Denial and acknowledgement in CSR reporting discourse: a BHR perspective on corporate harm-related rhetoric
The impact of corporate harm within society is wide-ranging and egregious, supported by considerable corporate power, which stems partly from corporate rhetoric. This project develops and applies a novel means of analysing the discourse of powerful actors: specifically the harm-related discourse of the corporation. My aims are twofold: first to systematise pre-existing state- and individual-level conceptualisations of denial and acknowledgement, increasing provision of tools available for the examination of corporate social responsibility (CSR) texts specifically, but equally any discourse of a powerful actor. Second I discover how these rhetorical devices are used to create the contemporary corporate actor through its discourse. Discourse being an important aspect of how actors navigate the world, an understanding of denial, and its counterpart acknowledgement, can have implications for scholarship, regulation and corporate discourse itself. Although situated within the field of business and human rights research, in developing the methodology applied in this project, I draw on various literatures. My framework of denial and acknowledgement techniques draws on the state- and individual-level conceptualisation outlined by sociologist Stanley Cohen, and is informed by numerous other scholars in that field. The iterative, inductive analysis uses a reconstruction of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), with my framework of denial and acknowledgement techniques providing direction and clarity. The texts which I analyse are drawn from the globally recognised United Nations Global Compact Communication on Progress scheme, considering Anglophone manufacturing and extractive multinationals. In this way, I find that corporations, despite portraying themselves as expert, active, engaged actors in the human rights and CSR conversation, in fact utilise rhetoric which is passive, self-aggrandising and evasive. This project therefore builds on existing limited analyses of corporate rhetoric, which identify reputational traction as a product of corporate discourse (through for example positivity in rhetoric). Equally, however, I find that such positivity does not possess an ‘educating’ effect, rather serving to minimise harms and victims through its employment – characterised as ‘defensive’ rhetoric by commentators. Thesis embargoed until 31 July 2026.
CSR, corporate social responsibility, business and human rights, corporate rhetoric, discourse analysis, denial, acknowledgement, human rights
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