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One Rule to Rule Them All? Organisational Sensemaking of Corporate Responsibility

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Abstract

Corporate responsibility (CR) has often been criticised as a decoupled organisational phenomenon: a publicly espoused rule that is not followed in daily organisational practices. We argue that a crucial reason for this criticism arises from the dominant in-house assumption of CR literature, which mitigates tensions and contradictions in organisational life by claiming that integrated rules result in coupled practices. We aim to provide new insights by problematising this in-house assumption and by examining how members of two organisations discursively make sense of CR, as a daily rule-bound practice, via three strategies: integration, differentiation and fragmentation. We elaborate the contemporary literature on CR as a daily organisational practice by examining the significance of discursive sensemaking for organisational rules for further development and learning regarding CR. We then discuss the significance of our results for understanding CR as a coupled/decoupled phenomenon.

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Notes

  1. One of the aims of CR is to increase voluntary rule-setting behaviour and standardisation on behalf of corporations in order to achieve conformity in environments without bounding laws and regulations (Fransen and Kolk 2007). By definition, standards are specific types of rules (Blind 2004, p. 65) that vary in the ways that they are applied in organisations and their environments. We therefore use the terms interchangeably in order to avoid repetition.

  2. To be more specific, these differences bear a strong resemblance to the seminal work of Burrell and Morgan (1979) on sociological paradigms in organisational research.

  3. We consider the strategic use of discourse to differ from sensegiving (Gioia and Chittipeddi 1991) when the latter is understood as a deliberate attempt to shape others’ interpretations.

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    1. School Business and Economics, University of Jyväskylä, P.O. Box 35, 40014, Jyväskylä, Finland

      Tiina Onkila & Marjo Siltaoja

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    1. Tiina Onkila
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    Correspondence to Tiina Onkila.

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    Both authors contributed equally to this article.

    The paper has benefitted from the suggestions and comments received at the 8th OS paper development workshop (Mykonos, 2013) and EGOS annual conference (Helsinki, 2012). We are also grateful to our colleagues for their feedback. The research has been funded by The Finnish Work Environment Fund (109344) and the Finnish Funding Agency for Technology and Innovation (40170/10).

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    Onkila, T., Siltaoja, M. One Rule to Rule Them All? Organisational Sensemaking of Corporate Responsibility. J Bus Ethics 144, 5–20 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-015-2763-5

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