Corporate environmental reports are increasingly viewed as products of the managerial

framing of responsibility and stakeholders. This notion encouraged us to conduct a multiple case study

on how stakeholders are framed in environmental reports. We show how interaction between companies

and stakeholders is described in the environmental reports of three firms operating in different business

sectors – financial, aviation and energy – over a period of five years. We use an inductively oriented

content analysis to identify five categories of relationships being constructed in the data: demanding,

promoting, committing, donating and preventing. We then show how commitment and promotion

dominate. We conclude by discussing the implications of this type of managerial framing to maintaining

business-as-usual approaches to corporate environmentalism and show how the critique of

environmental reports derives from stakeholder accountability and critical approaches. We argue that

managerial framing of stakeholders in environmental reports partly explains the increased criticism

among stakeholder representatives and academics.