Att lova guld och grön energi
En diskursanalys av svenska energibolags CSR-rapporter
Corporate Social ResponsibilityCSRCSR reportingDiscourse analysisDiscourseEnergy sectorSocial constructionismCorporate Social ResponsibilityCSRCSR-rapportDiskursanalysDiskursEnergibranschenFöretags samhällsansvarSocialkonstruktionism
The environmental situation is becoming increasingly critical. The energy sector and other industries have a big impact on our climate and the public is raising their voice for companies to admit their responsibility towards the environment and society. Companies engage in corporate social responsibility (CSR) and happily disclose their responsible performance in annual reports. But what messages are they conveying in their CSR-reporting, and what attitudes towards CSR can be found underneath the explicit content? The aim of this study is to discover which discourses exist in CSR-reports from Swedish energy companies, and how these discourses operate. Based on a social constructionist perspective a discourse analysis derived from the discourse theory of Laclau and Mouffe was selected to meet this certain aim. The result of the discourse analysis showed that three different discourses figure in the CSR-reports of the Swedish energy sector. These were a responsibility discourse, an economic discourse and a discourse on development. The discourses found were not mutually exclusive rather than complementing each other to enclose the whole concept of CSR as depicted in the reports examined. As a final point this study confirms the idea of CSR as a socially constructed phenomenon.