Abstract

The business case for corporate social responsibility (CSR) suggests that by doing good (i.e., engaging in CSR) a firm will do well (i.e., be profitable), and this notion has permeated the linguistic sensemaking of firm actors. But how are firms that articulate business‐case justifications evaluated by various stakeholders? We hypothesize that the way firms communicate their CSR engagement (i.e., accompanied by business‐case justifications or not) differentially impacts stakeholders’ perceived integrity, benevolence and ability trustworthiness of the firm. Conducting the same online experiment with two separate samples from the United States, we replicate three results; business‐case justification for CSR reduces benevolence trustworthiness among employees, increases ability trustworthiness among investors, and has no effect on perceived trustworthiness among consumers. We discuss the implications of our findings for the CSR literature and encourage future researchers to more carefully scrutinize the implications of justifying CSR with the business case.