Between Ego and Eco: Sustainability Discourse, Corporate Identity, and the Communicative Construction of Responsibility
Author
Hager, Elisabeth Deleuran
Term
4. term
Publication year
2026
Abstract
This thesis examines how sustainability is constructed as a field of meaning in corporate annual reports, and what the regulatory distinction between organizations inside and outside the EU’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) reveals about the conditions under which that construction occurs. Grounded in a social constructionist and interpretivist approach, it combines Foucauldian discourse theory with corporate communication and corporate identity scholarship. A six-step discourse-analytic framework is applied to a corpus of eight annual reports, four from organizations subject to the CSRD and four operating without equivalent obligations. The analysis attends to discursive patterns, subject positions, strategies, and silences across the corpus. Findings show distinct subject positions and a consistent construction of sustainability as a future-oriented, business-compatible project in both regulatory contexts. A set of discursive strategies sustains a persistent gap between ambitious claims and verifiable accountability. An unexpected finding is the widespread use of the term “ecosystem” in different analytical registers, indicating that ecological language functions as a legitimacy resource in the genre. The comparative dimension highlights that the CSRD produces meaningful structural effects without fundamentally changing the underlying conventions that shape what sustainability is made to mean; a persistent “grammar of aspiration,” expressed through hedged modal constructions, appears across both groups. The scarcity of regenerative thinking as a substantive organizing principle suggests that a genuinely different relationship between organizations and ecological systems likely requires more than changes to reporting requirements.
Dette speciale undersøger, hvordan bæredygtighed bliver konstrueret som et meningsfelt i virksomheders årsrapporter, og hvad reguleringsforskellen mellem organisationer inden for og uden for EU’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) afslører om betingelserne for denne konstruktion. Med udgangspunkt i en socialkonstruktionistisk og interpretivistisk tilgang kombineres Foucauldiansk diskursteori med forskning i virksomhedskommunikation og corporate identity. En seks-trins diskursanalytisk ramme anvendes på et korpus af otte årsrapporter, hvor fire organisationer er underlagt CSRD og fire opererer uden tilsvarende krav. Analysen fokuserer på mønstre, subjektpositioner, strategier og tavsheder i materialet. Resultaterne peger på tydelige subjektpositioner på tværs af rapporterne og viser, at bæredygtighed gennemgående fremstilles som et fremtidsorienteret og forretningsmæssigt kompatibelt projekt, uanset reguleringskontekst. En række diskursive strategier opretholder et vedvarende gab mellem ambitiøse udsagn og efterprøvbar ansvarlighed. Et uventet fund er den udbredte brug af begrebet “økosystem” i forskellige analytiske registre, hvilket tyder på, at økologisk sprog fungerer som legitimitetsressource i genren. Den komparative analyse viser, at CSRD skaber meningsfulde strukturelle effekter uden grundlæggende at ændre de underliggende konventioner for, hvad bæredygtighed gøres til at betyde; en vedvarende “grammatik af aspiration” gennem forsigtige modalformer går igen på tværs af grupper. Knappheden af regenerativ tænkning som organiserende princip indikerer, at en anderledes relation mellem organisationer og økologiske systemer formentlig kræver mere end ændrede rapporteringskrav.
[This abstract has been generated with the help of AI directly from the project full text]