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Introduction

Traditionally, business practitioners have attached great importance to the strictly financial information of companies, by reporting it systematically in a vast array of disclosures full of numerical data, including financial statements, balance sheets, and audited accounts. However, a good financial framework is not enough for modern corporations to be granted a comparative advantage towards competitors on the marketplace. Today, a wide-ranging set of non-financial activities and initiatives undertaken by the top management of world companies seems to represent the peripheral ends of the value chain which have the power to orient people’s choice in buying a core good or service of a specific company instead of opting for a competitor.

The combination of the intangibility of the offer and the impacts exerted by corporate actions into the outside world acts as a particularly striking business formula in the eye of the general public. A certain institutional burden increases tremendously when it comes to big traditional companies which have served for a long time as state-owned enterprises in each country of the globe, such as postal services, national banks or national railway operators. This is mainly due to their historical role set, to the market pressure caused by private competitors and to a wide network of service operations.

The present dissertation focuses on the rail sector, specifically on the national railway companies operating in the EU as a modern supra-national community.

Just like other market-based business entities, railway operators are engaged in reporting their non-financial achievements and commitments on a yearly basis. This is possible by means of an annual or integrated report combining financial and socially relevant information, or a separate ‘CSR report’.

The acronym ‘CSR’ stands for ‘corporate social responsibility’, which entered the economic literature in relatively recent times in order to define the commitment of corporations to ethical and responsible practices in daily operations addressing the society at large. Logically, CSR entails a sustainable approach encompassing both the environmental and social impacts of corporate actions.

Measurement criteria are hard to set out in the field of CSR, thereby communication plays a fundamental role in expressing a more or less significant degree of commitment to sustainability-oriented issues. Language – in its informative and persuasive functions

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– serves as one of the most tangible codes through which commitment statements can be examined, at least in qualitative terms when quantitative calculations are unfeasible.

In particular, this corpus-based analysis explores a diversified variety of expressions of future commitment used by EU national railway companies, all of which provided their annual disclosures in a common language, namely English as an international language.

Specific verbal tenses and elaborate clusters are targeted in order to analyze the way commitment is mitigated from time to time. Simultaneously, lexical items playing a commissive function in a future perspective across the general corpus are also paralleled in order to detect common trends and more heterogenous peculiarities in the manner of stating commitment.

The first chapter of this dissertation provides a literature review of CSR in the rail sector along two main areas, namely the history and the evolution of corporate social responsibility in business contexts and the status of the railway industry in the light of its traditional state ownership. CSR reporting as a relatively recent discourse practice is delved into in its main final disclosures drafted by all companies at the end of every fiscal year – namely annual, integrated and CSR reports – by constantly looking at the standards and indications provided at the EU level. The infrastructural characteristics in the rail sector are also contextualized in an EU-wide perspective, thus understanding the path followed by contemporary railway companies from marketization to international liberalization.

In the second chapter, the methodological steps undertaken in the corpus-based analysis of commitment-related lexical items and clusters are clarified in-depth as a preliminary overview of the final experiment. Additionally, the general corpus of the analysis – including 15 out of 28 EU railway companies overall – is meticulously described: each corpus representative is individually singled out in terms of corporate history, juridical framework, geopolitical context and CSR reporting tradition, along with secondary socially-relevant observations.

The third chapter sets out a thorough linguistic analysis on the general corpus – dating back to the financial year 2016 – both quantitatively and qualitatively. Showing commitment to future CSR engagement is the golden thread along which this linguistic study is based on.

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Firstly, a wordlist containing commitment-related ‘content’ words is provided in order to give a general framework of commitment in terms of highest frequency.

Secondly, the analysis moves on to a detailed investigation of a variety of discursive practices occurring in the general corpus and of the extent to which these are shared by more than one railway company or personalized.

Discourse variation encompasses two main language items, namely non-verbal forms and verbal clusters. Non-verbal forms take the form of nouns, adjectives or adverbs, and in some cases two or more than two grammatical categories may overlap.

Verbal clusters give birth to more complex patterns, which in a commissive mode of expression take various forms in corporate discourse: personality-intensive patterns built around the collective pronoun we, productive usages of the will modal, present simple or present continuous expressions and, on top of these, verbal choices that corroborate a more or less ‘committed’ semantic meaning.

Judging from these considerations, the present study embraces two intertwined areas of interest, namely linguistics and matters of socio-economic nature.

In fact, this research aims at summarizing the latest CSR performance emerging from ad hoc disclosures in an EU-wide context within the same sector, namely the national rail industry. Internal variation can be predicted as a trademark principle in such a pluralized community, mostly due to the non-mandatory character of non-financial disclosures at the time in which the general corpus was published.

For this reason, this corpus-based analysis may be looked at as exemplary of the CSR reporting status of the EU before the final implementation of EU Directive 2014/95 on non-financial reporting, which imposes from 2018 onwards the compulsory nature of sustainability disclosures for big corporations operating in any member states.

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1.

Corporate Social Responsibility in the Rail Sector

This chapter will showcase the complex theoretical framework aimed at enabling a full understanding of a corpus-based study in the rail sector. Specifically, the following analysis will explore how traditional national railway companies in the European Union approached the notion of corporate social responsibility in their reporting disclosures.

This is achieved by looking at the discursive practices used in order to express future commitment to issues related to sustainability. Not only does corporate social responsibility encompass a variety of social and ethical contexts of the whole business environment that seem to share a commonly accepted ‘sustainability’ trademark, but it is also communicated by the use of discursive strategies aimed at enhancing entrepreneurial competitiveness in the market arena, despite dealing with an apparently limited set of corporate aspects that may orient market responses. In similar terms, the rail sector needs to be understood in its historical shift from a state-possessed entity providing individuals with daily services and needs to a fully marketized business that continues to commit itself in behaving responsibly towards the society, thus deserving constant monitoring in terms of service offer.

1.1 CSR as an Essential Tool for Business Communication

The notion of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) has emerged in the latest phases of the history of corporations, yet with such a strong degree of resolution that has made it into ‘a fashionable item on the corporate agenda’ (Malavasi 2012, p. 247) of contemporary firms. The underlying idea that companies should commit themselves to behaving in a responsible way embraces at least two main implications at a corporate level. On the one hand, the top management is asked to devote more and more resources to a set of diversified activities that show what ‘good’ the company has been doing for the community, all of which share a ‘sustainable’ orientation in terms of environmental protection, economic trustworthiness and social support. On the other hand, CSR commitment has become a source of comparative advantage, namely a tool that simultaneously entails a large number of market-oriented and discursive practices aimed at making companies thrive over competitors.

