The social construction of global corporate citizenship: Sustainability reports of automotive corporations

What does global corporate citizenship mean? In the absence of formal definitions, a place where understandings of corporate citizenship can be found is corporate texts. From the perspectives of sociological institutional theory and strategic legitimacy theory, we utilized critical discourse analysis as a methodology to study the corporate sustainability reports of multinational automotive corporations. We observed isomorphic themes that constitute socially constructed expectations of global corporate citizenship regarding climate change. We also observed heterogeneity in how these themes are manifested. We examined the rhetorical features of these reports as ways that corporations strategically position themselves in the global marketplace.