Framing and Argumentative Strategies in Modern Slavery Statements: Debating Sustainability or Avoiding Responsibility?

This chapter develops an analysis of the linguistic content of modern slavery statements by UK-based businesses, which represent a genre of sustainability communication that has emerged in recent years. We built a dataset of all modern slavery reports filed in 2019 by FTSE100 firms. Our analysis followed a multi-step procedure including qualitative and quantitative discourse-analytic methods. First, a small sample was screened to find claims and supporting arguments. Subsequently, a corpus-assisted analysis of keywords-in-context was undertaken to identify micro-level framing strategies. Our results provide evidence of a very minimalistic argumentative engagement. Rhetorical appeals to ethos prevail over logos and pathos appeals, to construct trust-building and responsibility-shifting frames while avoiding critical discussion. The main rhetorical strategy that emerges from these frames consists in (a) companies portraying themselves as reliable and compliant agents of social sustainability and (b) companies putting themselves in the expedient position of a benevolent intermediary between governments and stakeholders towards whom ultimate responsibility is shifted. Our findings advance our understanding of how companies communicate rhetorically to comply with regulatory demands of accountability while promoting the desired image of ethics and sustainability in front of markets and society. Our study is the first to offer a systematic analysis of the content of modern slavery statements from a discourse perspective. It contributes to strategic communication research on framing with a focus on its linguistic aspects. The findings have implications also for policymakers and their attempt to design a more effective disclosure framework to enhance transparency and accountability on modern slavery and other social sustainability issues.