The Handbook of Communication and Corporate Social Responsibility

Øyvind Ihlen, Jennifer Bartlett, Steve May, Øyvind Ihlen, Jennifer Bartlett, Steve May

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9781118721384, 9781444336344
• eBook ISBN: 9781118078730
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This book represents the definitive research collection for corporate social responsibility communication, offering cross-disciplinary and international perspectives from the top scholars in the field.

• Addresses a gap in the existing CSR literature
• Demonstrates the relevance of effective CSR communication for the management of organizations
• The 28 contributions come from top scholars in public relations, organizational communication, reputation management, marketing and management

Part I

Introduction

1

Corporate Social Responsibility and Communication

Øyvind Ihlen, Jennifer L. Bartlett and Steve May

Corporate activities are increasingly scrutinized for their effect on society and the environment. It is unthinkable that a corporation today will declare publicly that its only goal is to make money for its shareholders. Instead, corporations typically claim to balance the needs of society and the environment against the need to make a profit. That is, corporations say they practice corporate social responsibility (CSR). This edited volume explores the complexities of this seemingly simple claim. As such it is an essential resource to complement the latest academic thinking from management and communication research on how corporations communicate about CSR. This chapter presents an overview of the book.

While there is a huge literature on corporate social responsibility (CSR), the literature on CSR communication is disproportionate in size, with relatively little cross-disciplinary research on the topic. This book aims to be the definitive research collection for CSR communication by pulling together and expanding on existing recommendations from the management discipline and from communication disciplines such as public relations, organizational communication, marketing, and reputation management. Scholars from all these disciplines contribute to the book and together show how such notions as dialogue, trust, discourse, reputation and rhetoric enrich our understanding of CSR communication and influence the way organizations should be managed. The contributors to the book were also asked to provide suggestions for future research, something we consider to be a crucial feature of the book. We also make the case that CSR, and CSR communication specifically, should be studied in its own right. The central role corporations have in society merits research in itself as corporations have the ability to influence our daily lives in myriad ways.

In this introductory chapter we first give a short overview of the literature on CSR communication and present the rationale for the book. Then we briefly explain what we mean by CSR, discuss the criticism of the concept and spell out why we think communication has such a crucial role in relation to CSR. The final part of the chapter gives an overview of the structure and content of the book.

The Literature on CSR Communication

CSR is a highly fashionable management concept and something modern managers ignore at their own peril (Porter and Kramer, 2006; Zorn and Collins, 2007). With a few exceptions (e.g., den Hond, de Bakker, and Neergaard, 2007; Smith, Vogel, and Levine, 2010), however, management books are largely silent on the topic of CSR communication. Textbooks like Corporate Responsibility: A Critical Introduction (Blowfield and Murray, 2008) and Strategic Corporate Social Responsibility: Stakeholders in a Global Environment (Werther and Chandler, 2006), typically relegate communication a role in the periphery. The situation is the same in research volumes like The Oxford Handbook of Corporate Social Responsibility (Crane, McWilliams, Matten et al., 2008b), Global Practices of Corporate Social Responsibility (Idowu and Filho, 2009), Corporate Social Responsibility Across Europe (Habisch, Jonker, Wegner, and Schmidpeter, 2005), Developing Corporate Social Responsibility: A European Perspective (Perrini, Pogutz, and Tencati, 2006), and A Handbook of Corporate Governance and Social Responsibility (Aras and Crowther, 2010).

It does not help, either, to look at books that deal with related concepts like corporate citizenship, for example, Handbook of Research on Global Corporate Citizenship (Scherer and Palazzo, 2008). When communication is actually mentioned in this literature, the communication ideal that is implied is often ill-defined and vague. Calls are issued for corporations to engage in stakeholder dialogue and implement transparency/accountability through the publication of nonfinancial reports, but the books seldom mine the insights that can be culled from communication disciplines in this regard.

