Management by keywords: A corpus-based investigation into the discourse of six capitals in best practice integrated reporting

Jaworska, Sylvia; Stenka, Renata; Parlakkaya, Emre

doi:10.1075/ijcl.24069.jaw

Article published In:

International Journal of Corpus Linguistics
Vol. 29:3 (2024) ► pp.331–360

Management by keywords

A corpus-based investigation into the discourse of six capitals in best practice integrated reporting

Sylvia Jaworska | University of Reading

Renata Stenka | University of Reading

Emre Parlakkaya | University of Reading

We examine a corpus of integrated reports endorsed as best practice to explore how the concept of ‘capital’ and its novel extension into six types of capitals — including ‘human’, ‘social and relationship’, and ‘natural’ — are discursively constructed and legitimised in the corporate field. Our findings show that the new capitals are mentioned frequently, but in a bullet point-like way without elaboration on their significance — a response strategy that we call ‘management by keywords’. Our analysis suggests that the collective business mindset remains centred on financial value creation, with the new capitals acting as servants to financial objectives. This questions the transformative power of the six capitals, hailed as a business innovation, to move corporate practices towards more social and environmental sustainability via enhanced corporate accountability. At the conceptual and methodological level, the study showcases the potential of corpus linguistics for fostering interdisciplinary research involving linguists and scholars in business and accounting.

Keywords: six capitals, integrated reporting, sustainability, keywords, collocations

Article outline

1.Introduction
2.Integrated reporting and the notion of six capitals: A brief overview
3.Data and analytical procedures: Issues and challenges
4.Results
- 4.1Results from the keyword analysis
- 4.2The discourse of capitals
5.Discussion and conclusions
Note
References

Available under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at [email protected].

Published online: 4 October 2024

https://doi.org/10.1075/ijcl.24069.jaw

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