Antecedents of corporate misconduct: A linguistic content analysis of decoupling tendencies in sustainability reporting

Corporate social irresponsibility and corporate misconducts are a severe threat to the endeavours establish more responsible business practices. Therefore, academia practice alike try find ways anticipate these behaviors. In this regard, linguistic analysis can provide an approach detect decoupling tendencies of firms, that is identify firms fail walk talk. This paper examines how sustainability reports eight manufacturing in automotive aircraft industries differ regard their composition. By applying Linguistic Inquiry Word Count software, we emphasize decouplers implementors morphology, syntax, semantics pragmatics. The reveals decouplers, among other factors, communicate less cognitively complex way. As they use shorter sentences, informal language, past future references, fewer conjunctions, derive characterized by lower sophistication. Moreover, decouplers’ be classified hubris, which defined emotional self-references, references risk anxiety, heavy reliance on male language. contributes debate irresponsibility, identifies antecedents misconduct, enriches domain CSR reporting with perspective. It supports understanding managers, policymakers stakeholders evaluate whether firm may