The influence of national cultural values on the formation of linguocultural strategies for representing corporate social responsibility

The article is dedicated to analyzing how national cultural values influence the choice of linguocultural strategies in the representation of corporate social responsibility (CSR) by international companies. The object of the study is the texts of corporate social responsibility from large corporations operating in various national cultural contexts. The subject of the research consists of linguocultural markers and communicative strategies used by companies when representing CSR programs. The CSR discourses from reports and public communications of companies in the USA, Europe, and Russia are examined, comparing the linguistic markers, rhetorical moves, and ways of masking contradictions between declared values and actual practices. Special attention is paid to how companies construct the image of "responsible" business through vocabulary, metaphors, grammatical constructions, and topic selection, aligning it with the expectations of local culture and the regulatory environment. The methodological foundation includes critical discourse analysis, linguocultural analysis, and a comparative approach based on G. Hofstede's cultural dimensions theory and F. Trompenaars' concept of communication context. The empirical base consists of over 250 fragments of CSR texts from 15 international companies during the period from 2020 to 2023. Elements of quantitative content analysis are applied, taking into account the frequency of key markers. The novelty of the research lies in the fact that it integrates the results of four leading national studies on CSR discourse into a single linguocultural framework for the first time, allowing for a systematic description of the relationship between cultural parameters and linguistic strategies. A detailed typology of masking mechanisms (reaccentuation, technization, ideologization) is proposed, demonstrating how the same social issue is “rewritten” differently in American, European, and Russian contexts. It is shown that the choice of linguistic means in CSR texts functions as a financial signal for investors and affects the assessment of corporate sustainability. The conducted research established that culturally conditioned speech strategies in CSR communication both reflect and shape perceptions of business social responsibility, serving as a tool for reputation management and smoothing structural contradictions. At the same time, hybrid and transitional cases are identified that do not fit into a rigid triad of models, underscoring the need to consider both national cultural profiles and industry specifics and the dynamics of crisis contexts when interpreting CSR discourse.

corporate social responsibility, linguocultural analysis, critical discourse analysis, national cultural values, discursive strategies, semantic retouching, impression management, power distance, uncertainty avoidance, communication context