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The purpose of this paper is to longitudinally explore the symbolic and substantive ideological strategies located in ENGIE’s environmental discourse while considering the specific negative media context surrounding the company’s environmental activities.

Thompson’s (2007) and Eagleton’s (2007) theorizations are used to build an extended ideological framework to analyze ENGIE’s environmental talk from 2001 to 2015.

ENGIE drew extensively on a combination of symbolic and substantive ideological strategies in its annual and sustainability reports while ignoring several major issues raised in the press. Its substantive ideological mode of operation included actions for the environment, innovation, partnerships and educating stakeholders/staff, while its symbolic ideological mode of operation used issue identification, legal compliance, rationalization, stakeholders’ responsibilization and unification. Both ideological modes of operation worked synergistically to cast a positive light on ENGIE’s environmental activities, sustaining the ideology of a company that reconciles the irreconcilable despite negative press coverage.

This paper develops the notion of environmentally friendly ideology to analyze the environmental discourse of a polluting company. It is the first to use both Thompson’s and Eagleton’s ideological frameworks to make sense of corporate environmental discourse. Linking corporate discourse with media coverage, it further contributes to the burgeoning literature that interpretively distinguishes between symbolic and substantive ideological strategies by highlighting the company’s progressive shift from symbolic to more substantive disclosure.

This paper seeks to situate the green economy (GE) within the broader history of sustainable development (SD), bringing related lessons and insights into its fold.

We critically examine the history of SD, focusing on the relationship between SD outcomes and a variety of theoretical and political influences, such as demodernization theories, ecological modernization, neoliberalism, and state theory. We situate the GE within this broader history and identify emergent pathways to successful GE development.

We suggest that a strong GE discourse, one that prioritizes both people and the environment, provides an opportunity to revitalize the state, combat neoliberal primacy, and drive progressive economic and environmental policy.

A critical examination of SD history can provide important lessons for GE actors seeking progressive social and environmental change.

As social and environmental crises deepen, the need for developing and propagating discourses that engender economic reform and ecological protection becomes ever more evident.

Based on more than 2.7 million online reviews (ORs) collected with big data analytical techniques from Booking.com and TripAdvisor.com, this paper aims to explore if and to what extent environmental discourse embedded in ORs has an impact on electronic word-of-mouth (e-WOM) helpfulness across eight major destination cities in North America and Europe.

This study gathered, by means of Big Data techniques, 2.7 million ORs hosted on Booking.com and TripAdvisor, and covering hospitality services in eight different destinations cities in North America (New York City, Miami, Orlando and Las Vegas) and Europe (Barcelona, London, Paris and Rome) over the period 2017–2018. The ORs were analysed by means of ad hoc content analytic dictionaries to identify the presence and depth of the environmental discourse included in each OR. A negative binomial regression analysis was used to measure the impact of the presence/depth of online environmental discourse in ORs on e-WOM helpfulness.

The findings indicate that the environmental discourse presence and depth influence positively e-WOM helpfulness. More specifically those travelers who write explicitly about environmental topics in their ORs are more likely to produce ORs that are voted as helpful by other consumers.

Implications highlight that both hotel managers and platform developers/managers should become increasingly aware of the importance that customer attach to environmental practices and initiatives and therefore engage more assiduously in environmental initiatives, if their objective is to improve online review helpfulness for other customers reading the focal reviews. Future studies might include more destinations and other operationalizations of environmental discourse.

This study constitutes the first attempt to capture how the presence and depth of hospitality services consumers’ environmental discourse influence e-WOM helpfulness on multiple digital platforms, by means of a big data analysis on a large sample of online reviews across multiple countries and destinations. As such it makes a relevant contribution to the area at the intersection between big data analytics, e-WOM and sustainable tourism research.

I examine how four distinct episodes of environmental policy debate have been depicted in the Vancouver Sun, British Columbia's largest daily newspaper. Discourse analysis is applied to the Protected Areas Strategy, the Forest Practices Code, the Working Forest and the Results-based Forest Practices Code. The network of power/knowledge constructed through these texts limits debate to the hegemonic alternatives of “ecomanagerialism” and “eco-capitalism.” This textual reality is constructed from three major organizational standpoints: government, industry and environmentalists. The voices of First Nations and forestry labour are marginalized, as are discourses that challenge the hegemony of the “treadmill of production.”

In recent decades, the concepts of sustainable development (SD) and sustainability have become a part of the everyday information flow. Is there real impact on students who have potential to become stakeholders and decision-makers? To be able to answer this question, the authors focussed on the following problems: whether the discourse of SD has any impact on students of economics concerning their knowledge of the environmental pillar of SD; and whether it has an impact on their individual value orientation towards the New Ecological Paradigm (NEP).

A group of 120 university students of economics programs from the Czech Republic was chosen for the quantitative research of this study. About a half of them have already encountered environmental education. The questionnaire included topics of environmental pillar of SD and revised NEP scale.

Using correlation analysis, the results show that the discourse of SD does have an impact on the students’ knowledge of the environmental pillar of sustainability and it also has an impact on their individual value orientation towards the NEP in general. The knowledge of the environmental pillar of SD is not significantly influenced by the study of a subject which included the topic of SD and its principles. Value orientation towards NEP is not significantly influenced by the study of a subject which, among other things, included the topic of SD and its principles.

