THE DISCURSIVE CONSTRUCTION OF EQUALITY, DIVERSITY AND INCLUSION Insights from an analysis of CSR reports in the USA, UK and Japan

Communicating Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) topics has become a ‘must-have’ corporate practice for firms worldwide and a key component of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) reporting. Most studies have been carried out from a content analysis perspective and sparse attention has been paid to how the topics are discursively constructed. This paper explores the linguistic resources adopted in CSR reports to communicate EDI to both internal and external stakeholders. The analysis was conducted on a small sample of disclosures belonging to companies operating in three different sectors: Banking, Pharmaceuticals, Personal & Household Products and Services, and headquartered in three countries: the USA, the UK and Japan. With the support of corpus linguistics tools, portions of CSR reports were examined in a selection of frequent words and their phraseology. The quantitative and qualitative analysis was intended to shed light on the main discursive and rhetorical strategies for the expression of EDI in its many forms.