Visual strategies of sustainability communication on corporate websites: A critical multimodal discourse analysis in the hospitality sector

Anchored in the methodology of digital corporate communication, multimodal discourse analysis, legitimation and relevance theories, this research focuses on the contribution of images - photographs and logos- to sustainability meanings conveyed by websites to different stakeholders. The corpus analysis includes 330 images from the five most sustainable hotel chains according to the Sustainability Yearbook 2022. The images were downloaded manually from the English corporate websites and more specifically from websites with header and sub -header related to sustainability. The research procedure was organized in three phases from a quantitative and qualitative perspective by answering the questions: "what do you see?", "what do the images evoke regarding sustainability issues?" and "how are visual elements utilized to convey the different dimensions of sustainability on websites?". The results obtained show that the hotel chains preferred photographs of people in order to elicit the people dimension and humanize their image. Photographs of nature depicting the planet dimension are, contrary to the author's expectations, only in the third position. With sustainability communication as a complex area of investigation, the aim of this paper is twofold. On the one hand, it aims at contributing to the studies of sustainability communication from a multimodal perspective. On the other hand, it hope to strengthen and further a methodological tool to critically analyse sustainability discourse as a multimodal digital discursive practice.