“Responsibility is an advantage” – A critical discourse study on the legitimation strategies and environmental discourses of the climate commitment by the Finland Chamber of Commerce
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School of Business |
Master's thesis
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Date
2022
Department
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Mcode
Degree programme
Creative Sustainability
Language
en
Pages
86
Series
Abstract
In this master's thesis, I study the legitimation strategies and environmental discourses used by the Finland Chamber of Commerce (FCC) when it advises businesses in reducing greenhouse gas emissions in the context of a voluntary carbon neutrality program called the Climate Commitment. The study is motivated by a research gap concerning discourses on carbon neutrality programs and their economic and political underpinnings. My critical discourse study shows that the FCC deploys two discursive strategies to legitimize the Climate Commitment in the eyes of corporations. I call the strategies the Win-Win and the Status Quo discourses. The Win-Win discourse aligns the pragmatic and moral legitimacies by suggesting that corporations can address climate change and promote societal welfare by adopting an instrumental approach to corporate social responsibility (CSR). The instrumental CSR aims to maximize the corporations' economic benefits. The Status Quo discourse suggests that climate actions should be based on expanding neoliberal capitalism's existing economic structures. The FCC constructs the Status Quo discourse on the cognitive legitimacy – the taken-for-grantedness – of the existing economic structures. Based on the two legitimation strategies, their underlying instrumental logic, and the voluntariness of the Climate Commitment, my study demonstrates that the FCC implicitly suggests carbon neutrality to be something that corporations may consider appropriate if they find it profitable on a case-by-case basis. This way, the FCC seeks to legitimize climate actions without delegitimizing corporations that are passive or opposite to climate actions because it is unprofitable for them. Concerning environmental discourses, my study shows that the FCC draws on and reproduces ecological modernization, a discourse recognized in the environmental policy literature. The FCC constructs the discourse by highlighting the business opportunities resulting from climate change mitigation, the partnerships between public and private actors, and the importance of technological and managerial processes and expertise as the central means to achieve carbon neutrality. My study connects to prior research showing that the mainstream social practices of Finnish society currently reproduce ecological modernization. My study contributes to the research on CSR by suggesting that corporations’ activation in climate change mitigation and the prominence of ecological modernization during the past years have not changed the dominant position of instrumental CSR in Finland.Description
Thesis advisor
Moisander, JohannaKeywords
ilmastonmuutos, hiilineutraalius, yritysvastuu, diskurssianalyysi, climate change, carbon neutrality, critical discourse studies, corporate social responsibility