Making sense of CSR communication

Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment

Correspondence to: Paul Ziek, Rutgers University, 4 Huntington Street. New Brunswick, New Jersey 08901, USA. Email: [email protected]

Corporate Social Responsibility and Environmental ManagementCorp. Soc. Responsib. Environ. Mgmt. 16, 137–145 (2009)Published online 24 February 2009 in Wiley InterScience(www.interscience.wiley.com) DOI: 10.1002/csr.183

Making Sense of CSR Communication

Paul ZiekRutgers University, 4 Huntington Street. New Brunswick, New Jersey 08901, USA

ABSTRACTAlthough a great deal of research has focused on communicating Corporate Social Respon-sibility (CSR), the literature is diverse and encompasses a plethora of theories and approaches. It is still unclear what communicative behaviors carry the messages of orga-nizational virtuosity and the implementation of responsible initiatives. What is missing is a simple, inclusive assessment of how organizations explicitly communicate the behaviors that constitute CSR. Accordingly, the purpose of this paper is to provide an illustration of the accounts that constitute CSR communication. Fifty US fi rms are examined for CSR moves within a variety of organizational contexts. The results show that communicating CSR is limited to large organizations and primarily, that they communicate CSR by conveying information about classically accepted responsible and virtuous behaviors. This patterned communicative behavior is a process that organizations engage in to make sense of CSR. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.

Received 18 March 2008; revised 25 August 2008; accepted 27 August 2008

Keywords: sensemaking; CSR moves; communicating virtuosity; stakeholder dialogue

Introduction

ALTHOUGH THE CONCEPT OF CORPORATE SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY (CSR) HAS BEEN EVOLVING SINCE THE 1930S (Carroll, 1991; 1999), a series of corporate scandals and business changes that occurred in the early 1990s

(Vogel, 2005) has made it a pervasive phenomenon (Doh and Guay, 2006). Consequently, practitioner

and academic discussions regarding CSR have intensifi ed over the past decade (Munilla and Miles, 2005).

Countless theoretical and popular press articles and books have focused on the philosophical and operational shift

to the triple bottom line (Elkington, 1998) and CSR as a business imperative. Yet an often-overlooked component

of CSR research and practitioner attention is communicating CSR.

Myriad stakeholders such as government agencies, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), employees, invest-

ment fi rms and the general public seek information concerning company policy on governance, environmental

issues, social programs and community involvement (Dawkins and Lewis, 2003). Delivering this information

becomes integral to mitigating risks associated with CSR-related issues, inclusion in indexes and the satisfaction

of behavioral standards. Companies must not only adopt CSR as part of their mission, they must also communi-

cate CSR to stakeholders (Brønn and Vironi, 2001).

The literature that currently focuses on communicating CSR is diverse and encompasses numerous theories

and approaches. Subsequently, there is a vague understanding about the overall behavior of communicating CSR.

A clear assessment of the rhetorical behaviors utilized by organizations to communicate CSR and the dedication

138 P. Ziek

Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment Corp. Soc. Responsib. Environ. Mgmt. 16, 137–145 (2009) DOI: 10.1002/csr

to issues beyond the bottom line is much needed. Equipped with a basic understanding of the rudimentary parts,

a more defi nitive perspective of communicating CSR will develop. Accordingly, the purpose of this paper is to

provide an illustration of the accounts that constitute CSR communication so that further discussions can focus

on the topics that underpin the ideal visions of social organizations (Zadek, 2005) such as transparency, account-

ability and public goods.

Background

The concept of CSR is vague and ambiguous (Frankental, 2001; Coelho et al., 2003) and the confusion (Dahlrud,

2006) creates high equivocality (Weick, 1995) which in turn produces a great deal of organizational communica-

tion variation. Indeed many channels have been used to communicate CSR from the annual report (Cerin, 2002)

to nonfi nancial reporting (Hooghiemstra, 2000; Chatterji and Levine, 2006; Haddock-Fraser & Fraser, 2008) to

web pages (Coupland, 2005; Guimarães-Costa and Pina e Cunha, 2008). In addition to methods and genres, the

overall approach to the communicating CSR varies by organization and is contingent on many factors, such as

location (Chappel & Moon, 2005; Baughn et al., 2007; Welford et al., 2007), size (Esrock and Leichty, 1998; Spence

et al., 2003; Graafl and et al., 2003) and the departmental origin of the communicative behavior (L’Etang, 1994;

Frankental, 2001; Hockerts and Moir, 2004;Chamorro and Bañegil, 2006; Porter and Kramer, 2006). With such

a vast organizational landscape, academic research depicting and explaining CSR communication has followed

suit.

