Issue Cycles in Corporate Sustainability Reporting: A Longitudinal Study

Abstract

Issue cycles in media reporting and in the coverage of environmental news in particular have been studied since the 1970s. This study seeks to extend existing theory on issue-attention lifecycles from the news-media domain to the corporate domain by exploring how companies operationalize environmental sustainability over time. Using computer-assisted text analysis, this study investigates 744 corporate environmental reports in a 10-year longitudinal design in order to study how the attention that companies pay to a set of 13 environmental issues shifts over this period. The results indicate discernible issue cycles for almost all of the issues studied. Some issues are in a phase of heightened awareness, others in a punctuated equilibrium following specific events, and even others in a phase of decline. The issue cycles identified suggest that companies pursue their environmental strategies consistently, but shift attention to particular issues as a response to high-profile environmental events. .

Change But no Climate Change: Discourses of Climate Change in Corporate Social Responsibility Reporting in the Oil Industry

“…Yet, with some exceptions (e.g. Livesey, 2002b;Ihlen, 2009;Pollach, 2016;Jaworska and Nanda, 2016) little is known about the extent to which corporations attend specifically to climate change in their CSR reporting and how climate change is rhetorically and discursively built into the discourses of environmental sustainability. Examining the use of terms describing climate change is essential because research suggests that the choice of climate lexis reflects diverging attitudes and values and can influence perceptions and responses (e.g.…”

“…Particular attention has been paid to discourses around environmental sustainability (Ihlen & Roper, 2014; Laine, 2010; Lischinsky, 2015; Livesey, 2002b; Livesey & Kearins, 2002; Milne, Kearins, & Walton, 2006) showing how companies strategically utilize the categories of “environment” and “sustainability” to create a positive image of themselves, increase legitimacy, and competitive advantage. Yet with some exceptions (e.g., Ihlen, 2009; Jaworska & Nanda, 2016; Livesey, 2002a; Pollach, 2016) little is known about the extent to which corporations attend specifically to climate change in their CSR reporting and how climate change is rhetorically and discursively built into the discourses of environmental sustainability. Examining the use of terms describing climate change is essential because research suggests that the choice of climate lexis reflects diverging attitudes and values and can influence perceptions and responses (e.g., Schuldt, Konrath, & Schwarz, 2011; Whitmarsh, 2008).…”

Analysing the environmental websites of the world’s greatest polluters: a multimodal ecolinguistic approach

“…A number of factors have been found to influence a company's readiness to be publicly engaged with climate change. Among them, size (C ordova et al, 2018;Eleftheriadis & Anagnostopoulou, 2015;Nartey, 2018;S anchez-Infante Hern andez et al, 2020), internal organisation systems (C ordova et al, 2018;Nartey, 2018;Rankin et al, 2011), international presence (Halkos & Skouloudis, 2016), the sector in which the companies operate (Weder et al, 2019), and external pressure (Haque & Islam, 2015;Littlewood et al, 2018), including media exposure (Wang et al, 2013) and extraordinary natural disasters (Pollach, 2018). Research also suggests that those companies and countries which implement environmental issues in their everyday practices, through patents or industrial and economic activity, tend to be more successful in terms of competitive advantages, economic growth and innovation (Ferreira et al, 2020;Mohammadi et al, 2018;Singh et al, 2019;Skare & Golja, 2012).…”

Climate change from a corporate perspective: a case study of the linguistic representation of the energy transition by the fossil fuel companies Total and Equinor

“…10 In order for a business to be acceptable as a social actor and attractive to its stakeholders, disclosure of information related to climate change is now considered vital (Abitbol et al, 2019). Climate change and the environment typically are dealt with in tandem (Comfort and Park, 2018;Pollach, 2018). The business writer and corporate sustainability authority John Elkington (1999) has suggested dealing with sustainability by means of a three-dimensional framework, conceptualised as the so-called triple bottom line.…”