The situation is better in some of the management journals, particularly in business ethics. Scholars have been particularly occupied with nonfinancial reports (e.g., Aras and Crowther, 2009; Campbell, Shrives, and Bohmbach-Saager, 2001; Clarke and Gibson-Sweet, 1999; Hartman, Rubin, and Dhanda, 2007; Perrini, 2005), communication of corporate ethic codes (e.g., Painter-Morland, 2006; Svensson, Wood, Singh et al., 2009a; Svensson, Wood, Singh et al., 2009b), and stakeholder dialogue processes (e.g., Burchell and Cook, 2006, 2008; Morsing and Schultz, 2006). The list grows longer if we include studies of communication of sustainability (e.g., Jose and Lee, 2007; Kolk, 2003; Livesey and Kearins, 2002). But again, many of the studies remain in their silos with little or no reference to communication theory or practice (e.g., Du, Bhattacharya, and Sen, 2010).

Actually turning to the communication disciplines, work on CSR communication has been published in journals within fields such as public relations (e.g., Bernays, 1975; Golob and Bartlett, 2007; Wang and Chaudhri, 2009), corporate communication (e.g., Birth, Illia, Lurati et al., 2008; Branco and Rodrigues, 2006; Nielsen and Thomsen, 2007), organizational communication (e.g., Chaudhri and Jian, 2007), marketing communication (e.g., Morsing, Schultz, and Nielsen, 2008; Podnar, 2008), communication management (e.g., Moreno and Capriotti, 2009), and reputation management (e.g., Fombrun, 2005; Hagen, 2008). These and other contributions will be thoroughly reviewed in the following chapters.

To date and to our knowledge, communication scholars have published one textbook on CSR, Corporate Social Responsibility: Virtue or Vice? (May, 2011), and three edited volumes: Strategic CSR Communication (Morsing and Beckmann, 2006), The Debate Over Corporate Social Responsibility (May, Cheney, and Roper, 2007), and Handbuch Corporate Social Responsibility: Kommunikationswissenschaftliche Grundlagen und Methodische Zugänge [Handbook of Corporate Social Responsibility: Theoretical Foundation and Methodological Approaches from Communication Studies] (Raupp, Jarolimek, and Schultz, 2010). The first of these edited, scholarly books raises key issues and challenges that managers face as organizations engage in stakeholder dialogues. The book is very useful, but most of the empirical material is related to Denmark, thus limiting its scope. The title of the second book, The Debate Over Corporate Social Responsibility, gives away the fact that the primary emphasis of the volume is on conceptual foundations for the study of CSR. In other words, the book only contains a few chapters on CSR communication, as such, and stops short of pointing out recommendations for CSR communication. The third book touches on basic concepts of CSR communication, CSR in public communication, interdisciplinary approaches, methodological approaches and case studies. However, the book is published in German and largely focuses on German empirical material, thus limiting its scope and reach.

Taken together then, there has been valuable work on CSR communication in both management and communication and more detailed overviews are presented in chapters to follow. Still, we argue that the work often stays within the limits of its discipline and, furthermore, that it has not reached a critical mass where it has had an impact on mainstream management textbooks. Our goal with this volume is thus to (1) move beyond the scattered journal articles in order to present, discuss and extend on the state-of-the-art insights on CSR communication, and (2) to demonstrate how this research has implications for the strategic management of organizations. As mentioned, we also maintain that CSR and CSR communication deserves to be studied in its own right, since it is such a prominent feature of current business life. The larger backdrop here is the recognition that corporations have become today’s dominating social institution (Deetz, 1992; Korten, 2001).

Defining CSR and CSR Communication: Background and History

Several concepts have been launched to describe the relationship between business and society (see, Elkington, 1998; Henriques and Richardson, 2004; Waddock, 2004; Wood, 1991a). Corporate citizenship is one such notion that has been particularly popular (Waddock, 2001; Windsor, 2001). A journal is dedicated to this concept – Journal of Corporate Citizenship – and large corporations like ExxonMobil and General Electric use the term (e.g., ExxonMobil, 2010; General Electric Company, 2010). Scholars typically point to how corporate citizenship can help to focus on the political role of the corporation, but also that the citizenship concept implies that the corporation has rights, too. Still, the concept has its fair share of detractors, criticizing it for being fundamentally instrumental and self-serving, and masking the profound role of corporations in society (Matten, Crane, and Chapple, 2003; Windsor, 2001).

