1,720,971 research outputs found
How have banks performed institutional maintenance work in their CSR/annual reports to address their responsibility for the financial crisis?
No full textCSR reporting after the financial crisis: Reconciling pro-sociality with profitability
No full textPurpose: Our point of departure is the discretion companies have in their CSR reports to
emphasize positive aspects of their CSR performance and downtone or omit negative events.
We study this discretion in the specific context of CSR reporting by companies that are under
a high-profile legal investigation for alleged mismanagement. These companies are in a
situation where the very idea of transparency and accountability inherent in CSR reporting is
at odds with the business logic of profitability. They face the dilemma of inflating a potential
fine when acknowledging any responsibility for the alleged misdeeds in their CSR reports,
but at the same time cannot not address this issue in their CSR reports, if these reports are to
be of any value to their stakeholders.
Design/methodology/approach: Adopting a discursive approach, we selected the case of
large U.S. banks after the financial crisis to study how they handled this communicative
challenge of needing to rebuild their legitimacy in their CSR reports while being under a
high-profile criminal investigation. We combine the fields of organizational discourse with
CSR communication in a cross-disciplinary study of CSR reports. This is a rare combination,
as CSR communication has traditionally been based on quantitative, content-analytic analyses
of CSR reports.
Findings: The study shows how CSR reports do not just disseminate information about a
company's social and environmental performance, but contribute to the definition of these
very responsibilities towards stakeholders through positive identity claims, the discursive
construction of relationships, and the discursive connection of the company with favorable
events and the disconnection from unfavorable events.
Originality/value: Our study is qualitative in nature and contributes to the relatively small,
but growing stream of research that has adopted a discursive, constructivist approach to CSR
communication. Specifically, our study contributes an understanding of how discourse
strategies are used to define and redefine responsibilities in CSR reports, especially in times
of legal uncertainties
To Be Responsible, or Not to Be Responsible: Managing Guilt After Organization-Level Failures
Full text linkOrganizational responses to failures are traditionally classified into accommodative strategies,
through which the organization accepts responsibility for the failure by apologizing and
implementing corrective action, and defensive strategies, through which the organization does not
accept responsibility by denying or by providing justifications. However, the complexity of large
organizations entails that it can take years to establish whether an alleged failure has occurred at
all and to what extent a specific organization is responsible for it. Given the high level of media
interest after an organization-level failure, organizations need to communicate with the public
about their potential guilt, but are ill-advised to deny or admit any guilt, before they are
eventually either convicted or exonerated. We refer to this discursive practice of addressing guilt
without admitting or denying it as guilt management. The contribution of this paper is twofold.
Based on a review of guilt in the fields of psychology, philosophy, and law, we first contribute a
theoretical understanding of organizational guilt, which is not an established concept yet. Second,
we conduct a fine-grained discourse analysis of organizational guilt management to arrive at an
empirically grounded understanding of guilt-management strategies used by organizations under
suspicion of a large-scale failure
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
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