Corporate social responsibility (CSR) communication and small and medium sized enterprises: The governmentality dilemma of explicit and implicit CSR communication
By M. Morsing, Laura J. Spence. Human Relations, 2019
120 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Businesses that promote corporate social responsibility (CSR) through their supply chains by requiring their suppliers to report on and otherwise communicate their CSR are doing a great thing, aren’t they? In this article, we challenge this assumption by focusing on the impact on small and medium sized enterprise (SME) suppliers when their large customer firms pressurize them to make their implicit CSR communication more explicit. We expose a ‘dark side’ to assumed improvements in CSR reporting within a supply chain. We present a conceptual framework that draws on previous research on communication constitutes organization (CCO) theory, implicit and explicit CSR, and Foucault’s governmentality. We identify and discuss the implications of three resulting dilemmas faced by SMEs: authenticity commercialization, values control and identity disruption. The overarching contribution of our article is to extend theorizing on CSR communication and conceptual research on CSR in SME suppliers (small business social responsibility). From a practice and policy perspective, it is not ultimately clear that promoting CSR reporting among SMEs will necessarily improve socially responsible practice.
Subfields: Information Systems and Management, Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management, Strategy and Management
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/2d9ebc8751a5d376c332f0a7c714f8e5711a28e9
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In Information Systems and Management
In Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management
In Strategy and Management
Citations in the corpus
- Critical Essay: The reconciliation of fraternal twins: Integrating the psychological and sociological approaches to ‘micro’ corporate social responsibility (2019, background): “…strategy (Hengst et al, 2019), organizational structures supporting CSR deployment (Sandhu and Kulik, 2018), external and internal communications (Morsing and Spence, 2019), broad social and environmental issues that have to be sold to stakeholders (Wickert and De Bakker, 2018), and CSR…”