Shop Smart, Stay Safe: A CDA of CSR Reports by Amazon and Walmart before and after COVID-19 Pandemic

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) reports complement the information of financial accounts and enable stakeholders to estimate the intangible value drivers and sustainability-related achievements of a company. The genre is characterised by high hybridity, combining informational with promotional elements and contributes to the rhetorical construction of an ethical corporate identity, shaping the communicated corporate image. CSR reports tend to be a display of successful systems and positive performance, while problematic issues are often relativised and even exploited to reaffirm the company’s ability to overcome them. Disasters directly impact a company and its stakeholders, potentially causing business disruption and resulting in high costs of recovery. Nevertheless, the company can use the problem to its own benefit, especially when it had no responsibility in the crisis, as in the case of COVID-19 disease outbreak and pandemic. The organisation can indeed employ its communication channels to extol its disaster response mechanisms and its efforts to support the communities affected. This study focuses on the genre of CSR reports by analysing, in a diachronic perspective, texts published before and after the COVID-19 pandemic by two of the largest businesses in the world, Amazon and Walmart, both based in the United States. Although the two companies offer a different range of products, both were able to grant necessary services in the period of stay-at-home orders, closure of nonessential businesses, and strict limitations on people’s movement. The analysis aims at investigating how the companies adapted their promotional strategies in their most recent CSR reports compared to the previous ones, how they framed COVID-19 and how they exploited the issue for the rhetorical construction of an ethical corporate image. The study will examine the texts from a Corpus-Assisted Critical Discourse Analysis approach, to identify issues, motifs, and actions foregrounded by the companies in their narrative of the pandemic. Since sustainability reports are multimodal texts, representing a union of written elements, graphs, and images, the paper will also examine how the companies represent COVID-19-related issues in their visuals, always to enact a self-presentation of the attributes they wish to promote as central to the organisation’s ethics.