Corporate Social Responsibility Reports in the Confectionery Industry: A European Overview

The present investigation is carried out on a corpus of fourteen CSR reports, written in English regarding the Fiscal Year 2014/2015 or the calendar year 2015 and issued by some European food companies operating worldwide. The analysis tries to provide insights about the genre of CSR reports, investigating how some European food companies try to represent their business using discourse strategies and to promote themselves thanks to multimodal practices. The theoretical framework adopted in the research is based both on Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), which can be useful for analysing discourse as a social practice, and Genre Analysis (GA), which emphasises the form, purpose and function of textual genres. It must be also reminded that other key concepts have been taken from studies about multimodality and visual communication.