Corporate Social Responsibility Strategy, Communication, Governance

The third part of the book discusses corporate social responsibility (CSR) communication as a new area, reflecting the emerging CSR literature's responses to the increased demand on companies to be more explicit and transparent about their CSR activities. This selection of chapters introduces key concepts to understand the opportunities for business engagement in CSR communication, while it also unfolds the complexity and approaches to manoeuvre this complexity in the context of social media. CSR communication is most often linked to the way that companies present their CSR activities to external audiences in advertising, marketing campaigns or CSR reports. The basic idea is that the positive association of CSR will lend itself to improve the corporate image. However, in practice many companies have experienced such communication attracting attention from sceptical stakeholders who criticise the company for not doing enough or for doing the wrong things. All chapters in this part point to this ‘double edge’: CSR communication is necessary, yet it has reputational risks. CSR communication must be managed, yet it is often beyond the corporate control to do so. With the rise of social media, many different stakeholders take part in the conversation about companies’ CSR. As such, the corporate messages from managers are only one among many other voices that come to influence the CSR communication and present managers with new challenges.

Mette Morsing (Chapter 11) introduces some of the key approaches to CSR communication. The discussion points out how CSR communication not only includes the strategically planned communication from managers but also the less planned and informal forms of communication. The chapter presents an overview of three CSR communication strategies and provides students with an insight into the main phases of the development of CSR communication. Tim Coombs (Chapter 12) builds on this overview by showing how crisis communication is centrally linked to CSR and reputation. Coombs takes the reader through the central modes of crisis communication exemplified by cases that illustrate the importance for companies in knowing how to respond when crises hit. Finally, Coombs recommends how to engage with CSR crisis communication.