Mixing_and_Bending_The_recontextualisat (1).pdf

Since their emergence, discourses of sustainability have been widelyresemioticised in different genres and have intertextually merged with otherdiscourses and practices. This paper examines the emergence of IntegratedReport (IR) as a new hybrid genre in which, along with financial information,organisations may choose to report the social and environmental impacts oftheir activities in one single document. Specifically, this paper analyses aselected sample of IRs produced by early adopters to explore how discourses ofsustainability have been recontextualised into financial and economic macrodiscourses and how different intertextual/interdiscursive relations have playedout in linguistic constructions of ‘sustainability’. We contend that, by and large,the term sustainability has been appropriated, mixed with other discourses andsemantically ‘bent’ to construct the organization itself as being financiallysustainable i.e. viable and profitable and for the primary benefit of shareholders.From this stance, we argue that, through the hybridity of IR, most companieshave primarily colonized discourses of sustainability for the rhetorical purposeof self- legitimation.