Multimodal Strategies of Knowledge Communication in Corporate Social Responsibility Reports and Sustainability Webpages: A Comparative Analysis

The paper reports on the results of a comparative study of two small corpora including the CSR reports and webpages generated by a sample of European companies working in three different sectors: Banking, Food and Beverages, and Oil and Gas. In an attempt to analyse the process of intralingual and intersemiotic translation of information from printed into digital materials, the two sets of documents were examined in a selection of multimodal configurations and language strategies used by firms to communicate their sustainability. The results suggest that highly informative portions of reports which mostly cover data, performance and achievements are counterbalanced on the Web by more discursive and ‘diluted’ sections which focus on companies’ CSR goals, values, programs, and partnerships.