Framing water for future action: Corporate communications

In this study, we explore how UK water companies frame water when communicating with consumers versus investors. We take a corpus and discourse approach, combining quantitative corpus tools with qualitative discourse analysis to examine how water is constructed in two purpose-built corpora: one comprising consumer-facing communications and the other investor-facing texts. Our analysis triangulates findings from analysis of collocation, transitivity processes, pronoun usage, keyness, and metaphor to investigate how water is ideologically positioned across institutional narratives. Investor-facing texts predominantly frame water as a manageable and commodified resource, positioning companies as competent actors through material processes such as supply, manage, and secure. In contrast, consumer-facing discourse constructs water as a shared and vulnerable resource, attributing it varied processes (break, run, save). The analysis consistently shows how consumers are made responsible for water and how the water companies background their own agency in communicating with this audience. Metaphor analysis reveals a surprising degree of consistency across both corpora as metaphors of commodity and precious resource dominate investor and consumer texts alike. This shared framing suggests a financial orientation that transcends audience type, with economic considerations consistently foregrounded over ecological concerns. The study contributes to environmental discourse, corporate communication, and sustainability framing research, highlighting how institutional narratives may shape perceptions of water, responsibility, and environmental risk.