Abstract:

The language companies use when talking about sustainability does more than just communicate about their actions on the sustainability agenda to their stakeholder audience. It also helps to shape the wider social debate about sustainability and influence stakeholder perceptions and expectations. A particularly interesting aspect is the metaphors that companies use when talking about sustainability. Metaphors facilitate our understanding of more abstract and unfamiliar concepts by placing them in terms of something that is closer to our experience and therefore clearer to us. They guide our interpretations of reality, and have the power to shape and alter these perceptions: "New metaphors have the power to create a new reality" (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980). In the management field the primary application of metaphor analysis is to organizations themselves and to organizational change, building on Gareth’s Morgan’s (1986) pioneering ‘Images of Organization’. Sustainability, as a contested concept that is unclear and unfamiliar to many (particularly consumers), constitutes another promising field for the use and analysis of metaphors since “metaphors enable us to think and talk about abstract, complex, subjective or poorly delineated areas of experience in terms of concrete, simpler, physical or better delineated areas of experience” (Semino, 2008).

This paper applies a systematic metaphor analysis to the CSR and/or sustainability reports of the thirty biggest organizations on the 2011 Fortune’s Global 500 list to understand how they talk about sustainability through metaphors. Of these, 29 produce such a report (the exception being Berkshire Hathaway which is primarily a vehicle for investing in other firms) and the full texts of these reports were analysed to identify and classify each metaphor the firms used to discuss sustainability or CSR as a whole or their key component concepts.