Flying With Every Voice: Care-Based CSR Reporting in Chinese and US Airline Industries

Carbon-intensive industries, particularly aviation, encounter great challenges in reconciling profitability with environmental accountability in their corporate social responsibility (CSR) reporting. Care ethics provides an apt framework for navigating diverse stakeholder interests. This study advances a novel perspective on the linguistic construal of care values in CSR discourse to explore how they address diverse needs at a linguistic level. We analyse four-word lexical bundles in two corpora of airline CSR reports (China: 71,109 tokens; US: 150,127 tokens), representing two key aviation markets globally. From each corpus, the top 5% of four-word lexical bundles were coded deductively and inductively in their immediate sentence-level contexts for care values based on six categories: attentiveness, responsibility, competence, responsiveness, emotional connection, and human voice. In parallel, these lexical bundles were classified according to their discourse function: referential, discourse organiser, and stance marker. The findings reveal that all six care values are employed to reconcile diverse interests, but with cross-cultural variation. In the Chinese corpus, care is enacted by uniting stakeholders predominantly through the responsibility strategy, with referential bundles indicating alignment with national policies and collective obligations. In contrast, care in the US corpus is conveyed by reassuring stakeholders mainly through competence strategy, employing referential bundles to highlight statistical evidence and discourse organisers to establish causal relationships. By systematically linking lexical bundles to care values, this study demonstrates how the lexico-grammatical construction of care is used to address conflicting stakeholder relationships across cultures.