Communicative Dilemmas of CSR: Towards an Integrative Framework of CSR Communication

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) is said to be resting on a fundamental dilemma: a dilemma between ethical obligations towards society versus economic duties of maximising profits. In other words: A clash occurs between business and morality. In this chapter, we explore how this fundamental dilemma is replicated in CSR communication contexts. The purpose is to conceptually explore CSR dilemmas in communication contexts in order to develop an integrative framework for understanding the complexity of and communicative dilemmas embedded in CSR. Framed by three communication disciplines (integrated marketing communication, organisational communication and corporate communication), we outline how CSR is applied, and how it changes and redefines key concepts within each discipline. CSR generates new stakeholder demands and social expectations towards the organisation; the question is how the organisation manages and communicates this new role of responsibility. On that basis, we discuss how the CSR dilemma manifests as three communicative dilemmas: A self-promotion dilemma related to challenges of promoting CSR without simultaneously demonstrating its organisational anchoring; an identification dilemma related to the challenges of creating CSR value for employee identification without becoming a normative tool of employee identity control; and a relation dilemma, which is concerned with the challenges related to stakeholder engagement and the balancing of how to integrate the multivocality of different, opposing stakeholders without compromising the ideal of representing one unified corporate entity. The insights of the chapter contribute to the literature on CSR and CSR communication by providing a more nuanced understanding of the challenges and complexity of CSR communication, manifested as communicative dilemmas.