Communicating Well-Being and Representing Employees: An Analysis of Non-Financial Reports in the USA, Germany, and Japan

This paper investigates the communication of well-being in the context of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). Through a corpus-assisted approach (Partington et al. 2013), this study analyses an exploratory corpus of sections containing social information, retrieved from 2022 English-written non financial reports of North American, German, and Japanese companies operating in three sectors (electronics, automotive, and biotechnology). The aim is to explore the linguistic and discursive strategies used by companies to disclose information about well-being-related policies and how employees are discursively represented in the context of these practices. An additional goal is to assess whether the language used to communicate this information is transparent or vague. Findings reveal that CSR disclosures on well-being generally tend to be permeated by statements of practices, alongside recurrent expressions of goals and commitment related to health and safety, learning opportunities, professional and personal development, and workplace inclusion. Some divergences emerge across the three geographical areas and well-being-related topics with respect to the linguistic choices that convey transparency – in terms of the amount, accuracy, reliability, and clarity of information – or those that suggest a lack of it – primarily nouns with generic meaning. In addition, the analysis unveils a discursive representation of employees as passive beneficiaries of corporate practices, thereby lacking agency in co-shaping, together with the companies, the initiatives aimed at ensuring their well-being.