Understanding Communication of Sustainability Reporting: Application of Symbolic Convergence Theory (SCT)

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the nature of rhetoric and rhetorical strategies that are implicit in the standalone sustainability reporting of the top 24 companies of the Fortune 500 Global. We adopt Bormann’s (Q J Speech 58(4):396–407, 1972) SCT framework to study the rhetorical situation and how corporate sustainability reporting (CSR) messages can be communicated to the audience (public). The SCT concepts in the sustainability reporting’s communication are subject to different types of legitimacy strategies that are used by corporations as a validity and legitimacy claim in the reports. A content analysis has been conducted and structural coding schemes have been developed based on the literature. The schemes are applied to the SCT model which recognizes the symbolic convergent processes of fantasy among communicators in a Society. The study reveals that most of the sample companies communicate fantasy type and rhetorical vision in their corporate sustainability reporting. However, the disclosure or messages are different across locations and other taxonomies of the SCT framework. This study contributes to the current CSR literature about how symbolic or fantasy understandings can be interpreted by the users. It also discusses the persuasion styles that are adopted by the companies for communication purposes. This study is the theoretical extension of the SCT. Researchers may be interested in further investigating other online communication paths, such as human rights reports and director’s reports

Exploring the role of public relations as a cultural intermediary occupation

This article sets out an argument for paying greater sociological attention to the public relations industry as an important mechanism through which society and culture are formed. It offers a theoretical and empirical exploration of public relations practice which begins to address this lacuna, using a Bourdieuian framework. After introducing the public relations industry and cultural intermediation, arguments are made for the centrality of discursive struggle in Bourdieu’s work, drawing on other theorists as necessary to make explicit the logic that puts language and discourse at the centre of the struggle for symbolic power. This clarifies the importance of public relations as an object of sociological analysis. Bourdieu’s conception of practice is then reflected on and applied to public relations, before the findings from an exploratory case study are considered. The article concludes by reviewing implications for future theoretical and empirical work in this area