Mixing_and_Bending_The_recontextualisat (1).pdf

Since their emergence, discourses of sustainability have been widely

resemioticised in different genres and have intertextually merged with other

discourses and practices. This paper examines the emergence of Integrated

Report (IR) as a new hybrid genre in which, along with financial information,

organisations may choose to report the social and environmental impacts of

their activities in one single document. Specifically, this paper analyses a

selected sample of IRs produced by early adopters to explore how discourses of

sustainability have been recontextualised into financial and economic macro

discourses and how different intertextual/interdiscursive relations have played

out in linguistic constructions of ‘sustainability’. We contend that, by and large,

the term sustainability has been appropriated, mixed with other discourses and

semantically ‘bent’ to construct the organization itself as being financially

sustainable i.e. viable and profitable and for the primary benefit of shareholders.

From this stance, we argue that, through the hybridity of IR, most companies

have primarily colonized discourses of sustainability for the rhetorical purpose

of self- legitimation.