This study examines the ideology of environmental sustainability in Lego’s Corporate Social Responsibility articles and reports of its website.
Nowadays businesses are expected to be accountable for their impact towards the environment with increasing pressure from stakeholders. For this reason, companies employ different communication strategies in their Corporate Social Responsibility discourses to show themselves as doing their best to be protective of sustainable development.
This research aims to reveal the ideology of environmental sustainability in Lego’s Corporate Social Responsibility articles that appear on the ‘Responsibility’ section of the website and two reports regarding sustainability achievements. The methodologies applied for this aim are Multimodal Critical Discourses Analysis and Fairclough’s three-dimensional Critical Discourse Analysis model. The analysis is divided into three parts: textual analysis, discursive practice and social practice. The theoretical framework is developed using theories of corporate social responsibility, environmental sustainability in Corporate Social Responsibility, discourse and ideology.
The findings of this study show that Lego focuses their Corporate Social Responsibility reporting on making sure their stakeholders are aware on actions of sustainability that the company is doing and showing an overall positive and optimistic outlook towards sustainability. Lego uses discourses that allow it to communicate about its competitive advantage to stakeholders.