Exploring the language of transparency: a comparative analysis of the sustainability reports of US vs. Italian fashion brands

In corporate settings, promoting an image of transparency among key stakeholders and the general public has become an essential part of communication. Although transparency has traditionally been associated with mandatory financial reporting (e.g. annual reports), in recent years it has also been addressed in non-financial reporting genres (e.g., CSR or sustainability reports) in relation to their efforts in areas such as the environment, social and employee matters, diversity, and human rights. This paper explores the linguistic expression of transparency in the sustainability reports of leading U.S. and Italian fashion brands that operate on an international scale. In addition to its considerable economic impact, the fashion industry engages with a range of important issues in contemporary society, including environmental protection, ethical supply chains, working conditions, diversity, and animal welfare. It thus represents a highly influential sector in which the public perception of transparency is critical. The aim of this contribution is to offer insights into how fashion companies use language to communicate transparency and how it may be framed differently with respect to country-of-origin or national culture. Towards this aim, two comparable corpora consisting of the sustainability reports of selected US and Italian fashion brands were compiled and queried with text analysis software to extract linguistic items encoding transparency. The findings showed that, from a lexical perspective, a limited range of lemmas (i.e. transparen*, engag*, disclos*, open*, dialog*, conversation*) was shared both across the corpora and also within them, often with very similar patterning (e.g. open and transparent, open dialogue, community engagement, climate change disclosure), thus reflecting a certain degree of cultural standardization. However, drawing from theories of cultural diversity, some nuanced differences were also detected that could be interpreted in terms of the different communication styles associated with the two national cultures represented in the corpora.