Shamsun Nahar

Women’s participation in higher education is quite low in Bangladesh. Their participation in different professions is even lower. Various types of barriers are faced by women in their families, communities and broader society in acquiring higher education and in pursuing different professions. This paper attempts to find the proportion of women who had acquired education up to the S.S.C. level in the study area, discover those who were engaged in some kind of professional activities among them and then reveal the opinions and experiences of those working women in entering and continuing a professional life. 44 out of 54 S.S.C. holder women belonging to 150 households residing within the study locale were respondents of this study. 80% of these respondents held either a bachelor’s or a master’s degree. Only 7 of the respondents were housewives, 28 were engaged in some kind of profession, and most of others were students. The respondents thought that in acquiring higher education and pursuing different professions women faced problems related to family approval, and financial support. Unavailability of day care centres barred mothers from materializing their dreams of doing well in higher education and pursuing challenging professions.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the nature of rhetoric and rhetorical strategies that are implicit in the standalone sustainability reporting of the top 24 companies of the Fortune 500 Global. We adopt Bormann’s :396–407, 1972) SCT framework to study the rhetorical situation and how corporate sustainability reporting messages can be communicated to the audience. The SCT concepts in the sustainability reporting’s communication are subject to different types of legitimacy strategies that are used by corporations as a validity and legitimacy claim in the reports. A content analysis has been conducted and structural coding schemes have been developed based on the literature. The schemes are applied to the SCT model which recognizes the symbolic convergent processes of fantasy among communicators in a Society. The study reveals that most of the sample companies communicate fantasy type and rhetorical vision in their corporate sustainability reporting. However, the disclosure or messages are different across locations and other taxonomies of the SCT framework. This study contributes to the current CSR literature about how symbolic or fantasy understandings can be interpreted by the users. It also discusses the persuasion styles that are adopted by the companies for communication purposes. This study is the theoretical extension of the SCT. Researchers may be interested in further investigating other online communication paths, such as human rights reports and director’s reports.