Although previous literature has laid much of the ground work, what is needed is an analysis of the basic units

of linguistic communication that constitute CSR communication. As Carey (1989, p. 31) explains, ‘we understand

communication insofar as we are able to build models or representations of this process.’ Consequently, the

purpose of this paper is to illustrate the moves that constitute CSR communication in an attempt to explain the

broader organizational behavior. In other words, a refl ection about the hypothesis of communication that provides

evidence about the choices made by organizations (Aakhus, 2007) when communicating CSR. With this in mind,

several research questions regarding CSR communication guide this paper.

RQ1: How do fi rms communicate CSR?

RQ2: Does communicating CSR vary between fi rms?

RQ3: Is there a pattern of communicating CSR?

Method

Moves

To study CSR communication, this paper relied on Goffman’s (1981) notion of the communicative move. A com-

municative move is talk that has a distinctive unitary bearing on some circumstance (Goffman, 1981). Thus, a CSR

communicative move is making CSR behaviors explicit and available in an organizational context. Moreover, CSR

communicative moves are the foundation for the extensive expression of organizational behaviors. This thematic

approach to unitizing allowed the paper to encompass a variety of CSR communicative moves that act indepen-

dently of particular organizational channels, media or genres.

Although ‘it is diffi cult to come up with a uniform unit of analysis with which to precisely specify the extent of

CSR’ (Chappel and Moon, 2005, p. 424), Schwartz and Carroll (2003) have developed an approach to CSR that

they believe can serve as a behavioral defi nition for researchers. The model includes three domains: economic,

legal, and ethical responsibilities (Schwartz and Carroll, 2003). Using Schwartz and Carroll (2003) as a guide, it

is the communicative circumstance (Goffman, 1981) of CSR that deemed something a move. The move had to

represent an organization’s dedication to economic, legal and ethical responsibilities (Schwartz and Carroll, 2003).

For example, CSR communicative moves included organizational descriptions of Citizenship, Environmental

Communication CSR 139


Sustainability, Stewardship, Community, Human Rights, Volunteerism, and Ethics, to name a few. In short, to

qualify as a CSR move, there must have been an explicit attempt to communicate the virtuosity of the fi rm.

In addition, moves can and do occur within a variety of organizational contexts that are ‘socially recognizable

types of organizational communication’ (Orlikowski and Yates, 1994, p. 542). Consequently the CSR moves studied

included discussions of CSR behaviors and initiatives in the following organizational contexts: Annual Report; Annual Shareholders Letter; Indexes and Organizational Linkages; Information on Philanthropy; Nonfi nancial Reports; Organizational Codes and dedicated nonfi nancial Web Page.

Annual Report

Many companies are bound by regulation to produce and distribute an annual fi nancial report. But most often

they become an all-encompassing apparatus for both fi nancial and social information. Indeed, more and more

organizations are using annual reports as vehicles for the publication of CSR evaluations (van Huijstee and Glas-

bergen, 2007) and environmental performance (Brown and Deegan, 1998). In fact, according to Dawkins (2004),

many audiences are not proactively looking for information on corporate responsibility, and subsequently, there

is a case for embedding corporate responsibility messages in more mainstream communications such as the

annual report. To code for this move, an organization’s 2005 Annual Report was located and examined for a

dedicated self-contained CSR section.

Annual Shareholders Letter

Hemingway and Maclagan (2004) explained that the personal values of individual leaders are connected with the

adoption and implementation of CSR. These leaders are often the Chief Executive Offi cer (CEO) and therefore

their communication competency (Ruben, 2006) also becomes an important aspect in organizational communica-

tion of CSR. Beyond appearances, speeches, fi nancial presentations, and interviews, the annual letter to sharehold-

ers is a strategic communication tool used to rationalize corporate events and predict future performance (Segars

and Kohut 2001; Cerin, 2002). After searching the 2005 Annual Report for a dedicated CSR section, the CEO

letter to shareholders was evaluated for discussions of CSR.

