Rights statement: The final, definitive version of this article has been published in the Journal, Discourse and Communication, 10 (5), 2016, © SAGE Publications Ltd, 2016 by SAGE Publications Ltd at the Discourse and Communication page: http://journals.sagepub.com/home/dcm on SAGE Journals Online: http://journals.sagepub.com/
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Final published version
Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
}
TY - JOUR
T1 - ‘Mixing’ and ‘Bending’
T2 - The recontextualisation of discourses of sustainability in integrated reporting
AU - Zappettini, F.
AU - Unerman, J.
N1 - The final, definitive version of this article has been published in the Journal, Discourse and Communication, 10 (5), 2016, © SAGE Publications Ltd, 2016 by SAGE Publications Ltd at the Discourse and Communication page: http://journals.sagepub.com/home/dcm on SAGE Journals Online: http://journals.sagepub.com/
PY - 2016/10
Y1 - 2016/10
N2 - Since their emergence, discourses of sustainability have been widely resemioticised in different genres and have intertextually merged with other discourses and practices. This article examines the emergence of Integrated Reporting (IR) as a new hybrid genre in which, along with financial information, organisations may choose to report the social and environmental impacts of their activities in one single document. Specifically, this article analyses a selected sample of IRs produced by early adopters to explore how discourses of sustainability have been recontextualised into financial and economic macro discourses and how different intertextual/interdiscursive relations have played out in linguistic constructions of ‘sustainability’. We contend that, by and large, the term sustainability has been appropriated, mixed with other discourses and semantically ‘bent’ to construct the organisation itself as being financially sustainable, that is, viable and profitable and for the primary benefit of shareholders. From this stance, we argue that, through the hybridity of IR, most companies have primarily colonised discourses of sustainability for the rhetorical purpose of self-legitimation. © 2016, © The Author(s) 2016.
AB - Since their emergence, discourses of sustainability have been widely resemioticised in different genres and have intertextually merged with other discourses and practices. This article examines the emergence of Integrated Reporting (IR) as a new hybrid genre in which, along with financial information, organisations may choose to report the social and environmental impacts of their activities in one single document. Specifically, this article analyses a selected sample of IRs produced by early adopters to explore how discourses of sustainability have been recontextualised into financial and economic macro discourses and how different intertextual/interdiscursive relations have played out in linguistic constructions of ‘sustainability’. We contend that, by and large, the term sustainability has been appropriated, mixed with other discourses and semantically ‘bent’ to construct the organisation itself as being financially sustainable, that is, viable and profitable and for the primary benefit of shareholders. From this stance, we argue that, through the hybridity of IR, most companies have primarily colonised discourses of sustainability for the rhetorical purpose of self-legitimation. © 2016, © The Author(s) 2016.
KW - Accountability
KW - corporate social responsibility
KW - critical discourse analysis
KW - financial communication
KW - genre analysis
KW - hybridity
KW - integrated reporting
KW - interdiscursivity
KW - recontextualisation
KW - semantic bending
KW - sustainability
U2 - 10.1177/1750481316659175
DO - 10.1177/1750481316659175
M3 - Journal article
VL - 10
SP - 521
EP - 542
JO - Discourse and Communication
JF - Discourse and Communication
SN - 1750-4813
IS - 5
ER -