Search results

Based on the construal level theory, this research study examines the interactive effect between social crowding and corporate social responsibility (CSR) statement type on consumers' purchase intention.

The authors conducted two empirical experiments on a total of 508 subjects.

There is an interactive effect between social crowding and CSR statement type on consumers' purchase intention. Specifically, in high social crowding situations, concrete CSR statements lead to consumers' higher purchase intention, while in low social crowding situations, abstract CSR statements lead to consumers' higher purchase intention. Self-construal and processing fluency play a moderating and mediating role in the mechanism.

This research study contributes to the theoretical understanding of the interaction between social crowding and CSR statements, enriching the field of consumer behavior research on social crowding. Additionally, it offers practical insights for enterprises on how to present CSR information in crowded situations.

Based on the framing theory and the associative network theory, the purpose of this paper is to develop and test a model that examines the impact of employing corporate social responsibility (CSR) communication in apology statements after negative publicity. Specifically, this study examines the role of CSR fit and CSR history in reducing anger and negative word-of-mouth (NWOM). This study also examines whether perceived CSR motivation and skepticism toward the apology statement mediate the effect of CSR fit and CSR history on anger and NWOM.

This study was a 2×2 between-subject design manipulating CSR fit (high or low) and CSR history (long or short).

The findings of this study suggest that strategically employing CSR communication in an apology statement after negative publicity may reduce negative consumer reactions.

The effects of CSR history and CSR fit have been studied in different contexts, but the effects of mentioning the two components in terms of apology statements had been understudied. This paper fulfills an identified need to study how employing CSR communication in apology statements after negative publicity can mitigate negative audience reactions.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how Malaysian CEO Statements represent corporate social responsibility (CSR).

A corpus of 27 CEO Statements was analyzed using Fairclough's three-dimensional critical discourse analysis (CDA) model, which proposes analyzing text, discourse practice and social practice. The analysis emphasized image and language features in text while it explored intertextuality in discourse practice and ideology in social practice.

The analysis revealed that selected image and language features contribute to six themes about CSR, namely achievement, identification, aspiration, disclosure, recognition and appreciation. The analysis also revealed that policies, standards and studies are often cited to reduce a credibility gap. These analyses indicate that CEO Statements represent CSR as a corporation's philanthropic initiatives for stakeholders. This representation reflects the ideology of CEO Statements. It establishes corporations as an agent of positive change in society, which helps to improve the social legitimacy of corporations.

Since the corpus was limited to ten corporations in three years, the findings might not be representative of the genre of CEO Statements. The corpus could be extended to include CEO Statements from other years, countries and languages and it can launch a productive enterprise in intercultural studies.

This paper demonstrates CDA as an approach to understand CEO Statements. It may be useful to people practicing and teaching corporate communication because it encourages them to consider the meaning implied by image and language features, which can influence the meaning of CEO Statements.

The purpose of this paper is to contribute to understanding the effects of framing apology statements with corporate social responsibility (CSR) communications after a company has suffered negative publicity. Specifically, this study examined the role of CSR fit on consumers’ skepticism toward the apology statement and attitude toward the company compared to a no-CSR message condition. In addition, the study also analyzed the interaction effects between CSR fit and history on skepticism toward the apology statement and attitude toward the company.

A 2 (CSR fit: high or low) × 2 (CSR history: long or short) between-subject design was employed to examine the hypotheses. In addition, a no-CSR message group without any mention of CSR activities was included. To test the hypothesized constructs of main interest (i.e. CSR fit and CSR history) and incremental validity in the same set of model equations, this study used a hierarchical regression approach.

The high CSR fit condition led to less skepticism toward the apology statement and a more positive attitude toward the company than the no-CSR message condition did. The low CSR fit condition, in contrast, led to more skepticism toward the apology statement and a less positive attitude toward the company than the no-CSR message condition did. In addition, the results showed that the interaction effects between CSR fit and history will predict skepticism toward the apology statement and attitude toward the company.

