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Industry and Sustainability: A Re-View Through Critical Discourse Analysis
Leigh Price
August 12, 2002

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Introduction
Within industry, the actions taken in response to an increasingly prominent environmental crisis include a number of possibilities. One of the most common responses is public environmental reporting. This paper provides a perspective on industry's responses to calls for sustainable development, not through an overview of trends and initiatives in the region, but through an in-depth analysis of one instance of environmental reporting, namely the annual Environmental Report (2000) of the Electricity Supply Commission of South Africa (ESKOM). This report was awarded the KPMG Gold award for the best sustainability disclosure in an annual report in the Public Entities Category (2000 Annual Report), and the KPMG Gold award for the best Corporate Environmental Report in the South African Category (2000 Environmental Report). KPMG is a global network of professional service firms providing financial advisory, assurance, tax and legal services (the letters KPMG stand for the names of the organisation's founding members). This report could thus be seen as an example of environmental ‘best practice’ in industry in the region.

This paper offers possible insights to those people in companies responsible for writing their environmental reports, to allow a greater understanding of the language and rhetoric they use. It also aims to help those who teach about the environment, by offering a possible approach for teachers that allows them to mediate between such texts as the ESKOM report and their students. Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) of a document such as the ESKOM report can deepen students' understanding of the complexity of environmental discourses at play in society.

In the title of this paper, the word 'critical' is used to indicate an affiliation with CDA techniques. Nevertheless, it should be noted that this paper uses only those CDA techniques which might easily be applied by the general public, in an attempt to de-mystify discourse analysis and open it up for more general useage. This is not an ideologically 'critical' paper in that, whilst I use critical analysis techniques, I attempt to avoid positioning myself ideologically as either for or against ESKOM. I am not trying to uncover hidden but foundational truths about ESKOM. Instead I try to show up contradictions and problematise the ESKOM use of language.

The title of the report used in the analysis is "Towards Sustainability". The theme of sustainability will be emphasised in this analysis, since it was an important focus for the World Summit on Sustainable Development. But it is also a word whose meaning and usefulness has been contested.

The meaninglessness of such universal statements (as 'sustainable development' and 'sustainability')… and the arrogance of the white, upper-middle class, educated men who develop such statements, shines through. We need to be encouraging people to deconstruct these statements for the value they embody and the perspectives they contain (Gough, cited in Sauve, 1999: 24, explanatory comment in brackets mine).

For example 'sustainability' and the term from which it was derived, 'sustainable development', do not indicate 'what' is being sustained, or for the latter, 'what' is to be developed. Given the frequency of the usage of the word 'sustainability' it seems it may be useful to examine how this word is being used within the context of industry, and perhaps what is the underlying perspective contained within it.

Texts, such as the ESKOM environmental report, are instantiations of socially regulated discourses and their processes of production and reception are socially constrained (Janks, 1997: 329; Hodge & Kress, 1988: 4). Such a report is thus a form of social practice that is tied to a specific historical context and is a means by which existing social relations are reproduced or contested and particular interests are served. In this case, we are examining the social relations around environmental and sustainable developmental issues. We might therefore ask of the ESKOM environmental report questions that relate its discourse to the underlying social and environmental perspectives that the report embodies. Specifically, we might ask how these perspectives and their attendant relations of power are reproduced through the use of such words as 'sustainability' within the report.

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