While the most distinctive voice in the developing network of public discourses concerning sustainability has been that of science, many other parties are involved in its ongoing construction. The case of companies is particularly important, since, despite their essential role in the dominant socioeconomic system, many of the typical operational goals of business organisations —such as increased consumption, cheaper infrastructure and less regulation— frequently clash with the measures needed to ensure the sustainability of environmental and social development. Empirical research suggests that this leads the business community to a conception of sustainability significantly different from that in the academic development literature (Bebbington and Thomson, 2007; Gray and Bebbington, 1996).

However, and despite analyses of corporate discursive formations in the Foucauldian sense Milne et al. (2005); Spence (2007); Triandafyllidou and Fotiou (1998), empirical evidence for such theorisation remains scarce. In this paper, we seek to provide a systematic account use of managerial conceptions of sustainability by means of a quantitative and qualitative corpus analysis of corporate public communication. Although this form of research has proved useful in the analysis of political and media discourse (Gabrielatos and Baker, 2008; Mautner, 2007; Pan, 2002), little headway has been made yet in applying it to organisational matters.

Drawing on an ad-hoc 1’000’000-token corpus built from financial and social responsibility reports for 2008 issued by 50 large corporations, we explore the frequencies and collocations of terms describing sustainability and related concepts to provide empirical evidence of the semantic contour that they adopt in managerial discourse. The paper examines the routine phraseological context in which such discussions occur, only apparent in this kind of large-scale examination, in order to determine:

• what entities are routinely related to sustainability and assigned specific thematic roles in reference to it;
• what semantic environments do references occur in, giving rise to semantic prosodies (Hoey, 2005; Louw, 1993) that imbue descriptions of events and entities with attitudinal content

Comparisons with the non-genre-specific British National Corpus are also used to establish which of these words show significantly unusual frequencies (keyness) in our texts, a further measure of their pragmatic relevance, as well as differences between semantic prosodies according to context (Tribble, 2000) that can provide empirical warrants for theorising managerial discourse. preferences compared.