Università degli studi di Modena e Reggio Emilia

Press releases as a genre can be seen as a pre-formulation device for news reports, highlighting the relationship emerging between press release writers and journalists (Jacobs 1999). Within genre studies (Swales 1990; Bhatia 1993), company press releases have been shown to exhibit a set of standard moves and strategies (McLaren, Gurau 2005), which reveal their hybrid nature resulting from the tension between informative and promotional goals (Catenaccio 2008). However, the status of the press release as a genre has been questioned due to a continuous variation in stage combinations and communicative purposes (Lassen 2006). Digital technologies have also challenged the textual structure and the participation framework of the genre (Catenaccio 2008). This paper concentrates on non-profit organizations and examines the language and features of a pilot corpus of online news press releases retrieved from the webpages of a British LGBT+ charity (Stonewall) and of its closest Italian counterpart, the Italian LGBT+ organization Arcigay. From a genre perspective, the results suggest recourse to the same (recursive) rhetorical moves, which serve informative purposes and, crucially, are primarily promotional and persuasive in nature. Additionally, based on the corpus-informed analysis, investigation into the collocational patterns of selected top lexical keywords for each corpus (vis-à-vis EnTenTen20 and ItTenTen20), as well as their concordances, showed that both organizations presented themselves as cohesive and committed communities promoting inclusiveness, and supporting LGBT+ people and communities, which are discursively framed as threatened by homo-bi-transphobic violence.

The last decades have been marked by social changes that have affected civil society and the business world. In particular, the rise of different social movements in recent times, including the women’s rights movement, #MeToo, LGBTQIA+ activism, Black Lives Matter, the strikes organised internationally by Fridays for Future and the animal rights movement, has affected companies’ way of doing business and their communication practices. Companies, in fact, have progressively acquired awareness of the necessity to show a socially and environmentally responsible behaviour. This is reflected in the number of different types of documents that have been increasingly published by companies to disclose information related to these issues (Point & Singh 2003). These include Corporate and Social responsibility (CSR) reports; Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) reports; Annual Reports, Modern Slavery Statements, Diversity Statements; and web sections where this kind of information is included (e.g., About-us Sections, Mission Statements and People & Communities). In relation to the commitment of companies to equality, diversity and inclusion (henceforth EDI), the existing literature has widely focused on this aspect from a management perspective (Oswick and Noon 2014). In this field, equality is referred to the belief that all individuals should have the same opportunities irrespective of their ethnical origin, sex and disability. In practical terms, this means, for instance, guaranteeing employees with equal and dignified career opportunities, salaries, and social benefits. Diversity is conceptualised in corporate management as the awareness that differences (e.g., age, ethnicities, biological sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, disabilities, learning disorders, religious beliefs, and dietary practices) represent an added value. Inclusion is concerned with those actions undertaken to support, empower and make different employees contribute together to the future of a company. However, there is still a paucity of studies that investigate the discursive promotion of diversity and inclusion in corporate discourse (Malavasi 2023; Nocella 2023), and scarce attention has been paid to the specific linguistic choices employed to communicate EDI issues. Furthermore, although transparency is a key value that guarantees a successful corporate communication, no linguistic research has been conducted on how EDI is linguistically promoted in a transparent way. Drawing on this background and considering that some of the companies from the transportation sectors selected for this research have grown in recent times, this study quantitatively and qualitatively examines two ad-hoc monolingual corpora of texts from the sectors of car hiring and sharing. In detail, the corpora contain respectively 2020-2022 ESG reports and web sections, all written in English, created by international companies operating in this field, including, e.g., Avis Budget Group and Lyft. The aim of this analysis is to answer the following research questions: 1. What aspects related to EDI are the most or least represented in the communication by the selected companies? 2. How are EDI and related issues discursively constructed in the texts under analysis? 3. Which linguistic and pragmatic strategies are employed by the companies under study to (un)transparently disclose information about EDI practices and initiatives? 4. Do multimodal resources, such as images and visuals, contribute to the (un)transparent expression of companies’ approach to EDI? 5. Is it possible to find similarities or differences between ESG reports and web sections? In terms of methodological procedures, the first stage of the analysis, aimed at providing results to answer the first research question, employs quantitative tools of corpus linguistics, including the observation of lexical