Holistic, nurturing and sustainable : discursive shift in corporate social responsibility reporting

Abstract

Festivals and events are becoming an increasingly important part of economies around the world. However, they can result in negative impacts to the environment via waste and carbon emissions. Wonderfruit, a popular annual arts and music festival held in Thailand, espouses eco-friendliness and environmentalism among its key tenets. Perhaps in line with these principles, Wonderfruit is also one of the few festival organizers that publishes corporate social responsibility (CSR) reports. This study utilizes corpus linguistic and discourse analytical frameworks to explore Wonderfruit’s social responsibility reports published between 2019 and 2024 in order to understand how the festival navigates this form of corporate communication. The analysis of key grammatical and semantic tags from the festival’s CSR reports indicates that over this period the festival moved away from sustainability and environmental discourses toward a more promotional form of discourse. Methodological implications for approaching small datasets using corpus linguistic methods are also discussed.