Keynote Crane 27 october

1. Researching CSR and
Communication: Challenges
and Opportunities
Andrew Crane
Schulich School of Business
York University, Canada
CSR Communication Conference,
Amsterdam, Oct 2011

2. A conversation waiting to
happen…
CSR Communications
Social
reporting

3. A conversation waiting to
happen…
CSR Communications
Social
reporting Practitioners

4. So what’s so
important about CSR
communication…?

6. What happened to CSR?
“Our commitment to Responsible Finance is embedded throughout the company.
We put the strength of our business, products and people to work to help
improve communities and the environment around the world."
Pamela Flaherty, Director of Corporate Citizenship, Citigroup
“The HSBC Climate Partnership is a five year, US$100m commitment to work with
four leading climate NGOs and engage HSBC employees in understanding and
taking action on carbon emissions."
www.hsbc.com
 16 of the Global 100 “Most Sustainable
Corporations” (2011) are financial services firms
(Corporate Knights/ Sustainalytics/Bloomberg)
 Finance companies are saying a lot about CSR … but
almost nothing about protest, capitalism, lobbying,
bail-outs, executive pay, tax, etc

7. Trust in business in flux
Source: Edelman 2011 Trust Barometer

8. Source: Globescan CSR Monitor

9. Do we need:
More CSR?
Better communicated CSR?
Or just different CSR
communication?

10. Some different ways of thinking
about CSR communication
CSR communication is about how you inform, persuade,
and celebrate your CSR programs
CSR program Communication Audience

11. Some different ways of thinking
about CSR communication
CSR communication is about how you inform, persuade,
and celebrate your CSR programs … and how you gather
and integrate feedback into those programs
CSR program Communication Audience

12. Some different ways of thinking
about CSR communication
CSR communication is about how communication
facilitates the co-creation of CSR programs
CSR program Communication Audience

13. Some different ways of thinking
about CSR communication
CSR communicationAudience how communication
is about Audience
facilitates the co-creation of CSR programs
CSR program Communication Audience
Audience Audience

14. Some different ways of thinking
about CSR communication
CSR communication is about how communication is
embedded into CSR programs
Communication Audience
CSR program

15. So what about
research?

16. 4i’s of CSR communication
research
Internal CSR integration CSR interpretation
External CSR identity CSR image
Reflecting Constituting
Reality Reality

17. 4i’s research
opportunities and
challenges

18. CSR integration
 Opportunity 1: companies are struggling with
understanding how to get CSR buy-in throughout the
organization
Research indicates that employees are often
ill-informed and poorly involved in their company’s
CSR initiatives
“Using Corporate Social Responsibility to Win the War for Talent”
C.B. Bhattacharya, Sankar Sen and Daniel Korschun
Sloan Management Review
January 1, 2008

20. CSR interpretation
 Opportunity 2: CSR is a rich context (or text) to
explore theories around CCO (communicative
constitution of organization, see Cooren et al 2011):
 CSR is brought into being by communication
 E.g.
sensemaking-sensegiving; rhetorical strategies;
narrative; moralization-amoralization, etc.
“Consequently, [CSR] knowledge, rules, processes,
persons, markets, and even organizations themselves
are the ongoing products of meaning-making practices
that are always political in the sense that they could
have been produced otherwise”

21. CSR identity
 Opportunity 3: No one really knows well how to
successfully communicate with external stakeholders
around CSR
 Actually we don’t even agree what “success” is
 From broadcasting CSR identity to accountability –
designing more democratic forms of stakeholder inclusion,
engagement, and reporting
“A deliberative concept of CSR changes the modus of responsibility…
The corporation, within the network of civil society communication,
does not replace the idea of stakeholder management but enhances
it and frames it in an ongoing process of observing and participating
in public discourses.”
Andreas Scherer and Guido Palazzo: 2007, 'Toward a political conception of corporate
responsibility: business and society seen from a Habermasian perspective',
Academy of Management Review, 32(4), 1096-1120.

23. CSR
Truth

24. CSR
Truth CSR
CSR Truth
CSR Truth
CSR
Truth
Truth
CSR CSR
Truth CSR
Truth
Truth

25. CSR image
 Opportunity 4: CSR is an “essentially contested”
concept
 Discursive contestation is ongoing
 CSR communication implicitly defines the division of labor
for responsibility among actors
“There is not a pre-existing market of responsible
consumers out there waiting to be served, but rather
it must be brought into existence through the
assumptions and technologies of market segmentation”
Robert Caruana and Andrew Crane, “Constructing Consumer
Responsibility: Exploring the Role of Corporate Communications”
Organization Studies 2008; 29: 1495-1519

26. Communicating boundaries
what government
is responsible
for…
what we are what you are
“what we do”
responsible for responsible for
what consumers
are responsible
for…

27. Theory
Practice

28. Conclusion
 Conversation waiting to happen
 Why CSR communication is important
 How we think about CSR communication
 4i’s of CSR communication research – opportunities
and challenges

29. For more CSR
communication…
craneandmatten.blogspot.com
@ethicscrane