MAKING MONEY: THE INSIDE OUT OF THE SUSTAINABILITY DISCOURSE IN VALE
Discourse Analysis. Sustainable Development. Sustainability. Global Governance. Vale.
This research aims to unveil the corporate discourse of sustainability in the mining company Vale. The sustainability is analyzed from a discursive and historically determined perspective, where the discourse is an effect of meanings between interlocutors. It is demonstrated that sustainable development is an enunciative event on the discursive construction of development in capitalism and that, posteriorly, transfigures itself into sustainability, converting itself into a managerial perspective of sustainable development, originating the discursive construction of corporate sustainability. As a theoretical and methodological basis, Pêcheux's Analysis of the Discourse was utilized, whose theoretical and analytical procedures are defined in the light of dialectical and historical materialism. To outline how the meanings of the sustainability discourse are constructed, a corpus was constituted from discursive sequences extracted from Vale's sustainability reports, published between 2007 and 2017. The subject-position of corporate discourse was identified, along with the subject-form that determines it and its universal enunciator, which made it possible to note that Vale produces three effects of meaning: make mining viable, turn itself into a competitive company and create value for the shareholders. It is concluded that, in its operation, the sustainability discourse in Vale serves the purpose of promoting hygiene of the company's image, eliminating its state-owned history and camouflaging its main goal of converting nature into
money.