Visualising Corporate Social Responsibility: The evolving role of photographs in Inditex's corporate reporting

A few previous studies have dealt with the role of photographs in communicating Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). In general, however, this remains a neglected field. Accordingly, this study seeks to investigate the extent to which corporations make use of photos to illustrate concepts related to CSR, as well as to shed light on how that use has evolved. To these ends, a case study was designed to analyse the use of images in the CSR reporting of Inditex, the world’s biggest fashion retailer (www.inditex.com). The methodology applied was that of quantitative content analysis (QCA). This uses quantification to establish the frequency of visual elements in a defined corpus and provides information that is especially valuable for diachronic studies. In the study, QCA was used to analyse a total of 1,725 photographs featuring in the reports published by Inditex between 2002 and 2019. These images were coded and classified with respect to: (i) their size; (ii) the concept about which they provide visual information; and (iii) the various visual motifs used to communicate these concepts through images. The findings show how Inditex’s use of photographs in its corporate reporting over the last two decades has evolved through three different stages, with photographs playing a different role in each. These results can provide the basis for other, broader studies designed to establish a general pattern.