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Business communication does play a striking role for the dissemination of CSR ideas and achievements, mostly because of the complex nature of the CSR concept itself, whose mixture of interdisciplinary areas of interest may lead to the promotion of engagements that might result in rather vague and elusive information sources in the eye of the consumers and, ultimately, of the society at large. As a relatively recent field of interest, the evolution of CSR reporting has been subject to an incredibly fast pace, and on the basis of the historical and juridical background of most countries all over the world, it still represents a rather individualistic reporting tool which to a certain extent mirrors the way each country understands responsible business.

US-based NGO1 Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) is quite homogeneously considered to be one of the reference standards organizations in CSR-related issues like climate change, corruption, human rights, environment, labour practices, decent work and society in general, as it specifically provides a series of sustainability reporting guidelines that national and international companies may be willing to take into consideration while drafting their ‘CSR Report’ every year, although universal standards do not exist due to the newness of the reporting document (Bhatia 2012, p. 225).

However, this corporate reporting subgenre has not been equally adopted by all communication specialists employed in the corporate environment worldwide. On the contrary, for a long period of time firms used to integrate the description of their activities devoted to sustainable business into the so-called ‘Annual Report’, which is still considered to be ‘the principle document used by most public companies to disclose corporate information to their shareholders’ (Securities and Exchange Commission 2002) and, more specifically, as an ‘antecedent genre’ (Yu; Bondi 2017, p. 274) for CSR reports. Annual reports typically serve as the classic communication vehicle for corporate communication, addressing not only investing groups like stakeholders and shareholders, but also the public at large, including customers, the media, and government agencies. In fact, the wide readership of annual reports can get acquainted with both the general financial performance – displaying investments, profits and losses – and the social concerns prioritized by the corporation. In the long run, CSR reports emerged as an alternative accounting framework specialized in these latter social concerns by approaching them in a sustainable way.

At present, annual reports definitely outnumber the CSR reports drafted by the majority of companies worldwide, but this dissertation intends to look at this general trend within

1 Non-governmental organization

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the boundaries of a more limited sub-context, namely the European Union.

In fact, the largest number of EU-based businesses have until recently stayed faithful to the disclosure of an ‘Annual Report’, because the additional ‘CSR Report’ and the implementation of sections on corporate social responsibility were not yet compulsory.

Nevertheless, the EU Directive 2014/95 on non-financial reporting, which has been gradually implemented into all EU member states since its issue in 2014, confirmed the mandatory character of CSR reporting from 2018 onwards.

1.2 Background and Definition: CSR

Although corporate social responsibility has been given a large number of – to a certain extent, ‘vague’ – definitions over the course of the last decades, it can still be considered as ‘a relatively new phenomenon’ (Bhatia 2012, p. 222) by simply looking at the divergences in the way businesses incorporate the CSR notion in their corporate communication strategies. The first social and economic attempts showing interest in CSR date back to the 1950s, when businessmen were generally asked to accomplish those obligations to ‘make those decisions which are desirable in terms of the objectives and values of our society’ (Bowen 1953, p. 6), thus giving the public at large a positive social contribution. In the following decades, ‘a responsible enterprise’ was expected to benefit the society in a more targeted way, by taking into consideration specific categories including ‘employees, suppliers, dealers, local communities, and the nation’

(Johnson 1971, p. 50). In the new millennium, the WBCSD2 (2001) defined CSR as ‘the commitment of business to contribute to sustainable economic development, by working with employees, their families, the local community and society at large to improve their quality of life’.

In a growingly globalized society, businesses exert a significant influence on the continuous processes that connect people with each other and with the variety of contexts in which they are expected to operate on a daily basis. Therefore, the social and ethical impacts that enterprises may have on the society as a whole stand out as an intangible set of principles and values that need to be translated into concrete actions.

These actions aim at showing how responsibly businesses are behaving for the society, by encompassing not only a series of different activities undertaken by and within corporations, but also several groups of people that activate the functioning of

2 World Business Council for Sustainable Development

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corporations. Such a complex exercise is bound to be perceived as vague and misleading when it comes to summarizing it through a unique concept. In fact, the notion of corporate social responsibility tends to cover simultaneously at least four main dimensions: ‘economic, legal, ethical and discretionary/philanthropic/humanitarian issues’ (Snider, Hill, Martin 2003; Lantos 2001, p. 500). On the one hand, from an economic and legal point of view the corporate running of operations is subject to certain legal constraints – in the form of regulations, directives, standards, or policies – which necessarily affect corporations’ profitability. On the other hand, companies feel the need to orient their core activities towards the community – at a local, national or international level – by ‘doing good’ for the society at large. This is traditionally achieved not only by committing themselves to ethical and moral principles regulating the working environment itself, but also by embracing philanthropic campaigns and initiatives aimed at supporting the community through charitable donations of profits and resources. At present, due to the complex nature of all the issues involved in the wide-ranging activities engaged in social responsibility, CSR can be seen ‘as a synonym for business ethics, moral rectitude, or [an] imperative for managers to do the right thing’ (Malavasi 2012, p. 194).

However, this rather optimistic idea merely views CSR as an actual bridge that links marketing issues to more ethical and social causes at a corporate level (Kotler & Lee 2005, p. 3). Moreover, this vision does not seem to grasp the instrumental function behind CSR activities, be it a ‘misuse of corporate resources in the interest of the management only, a PR invention […] or mere image-building activity’ (Bondi 2016, p.

59).

1.3 CSR Discourse

From a more realistic perspective, the dissemination of CSR commitments and achievements represents for a company one of the ‘special form[s] of instrumental action oriented towards success’ (Elving, Golob & Podnar, Ellerup-Nielsen & Thomson 2015, p. 120) and profitability, which still stand out as the core prerogatives that ideally make corporations’ life cycle as long-lasting as possible. Showing a certain degree of sensitivity to responsible behaviour and sustainability across sectors and presenting them as an integral part of the corporate agenda significantly contributes to strengthening corporate image in the eye of consumers, as long as it is achieved through effective communication strategies and moves. More specifically, CSR discourse

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includes a large number of texts and text types that are produced, performed, received and discussed through a continuous flow of information exchange between corporations and their different stakeholders. Considering that corporate texts reflect this dialogue, they should include a mixture of informative, persuasive, aspirational and participatory types of communication if companies are willing to maintain their credibility when stating how ‘good’ their activities will be for people’s welfare and life.

