The New Specialized Discourse of Business Greening: A Multimodal Approach to Environmental Knowledge Communication

To be or not to be green is no longer a question for business communities. The necessity to reduce the environmental impact of various products and production methods is an unquestionable responsibility of the contemporary business world. The challenging question is: how is business greening communicated? This paper explores how environmental knowledge is communicated in the new specialized discourse of a series of multimodal texts existing in Arla Corporation’s website at: http://www.arla.com/closer-tonature/from-nature-to-you/. The texts are a part of “Closer to Nature” marketing campaign promoting environmentally friendly products and positioning Arla as an eco-friendly corporation. In order to investigate how knowledge about business greening is communicated in accordance with the potential and constraints of linguistic features and images, the paper draws upon a multimodal methodological framework. The paper intends to establish which semiotic mode is given prominence in the multimodal interplay by examining the functional differentiation of the two semiotic modes. Furthermore, as the greening of business is persuasively promoted, the paper also intends to contribute with a discussion of new multimodal processes of discursive transformation like evaluation and legitimation.

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