Evaluating Visual and Textual Framing in Corporate Integrated Sustainability Reports: A Multimodal Framing Audit Framework

• Abiodun Okunola

  Ladoke Akintola University Technology

  Author

Corporate integrated sustainability reports increasingly combine narrative text with photographic imagery to communicate environmental and social commitments, yet stakeholders lack systematic tools to evaluate whether these two modalities tell a coherent story. Prior research has examined textual impression management and visual rhetoric in isolation, but no validated framework exists for auditing cross-modal alignment within integrated reports. This study develops and tests a Multimodal Framing Audit Framework (MFAF) to evaluate the congruence between textual claims and visual framing in corporate sustainability disclosures. Using a mixed-methods design, we analyzed 48 integrated reports from publicly listed firms across three sectors (energy, consumer goods, and financial services), coding 1,247 text segments and 892 photographs. The MFAF achieved 89.4% inter-rater reliability in identifying framing congruence and flagged 23.7% of reports as exhibiting significant text-image dissonance, particularly in environmental performance sections. Textual analysis revealed that firms used more hedging language when visual imagery depicted positive stakeholder engagement, suggesting compensatory framing. The framework offers practitioners a replicable diagnostic tool for report assurance and provides academics with a validated instrument for studying multimodal sustainability communication. Implications extend to regulatory oversight of greenwashing and the design of more credible sustainability narratives.

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Copyright (c) 2026 Abiodun Okunola (Author)

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