기업 경영전략 담론으로 전유(專有)된 ESG : 정부와 지자체 정책보고서 및 신문 사설에 대한 비판적 담론분석

This essay examines how ESG, which is emerging as an important social agenda, is structured and reproduced in Korean society. For this, we analyzed a series of policy reports from government and local governments and newspaper editorials, that mediate social imagination in a multi-layered and linked manner. Through this, we sought to find out the structural strategy of the ESG discourse currently shared widely in Korean society and the basis for normality or rationality contained within it. The purpose is to critically interpret the nature of the various ESG discourses and reveal the related interests and the ideological attributes that mediate them. As a result, ESG appears to be presented as a major means to achieve the goal of maintaining the community by resolving existing crisis in the environmental, social, and governance areas and promoting the rights of the socially disadvantaged. In this process, ESG is explained through statements that imply community, such as ‘ethics’, ‘human rights’, and ‘stakeholders’. However, the properties that appear in the process of practicing ESG discursively and socially reveal their meaning as a metaphoric means to achieve economic goals. This can be said to be a process through which ESG acquires normality and rationality by borrowing communal language in order to acquire social hegemony and expand market functions.