In fact, as Guenster (2009, p. 99) states:

‘principles of CSR [are] becoming aligned with business objectives within the overall company strategy, integration across business entities and functions, and institutionalization within business strategies, policies, processes, and systems.’

Paradoxically, such intertwined communication functions applied to the field of business responsibility result in what can be referred to as ‘one-way CSR communication’ (Elving, Golob & Podnar, Ellerup-Nielsen & Thomson 2015, p. 124).

Although sustainability is supposed to be a one-for-one ethical value synergistically shared by both the top management and anyone who benefits from the products and the broad service offer of a given corporation, in reality CSR becomes an additional strategic tool used by corporations in order to thrive in a self-referential way and maintain and increase their reputation – and, ultimately, their financial results – by presenting themselves as a competitive entity in the market, especially in the eye of stakeholders, whose confidence in corporate management will determine their decision to keep their investments in the company or, on the contrary, to withdraw them. In these terms, the CSR concept appears to be designed in such a way that communication is able to reverse ‘private interest in service of public interest’ (Guenster 2009, p. 99) and, possibly, to serve as ‘much more than a mere management instrument’ (Ungericht; Hirt 2010, p. 2), thus playing the role of an actual negotiation tool when any socially-based problem is discussed in the political arena in terms of responsibility.

1.3.1 CSR Reporting Framework

Over the past three decades, the practice of CSR reporting has been widely adopted by the majority of businesses on a voluntary basis. However, quantitative research in this field shows that in the last few years it has become a rather ‘mainstream’ practice (Elving, Golob & Podnar, Ellerup-Nielsen & Thomson 2015, p. 119).

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Consequently, several international guidelines, standards and national and supranational strategic directives have been published in order to provide communication experts within corporations with some reference indicators and indications of what their reports should cover: OECD Guidelines, ISO 26000, UN Global Compact, UN Principles for Responsible Investments, UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, Global Reporting and ILO MNE Declaration are a few examples of this extensive body of regulations on the CSR-related field.

The guidelines drafted by the American non-governmental organization Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) adds up to the list of the most influential standards that has provided corporations with some trustworthy material on CSR content coverage.

In particular, GRI Guidelines – GRI has launched updated versions of its reporting frameworks regularly since 20003 – indicate five core subfields that experts in charge of CSR drafting should take into consideration in their argumentations. Environment concerns issues related to energy, water, materials, biodiversity, emissions, wastes, and the environmental impacts of products. Labour Practices and Decent Work regard issues like employment, occupational health and safety, training and education, diversity and equal opportunities, and equal remuneration for women and men. Human Rights deal with phenomena like discrimination, child labour, forced and compulsory labour, and indigenous rights. Society concerns local communities in terms of corruption, public policy, anti-competitive behaviour, volunteering initiatives, and charitable giving. Product Responsibility entails customer health and safety, product and service labeling, customer privacy, and satisfaction.

Despite the existence of these formal guidelines that have created a rather homogenous perception of the areas involved in the CSR concept, corporations are still taking advantage of a certain degree of freedom in terms of linguistic and discursive practices of CSR reporting. In fact, as Catenaccio (2011, p. 172) observes,

‘GRI guidelines provide fairly extensive indications of what should be included, but do not say anything about how the information should be articulated’. This allows companies to orient their CSR engagements towards a form of exposition that highlights them in their own terms through their own communication skills and policy.

3 The most recent reporting framework dates back to 2016.

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1.3.2 Annual and CSR Reporting

Among the institutionalized documents incorporating – among other corporate aspects – CSR issues that companies are required to disclose on a regular basis, the

‘Annual Report’ stands out as the traditional vehicle for CSR communication with stakeholders. However, in more recent times this trend has experienced a gradual move towards a separate document called ‘CSR Report’ – also labelled as

‘sustainability report’, ‘corporate citizen report’, ‘environmental report’, ‘corporate responsibility report’ or ‘responsible business report’ –, which is explicitly specialized in communicating the corporate performance in CSR-related areas.

Annual reports can be considered as the core communication tool on corporate information par excellence. In fact, in the last 30/40 years, many countries have shared in their national legal framework some regulations on the mandatory character of annual reports, which must contain information about the corporation, the management, financial performance, and the audited accounts. At the beginning, corporations were asked by legislation to make their ‘Annual Report’ available to their shareholders at the end of every financial year, usually by sending it to them directly. Shareholders are considered to be the principal depository of annual reports, because through the overall financial framework provided in these documents they could make important decision as to whether maintain their investments in the company or to sell them. (Breeze 2013, p. 165-6). This decision depends on a variety of facts and data regarding the company’s general performance in the past year, specifically on its recent investments and commitments, on its profits and losses, and on the impacts of their activities. Similarly, annual reports allow stakeholders – comprising of those potential investors in the company – to decide whether to start a financial relationship with that company based on its financial status. More recent annual reports are made available not only to shareholders and stakeholders, but also to a wider range of addressees who may be interested in the company’s financial and non-financial developments despite their different levels of financial literacy and social background, including financial experts, academicians, employers and employees, business executives, creditors, government agencies, the media, and the

society at large

(Franco, M.; Haase, H.; Pereir, A. 2016, p. 1).

The broad audience coverage of annual reports has led companies to publish them on

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the corporate website at the end of every financial year, usually in PDF format.

Consequently, despite their historical mandatory nature in the entrepreneurial world annual reports have intrinsically changed over the past years in their visual format. In general, they have increased in the amount of text and pages, and contents have been rephrased within more colourful and multimodal layouts. Moreover, pictures of people, poses and action shots have been added to many sections both inside the reports and in the front and back cover, thus giving them a more realistic touch with which any member of the audience may identify themselves (Breeze 2013, p. 107-8).

However, the level of iconicity is adapted to the section that is being dealt with in the report. In fact, annual reports are typically subdivided into two main parts.

