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

中文翻译：

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企业不当行为的前因：可持续性报告中脱钩趋势的语言内容分析

企业社会不负责任和企业不当行为对建立更负责任的商业行为的努力构成严重威胁。因此，学术界和实践界都试图找到预测这些行为的方法。在这方面，语言分析可以提供一种检测企业脱钩趋势的方法，即识别未能言出必行的企业。本文研究了汽车和飞机行业 8 家制造公司的可持续发展报告在语言构成方面有何不同。通过应用语言查询和字数统计软件，我们强调解耦者和实施者的可持续性报告在形态、句法、语义和语用方面有何不同。分析表明，除其他因素外，解耦者以认知复杂度较低的方式进行交流。语言的复杂性。此外，解耦者的报告可以根据他们的语言傲慢进行分类，其定义为较少的情感提及、更多的自我提及、较少提及风险和焦虑，以及对男性语言的严重依赖。本文为脱钩和企业社会不负责任的辩论做出了贡献，确定了企业不当行为的语言前因，并从语言的角度丰富了企业社会责任报告的领域。它支持管理人员、决策者和公司利益相关者的理解，以评估公司是否可能无法言出必行。