Indexes or Organizational Linkages

Organizational participation in environmental and CSR alliances (Arts, 2002), coalitions (Zadek, 2005) and part-

nerships dedicated to addressing public policy and systematic social issues (Zadek and Radovich, 2006) have

increased in recent years. Association with unions such as the World Business Council for Sustainable Develop-

ment (Daboub and Calton, 2002) or green alliances (Stafford and Hartman, 1996; Hartman and Stafford, 1997;

1998) enable fi rms to adopt a substantial material and symbolic level proactive approach (Livesey, 1999). In addi-

tion, as Castka et al. (2004) explain, the ISO 9001:2000 and 1400 can help fl ood CSR issues into the organizational

system. Thus, networks based around standards such as the ISO (Morhardt et al., 2002) can provide a source of

guidance which affords a method of communication and organizational representation. To this end, participation

in any CSR network constituted the use of this communicative move.

Information on Philanthropy

Although corporate philanthropy has existed since the late 1800s, it radically changed during the 1980s with the

idea of linking corporate philanthropy with business interests. Today, corporate philanthropy, which is also referred

to as strategic philanthropy, is considered a planned activity designed to meet business strategies (Genest, 2005).

And because strategic philanthropy can be used by organizations to improve their competitive context (Porter and

Kramer, 2003), communication becomes an important facet of this activity. In fact, as Genest (2005 p. 316) main-

tained, corporate philanthropy is used by fi rms as ‘a tool in the communication arsenal positioning the corporation

in the competitive marketplace’. Corporate philanthropy is the foundation upon which CSR is built and thus

140 P. Ziek


describing this behavior in an organizational context becomes the oldest of the communicative moves. For this

study, organizational discussions and statements referring to organizational level philanthropy constituted the use

of the move.

Nonfi nancial Report

Even though reporting of environmental and social information is not mandatory (Morhardt et al., 2002), to move

toward greater transparency and disclosure of behaviors, numerous companies have committed to producing

nonfi nancial reports (Frankental, 2001). As Cerin (2002, p. 217) explains, ‘these reports offer a previously unavail-

able window into corporate environmental and social strategy and performance.’ Flawed as they may be considered

(Chatterji and Levine, 2005; Schafer, 2005), annual social reports are still considered to improve the accountabil-

ity of the fi rm to external stakeholders (Graafl and et al., 2003), particularly when the Global Reporting Initiative

(GRI) is followed (Cerin, 2002). Social and environmental reports are also an important facet of the inclusion in

various investing indices (Collison et al., 2008). As a result, nonfi nancial reports have become a prime channel

for how organizations, particularly large organizations (Cerin, 2002; Haddock-Fraser and Fraser, 2008), commu-

nicate responses to corporate responsibility issues (Dawkins, 2004). Consequently, this move was based on the

availability of a nonfi nancial report from any year.

Organizational Codes

According to Murphy (2005), the earliest known ethics statement was developed by J.C. Penny in 1913. Although

codes differ widely in scope (Bindu and Salk, 2006), they have grown to become a more delineated treatment of

a fi rm’s ethical behaviors (Murphy, 2005). In today’s business environment, many fi rms utilize both voluntary

(Bindu and Salk, 2006) and mandatory codes of conduct (Graafl and et al., 2003) and codes of ethics (Murphy,

2005) to communicate the principled behavior of the fi rm. The use of this move was based simply on the existence

of an organizational code of conduct, ethics or CSR.

Web Page

As Guimarães-Costa and Pina e Cunha (2008) suggested, the Internet is the best medium available for companies

to convey socially responsible information. More specifi cally, web pages offer corporations an opportunity to

participate in ‘setting the agenda’ on public policy issues (Esrock and Leighty, 1998). To this end, Flanagin (2000)

dictates that organizational websites constitute an important development in contemporary organizational land-

scape. Thus this move was determined based on an organizationally maintained and dedicated CSR web page.

Sampling

Baughn et al. (2007) and Welford et al. (2007) both explained that CSR is a location-specifi c context, thus a non

probability sample of US companies was drawn from two sources: Fortune 500 2005 and 2005 Forbes’s special

report, America’s Largest Private Companies. In total, the study includes 50 companies: 25 privately owned and 25

publicly held. The companies were further separated by the additional characteristics of size by revenue and

number of employees. This includes organizations from the Top 5 in revenue, Mid 5 in revenue, Bottom 5 in

revenue, companies with 25,000 employees and companies with 10,000 employees. Appendix 1 lists the organiza-

tions studied.

