Product packaging as an everyday manifestation of the environmental discourse

Materiality, multimodality and multithematicity as methodological challenges

Abstract

The article outlines the technical, semiotic and discourse-linguistic challenges that arise in the data collection, the data processing and the data analysis of a quite small corpus of current product packaging texts (food/beverages, cleaning agents and hygiene products) of a running DFG-project. These three types of problems are due to the materiality, multimodality and multithematicity of the material analysed. The project which is focused on the German environmental discourse 1990-2020 and which is investigating the tension between individual freedom and social norms expressed in it, thus deliberately leaves the big data level of the originally project context within a bigger research group and switches to the level of hermeneutic-qualitative analyses of selected key texts. The hypothesis underlying this decision is that the environmental discourse is reflected in a condensed form in texts that are committed to corporate sustainability communication and are influencing the discourse space of everyday life in everyone’s household. Initial insights into the material and multimodal nature of the corpus are provided and the first results of the discourse linguistic analysis are offered, whereby the material is always discussed in its special significance "beyond big data". The preliminary results show that the everyday products analysed here are discursive mediators between companies, consumers and the environment, in that responsibility is shifted and displaced several times so that in the end it can to be concluded on all sides: Good for you and good for the planet.