(Un)transparently Communicating Diversity, Equality, Equity, and Inclusion in the Car Transportation Sector

Abstract

The rise of social movements (#MeToo, LGBTQIA+ activism, Black Lives Matter) has influenced corporate practices and communication about diversity, equality, equity, and inclusion (DEI). The increasing demand for transparency (Schnackenberg & Tomlinson, 2016) and socially responsible behaviour has led to the publication of disclosures including this type of information, such as CSR and ESG reports and DEI web sections (Point & Singh, 2003). However, little research has examined the discursive construction of DEI (e.g., Malavasi 2023) and whether it is communicated transparently. This study seeks to fill this gap by examining a corpus of 2020-2023 CSR/ESG reports and web sections, written in English by American international companies operating in the sectors of car rental and ride-sharing. The dataset is investigated using the tools of corpus-assisted discourse studies (Partington et al. 2013): the analysis of the lexical keywords and normalised frequencies of DEI related terms sheds light on the most and least represented aspects of DEI; the close reading of their extended concordance lines aims to identify their lexico-phraseological patterns (Sinclair 2004), to reveal the linguistic choices employed by the companies to discursively construct and (un)transparently communicate about DEI. Multimodal resources, such as images, are also examined to assess if their choice supports the linguistic findings.