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Advisor(s)
Abstract(s)
Introduction and Purpose of the study:
In our contemporaneity that many designate under the acronym VUCA (volatile, unpredictable, complex and ambiguous) it is urgent to rethink, paraphrasing Woot (2013, 2016), "in the face of the force of things", the responsibility of the human being. It does not seem enough to search for a new political paradigm, but it seems that we all need a new way of life. More than the notion of mission or vision, it is the notion of purpose that guides organizational practices and performances, and position them in global ecosystems as partners with other companies or entities from other sectors. Companies today must regain values that have been lost for a few decades and that lead them to assume their role as citizens in communities, with their rights and duties, as each and every one of us.
It's precisely in this sense that this research was constructed. Assuming a constitutive interpretation of the concept of "communication" that enables us to understand it as belonging to the realm of any organization, as well as avoiding any instrumental vision of the concept of "Corporate Social Responsibility" (CSR), related to the merely instrumental role attributed to some notions as those of sustainability or accountability. In Portugal, The GRACE Association congregates 158 organisations from both the private and non governmental sectors, that are specially interested in the above mentioned questions.
In this research authors tried to figure out not only if the concepts of "social responsible enterprise", "corporate social responsibility", "corporate social investment" and "corporate citizenship" were used by the GRACE associates, but also how they were used and what they meant for each one of those specific organizations.
Literature Review:
The decision authors took, from a theoretical point of view, to design the research based on the concept of "Corporate Citizenship" is intentional. This notion emerged in recent years as rescuing some of the ideas prevailing in Western societies before the neoliberal turn of the last decades of the 20th century (Woot, 2004, 2013). In the perspective of the first publisher of The Journal of Corporate Citizenship, a journal published quarterly in the UK., "true corporate citizenship involves much more than what has traditionally been called CSR" (Waddoc, 2003: 3). To paraphrase Pattern, in a theoretical framework that we can call an "ethics of duty," a clearly modern paradigm, to act well is still, in the end, to act in our best interest. Do these organisations act according to these idea? What do they consider as belonging to the realm of CSR? What is the role of strategic communications in these processes (Hallahan et al., 2007)?
Methodology:
From a theoretical point of view the research belongs to the realm of an interpretative paradigm of investigation. Interviews (according an open scrypt) that met all requirements both from the point of view of ethical issues (eg. issues of informed consent) and from the point of view of research validity (triangulation) were performed and recorded. Although the theme is not at all consensual, it was decided to maintain the phase related to the collection of data (information) separated from the phase of its analysis. Although with some contamination it is hoped that somehow preserving the interviewers from being overly influenced by previous respondents during subsequent interviews. The interviews were transcribed in full. It is intended with transcription (unlike for example what would be expected if the option were the one of the paraphrase or the summary) to preserve the sense of the speaker, that is to say, the transcription allows not to make interpretations previous to the analysis, thus maintaining a greater proximity to the original data. A qualitative content analysis was afterwards performed (Berger, 2014). Some of the limitations that are intrinsic to this type of analyses are also assumed (Seidman, 2013), and they are related to a certain amount of perspectivism that is due to the fact that the "facts" are somehow always mediated by the experience itself.
Results and Conclusions:
If some consensus were found, they dealt with the idea that almost all the organizations consider social work as belonging to their practices and a major issue in their work and none of them seem to have major policies in what we may refer as questions concerning governance and work-life balance policies. Major differences appear when confronting national and international organizations, as well according to activities sectors, in aspects related to the questions of quality, safety and environment. Questions of ethics and transparency aren't focused as often as we might have expected. Some sectors specifically in the area of services offered some of the most unexpected results in terms of the economic investments put in the area of CSR. At this moment, authors are still gathering the last results notably in what concerns CSR and government financial incentives.
Description
Keywords
Corporate citizenship Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) Communication management IPL/2018/3Cs_ESCS
Citation
Eiró-Gomes, M., Raposo, A., & Simão, J. (2019, jul, 04-06). Communication and corporate citizenship in a VUCA world: An empirical research. Comunicação apresentada na BledCom 2019: Trust and Reputation / 26th International Public Relations Research Symposium, Rikli Balance Hotel, Lake Bled, Slovenia