ABSTRACT
Corporate environmental reporting provides corporations with a means to report on their interactions with the natural environment to their stakeholders and also to the wider community. This chapter outlines how a critical approach can help to understand the corporate relationship with nature. It explains the means for developing a method of analysis with which to identify and highlight the philosophical approaches which underpin the relationship between corporations and the natural world. Since critical and qualitative research aims to analyse the influence of social structures in the workings of society, context forms an integral part of the lens through which data should be viewed. An ontology of discrete objects is demonstrated by the mention of ‘environmental impacts’ without context which might illustrate the effect of the impacts on living ecosystems within nature. The human nature divide is a foundational concept in dualism, and therefore text which demonstrates this approach will be categorised into the human nature divide subgrouping.
