Building an Environmental Sustainability Dictionary for the IT Industry

Abstract

Content analysis is a commonly utilized methodology in corporate sustainability research. However, because most corporate sustainability research using content analysis is based on human coding, the research capability and the scope of the research design has limitations. The relatively recent text mining technique addresses some of the limitations of manual content analysis but its usage is often dependent upon the development of a domain specific dictionary. This paper develops an environmental sustainability dictionary in the context of corporate sustainability reports for the IT industry. In support of building said dictionary, we develop a standardized dictionary building process model that can be applied across many domains.