All Aboard: Diversity, Equity and Inclusion in the Sea Transport Sector

Abstract

Although greater public awareness has forced firms to take a more proactive approach to transparent communication and disclosure, it is often difficult to verify the quality of the information provided. This paper explores the characteristics of language which can act as indicators of transparency and focuses on the information about the promotion and practice of Diversity, Equality and Inclusion (DEI) which has become a business imperative in the wake of recent social movements like Black Lives Matter and #MeToo.

A corpus of texts dealing with the question of DEI have been extracted from various sections of the websites and the latest CSR reports of ferry and cruise operators. The texts will be examined adopting a corpus-assisted, quantitative and qualitative discourse analysis approach to gain insights into the linguistic and discursive strategies adopted to present the information. The results of the analysis show a great disparity in the attention paid to the topic of DEI, in the amount of space dedicated to it, the clarity and accuracy of the information being given.