There is little research on the effectiveness of high (congruent) and low (incongruent) CSR fit compared to a no-CSR message condition. To address this gap, this paper compared the effectiveness of the two conditions to a no-CSR condition.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how Malaysian CEO Statements employ language and image to convey interaction between the CEO and stakeholders.

The paper examines an archive of 32 Malaysian CEO Statements. The archive is analyzed with Systemic Functional Multimodal Discourse Analysis (SF-MDA), where several interpersonal systems can establish how language and image features articulate interaction. The analysis identifies who the stakeholders are, and how these stakeholders and the CEO interact.

There are four stakeholders, who are the community, customer, employee and environment, and these stakeholders are sub-categorized by type or activity. The stakeholders and the CEO share multisemiotic interaction through contact, reaction and equality. These three strategies mimic a face-to-face conversation (contact) and the CEO is depicted to reveal some positive emotions (reaction) to social equals (equality). These strategies reflect synthetic personalization, through which the CEO and stakeholders seem to interact because the CEO speaks directly to stakeholders in friendly conversation about CSR. CEO Statements are part of the quest for social legitimacy and designate corporations as agents of positive social change. Their ideology can be stated as a general principle: corporation A recognizes problem B and proposes solution C, which has positive result D for stakeholder E.

Previous research has not emphasized interaction in CEO Statements. The paper also utilized SF-MDA, which may enhance the discursive competence or a systematic way to decipher language and image for people who practice or teach corporate communication.

Research on corporate social responsibility (CSR) reporting highlights an increasing lack of transparency in the information reported along with concerns surrounding overall reporting practices. One area that needs exploration is how chief executive officers (CEOs) convey messages in relation to CSR. This paper aims to investigate the linkage between CEO’s statements (words and images) in relation to CSR and the performativity of such communication.

The study analysed CEOs statements from five Malaysian companies contained in 2016, 2017 and 2018 standalone sustainability and annual reports. The texts and visuals are analysed by using discourse analysis.

The findings uncover three main discourses (economic, environmental and social) along with other discourses (achievements and recognition and challenges). The texts and images are found to be lacking in clarity and consistency and in many ways leave the stakeholders to make their own conclusions about the reported information.

The research indicates that while the leaders can be more direct to their stakeholders, however, the opportunity is not always capitalised. Overall, the analysis suggests an increasing scientism in CEOs messaging in relation to CSR as a tool to enhance perceived accountability of the business. The study also suggests avenues for improvement. This paper contributes to the emergence of different types of discourses that are being upheld by CEOs in their statements on CSR in Malaysian context. The discourses identified provide interesting insights into how CSR is perceived by the leaders.

This study aims to explore the patterns of corporate social responsibility (CSR) practices and investments across different ownership groups and relevance of CSR practices in the vision and mission (V&M) statements of firms.

The paper uses the neo-institutional theory approach, which explains similarities and differences in the CSR practices of organisations embedded within (and between) similar sectoral contexts. The study accounts the CSR activities of the top 100 companies listed on the Bombay Stock exchange (BSE) based on their ownership and checks the overlap of the CSR activities conducted by the companies with the ongoing social development schemes launched in India during the same of time. The time period between 2017 and 2020 is chosen to analyse the CSR studies. The study uses content analysis technique to derive conclusions. A textual analysis of top 100 listed firms across all ownership groups aimed at understanding patterns of CSR practices opted by the different groups and coherence of CSR patterns in the V&M statements. CSR related keywords were analysed in the V&M statements to understand what influence reporting of CSR practices in the strategic communication of firms.

Overall analysis indicated that top 100 firms prefer to invest in the areas of “Education”, “Sustainability” “Skill” where public-owned firms preferred towards “Sanitation” and “Environment/Sustainability” showing concurrence with local development goals. Private and foreign groups preferred to park their CSR funds in “Education” and “Skill” development showing coherence with the global agendas. Public-owned firms tend to report more CSR related specifically “Environment’ and “Sustainability” in the strategic documents. However, private and foreign firms do not pay any significance to CSR related keywords in their V&M statements.