The first part is a review of the year, in which the company introduces itself to the general public, by providing an overview of the past financial year that normally highlights the core financial events that have been relevant to the company – also in the field of corporate social responsibility, when the ‘Annual Report’ takes the form of an integrated report – and by speaking to the public through the words of the Chairman’s letter and/or the CEO’s letter or statement. In this macrosection, multimodality is mostly adopted as the drafting principle aimed at reinforcing corporate image, through colours, images, captivating headings, and ‘up’ words4, all of which give readers a generally positive and optimistic idea on the corporation, in spite of its (possible) financial performance lacks.

The second part of annual reports usually corresponds to an operating and financial review of the year, in which companies provide more technical and more objective information on their performance (Weetman 2006, p. 363). This in-depth display of data on the company’s financial situation is supported by specific subsections like balance sheets, income statements, cash flow statements, notes to the financial statements, and auditors’ statements. In this case, multimodality must be reduced in order to make this information appear to be more authentic and reliable, which implies a change in the way this section actually looks like: texts do not disappear, but they are combined with a mixture of tables, charts, graphs and numerical data inserted in a sober style that gives expert readers a sense of factuality.

4 ‘Up’ words should be intended as the set of lexical markers expressing positive connotations.

Typical examples in corporate reporting are adverbs like particularly or exceptionally,

adjectives like leading, top, excellent, profitable or transparent, verbs like expand, optimize, achieve, aim, increase, rise or ensure, and nouns like growth, success, support, flexibility or integrity.

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In the meantime, the more specific document labelled as ‘CSR Report’ has gained momentum in the last twenty years, namely since corporations understood how relevant their ethical commitments may be to their image and financial success, depending on the idea that stakeholders get from these specific commitments: as stated by Tschopp (2005, p. 57), ‘socially responsible investments (SRIs) constitute one of the most rapidly growing segments of the investment community’. The level of awareness of the financial impact that a company’s CSR history may have on its overall performance has been increasing in more recent times. For this reason, CSR reports share to a certain extent the persuasive character of the review of the year of annual report, thus changing the public’s perceptions in terms of transparency.

According to Bhatia (2012, p. 229):

‘transparency in CSR reporting is not always easy, given a preferred focus on productivity, rather than social responsibilities. Thus, companies, even when reporting on CSR, never miss an opportunity to promote their image.’

However, there are divergent degrees of commitment towards CSR themes, according to which companies tend to decide whether to draft their ‘CSR Report’ as an independent document from the more traditional ‘Annual Report’ at the end of every financial year or to report their CSR-based activities in the latter. Companies are also free to distribute the description of their social activities and ethical principles in a personal way, if they decide to devote their resources in a separate

‘CSR Report’. This decision has mostly been facultative across world enterprises, and those which have adopted it have certainly used it as an integral part of their self- referential promotional policy. In fact, companies have increasingly felt the need to report their specific actions and strategies aimed at promoting their environmental and social commitment as a functional tool for the enhancement of corporate image in the eye of stakeholders, business experts and the society at large. Publicizing sustainability at a corporate level is increasingly becoming a difficult task, because it is shared by a variety of corporate fields of action which commonly impact on financial performance, namely environmental protection, safety, health, personnel and customer relationships, and anything that pertains to ethical operations taking place among the corporate staff both internally and externally. As a consequence, sustainability reports have taken off as a real genre, which varies in terms of length, content distribution, multimodality strategies and stylistic devices, which shows that

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in the light of its growing popularity the practice of CSR reporting still represents an ongoing path whose main trends are subject to an evolution process full of open questions, heterogenous perspectives and different interpretations of similar actions according to the ‘ideological work’ (Catenaccio 2012, p. 35) that a company is willing to instill into the general public. Moreover, the wide coverage of the CSR concept itself in terms of content does not contribute to shaping a fixed vision of what should be included in a ‘CSR Report’. The GRI Guidelines (§1.3.1) seem to be widely accepted as to what CSR reporting activities should focus on, namely dealing with issues revolving around the environment, society and community, sustainability and efficiency. However, the fast pace of evolution characterizing CSR reporting and the CSR notion as such is launching a possible trend, according to which future sustainability reports might be exploring in a more prominent way contemporary issues linked to human rights, diversity and inclusivity, democracy in the workplace, bioethical causes, and geopolitical questions.

1.4 CSR European Framework and Directive 2014/95/EU

The framework-building process of corporate social responsibility instructions in the EU – which was launched at the beginning of the new millennium by the EU

Commission – can be said to have experienced a gradual shift from a legally

institutionalized to a strongly marketized approach, thus following the natural footsteps imprinted in a more and more market-based society, in which businesses have been characterized by an incredibly high degree of knowledge intensity in both internal and internationally-oriented activities addressing their community. As Brunsson (1989, p.

216) had already sensed:

‘organizations in modern societies are public not only in the sense that their structures, processes and ideologies are open to observation, but also in their ultimate dependence on public acceptance, i.e. of positioning themselves in relation to the perceptions and policies of society at large.’

The Green Paper titled Promoting a European Framework for Corporate Social Responsibility – published in 2001 by the EU Commission5 – can be considered as the founding milestone of CSR institutionalization within an EU-wide business context. In

5 The EU Commission was formerly called Commission of the European Communities

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fact, the Green Paper openly claimed to be ‘providing an overall European framework’6 by prescribing and describing CSR reporting as a voluntary approach for firms.

However, it was also underlined that ‘the voluntary approach to CSR must not hinder the further development of legal provisions’ (Ungericht; Hirt 2010, p. 4). In particular, the tentative framework intended to raise reference standards for CSR reporting through a set of internationally valid norms (§1.3.1) in integrating ethical and environmental considerations into yearly reports of businesses, which were meant to be carefully monitored by both the competent institutions and by any external parties ‘affected by the changes and decisions […] through open information and consultation’, namely stakeholders.

In 2002, the EU Commission7 drafted a new document titled Communication from the Commission concerning Corporate Social Responsibility: A business contribution to Sustainable Development. This communication marked a striking change in the vision of the CSR concept, which was said to represent ‘not an ‘add-on’ to business core activities’, but rather an omnipresent framework establishing ‘the way in which businesses are managed’8, explicitly in the light of economically relevant issues like

‘image, satisfaction of investors, competitive position and innovation’. In this context, firms are supported in their process of ‘enhancing […] competitiveness’ in order for

‘internationally competitive firms […] to invest in newer, more efficient and cleaner technologies’.