Several authors prefer to use the term corporate responsibility (e.g., Chen and Bouvain, 2009; Heath and Palenchar, 2008; Hillenbrand and Money, 2007). This is also the term favored by large corporations like Chevron (2010) and ING Group (2010). Probably the best argument for using corporate responsibility is that the term directs attention to how the responsibilities of business extend to the economic sphere and the environment. The latter point is also implicated in the number of large corporations that prefer the term sustainability when they issue their nonfinancial reports. Examples include Shell (2010), BP (2010), and Ford (2010).

Our decision to use CSR, however, is rooted partly in our agreement with the criticism of the corporate citizenship concept, and partly in the pragmatic reason that most of the research literature uses this term (e.g., Burchell, 2008; Crane, Matten, and Spence, 2008; Crane, McWilliams, Matten et al., 2008b; Crowther and Rayman-Bacchus, 2004b; den Hond et al., 2007; Habisch et al., 2005; Idowu and Filho, 2009; May et al., 2007; Vogel, 2005; Werther and Chandler, 2006). The term is also frequently used in business, including large corporations like China National Petroleum Corporation (2010). CSR is still “a dominant, if not exclusive, term in the academic literature and in business practice” (Carroll and Shabana, 2010, p. 86). (See also Chapter 2 and Chapter 3 for different takes on this discussion.)

CSR has a relatively long tradition rooted in notions of philanthropy, but also as a reaction against business’ social transgression (Mitchell, 1989). Still, it is the 1953 book Social Responsibility of the Businessman by Howard R. Bowen that is most frequently credited as laying the foundation for CSR thinking (Carroll, 1999). Many scholars agree that the notion gained foothold during the 1960s as a form of business response to new and stronger social demands (Buchholz and Rosenthal, 1999/2002; Carroll, 1999; Wood, 1991b). Since the late 1990s, however, the relationship between business and society has been discussed with more vigor than before, partly as a consequence of globalization. Many Western companies have increased their presence in new provinces with democratic deficits, questionable human rights records, and widespread corruption. Should the companies take steps to root out such practices, or should this be left to civil society and the governments in the host countries? In addition, both large and small companies face increasing domestic challenges related to the environment, outsourcing and contracting, as well as corruption and other forms of economic crime.

While the argument has been sounded that business should concentrate on legal ways to make profit for its owners (Crook, 2005; Friedman, 1970; Henderson, 2001; Levitt, 1958), the business world has embraced the CSR concept. Among the companies on the Global Fortune 250 list, nonfinancial reporting has become the norm rather than the exception. Nearly 80 percent of these companies issue such reports (KPMG, 2008). Influential institutions such as the United Nations, the European Union, the Organization of Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD), and the World Bank support the notion, and even critics recognize that “for most managers the only real question about CSR is how to do it” (The Economist, 2008, p. 12).

While CSR at a minimum implies that businesses have responsibilities beyond profit-seeking, the notion is still ambiguous. There is no dominant paradigm of CSR and no commonly agreed upon definition (Crane, McWilliams, Matten et al., 2008a; Crowther and Rayman-Bacchus, 2004a; Lockett, Moon, and Visser, 2006; McWilliams, Siegel, and Wright, 2006). One take on the topic is that business earns its “license to operate” from civil society and must act in accordance with accepted social norms to prosper and survive in the long term. The social nature of expectations regarding CSR is illustrated by how conduct that was previously acceptable, is now criticized in the media. Business must take into consideration and attempt to avoid or rectify the harmful effects of its activities.

CSR is an “essentially contested concept” which means that it is also flexible (Okoye, 2009, p. 624). CSR can be defined as a field of scholarship (Crane, McWilliams, Matten et al., 2008a) or as a business strategy of dealing with the social and environmental context (Commission of the European Communities, 2001; Perrini et al., 2006; Vogel, 2005). Some like to add a normative dimension and argue that CSR is about conduc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Part I Introduction
• Part II Field Overviews
• Part III Corporate Social Responsibility Communication in Action
• Part IV Commentaries and Conclusions
• Name Index
• Subject Index