Talking in circles. A semiotic analysis of sustainability reporting in the Swedish heavy industries

Abstract: How publicly traded companies perform with regards to environmental sustainability is receiving increasing attention both by investors and in society in general. Annually released sustainability reports are an important tool for public companies to disclose information relating to their environmental performance. Frequently released as an integrated part of the annual financial report, sustainability reports are predominantly seen as a way for organizations to gain and maintain legitimacy with a broad range of stakeholders, while critical scholars mainly view corporate sustainability reporting as a promotion tool disguised as an objective account. In the current study, a semiotic analysis is conducted on the sustainability reports of five Swedish public companies in the environmentally sensitive heavy industry sector to critically examine how the companies use signs to construct environmental sustainability in their communication with stakeholders. Using theoretical concepts based on Ferdinand de Saussure's structural linguistics and further developed by post-structuralists Roland Barthes and Jean Baudrillard, the study finds that the studied reports contain elements of arbitrarily constructed signs that are disconnected from reality, or what Baudrillard has termed hyperreality.