Parenting or partnership? Corpus-assisted analysis of institution-people dynamics in university sustainability reporting

Abstract Higher education institutions are increasingly required to produce formal reports on their sustainability practices. How these reports are written can tell us much about the way higher education leadership prioritises the contributions of different parts of the institution to sustainability goals. In this paper we investigate how key actors — institutions, staff, and students — are represented within these formal documents. We employ corpus-assisted discourse analysis, combining concordance and collocation analysis, to examine sustainability reports produced by UK universities included in the 2024 QS Sustainability Ranking. Findings show that universities, staff and students are the most frequently mentioned actors, but there are clear asymmetries in how they are represented. Universities are consistently portrayed as ethically, socially, and environmentally responsible leaders who provide facilities, inclusion programmes, services, and sustainability initiatives. In contrast, staff and students are more often positioned as passive recipients and beneficiaries of university affordances, often referenced in role-based terms or as components of carbon reporting rather than as agents in their own right. The findings point to a hierarchical “parenting” representational pattern that diminishes collective agency and undermines more participatory understandings of sustainability governance. Such representations are consequential because the discursive marginalisation of staff and student agency raises questions about the extent to which university sustainability governance is genuinely participatory or democratic. This study makes an original contribution to scholarship on sustainability discourse, governance and legitimacy in higher education, and demonstrates the value of corpus-assisted discourse analysis for identifying ideological patterns in institutional reporting.