Chinese And Western Energy Companies’ Conception Of Sustainable Development-A Corpus Assisted Discourse Analysis

Since industrial revolution,human beings have created enormous material wealth,accelerating the progress of human civilization.However,along with the great economic growth,human beings are confronting a series of environmental problems such as energy crisis and climate change,which severely hinder human’s sustainable development in the future.Against this background,the concept of sustainable development comes into being.Since then,it has become prominent in the discussion on the relationship between humankind and nature.However,so far,there seems to be no common understanding either on the definition of sustainable development or on the possible measures needed to be taken in order to achieve it because sustainable development could mean different things to different people in different contexts.As business operation has a great impact on the environment we live on,the role of companies in attributing to sustainable development has become a hot topic over the last decade.Nowadays,businesses are increasingly disclosing the information relating to environmental and social issues as well as frequently employing the term in their communications.Therefore,what the companies are actually saying in their disclosures of sustainability report? How company construct the concept of sustainable development in sustainability report? What are the similarities and differences between enterprises in developed and developing countries on sustainable understanding? Why? The answer is not clear.Answering these questions is of great significance for enterprises to better achieve sustainable development goals and to deepen people’s understanding and application of the concept of sustainable development.This kind of research idea coincides with Foucault’s theory of discourse,that is,the right that the society,culture,history and other factors jointly build determines the form of discourse.Therefore,this paper tries to study how to construct the concept of sustainable development in the context of business by combining the research methods of corpus linguistics and discourse analysis from the perspective of linguistics.This paper adopted the quantitative research of corpus linguistics and qualitative analysis of discourse analysis.Firstly,the research objective of this study is two comparable corpora consist of 24 SR published by reputed Chinese and western energy corporation separately.And next step is to generated the collocates list and concordance line of the node sustain* with the help of AntConc.Through collocates and concordance analysis of each corpus,this study aims at investigate the how Chinese and western enterprise define sustainable development and by comparative analysis further understanding of the difference as well as similarities between Chinese and western corporation in understanding sustainable development will be obtained.The results show that it is common to for energy companies to construct the concept of sustainable development from the three dimensions:economy,society,and the environment.And they all aware of basic challenges of sustainable development,such as resource depletion,ecological degradation and increasingly serious environmental pollution.However,developed countries and developing countries are in different stage of development,their emphasis on the three aspects of the economy,the ecological environment,and the sustainable development of society are also different.As developing country,China’s socio-economic development is the primary goal,and developed countries have undergone a period of rapid development and have paid more attention to the protection of environment.And as business actor,both parties are struggling to find the most recent combination of economic development and environmental protection.The present study intends to make a better understanding of the concept of sustainable development in the business context for Chinese and western corporation and their stakeholders.In addition,from the perspective of research methodology,this study also verified the application of corpus technology in discourse analysis,which enriched the research results of this method.