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This research aims to understand consumer responses to corporate social responsibility (CSR) during an unprecedented public health crisis. Specifically, two studies were conducted to investigate how companies’ different CSR initiatives in the early stage of COVID-19 would influence consumers’ advocacy intention according to their focus (i.e. targets of institutional CSR). The first study examined the moderating role of individuals’ CSR expectancy on the effects of companies’ CSR initiatives on consumers’ brand advocacy intention. The second study further extends the findings of Study 1 by examining the mediating role of perceived brand motive.

Two between-subject online experiments were conducted to explore the impact of three types of institutional CSR initiatives (i.e. community, employee and consumer-centered CSRs) on brand advocacy. Study 1 (N = 380) examined the moderating role of CSR expectancy in influencing consumer responses to institutional CSR initiatives. Study 2 (N = 384) explored the underlying mechanism through examining the mediating role of a company’s value-driven motivation in the process.

Study 1 indicated that institutional CSR, regardless of type, was more effective in generating a more significant brand advocacy intention than a promotional message, measured as a baseline. The impact of different kinds of institutional CSR on consumers’ brand advocacy intentions was significantly moderated by their CSR-related expectations. Specifically, individuals with moderate to high CSR expectancy showed higher brand advocacy intentions in both consumer- and employee-centered CSR initiatives than the promotional message. In comparison, those with low CSR expectancy only showed higher brand advocacy intentions in the community-centered CSR initiative. In addition, as individuals’ CSR expectations rose, the mediation effect of the perceived value-driven motivation became stronger.

The current study includes guiding principles to help companies effectively respond to COVID-19 as corporate citizens by demonstrating the importance of individuals’ CSR expectancy across three CSR initiatives. This study used real-life examples of how leading companies were stepping up CSR efforts and suggested an approach that aligns CSR behaviors with the urgent and fundamental human needs of COVID-19.

In line with the CSR goal of maximizing benefits for stakeholders, this study’s findings signal that situational changes determine CSR expectations and that companies must be highly susceptible to the changes in consumers’ expectations of CSR and their appraisal process of CSR motives to maximize its CSR value.

This paper aims to examine characteristics that contribute to leaders' emergence and development as social advocates in their organizations and communities.

Building on theories of social problems, influence, and impression management, this paper examines how advocacy is affected by needs and situational conditions. Advocacy is the act of supporting an idea, need, person, or group. Advocates use cognitive, emotional, and behavioral strategies to influence attitudes, behaviors, and/or decisions for the benefit of individuals or to promote organizational change and/or social welfare. Social advocacy occurs within organizations in the form of corporate social responsibility, and it occurs within communities in the form of social entrepreneurship.

This theoretical paper argues that motivation of leaders of social ventures is a function of their conviction, self‐confidence, and extroversion. Advocates' beliefs about people are likely to shape their advocacy strategies, in particular, their beliefs about whether people are likely to change their attitudes and behavior, are sensitive to possible losses and gain, and respond to information about the probabilities and outcomes of actions and events. Advocate's resilience and transformational abilities (communications and political skills, knowledge of change management, and learning orientation) are predicted to influence their success.

The paper discusses directions for management development research and practice to promote involvement in social ventures.

This study aims to examine relationships between corporate social responsibility (CSR) toward two key stakeholder groups – patients and society and hospital brand advocacy, and the mediating role of trust and patient-hospital identification (PHI) and the moderating role of hospital type on these associations.

The sample of 455 hospital patients was surveyed in Vietnam.

The results suggest that both CSR toward society and patients are positively related to brand advocacy. The influence of CSR toward patients on brand advocacy was stronger for private hospitals than public hospitals. Trust and PHI independently and partially mediate relationships between both stakeholder groups of CSR and brand advocacy with the exception of the trust, which fully mediates the relationship between CSR toward society and brand advocacy. Trust and PHI serve as serial mediators.

Hospitals can promote patients’ organic word of mouth through CSR initiatives and focusing on the reliability, safety and quality of care.

This study examines the mediation effects of trust and PHI and moderating role of hospital type in the relationships between two components of CSR effort and hospital brand advocacy.

Corporations are confronted with growing demands to take a stand on socio-political issues, i.e. corporate social advocacy (CSA), which affects their reputation in the public. Companies use different CSA message strategies, including calling the public to support and act on the issue they advocate. Using reactance theory, the authors investigate the impact of CSA messages with a call to action on corporate reputation in the case of a company's gender equality initiative.

A one-factorial (CSA message with or without a call to action) between-subjects experiment was conducted by surveying 172 individuals living in Switzerland. The CSA messages were created in the context of gender equality.

The authors' study indicates that CSA messages with a call to action compared to those without overall harmed corporate reputation due to individuals' reactance, which is higher for CSA messages with a call to action, negatively affecting corporate reputation. The impact of the CSA message strategy with a call to action on corporate reputation remains significant after controlling for issue alignment and political leaning.

Communicating about socio-political issues, especially taking a stand, is a significant challenge for corporations in an increasingly polarized society and has often led to backlash, boycotts and damage to corporate reputation. This study shows that the possible adverse effects of advocating for socio-political issues can be related to reactance. It emphasizes that companies advocating for contested issues must be more cautious about the message strategy than the issue itself.

Once a corporate crisis is entangled with a social issue, how consumers make sense of the crisis can be impacted by issue-based opinion polarization. This study investigates the underlying mechanisms as consumers go through this process. This study also examines whether corporate social advocacy (CSA) can be an effective crisis-response strategy for mitigating reputational loss.

Theoretical inquiries were empirically tested using an online experiment (N = 792). The experiment set the context in China, in a working-overtime-issue-related crisis. It had a 2 (online exposure: anti-issue opinion vs. pro-issue opinion) × 2 (CSA: absence vs. presence) between-subject design with a continuous variable (pre-existing issue attitudes) measured before the manipulation.