Procedure

As Esrock and Leighy (1998) maintain, one of the most important ways in which an organization can communi-

cate its social responsibility is to utilize rapidly expanding computer-mediated-communication networks. Indeed,

technologies such as the Internet and computer-mediated communication enable affordances (Hutchy, 2001;



Aakhus and Jackson, 2004), or, the creation and maintenance of new organizational communication procedures

and behaviors that are an important means of CSR communication (Haddock-Fraser and Fraser, 2008). Then it

should be no surprise that the Internet and World Wide Web are deemed to be great tools for CSR research (Esrock

and Leighty, 1998; Chapple and Moon, 2005; Guimarães-Costa & Pina e Cunha, 2008) as they act as a central

repository for CSR communication and information.

To fi nd the communicative moves associated with this study, each fi rm’s website was located and the commu-

nicative moves found were coded either ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ for the presence or absence of CSR messages. This web-based

procedure offered various advantages for comparative study and ‘a functionally uniform unit of analysis in that all

represent an offi cial presentation of companies’ policies and procedures’ (Chapple and Moon, 2005, p. 424). For

additional information on Indexes or Organizational Linkages, three Internet search engines were used to deter-

mine membership.

Results

Research Question 1: Cumulative Frequency of Moves

There was a large difference in move usage as Information on Philanthropy, Organizational Codes and Web Page

were utilized much more than the Annual Report, Annual Letter to Shareholders, Nonfi nancial Report and company

involvement in Indexes or Organizational Linkages. In fact, of the 134 total moves, Information on Philanthropy,

Organizational Codes and Web Page accounted for 69%. Additionally, Information on Philanthropy and Organiza-tional Codes together accounted for 48% of the total moves.

Overall, Information on Philanthropy was the most used communicative move with 66% of the companies detail-

ing donations and community involvement. Closely behind was Organizational Codes with 64% of the organiza-

tions making them available to stakeholders. And with 56% of the companies publishing a dedicated CSR web

page, Web Page was the third, most-exercised move. The remainder of the moves examined accounted for very

little. The Annual Letter to Shareholders and Nonfi nancial Report was used by 24% of the companies. Finally, of the

organizations studied, 18% were involved with related Indexes or Organizational Linkages and 16% had dedicated

sections in the Annual Report.

Research Question 2: Company Characteristics and Frequency of Moves

All of the groups except the Bottom 5 in revenue used the communicative move of Information on Philanthropy.

And although Organizational Codes was highly utilized, it is mostly employed by public organizations. In addition,

although 56% of the total companies bring into play the Web Page move, the difference between private and public

ownership usage was negligible. However, 90% of the Top 5 in revenue and 60% of the Mid 5 in revenue and

25,000-employee organizations used the Web Page move compared to only 20% of the Bottom 5 in revenue.

Research Question 3: Ensembles of Moves

Ensembles of fi rms could be identifi ed by the type of CSR communication they employed. The ensembles ranged

from the inclusion of two organizations to seven and encompass anywhere from the utilization of one move to all

seven moves. The largest assembly of fi rms contains seven organizations that relied only on Organizational Codes to communicate CSR. The second largest ensemble was a compilation of fi ve companies that utilized Information on Philanthropy, Organizational Codes and Web Page. And four organizations comprised the third-largest group

where Information on Philanthropy and Web Page were the moves of choice. Although this small sample used only

nominal data and not company characteristics in regards to the creation of ensembles, this is an important aspect

of communicating CSR. Even with the lack of basic characterization regarding CSR, organizations communicated

CSR using the same basic communicative moves.

To move beyond bar charts, frequencies and crosstabulations, I created a composite variable that was comprised

of the sum of all seven moves. An organization’s composite score ranged from 0 to 7, depending on how many

142 P. Ziek


moves were used to communicate CSR. The mean composite score of 3 dictated that on average, organizations

used 3 moves to communicate CSR. However, the mode was 1. In other words, 11 organizations, the bulk of com-

panies examined, used only 1 move to communicate CSR. If this is coupled with the 8 companies that did not use

any moves, then 38% of the companies examined make an extremely limited attempt to communicate CSR.

To test the earlier contention that CSR communication is related to the size of an organization, a Pearson cor-

relation test was performed. The specifi c measure was to determine the relationship between the Composite (total

communicative moves) and company revenue. With a score of .479, a signifi cant correlation was detected. There-

fore, this paper mirrors what has been discussed in previous literature, that there is a relationship between revenue

and CSR (Esrock and Leighty, 1998; Birth et al., 2006) as well as CSR communication (Graafl and et al., 2003;

Chapple and Moon 2005; Knox et al., 2005).

