"Suurin vaikutuksemme maailman kestävään kehitykseen tapahtuu tuotteidemme kautta"- Kestävän kehityksen diskursiivinen legitimaatio yrityksen verkkosivuilla

Abstract

This study aims to contribute to the discussion on how corporations legitimate their own existence through legitimation of sustainability engagement. More specifically, the research focused on the discourses and legitimation strategies corporations use in their own texts to assure their audience that they are a legitimate societal actor, and therefore should be supplied resources to. The research was executed as a discourse analysis on six Finnish production companies’ sustainability website texts. The data consisted of the sustainability websites’ front pages and descriptions of Approach to sustainability and Sustainability areas. Two opposing discourses were found to be used: Sustainability as an asset, which holds the idea of sustainability contributing to the organization’s operations positively and Sustainability as a liability, i.e. an obligation that has to be fulfilled. Six discursive themes under these were identified, which respectively from asset to liability were: Business core, Stakeholders, External valuation, Business impact, Moral obligation and Laws and regulations. The findings suggest that a stronger legitimacy can be achieved through strategic implications of sustainability, i.e. viewing it as an asset, where legitimacy can primarily be achieved through normalization and rationalization. Legitimacy increased through outsourcing the decision of important aspects to stakeholders through prospective normalization, as well as giving the authority to judge sustainability outside the company, through using authorization. Legitimation through the liability discourse seems to be in place especially if appealing to humanistic values when talking about employees or communities, with moralization primarily used to achieve legitimacy. Sustainability has been found to produce legitimacy to an organization’s existence, and therefore stronger stakeholder engagement. This study extends the knowledge of how corporations’ responsibilities today go beyond making profit, and especially how corporations seek to assure their audiences of their responsibility