the struggle itself.

This article analyzes sustainability values reports published by The Body ShopInternational and by the Royal Dutch/Shell Group. The authors show how corporate discourses expressed in these precedent-setting texts both reflect and influence sociopolitical struggle over the meanings and practices of sustainable development. Specifically, the authors examine metaphors of transparency and care used to describe corporate rationales for increasing stakeholder communication, including reporting. Drawing on distinct discursive domains of business accountancy and personal ethics and sentiment, these metaphors promise to reconstruct the interface between the firm and society. Exploring the quite different assumptions on which each of these metaphors relies and their implications for corporate practices of sustainable development, the authors consider whether sustainability values reporting and the dialogue that it claims to facilitate can promote more democratic and socially and environmentally responsive corporate decision making, even as they impose new forms of managerial control.As with progress, there is a frequent assumption that sustainable development can and should be determined and measured in scientific terms, rather than by ethical or political traditions. Yet there are philosophical problems inherent in any concept that purports to express both an objective, scientifically determinable characteristic and a social goal to be accepted and advocated on normative grounds.