“New Targets” for “More Sustainable” Companies: A Corpus-driven Study of the Adidas, Ikea and Vodafone Sustainability Reports

This paper investigates recurrent rhetorical strategies in the sustainability reports by three leading multinational companies, namely Adidas, Ikea and Vodafone, over the three-year period from 2008 to 2010. The companies are selected from distinct business sectors because the aim is to verify whether crosscutting phenomena can be identified, which would suggest the existence of genre-specific rhetorical patterns and, consequently, an increasing standardisation of this disclosure genre. The analysis is carried out using methodological tools from corpus linguistics (i.e. wordlists and concordances) and the study of phraseology, focussing on a selection of items, which are scrutinised for their most frequent collocates and co-occurring word.