Findings suggest that despite of huge CSR investments, private and foreign-owned firms lack CSR focus and communication in their V&M statements, which may create disintegration in the CSR investment and strategic alignment of near-term and future goals. The paper suggests that private and foreign firms should also communicate their CSR practices through their V&M to stakeholders so that CSR practices may not remain mere 2% mandated expenditure by the Government of India.

The study contributes in confirming the success of the CSR policy mandate in supplementing government’s social development programmes along with indications on the role of family firms in accelerating the process of community development as compared to foreign firms. The study also favours integration of CSR disclosures in the V&M statements to gain long-term benefit out of these investments.

The purpose of this paper is to look into the current corporate social responsibility (CSR) and human resource management (HRM) developments in Lithuania and to study the relationship between CSR, HRM and organisational performance outcomes.

A survey of 119 medium and large‐sized organisations (over 100 employees) in Lithuania was conducted to study CSR and HRM implementation in the country and to test the relationship between CSR, HRM and organisational performance outcomes.

In total, 78.1 per cent of the respondent organisations have a written or unwritten HR strategy. Only 38.8 per cent have a CSR statement, but more than half of respondent organisations have a code of ethics, corporate values statement and diversity statement (respectively 65.4, 63.0 and 53.1 per cent). Research findings show that there is a linkage between HRM, CSR and performance outcomes – organisations with more developed HRM, i.e. those where HRM performs a strategic role and the HR function performance is evaluated, have better developed CSR policies. The latter were found to have an impact on organisational and financial performance outcomes.

The study is built on the Cranet survey data, therefore not all CSR‐related HRM practices are analysed. Due to a limited number of organisations using CSR‐related HRM practices, the statistical analysis fails to determine statistically significant relationships between the usage of those practices, the level of CSR development and performance outcomes.

Organisations that are socially responsible and follow a strategic approach to HRM exhibit better performance outcomes, profitability in particular.

The paper confirms the existence of the HRM‐CSR‐performance linkage, i.e. organisations with better developed HRM, where HR plays a more strategic role and its performance is more evaluated, also have more developed formal CSR policies, which in turn has a positive impact on organisational and financial performance outcomes.

This paper aims to achieve the following objectives. First, through a longitudinal study, the authors explore the trend of voluntary external assurance of sustainability reports among Italian listed companies from 2008 to 2012. Thus, the authors aim to analyse the content level of the assurance statements and to test whether it is affected by certain corporate variables and by the type of practitioner chosen.

A legitimacy theory framework is adopted to investigate the phenomenon of sustainability report assurance services in Italy. The authors developed an assurance statement disclosure index (ASDI) constructed on the basis of the standards ISAE 3000 and AA1000AS. Thus, the authors tested whether the ASDI is affected by certain corporate variables using an ordinary least square (OLS) regression model. To test how each specific item is related to the assurance provider, a contingency table was developed.

The results of this paper show many differences in the assurance statements content in particular with reference to the criteria used, conclusive comments and recommendations. The presence of a corporate social responsibility committee and an expert who serves on it is positively related to a higher rank on the ASDI. In contrast, Big4 firms seem to be associated with a lower disclosure rank. Finally, Big4 are positively associated with the indications of the provider’s characteristics and negatively with their conclusive comments and recommendations.

This paper presents some findings in an area where little evidence exists, that is, the effects of some variables on the quantity of information disclosed in the assurance statements.

The purpose of this paper is to offer an exploratory assessment of the employment of assurance in the Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR)/Sustainability reports published by the UK's top ten food retailers.

The paper begins with an outline of the characteristics of assurance and the empirical information for the paper is drawn from the assurance material in the CSR/Sustainability reports posted on the internet by five of the selected retailers.

The findings reveal considerable variation in the nature and the scope of the assurance processes undertaken, at best the accent is on limited assurance and some concerns are expressed about the independence of the assessment process. The paper concludes that these concerns can be seen to reduce the reliability and credibility of the assurance process.

The paper provides an accessible review of how the UK's top ten food retailers are employing external assurance statements as part of their CSR reporting and as such it will interest academics, managers within the retail industry and those professionals and consultants who work with the industry.