Ideology, the Environment and One World View: A Discourse Analysis of Noranda's Environmental and Sustainable Development Reports

This chapter explores how one company's disclosure contributes to and reflects the broader discourse of environmentalism over time. We select some of Noranda's earliest environmental reports, 1990, 1992 and 1994, and some of its recent sustainable development reports, 2000, 2002 and 2004. Using Eder's framework (1996), we undertake a discourse analysis along three dimensions: moral responsibility, empirical objectivity and aesthetic judgement. This analysis is then linked to environmental philosophy perspectives as per Gray et al. (1996). Even though Noranda's disclosure changes significantly, the reports reflect a mixture of environmental philosophies that remains relatively constant with the social contract perspective being dominant.