How Corporate Purpose Discourses Reframe Environmental Liabilities During Industrial Disasters

• Abiodun Okunola

  Ladoke Akintola University Technology

  Author

Industrial disasters increasingly unfold not only as material events but as discursive contests over liability, responsibility, and corporate identity. While scholarship has examined greenwashing and crisis communication separately, little work explains how corporate purpose discourse—purpose statements, sustainability reports, and executive rhetoric—actively reframes environmental liabilities in the aftermath of catastrophe. This study investigates how firms deploy purpose language to transform environmental liabilities from admissions of fault into evidence of institutional virtue. Using a mixed-methods design combining critical discourse analysis of 147 corporate documents across four disaster cases (Bhopal, Deepwater Horizon, Fundão, and East Palestine) with a computational framing analysis, the research develops a diagnostic framework for identifying purpose-based liability reframing. Findings reveal that 89.4% of post-disaster purpose statements analyzed employed at least one of four reframing mechanisms: temporal displacement, stakeholder substitution, aspirational deflection, or systemic attribution. The study concludes that corporate purpose discourse functions as a liability-management technology that operates prior to, and often instead of, legal accountability mechanisms. The proposed Purpose-Liability Reframing Index (PLRI) offers regulators and researchers a replicable tool for assessing when purpose communication crosses from legitimate governance into liability avoidance.

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Copyright (c) 2026 Abiodun Okunola (Author)

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.