Findings should be accepted with the knowledge of the limited sample from one country, on the other hand, information flow – usual discourse of SD is global.

There is positive NEP orientation among the students of economics – young women and men have pro-environmental attitudes. This can be considered as great unused social potential in higher education.

This study deals with knowledge of SD, environmental education and value orientation. It is broader concept taking into account the real social environment in terms of usual SD discourse and individual value orientation, not only direct influence of education on knowledge. The study rejected direct impact of the environmental education on knowledge and value orientation in terms of SD discourse among the students of economics. The findings bring several important questions regarding the effective forms of environmental education.

This study aims to explore how organisations use institutional language in Green Bond reports to explain and justify their activities using language that describes and reflects narratives while simultaneously constructing and shaping ideology. The paper mobilises Wodak and Meyer’s critical discourse analysis (CDA) to examine reports and related documentation relating to Green Bonds issued in France.

The study uses three legitimating discourses: technocratic, environmental and social and business performance to develop a linguistic perspective that permits contributions to existing knowledge in the area.

The analysis attempts to identify the discursive strategies used to legitimise Green Bond issuance via claims linked to environmental management improvements and business activities’ social impact.

The study contributes to the critical literature on organisational legitimation and responsibility, investigations of Green Bond narratives and an understanding of broader environmental reporting in the financial sector.

In this chapter, the authors use emerging works on geopolitical ecologies to analyze the relations between tourism and the transboundary haze disaster in northern Thailand. The region’s ‘smoky season’, which occurs between February and April of each year, has become a recurring seasonal haze disaster that is reported to be the combined result of biomass burning and urban air pollution. Drawing on ethnographic research among urban tourism practitioners, as well as a critical discourse analysis of popular and social media reports and commentaries, the authors argue that geopolitical discourses of transboundary haze production are shaped by tourists and the tourism industry in ways that perpetuate inequitably distributed disaster risk. Transboundary haze, the authors further contend, has become an ecological actor that co-produces discourses of escape among mobile tourists and residents. This research contributes to emerging work that conceptualises the geopolitical ecologies of transboundary environmental disasters in relation to tourism mobilities in southeast Asia.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the discursive resources used to sustain and legitimize the reputation of the mining company Samarco Mineração regarding sustainability, before the environmental accident occurred in 2015.

The sustainability reports from 2005 to 2014 were accessed for the analysis of the presentation texts, and the discourse analysis method was applied to access the discursive resources employed.

From the classical concepts of rhetoric, ethos, pathos and logos, it was found that they reinforced the reputation and legitimacy of the company. The ethos is responsible for the company’s image, while pathos triggers the emotional reception of that image, provoking positive expectations. The logos relate the built image and its emotional reception to a rational discourse that values the company’s expertise. The analysis, in the light of the new rhetoric, exposes the strategies to lead the public to accept the image of solidity and confidence given by a reputation respected nationally and internationally.

As a limitation, the quantitative data of the report were not analyzed, since the objective was to analyze the discourse construction, understanding that the research was adequate for the established purposes. For the future, it is suggested to analyze the discourse of the company after the environmental accident in order to verify the strategies used in the same theme; analyze the discourses in other reports published in the Global Reporting Initiative model; investigate how the logic of sustainability report construction based on a standard model can interfere in the formation of reputation and legitimacy of the companies; and analyze the impact of CSR on the strategy of the companies.

The knowledge about the functioning of the language and discourse as an indicative of subjectivity provides a more critical reading and reveals elements implicit in the discourse of the organization. It was verified that the sustainability reports in encapsulated formats allow some stability in the discourse, since companies tend to follow the same line of previous years, even with changes in the organizational structure.

Discourses built by the companies do not always reflect the true operational and engineering situation practiced by them, and that successful and reputed companies can surprise their stakeholders with events of great magnitude that cause significant losses, be they monetary or human lives.

Environmental capabilities, allowing companies to carry out their productive activities in ways that limit damage to natural environment, are at the heart of the fourth stage of research in intellectual capital. Accordingly, the purpose of this research is to explore firm's current environmental capabilities, disclosed by managers through corporate messages, that participate to the development of sustainable intellectual capital (SIC).

With this in mind, we first conducted a lexical content analysis followed by a thematic content analysis of 241 letters to shareholders from the CEOs of major European companies published in 2016.

The lexical content analysis reveals that managers of major European companies have developed green alliances to address the energy transition challenge by modifying their manufacturing processes. The thematic content analysis of the CEOs discourse highlights that managerial competencies, continuous innovation and stakeholder integration are key environmental capabilities that matter to CEOs.

This study contributes to the fourth stage of research on IC highlighting the environmental capabilities and resources that are disclosed by companies in their corporate communication. Our results enhance the understanding on how environmental capabilities and resources enhance the human, organizational, technological and relational sustainable intellectual capital.

This research highlights the importance of green alliances that allow companies to address the challenge of the ecological transition. In this context, the continuous innovation capability seems to be a fruitful way of gaining competitive advantage in this challenge.

This paper provides a detailed description of the environmental capabilities that participate to the development of the human, technological and relational SIC.