‘Doing Well by Doing Good’: A Comparative Analysis of Nokia’s and Ericsson’s Corporate Social Responsibility Reports

Nowadays substantial corporate communication efforts have been directed towards the promotionalisation and description of corporate social responsibility (CSR), which is to be intended as the commitment of businesses to behave ethically, and to be responsive to society’s long-run needs and wants (Lantos, 2001). In the mobile communications industry the leading handset-makers, Sony Ericsson and Nokia Siemens Network, are no exceptions. The paper sets out to examine a small corpus of CSR reports in an attempt to identify the principles underlying the two companies’ decision-making and operational processes. With the support of corpus linguistics tools, the two sub-sets of documents published respectively by Sony Ericsson and Nokia Siemens Network are analysed both quantitatively and qualitatively in their value-related keywords. The study of key-words and key-phrases sheds some light on some of the most pervasive, common or distinctive argumentative strategies which are adopted by the companies under study to attract and motivate staff, to build consumer loyalty, and to persuade the whole readership of their authentic dedication to moral values and sustainability-oriented principles.