This renewed role of business sustainability became more crucial in the following Communication from the Commission to the European Parliament, the Council and the European and Social Committee – Implementing the Partnership for Growth and Jobs:

Making Europe a Pole of Excellence on Corporate Social Responsibility, which was published in 2006. Here, the EU Commission9 presents enterprises ‘as the motor for economic growth, job creation and innovation’10 and points out the need for ‘sustainable growth’ as a win-win approach ‘in the face of global competition’. This communication

6 All of the following unsourced quotes are taken from: Promoting a European Framework for Corporate Social Responsibility (Commission of the European Communities 2001)

7 see (5)

8 All of the following unsourced quotes are taken from: Communication from the Commission concerning Corporate Social Responsibility: A business contribution to Sustainable

Development (Commission of the European Communities 2002) 9 see (5)(7)

10 All of the following unsourced quotes are taken from: Commission to the European Parliament, the Council and the European and Social Committee – Implementing the Partnership for Growth and Jobs: Making Europe a Pole of Excellence on Corporate Social Responsibility (Commission of the European Communities 2006)

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represented a significant shift towards the perception of corporate social responsibility as an essential tool for business communication as a way of establishing corporate performance and entrepreneurship itself in a more and more competitive arena, which involves not only EU actors, but also international entities – including other businesses, stakeholders, and financial experts – that constantly interact with them.

The institutional decisions concerning CSR reporting that were made in the first decade of the new millennium in the EU did change the relationship between ethics and the market, but in fact they were given a rather recommending character, which implied that any corporations were free to adopt these regulations in the face of their own competitive background.

However, a few years later the Directive 2014/95/EU set out the rules concerning the mandatory character of non-financial reporting for European businesses at the end of every financial year. Technically speaking, this revolutionary directive amends in its first article11 the former Directive 2013/34/EU on annual and consolidated financial statement and related reports. Listed companies, banks, insurance companies and other companies designated by national authorities as public-interest entities – approximately 6,000 EU companies in total – must comply with this directive, namely those businesses with more than 500 employees that, on average, over the fiscal year have a balance sheet total of more than 20 million euros or turnover of more than 40 million euros.

This sustainability testing for EU enterprises applied retroactively as of 1st January, which means that companies need to report their CSR-connected activities starting from the calendar year 2018, by referring to the fiscal year 2017, as stated in the fourth article of the directive12 according to the deadline of its bringing into force. The new legislation was the result of a more complex implementation process of the directive into all EU member states, in which it has been transferred into diversified terms and legal instruments. Consequently, a similarly diversified reception and reaction of the directive is expected from a cross-national perspective, which will serve as solid ground for further research and examination of EU-wide CSR reporting actions from 2018 onwards in many corporate areas, including all traded companies in the banking sector, insurance institutes, manufacturing and service companies and state-owned enterprises.

More specifically, EU enterprises are required to disclose non-financial information in one of the following ways: they may decide to draft an ‘Annual Report’ integrating their

11 Amendments to the Directive 2013/34/EU 12 Transposition

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CSR performance into explicit sections or they may opt for a separate ‘CSR Report’

paralleling the traditional ‘Annual Report’ and made available similarly on the company’s website by six months after the balance sheet date.

As far as reporting standards are concerned, the directive gives firms the unchanged freedom to use any ‘national, European and international frameworks’ and recommends they consult the Commission Guidelines on Non-financial Reporting, published by the EU Commission on 26th June 2017. Alternatively, firms may adopt personal standards that have not been institutionalized in any of the existing guidelines, as long as they clarify the reasons behind this choice. Among the clear suggestions provided by the Commission, the UN Global Compact, the OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises and the ISO 26000 may be adopted by the addressed companies. Under the Directive 2014/95/EU, EU companies have to disclose reports on their CSR implementation policies by focusing on the following areas: environmental protection, social responsibility and treatment of employees, respect for human rights, anti- corruption and bribery, and diversity on company boards in terms of age, gender, educational and professional background13.

Envisioning the circumstances in which Directive 2014/95/EU was individually implemented in all EU member states was a fundamental research step to be taken in order to examine the contrastive CSR reporting policies adopted in each of them in a shared corporate field, namely the national rail sector. This dissertation focuses this specific business area in order to understand whether the urge for sustainability as an overwhelming approach covering contemporary business promoted in an EU-wide perspective has been interpreted transnationally in similar terms or through contrasting culture-based responses. As suggested by Yu and Bondi (2017, p. 287), CSR discourse is bound to appear as ‘socially constructed’ and ‘primarily characterized by common communicative purpose(s) and generic knowledge shared by business communities’, despite belonging to the same political macro-context of the European Union.

Consequently, this body of work intends to detect what individual community-based performance disclosures across EU national railway companies looked like before the Directive 2014/95/EU implementation process into all member states was concluded.

Interestingly enough, the corpus-based analysis will strategically take into consideration

13 This content summary has been literally transposed from the subsection on Non-financial reporting taken from the EU Commission’s ‘Policies, Information and Services’ section of its official website (ec.europa.eu)

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the latest CSR reporting material made available by each company, which usually corresponds to the CSR information disclosed in the calendar year 2017 and referring to the financial year 2016.

1.5 Corporate Social Responsibility in the Rail Sector

The corpus-based analysis that is going to be presented in this dissertation specifically explores the rail sector. A large number of reasons justify the choice of selecting the railway industry from an EU-wide perspective.

One the one hand, railway companies stand out as one of those enterprises whose birth was intrinsically linked to the industrial emancipation of modern nation states – both within the European context and in a larger cross-cultural perspective – and, in some way, their service offer is still perceived as such, that is as an institutional body that shapes the infrastructure of a country. On the other hand, despite its state-owned background the rail sector acts as a real entrepreneurial cluster of firms across nation states: in economic terms, a railway company can be defined as a business that encompasses a variety of profit-generating activities by producing and selling goods and services.

Coherently with this definition, in the liberalization era many railway companies have been subject to privatization issues, thus serving as independent entities in the market.

Although in simplistic terms manufactured goods have typically been differentiated from any service-oriented businesses, railway companies are perceived as exemplary in their in-between service offer. In fact, as well as allowing ‘free movement of persons’, which is one of the cornerstones of European Union citizenship (also included in EU substantive policies and actions of the TFEU14, as stated in Article 21), railway companies also entail a mixture of real estate activities like housing, rental lease and sale businesses of physical railway stations, retail activities like shopkeeping, supermarkets, department stores, restaurants and cafes in and next to stations and leisure activities inherited from the tourism industry (Doumas 2007, p. 78).

