Please note the below event has been cancelled. The ISS team are looking to rearrange: please check our event listings for updates and a full list of lectures.

Institute for Science and Society seminar by Dr Robert Caruana, Associate Professor of Business Ethics, International Centre for Corporate Responsibility, Nottingham University Business School.

Read the full abstract below:

Robert’s research focuses on corporate and consumer responsibility using (critical) discourse analysis. He is starting to think about new projects around climate change – and how consumer publics are constructed in certain ‘positionalities’ around the climate by corporations and other institutions.

Robert’s presentation will focus on the methodological and analytical story behind his earlier research that involved critical discourse analysis of a corporation constructed ‘responsible consumer public’:

The article examines the role of corporations in constructing the nature, meaning and implications of ‘consumer responsibility’. It draws on a theoretical framework that elaborates how objects, subjects and concepts are configured in organizational discourse.

Using critical discourse analysis, it reveals how consumer responsibility is organized into meaningful cultural knowledge through corporate communications. The findings suggest that such communications rely on strategic juxtapositions that offer a morally unconflicting concept of consumer responsibility that is facilitative of market choice.

The study context is the tourism industry.