Corporate social irresponsibility and the linguistic features of CSR reports

Purpose: By relying on a cognitive-linguistic perspective, we investigate whether firms react to their irresponsible business conduct (CSIR) by changing the linguistic features of their CSR report, and if so, how especially as firms become international. In fact, differences in how actors write instead of what they write are particularly informative of the ways they conceive important phenomena and represent them. Design (Framework) / Methodology / approach: To test our hypotheses, we focused on a sample of 135 large publicly-listed firms selected from the Forbes Global 2000 ranking, across 27 sectors. By using LIWC we analyse two constructs that are often investigated in linguistic analyses: the level of analytical (vs. narrative) style and the level of authentic (vs. deceptive) style in a text. Then, we estimate the effect of past irresponsible business conducts (i.e. human rights violations) on the language used in CSR reports and we investigate how the degree of internationalisation moderate this relationship. Findings: We find that the more a firm is involved in CSIR, the more it uses a narrative (instead of analytical) and deceptive (instead of authentic) language. Moreover, we show that these effects are even stronger for highly internationalised firms. Originality/value: This study contributes to the literature that analyses the relationship between CSIR and CSR communication by showing that companies modify their language style in CSR reports in cases of CSIR. Specifically, while earlier research has mainly focused on the potential outcomes of language choices (e.g. how adopting different language styles may lead a company to achieving different performances), we identify CSIR as an important antecedent that considerably affects the writing style adopted in CSR reports and that the degree of internationalisation strength such an effect.