Rhetorics of environmental routinisation in one Australian company's annual reports

Environmentalism is increasingly routinised and institutionalised in Australia. In this paper we focus on one Australian company, Amcor, that operated in the heavily disputed industry of forestry, and examine how it presented its environmental reporting throughout the period of those processes. We use content-analysis to show that Amcor appeared to track the salience of environmentalism as a political issue, and then use rhetorics of 'good news, 'retroscription' and 'we know best' to show its rhetorical moves. As more and more Australians are exposed to the market, through private shareownership or through superannuation, such corporate rhetoric becomes increasingly important as a site for sociopolitical action and study.