Subsequently, most of the rail sector activities deserve to be looked at also from a corporate social responsibility perspective, because service providers and customers,

14 The Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU) forms the detailed basis of EU law. Freedom of movement and residence for persons in the EU was first established by the Treaty of Maastricht in 1992, followed by the adoption of Directive 2004/38/EC on the right of EU citizens and their family members to move and reside freely within the EU.

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namely passengers, can coexist as long as decent conditions concerning the environment, equality, health and safety are granted.

1.6 Historical Background: From State Ownership to Marketization

Railway companies are conventionally known as state-owned enterprises (SOEs).

According to economic theory, a ‘state-owned enterprise’ is synonymous with

‘monopoly’: the notion of monopolies applies to those enterprises who serve as the only suppliers of a particular commodity. Historically speaking, public transportation falls within those well-established public services that were created – and stayed so for a certain period of time after their birth – through the lens of institutionalism of a given nation state, which was a typical move between and after the two world wars in the European context. Among the other SOEs belonging to this category, postal services, arms manufacturing and procurement, nuclear facilities, broadcasting and banking also deserve to be mentioned. Specifically, newborn nation states used to take full ownership of the growing rail infrastructure across its territory by developing an independent network of public service delivery that was meant to be marketized for all citizens. For this reason, since their foundation SOEs have always exercised a certain degree of political influence over national societies, by underestimating in some cases the impact of actual economic performance: in fact, along with the underlying myth of a social and political unification, state ownership also encapsulates the need for national defense, which can be best shown when it comes to ensuring national growth in situations with lack of market (Farazmand 1996, p. 15).

A core institutional change took place during the 1980s and 1990s. Due to governmental budget difficulties while facing a wide-ranging liberalization of markets, the rail sector was targeted by most progressive nation states as one of the first areas to be marketized, thus embracing a well-built corporate system of a vast number of businesses that had taken off in most states since the mid-nineteenth century (Breeze 2013, p. 15).

More specifically, the marketization process concerning state-possessed railways appeared to be two-fold. Internally speaking, railway companies were mostly oriented towards corporatization, which means that they gradually restructured their merely political relation to the state by creating an actual corporation, which means that the company is fully retained by the government in terms of stock, but it is given a legal

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identity and a market orientation. Structural reorganization involves a first stage of professionalization addressing boards of directors, who are in charge of managing the relationship between the government and the companies. Secondly, companies need to be commercially disintegrated and re-oriented towards more specialized tasks.

Furthermore, a de-politicization process in which political tasks move into specialized agencies allows the establishment of a corporatized mindset (Christensen 2017, p. 402).

Externally speaking, SOEs reacted to liberalization by rearranging their public service activities, which have necessarily moved toward contracts, partnerships, etc. under market regulation (Wettenhall; Thynne 2010, p. 32).

This double nature of contemporary SOEs paved the way for privatization, which implied the shift of railway ownership to private investors who transformed the former monopolies into domestic institutional market actors (Christensen 2017, p. 129) within the boundaries of a fiercely competitive market. Privatization strategies ‘were based on the assumption that private ownership is superior from the point of view of productive efficiency’ (Drăgan 2014, p. 30). In a more general sense, both SOEs and the diverse enterprises that were set up under the legal name of ‘corporations’ across the world were bound to approach privatization in contrasting ways according to the political and ideological social context in which they had emerged. As Breeze (2013, p. 15) observes:

‘Some areas of the world have seen the implementation of planned, controlled economies with scarcely any space for private enterprise, which were then swept away as the ideologies that sustained them evaporated.

Other areas have seen cycles of nationalization, in which state-run corporations proliferated, followed by phases of privatization, in which these same corporations are uncoupled from the mechanisms of the state and released again into the free market.’

Consequently, the corporatization process was undoubtedly more intense in those areas of the world in which liberal ideologies had already taken over protectionist policies at a national level. To a certain extent, the European continent – which can be seen as synonymous with an EU-based supranational organization – stands out as one of those world areas in which liberalism has triumphed for a long time. Nevertheless, EU member states differ tremendously with each other in terms of political, structural and economic conditions: Western Europe does maintain a progressive tradition, whereas those member states from the eastern part of the continent that have entered the Union

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in more recent times still suffer from anachronistic ideologies – i.e. the socialist background of previously Soviet regions – that partially restrain an ideally pan- European modernization status. For these reasons, the EU deserves to be understood from an in-depth analytical perspective in order to ultimately explore how social responsibility in European businesses has been interpreted within a complex microcosm.

1.7 Railway Liberalization in the EU

In the light of the fact that the transport industry accounts for about 7% of European GDP and railway services constitute a considerable input in various sectors of the economy (Busu; Busu 2015, p. 305), all monopolistic operators that have survived as SOEs need to be looked at as significant corporate entities within the context of competitive pressure among a large number of national and multinational corporations that have taken off at a worldwide level.

A certain degree of competition started to be felt within the European Union at the early stages of the liberalization process during the 1990s, which led the European Commission to launch a legislative framework inspired by liberalization principles. In concrete terms, EU authorities felt the urge to open up to competition by reducing the inherited importance of national boundaries in the rail sector. Over the various phases of the whole liberalization framework, EU legislation not only had to consider market changes coming from the outside, but also a more internal reorganization of both marketing activities and their meaning in terms of corporate social responsibility.

So far, EU legislation in the field of SOEs’ liberalization has taken the form of four main packages:

I. the First Package was promulgated in 2003, and its adoption aimed at granting equal and non-discriminatory access to the infrastructure all over the entire European Rail Network, initially for freight15 rail services only;

II. the Second Railway Package was approved in 2004 and officially opened the rail freight market to competition; in addition, it valued the importance of standardization of several aspects of the railway industry, such as safety, licenses and access rights to railway services, and it launched the European

15 Rail freight transport is the use of railroads and trains to transport cargo as opposed to human passengers

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Railway Agency, which serves as a reference institutional body that sets common safety targets, methods and indicators;

III. the Third Railway Package, adopted in 2007, turned its focus towards rail passengers’ rights as opposed to rail freight transport issues; it provided train drivers with an EU-wide driving license and emphasized passengers’ rights, such as availability of train tickets, availability of personal security and other rights devoted to special categories like long-distance travelers and persons with reduced mobility;

IV. the Fourth Railway Package was adopted in 2014 in order to liberalize the domestic passenger services in an attempt to reduce subsidies in the long term.

