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The discursive legitimation of corporate ecological identity in Chinese sustainability discourse

  • Ke Li

    Ke Li is an Assistant Professor at the School of English Studies in Dalian University of Foreign Languages. She received her PhD in Foreign Linguistics and Applied Linguistics from Beijing Normal University. Her areas of research involve systemic functional linguistics, ecolinguistic discourse analysis and corpus linguistics.

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    and Lise Fontaine

    Lise Fontaine is a Professor in the Département de lettres et communication sociale at the Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières. Her areas of research include semantics, pragmatics, lexicology, corpus linguistics, syntactic-semantic interface, and text analysis. She recently published Referring in Language: An integrated approach (Cambridge University Press).

Published/Copyright: September 7, 2023

Abstract

Ecological identity involves all aspects of how individuals or collectives identify themselves with nature. This paper aims to examine the discursive construction of corporate ecological identities in corporate sustainability reports in China and evaluate how these identities are legitimated through the lens of ecolinguistic discourse analysis. Our data was drawn from a collection of English-language sustainability reports of Huawei Technologies Corporation (2016–2020). The findings suggest a mix of ecological identities across all texts, among which stewarding nature dominates and it relates to the belief that humans are obligated to steward nature for the sake of sustainability. These ecological identities are discursively legitimized in terms of defining characteristics, social roles, and community memberships. Innovativeness, leadership and ethicalness are legitimated as the corporation’s dominant characteristics which serve as moral identity standards, allowing further legitimation of the social roles and community memberships that the corporation claims. In the case of social roles, green manufacturing depends on green technologies, and both of them point to the instrumentality and rightness of technology in advancing sustainability. These construals uncover the ecological sustainability in the Chinese cultural context, that is, achieving the harmonious coexistence between humans and nature. In legitimizing community memberships, hierarchical relationships between the corporation and other participants are revealed.


Corresponding author: Ke Li, Dalian University of Foreign Languages, 6 Lǚshun South Road, Dalian, 116044, China, E-mail:

Funding source: Liaoning Social Science Planning Fund Project

Award Identifier / Grant number: L22AYY009

About the authors

Ke Li

Ke Li is an Assistant Professor at the School of English Studies in Dalian University of Foreign Languages. She received her PhD in Foreign Linguistics and Applied Linguistics from Beijing Normal University. Her areas of research involve systemic functional linguistics, ecolinguistic discourse analysis and corpus linguistics.

Lise Fontaine

Lise Fontaine is a Professor in the Département de lettres et communication sociale at the Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières. Her areas of research include semantics, pragmatics, lexicology, corpus linguistics, syntactic-semantic interface, and text analysis. She recently published Referring in Language: An integrated approach (Cambridge University Press).

Acknowledgments

We would like to express our gratitude to the support of Cardiff University and Beijing Normal University. We are also indebted to Srikant Sarangi for his insightful comments on the earlier draft of this paper. We are indebted to the three anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments.

  1. Research funding: The present research is funded by Liaoning Social Science Planning Fund Project, through the Research Grant L22AYY009.

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Received: 2022-03-30
Accepted: 2023-08-21
Published Online: 2023-09-07
Published in Print: 2024-11-26

© 2023 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

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