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The Construction of Corporate Social Responsibility in Network Societies: A Communication View

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Abstract

The paper introduces the communication view on Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), which regards CSR as communicatively constructed in dynamic interaction processes in today’s networked societies. Building on the idea that communication constitutes organizations we discuss the potentially indeterminate, disintegrative, and conflictual character of CSR. We hereby challenge established mainstream views on CSR such as the instrumental view, which regards CSR as an organizational instrument to reach organizational aims such as improved reputation and financial performance, and the political-normative view on CSR, which highlights the societal conditions and role of corporations in creating norms. We argue that both the established views, by not sufficiently acknowledging communication dynamics in networked societies, remain biased in three ways: control-biased, consistency-biased, and consensus-biased. We discuss implications of these biases and propose a future research agenda for the communication view on CSR.

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Acknowledgments

The authors would like to acknowledge the support of the Danish Ministry of Science and Technology and the Strategic Research Council to this research. The authors would also like to express their gratitude to the team and council of the Responsible Business in the Blogosphere project, Joep Cornelissen, Andrew Delios, Dennis Schoeneborn, the Editors of this Special Issue Frank de Bakker, Jeremy Moon, Andreas Rasche, and two anonymous reviewers for inspiring and guiding us in the improvement of the paper.

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Schultz, F., Castelló, I. & Morsing, M. The Construction of Corporate Social Responsibility in Network Societies: A Communication View. J Bus Ethics 115, 681–692 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-013-1826-8

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