Framing Well-Being in Sustainability Annual Reports: A Case Study from the Coffee Industry

The concept of well-being has become increasingly prominent in corporate discourse, particularly in the context of human resource management and sustainability practices. By employing a combination of both quantitative and qualitative methods, this case study examines the discursive construction of well-being in the sustainability annual reports issued by Lavazza, an Italian coffee manufacturer, over a ten-year period (2014–2023), with particular attention to the construction of legitimation strategies and the positioning of social actors. The main findings show that Lavazza incorporates the concept of well-being into business-oriented frameworks. Within the corpus, well-being is primarily attributed to corporate employees and framed as a moral value. Over time, this strategy of legitimisation-by-moralisation has become more closely integrated with rationalisation, helping to position well-being as a measurable, strategic asset directly linked to the optimisation of corporate performance. Notably, this discourse tends to overlook some of the more vulnerable actors within this complex supply chain system, particularly the farmers and growers, whose backgrounding demands an attentive consideration. This case study contributes to the extensive body of literature on Corporate Sustainability Reporting (CSR) by offering novel linguistic insights on the construction of a timely and multifaceted concept such as well-being in corporate communication.