Corporate involvement brings environmental improvement: the language of disclosure in Malaysian CSR reports

Purpose – This paper aims to analyse how Environment Sections in Malaysian corporate social responsibility (CSR) reports disclose environmental CSR. Design/methodology/approach – The analysis is grounded in Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), which helps to examine the macrostructure (topics) and microstructure (language features) of Environment Sections. It is complemented by interviews with corporate representatives to obtain insights about these structures. Findings – The macrostructure consists of five topics of Introduction, Initiative, Featured Initiative, Adherence and Finance to enable a comprehensive understanding about environmental CSR. The microstructure emphasizes language features about corporate actions and descriptions to enable environmental CSR in a particular time, place and way. Through the macro- and microstructures, the disclosure in Environment Sections portrays corporate involvement as bringing environmental improvement. It displays the corporate perspective, which promotes corporations as agents of positive social change. The disclosure is seen to be influenced by Malaysia’s corporate context. Research limitations/implications – As the corpus is limited to ten corporations in three years, future research should expand the corpus to comprise Environment Sections from other years, countries, languages and industries. Originality/value – The paper is useful to people practicing and studying corporate communication, as knowing SFL can improve discursive competence or a systematic way to decipher and deploy language.