Background: Sustainability is becoming an increasingly important issue in higher education (HE). Leadership statements in university sustainability reports (LSUSR) represent a unique genre for university leaders to communicate sustainability. This study aims to demystify the genre so that future leadership statements might be crafted with a greater degree of reflexivity. Literature review : Sustainability discourse in HE has been regarded as a legitimacy tool and an opportunity for image improvement for universities. Some studies have examined university sustainability reports, whereas there is a lack of studies focusing on the section of leadership statements. Research question : Are there any cross-cultural similarities or differences in terms of rhetorical moves and communicative purposes between the Italian LSUSR genre and the American LSUSR genre? Research methodology: Using cross-cultural genre analysis, this study investigates the rhetorical moves of leadership statements produced by Italian and American universities. A move scheme is established and is used to annotate the sample texts. Results and conclusion: The findings show that although the Italian and American LSUSR genres share the communicative purpose of establishing a sustainable image, the degree of discourse force exerting on this communicative purpose varies. The image-building discourse force appears to be more noticeable in the American leadership statements, which tend to use a wider range and a larger quantity of image-improving moves. The Italian subcorpus, on the other hand, seems to pay more attention to the genre function of report-introducing, which is not explicitly linked to image improvement. This article suggests that practitioners could consider the potentials of the LSUSR genre in developing an institutional culture of sustainability.

中文翻译：

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意大利和美国大学可持续发展报告中领导力陈述的跨文化类型分析

背景：可持续性正成为高等教育 (HE) 中越来越重要的问题。大学可持续发展报告 (LSUSR) 中的领导声明代表了大学领导传达可持续性的独特类型。本研究旨在揭开这一类型的神秘面纱，以便未来的领导力陈述可以以更大程度的反思性来制定。文献综述：高等教育中的可持续性话语已被视为合法性工具和提升大学形象的机会。一些研究审查了大学的可持续发展报告，而缺乏针对领导声明部分的研究。研究问题：意大利 LSUSR 流派与美国 LSUSR 流派在修辞动作和交际目的方面是否存在任何跨文化相似或差异？研究方法：本研究使用跨文化流派分析，调查意大利和美国大学发表的领导声明的修辞动作。建立移动方案并用于注释示例文本。结果与结论：研究结果表明，尽管意大利和美国的 LSUSR 体裁都具有建立可持续形象的交际目的，但话语力对这一交际目的施加的程度各不相同。塑造形象的话语力在美国领导人的表态中表现得更为明显，往往使用范围更广、数量更多的形象提升举措。另一方面，意大利语料库似乎更注重报告介绍的体裁功能，这与图像改进没有明确联系。本文建议从业者可以考虑 LSUSR 流派在发展可持续性制度文化方面的潜力。