CSR between guidelines and voluntary commitments

The paper focuses on how the legal status of CSR is reflected in EU communication. We look at the range of documents available on the issue on the EU website and – focusing on a policy document and a guidebook - we study how the discursive practices of policy-making and public communication are shaped to reconstruct and transform the representation of social actors. The rest of the paper is structured as follows: Section 2 presents a critical reading of relevant institutional documents produced by the European Commission and Parliament on CSR. Section 3 introduces the corpus for analysis. Section 4 provides data on specific aspects of the analysis (multimodality/hypertextuality, polyphony and modality) and Section 5 draws some conclusions.