Discussion

Communicating CSR is limited to large organizations (Graafl and et al., 2003; Chapple and Moon, 2005; Knox

et al., 2005) and although there is variation in the moves utilized by these large fi rms, they do cluster regarding

the moves chosen to depict the ethical and virtuous behaviors of the organization. Primarily, the organizations

communicate CSR by conveying information about classically accepted CSR behaviors. As McClimon (2004)

explains, philanthropy is the oldest and most widely recognized piece of CSR as it dates back to the late 1800s.

And Murphy (2005) dates the birth and popularity of the Code of Ethics back to the early twentieth century, making

it clearly the second-oldest CSR behavior. The use of these characteristically understood communicative moves

draw on the language of predecessors (Powell and Colyvas, 2008). This process of retrospective sensemaking

(Weick, 1995) in turn fi lters and directs communicative behaviors on what can be said, and how it can be said

(Powell and Colyvas, 2008). The overwhelming use of the Information on Philanthropy and Organizational Codes infers that organizations rely on stakeholders’ comprehension that the fi rm is indeed communicating CSR.

Language can be regarded as a series of systems of constitutive rules and illocutionary acts (Searle, 1965) and

these rules guide behaviour and enable social organization (Taylor and Cooren, 1997). Therefore, if communica-

tion is based on a set of defi ned and prearranged rules, then it is possible to refl ect about the hypothesis that is

evident in the choices made by participants (Aakhus, 2007). Although the limitations of this study include a small

sample and small number of moves, the fi ndings do point to the fact that organizations presuppose (Aakhus and

Jackson, 2004) that this limited practice should follow a scripted transmission approach to communication. In

short, even though organizations can draw from numerous moves, communication cycles are scripted which helps

in the act of delineating the behavioural aspects of CSR with traditional operations.

Consequently, this model of interaction has been widely disparaged. As Elkington (2006) remarks, the debate

concerning CSR is shifting from public relations, impression management and legitimacy to issues of competitive

advantage and corporate governance. In an attempt to overcome criticisms, theorists, researchers and business

professionals have demanded a transformation of organizational governance and decision-making that includes

more representational voices (Kuhn and Deetz, 2008); a move beyond organizationally controlled CSR to the

acceptance and use of a stakeholder-managed model of environmental, social and governance issues. But this

partnership will require a shift in the logic that underlies the current model of communication (Suddaby and

Greenwood, 2005) and an acceptance of a logic that gives way to communication that allows an interaction of the

support of information and statements as well as the opportunity for challenges of accounts.

Conclusion

Countless organizational stakeholders are extremely interested in the actions taken by fi rms to become more vir-

tuous and socially responsible. And although there has been an increased acceptance of behaviors that constitute

an organization’s interest beyond fi nancial gain, the act of communicating CSR is still often overlooked. This

situation makes communicating CSR an elusive phenomenon that is not well understood by researchers and



practitioners. Numerous scholars have shed light on the subject of communicating CSR using a plethora of frame-

works. This previous literature has laid much of the ground work, yet there is still more to be done. In an attempt

to move toward more understanding of the phenomenon, the current study provides an assessment of the rhe-

torical and symbolic behaviors of CSR (Campbell, 2006) and found that the current framework of CSR commu-

nication is an attempt to reduce defi nitional equivocality (Weick, 1995) by conveying information about implicitly

understood CSR behaviors (Birth et al., 2006). But if nothing else, this paper reveals that communicating CSR is

still a subject that needs and deserves further research because as the signifi cance of CSR grows, so, too, does the

act of communicating CSR.

Appendix 1

Aecom IAC/InteractiveAsplundh Tree Expert JR SimplotBank of New York KelloggBB&T Corporation Kindred HealthcareBoise Cascase King PharmaceuticalsBon-Ton Stores Koch IndustriesBrightstar KohlerCampbell Soup M Fabrikant & SonsCargill MarsCarMax Meridian AutomotiveChevron MervynsCincinnati Financial Metro-Goldwyn-MayerCoach OmnicareCommercial Metals Peabody EnergyConcentra Operating Plastech EngineeredDelaware North Cos Pogo ProducingEstes Express Lines PricewaterhouseCoopersExxon Mobile Publix Super MarketsF Dohmen Sutherlands LumberFord Motor SwagelokFrank Consolidated Wal-Mart StoresGeneral Electric Watkins AssociatedGeneral Motors WatscoGiant Eagle Wendy’s InternationalGolden West Financials Wm. Wrigley Jr.

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Documents

Making sense of CSR communication