This study found that pre-existing issue attitudes can be directly and indirectly associated with corporate reputation, for the issue attitudes influence how consumers attribute crisis blame. Such a direct effect of pre-existing issue attitudes varies depending on which polarized opinion consumers were exposed to on social media. This study also found CSA to be a robust crisis response strategy, through multiple mechanisms, in protecting the corporate reputation.

Scholars are scarcely aware of the threats that issue-based opinion polarization poses to corporate reputation. This study serves as an early attempt to provide theoretical explanations. In addition to this, this study extends the current conceptual understandings of CSA during corporate crises that involve social issues while adding fresh insights into the established typology of crisis-response strategies.

Corporations are now taking stands on contemporary and controversial social issues that share no obvious connection to the corporations’ business practices. At the same time, political polarization continues to intensify, which begs the question: Are these corporate stands – referred to as corporate social advocacy (CSA) – and political polarization related to each other, and if so, how? The purpose of this study is to provide a conceptualization of the connections between CSA and political polarization through a series of propositions that can be tested in subsequent research studies. Corporations have influence in society, and the ways in which they communicate on controversial social issues could further intensify or help assuage political polarization. Conversely, political polarization may be causing CSA in the first place, which would put into question the legitimacy and desirability of CSA because of the environment from which CSA is cultivated.

This study is designed to be conceptual, and the approach is based on theory building.

The study conceptualizes the relationship between CSA and political polarization to be symbiotic because both are bidirectional causes of each other. Engagement in CSA is also argued to be positively associated with perceptions that corporations contain particular political ideologies, i.e. more “liberal-leaning” or “conservative-leaning.” This study also predicts that – dependent on particular conditions – CSA will also lead to an increase in both boycotts and skepticism.

This study will contribute to scholars’, practitioners’ and consumers’ understanding of the causes and effects of CSA. The way in which political polarization is potentially causing CSA puts into question the legitimacy of corporations engaging in CSA in the first place. If CSA is cultivated in the soil of political polarization, is CSA desirable for corporations? Conversely, the way in which CSA is potentially causing political polarization also puts the legitimacy of CSA into question. If CSA is causing political polarization, is CSA desirable for society?

Corporations are an influential part of society, and thus will influence how society views controversial social issues. If the predictions in this study hold, corporations will play an important role in either intensifying or reducing political polarization, and political polarization will also play an important role in how corporations communicate about CSA issues.

Research focused on CSA is burgeoning, yet limited studies have examined how CSA and political polarization interact. Although there could be positive aspects of corporate involvement in CSA, this study examines some of the potential negative aspects of corporate involvement in CSA. Future research will also be able to test the propositions proposed in this study.

This paper explores how a firm's public stand on a social-political issue can be a salient signal of the firm's values, identity and reputation. In particular, it investigates how boycott participation–conceptualized as a cue of a corporation's stand on important social-political issues–may affect the stock market valuation of that corporation, as well as how corporations legitimise their stand on the issues.

The authors employ a mixed-methods design that uses both qualitative techniques (content analysis) and quantitative methods (event study methodology) to examine a sample of US firms who participated in a boycott campaign that sought to call attention to issues of hate speech, misinformation and discriminatory content on social media platform Facebook.

Findings from the qualitative content analysis of company statements show that firms legitimise their stand on, and participation in, the boycott by expressing altruistic values and suggesting to stakeholders that their stand aligns not only with organizational values/convictions but also with the greater social good. Importantly, the event study results show that firms who publicly announced their intention to participate in the boycott, on average, earn a statistically significant positive abnormal stock return of 2.68% in the four days immediately after their announcements.

Findings relate to a specific case of a boycott campaign. Also, the sample size is limited and restricted to US stocks. The signalling value of corporate social advocacy actions may vary across countries due to institutional and cultural differences. Market reaction may also be different for issues that are more charged than the ones examined in this study. Therefore, future research might investigate other markets, use larger sample sizes and consider a broader range of social-political issues.

The presence of significant stock price changes for firms that publicly announced their decision to side with activists on the issue of hate propaganda and misinformation offers potentially valuable insights on the timing of trades for investors and arbitrageurs. Insights from the study also provide a practical resource that can be used to inform organizations' decision-making about such issues.

Taking the lead to push on social-political issues, such as hate propaganda, discrimination, among others, and communicating their stands in a way that speaks to their values and identity, could be rewarding for companies.

This study provides novel evidence on the impact that corporate stances on important social-political issues can have on stock market valuation of firms and therefore extends the existing related research which until now has focused on the impact on consumer purchasing intent and brand loyalty.

Based on Lasswell’s communication model, this study investigates how four categories of factors (i.e. the source, content, medium and receiver) conjointly affect the relational, financial and social outcomes (i.e. what effect) of CSA communication.

With a survey (N = 366), this study found configurations of core CSA communication factors leading to three different CSA communication outcomes.

While this study found multiways to yield three different CSA outcomes, combinational logic indicated the combined effects from source, content, medium and receiver. With content and medium, individuals’ connectedness (receiver) to a CSA issue is a core factor leading to a high level of purchase intention and issue advocacy. This study also found that message strategies (i.e. informativeness, factual tone, no promotional tone) are core factors leading to a high level of trust and issue advocacy.

With the theoretical guidance, this research contributes to strategic communication practice for various entities involved in advocacy communication by enabling an improved understanding of advocacy communication factors and triggering different communication outcomes.

As CSA communication involves multiple strategies, conventional research agenda focusing on correlational and path analysis approaches provide limited understanding of communication practice. To fill this void, this study adopts a configurational approach to understand current CSA communication practices holistically.