However, the efforts recently made by both governments and transnational institutions in order to establish SOEs as a set of independent corporations competing in the market, in a continuous process through which ‘corporations have been ‘equated’ with social institutions’ (Malavasi 2012, p. 248) still orients the perception of traditionally state- possessed firms in a less ‘authentic’ way in comparison to proper corporations.

According to Christensen (2017, p. 402) SOEs ‘are still commonly regarded […] as facing an inherent goal ambiguity as a result of needing to exist as market-based public organizations while also having to meet certain social expectation in terms of their objectives and governance’. This is one of the main reasons why it is possible to explore national infrastructure issues as a corporate social responsibility battlefield.

1.8 National Infrastructure as a Corporate Social Responsibility Battlefield

At a European level, the notion of corporate social responsibility embraces many dissimilar interpretations and applications that intrinsically vary according to member states’ own geographical location, political history, former ideology and economic background. However, this variety of positions on CSR issues becomes even more relevant when it comes to certain sectors of the economy which have historically served as milestones for citizenship formation and continue to be given this role. Among these sectors, energy, water, transportation, banking and finance can be looked at as those sets of goods and services whose everyday availability is perceived as basic and essential, because it affects the well-being of all citizens.

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As far as transportation is concerned, national railway companies are widely utilizing their capacity to ‘affect the operations of nations, shape public confidence and contribute to national security’ (Ridley 2011, p. 111), which implies that national governments are also closely involved in the continuous process of making infrastructure a source of economic growth and promotion of social well-being, certainty and confidence for all citizens. On the basis of these facts, Australian accounting and corporate governance expert Ridley (2011, pp. 112-5) asks herself whether critical infrastructure resilience should be considered to be a contemporary CSR strand.

This point has been discussed in the economic literature through the so-called A-S-I approach (Avoid-Shift-Improve), which has been applied to the field of sustainable transport. Firstly, general transportation can become more effective and efficient if railway companies manage to ‘avoid’ – or, at least, ‘diminish’ – the need to travel and the length of travel journeys. Secondly, a ‘shift’ to low-carbon transportation can only be granted by public transport, which would automatically take over road solutions and private alternatives. Thirdly, vehicle efficiency of public transport could only be obtained if governments ‘improve’ the set of technologies aimed at rearranging mobility aspects like speed limits, environmental performance or vehicles themselves.

This ideal approach to railway-inherent sustainability shows that railway infrastructure does represent a CSR strand, because it entails a rich set of sustainable goals encompassing environmental, economic and social aspects of citizenship.

Drăgan (2014, pp. 32-3) provides a complete list of sustainable goals in public rail transportation subdivided into three main categories. Among the environmental goals, he includes ‘health and local air quality, biodiversity, noise pollution, resource efficiency and land use impact’. Economic goals comprise ‘supporting economic growth and competitiveness through achieving mobility of persons and goods, avoiding congestion’ and ‘using resources efficiently without over-burdening public budget’. The third category, namely ‘social goals’, consists in ‘allowing individuals to meet their basic mobility needs […] in a way that does not impact their health’, which include

‘access to jobs, healthcare’ and ‘education’. From an economic point of view, national infrastructure, including goods and services provided through energy, water, transportation, banking and finance, cannot be neglected in any analysis on contemporary corporations oriented towards sustainability policies, goals and strategies,

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but it should be rather studied as a corporate social responsibility battlefield, in both national and supranational contexts.

2.

A Corpus-Based Analysis in the Rail Sector: Methods

and Materials

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This chapter sets out the analytical framework that is necessary to carry out an in-depth linguistic analysis focused on a contrastive study of the lexical devices and practices employed by EU national railway companies in reporting their corporate social commitments in a future perspective. Firstly, the research methods and the academic theories supporting the corpus analysis are clearly explained. Afterwards, in the light of the methodological stages involved in a preliminary consultation of the general corpus, the two main subcorpora are further contextualized within a nation-wide framework, thus depicting the historical and juridical background of each railway company, the individual CSR reporting choices, and additional business-oriented observations. EU railway companies that have been excluded from the analysis for practical reasons and non-EU states that share railway links with EU member states are also made reference to, thus providing a complete vision of the overall functioning of the European rail infrastructure.

2.1 Research Methodology

This section describes the main methodological steps taken to design the analysis carried out in this corpus-based dissertation, which focuses on the linguistic devices aimed at showing future commitment in corporate social responsibility reporting. First, a description of the corpus is provided, subdivided into two main subcorpora.

Afterwards, a presentation of the tools used for corpus building serves as the preliminary step to the three analytical procedures employed for a more detailed discourse study.

The data collected for this analysis come from a general corpus – containing approximately 179.448 words – of the latest 15 corporate social responsibility reporting documents drafted in the English language by the national railway companies of all EU member states with reference to the financial year of 2016 (all published in 2017).

The 15 documents were collected in the first quarter of 2018 and downloaded in PDF format from the official websites of each company.

Two main subcorpora were later singled out from the general corpus, namely 5 CSR reports (122.717 words) and 10 sections (56.731 words) from integrated reports dealing with CSR issues, depending on the availability of the former text type as opposed to the

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more traditional Annual Report type to date or, alternatively, to the disclosure of a deliberately integrated document reporting both financial and non-financial information.

Of all 2816 EU member states 13 had to be excluded from the analysis for practical reasons (see §2.2.2).

Corpus building was later aided by using the computer program Convertio, which transformed all documents in PDF format into TXT format. A manual examination was also conducted in order to correct textual errors in the latter format. Afterwards, all texts in TXT format were transferred into the freeware concordance software package AntConc for further qualitative and quantitative inquiries.

The analysis involved three main analytical procedures, which were independently employed for each of the two subcorpora.

Firstly, a general overview on the visual layout and the contents of the 15 corpus disclosures served as a source of preliminary observations in terms of layout, length, title, wording, content presentation, and balance between descriptive and graphical parts.

These considerations arose by flicking through the pages of both the CSR subcorpus documents and the subcorpus containing selected CSR sections from integrated reports.

