A diachronic analysis of the visual representation of sustainability in Huawei’s corporate reporting

Abstract

A few previous studies have investigated the role of photographs in communicating corporate sustainability, but Chinese cases and their diachronic changes are neglected. Accordingly, this study aims at exploring how Chinese companies illustrate the concept of sustainability through using photographs and how the use has evolved. A case study was designed to analyze the use of photographs in the sustainability reports of Huawei, a leading global provider of information and communications technology (ICT) infrastructure and smart devices based in China. Adopting the method of quantitative content analysis, this study relied on visual grammar as a framework to dissect a total of 1,405 photographs featuring in the sustainability reports published by Huawei from 2008 to 2022. These photographs were coded and classified with respect to their representational, interactive and compositional meaning potential, which consider both their motifs and structural aspects. The findings show that as Huawei’s use of photographs in its sustainability reports over a 15-year span has evolved through three phases, its visual representation of sustainability has shifted from what it has done to how it is done better. Meanwhile, a tendency towards visual legitimation through drawing on the rhetorical functions of photographs has been revealed in Huawei’s recent sustainability reports. These results can provide insights into future research on the visual representation of sustainability in digital channels.