In the former subcorpus – which is going to be referred to as Subcorpus I for practical reasons – a larger number of observations were made due to the more extensive volume of the CSR disclosures. The initial considerations regarded the report cover, which generally includes a title, an image, and additional slogans or corporate icons in a more or less multimodal framework. Subsequently, the table of contents of each CSR report was looked at as a reference point for a general content analysis, which was simultaneously aligned to the disposition of CSR-themed practices and to linguistic observations. The body of each CSR document was also examined in terms of textual disposition, according to the mixture of graphs, tables, charts, and – content-wise – the presence of case studies, which have become increasingly fashionable in the most successful CSR reports.

In the latter subcorpus – which is going to be referred to as Subcorpus II for practical reasons – observations on the visual layout and content structure were bound to be more limited than Subcorpus I, due to the fact that these documents are selected sections of

16 Due to ongoing negotiations on the country’s official exit after Brexit referendum held in 2016, the UK was still considered as a member state of the European Union in this analysis.

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annual or integrated reports. Consequently, the report cover rarely plays any role in a CSR-oriented study, whereas individual disposition choices in terms of content paragraphs across the CSR documents of Subcorpus II were explored along with the way tables, charts, graphs and additional case studies are presented. Nevertheless, individual exceptions across the two subcorpora were properly explored over the course of the analysis in the light of the drafting company’s sustainability background.

Meanwhile, during the first reading of all CSR disclosures in Subcorpus I and Subcorpus II, the most recurrent expressions emerging from each individual report were underlined and later jotted down in a temporary graph. All linguistic items had to share the idea of commitment in the future. The graph was subdivided into two main parts, namely a column including nominalized items like nouns, adjectives and adverbial expressions and a column containing all verbal clusters occurring in the texts.

Secondly, a quanti-qualitative analysis was conducted thoroughly on frequency data, supported by the concordance programme AntConc. Specifically, variation of lexicalized markers – in the form of any parts of speech and grammatical category – across both CSR reports and CSR sections of integrated reports was discussed.

This operation led to the creation of a wordlist encompassing both subcorpora, which includes the most common commitment-related forms among the corpus documents and the concordance patterns in which they are used. The result of the enquiry was a top 10 highest-frequency wordlist across the two subcorpora containing individual ‘content’

words – namely, nouns, verbs or words acting as both nouns and verbs in diversified contexts – related to the underlying idea of sustainability commitment for the future within the corporate sphere.

This final wordlist was possible thanks to the expressions included in the temporary graph which had been created ad hoc while reading all CSR documents for the first time.

In particular, the expressions shared by a larger number of railway companies were singled out. The final ‘content’ words were extracted from these selected expressions, and their real frequency was quantitatively checked by using the freeware concordance software packageAntConc.

In more qualitative terms, each lexical item ranking on the top 10 wordlist was analyzed in terms of semantic meaning, relationship with commitment statements, and collocational patterns in which they appear across the two subcorpora.

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Consequently, an in-depth lexical analysis – simultaneously conducted on both subcorpora – took into account a large number of discursive tools and practices contrastively used by each national CSR drafting committees operating within the railway companies under consideration. More specifically, the set of lexical markers, patterns and clusters that were discussed are linguistically employed with the aim of showing commitment at two main levels within the corporation, namely in terms of environmental impacts and relationships with employees and the main corporate target groups.

Across the general corpus, language choices enhancing the idea of commitment range from non-verbal forms to verbal markers expressing futurity.

The former category specifically focuses on nouns, adjectives and adverbs.

These grammar categories were discussed quantitively according to both the general and the individual occurrences across the two subcorpora and qualitatively on the basis of the most common concordance patterns in which non-verbal forms occurred in CSR- related subsections of Subcorpus I and Subcorpus II. Both operations were possible thanks to constant use of the concordance software AntConc. The wide range of quantitative observations on nominalized patterns led to the creation of a list of the highest-recurrent compounding constructs.

The second category was explored in the light of the usage of verbs expressing commitment. Specifically, diversified forms were selected by looking at their employment through a variety of vocabulary choices, verbal tenses and verbal patterns.

Firstly, the selection of the most common verbal items allowed a more lexis-oriented analysis of commissive verbs in their bare form, which were simultaneously looked at within their collocates, clustering expressions and frequency.

Secondly, more elaborate verbal clusters occurring with the collective plural pronoun we were explored in-depth, namely expressions of commitment in the present simple and present continuous tenses and in the modal will form, mitigated in the future perfect tense or in the passive forms. Explicit commitment clusters were also delved into in the analysis, along with additional verbal markers – expressing future commitment to CSR – which did not fall into any of the previously discussed categories.

Thirdly, clusters including the will modal and the collective possessive adjective our – both of which boast the largest number of occurrences across the two sub-corpora – were devoted a separate final section, in which they were explored in the light of their

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important contextual meaning in expressing a commissive approach to CSR. In fact, despite being ‘function’ words, the will modal is a prototypical marker of futurity which is often used to express future commitment, whereas the adjective our acquires a highly commissive meaning when combined with most of its collocates in a CSR reporting disclosure.

All operations were simultaneously conducted by using the concordance software AntConc. Additionally, two tables were added in order to graphically complement the linguistic analysis.

One table displays the highest-recurrent compounding constructs in the field of non- verbal forms occurring in the two sub-corpora. In particular, the most frequent adjective + noun compound words like ‘main focus’, ‘core mission’ or ‘high(est) priority’ were selected along with the noun + noun compound words occurring repeatedly in at least two disclosures of the two main CSR sub-corpora, such as ‘development priority’ or

‘business purpose’.

The other table reports the most frequently used self-referential verbal clusters in various tenses – namely, the will modal, the present simple tense and the present progressive tense used in the first-person plural pronoun we – by each national railway company. These three tenses are particularly relevant in a study of future commitment, because – although in different degrees – each of them can be used to express an action involving a commissive intention in either a present or a future orientation.

On top of these wide-ranging markers, collocation was constantly looked at in order to detect more complex clustering clauses and more peculiar usages, all of which are often localized through individual collocation choices by each national railway company.

As a result, all commissive forms show a diversified orientation of the degree of commitment that each national railway operator intends to enhance, which is ultimately meant to be submitted to the ‘verification’ test from the general public.

Further considerations on the strategic reasons underlying such discursive choices along with observations on similarities and differences both across states and across distinct CSR areas were also provided.

The approaches adopted for this corpus-based analysis strongly rely on corpus linguistics, specifically applied to critical discourse analysis (CDA), which is well- suited to address discursive devices used to express futurity and future commitment in

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