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The chapter develops a phase model of strategic planning in integrated corporate social responsibility (CSR) communication by presenting CSR as a mindset in communication processes.

The chapter provides rationales for establishing a new phase model of strategic planning in CSR communication by adapting existing models of strategic communications. In this context, the main focus is on the need to involve stakeholders in CSR communication processes (Morsing & Schultz, 2006).

The chapter argues that in the sense of CSR communication, stakeholders should be involved in the strategic planning process from the beginning, with respect to the issues that the corporation and targeted stakeholder groups have in common.

The chapter concentrates on selected key aspects of CSR and CSR communication. In particular the aspects such as reputation, credibility, ethical alignment and stakeholder involvement are considered as prerequisites for understanding the construction of the phase model.

This chapter provides practical implications for developing communication concepts in CSR communication in daily business practice.

This chapter facilitates a comprehensive understanding of strategic CSR communication as part of CSR reflected in the development processes of communication concepts.

Talking about smart cities also entails talking about new ways of mobility. Various concepts compete for reimagining future mobility, most prominently connected cars, robo taxis, and other forms of shared mobility. New digital technologies, changing customer requirements, but also new competitors are dynamically affecting previous market logics. To stay future-proof in this new world of mobility, the automotive sector, which is an important nucleus for developing such mobility solutions, is currently undergoing fundamental digital transformation processes. Established car manufacturers have to find their path to choose out of the many possibilities on the rise. Against this backdrop, they face the major challenge to find an answer to the question: Who are we and who do we want to be in the future? Therefore, we argue that organizations’ digital transformation is highly entangled with questions on organizational identity and discuss digital transformation as a potential identity threat for established organizations.

We begin this chapter by introducing the concept of organizational identity. Afterward, we will continue with applying it to the practical context of car manufacturers: After depicting the major trends of digitalization in the mobility and automotive sector, we will focus on the digital transformation processes of established automotive companies and discuss their impact on organizational identity. Empirical illustrations of the Volkswagen case depict our theoretical considerations.

We provide theoretical ideas for better understanding the impact of digital transformation on organizational identity, as well as suggestions for practitioners concerned with organizations’ digital transformation processes.

In job advertisements, companies present claims about their organizational identity. My study explores how employers use multimodality in visuals and verbal text to construct organizational identity claims and address potential future employees. Drawing on a multimodal analysis of job advertisements used by German fashion companies between 1968 and 2013, I identify three types of job advertisements and analyze their content and latent meanings. I find three specific relationships between identity claims’ verbal and visual dimensions that also influence viewers’ attraction to, perception of the legitimacy of, and identification with organizations. My study contributes to research on multimodality and on organizational identity claims.

Postmerger integration processes have been studied from the perspectives of organizational identity and organizational culture, but these two perspectives have rarely been integrated. We argue that organizational identification and organizational culture differences give rise to two different sets of individual responses that are both important, but for different types of outcomes. An empirical analysis of a large-scale merger between two service sector companies shows that identification with the postmerger organization positively relates to both behavioral intentions and key attitudinal variables. In contrast, our results show that perceived organizational culture differences are negatively related to attitudinal variables. The effect of perceptions of cultural differences on behavioral intentions is mediated by organizational identification.

The communication of messages and initiatives still remains the missing piece in the corporate social responsibility (CSR) practice. Traditional media and corporate websites (ruled by a one-way communication process) have failed to promote an open and interactive CSR communication process with different groups of stakeholders.

Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Pinterest, among other social media platforms, allow users to interact and collaborate with each other. For example, people are empowered through social media to demand more transparency regarding corporate operations that can impact society and environment. Therefore, with the popularisation of social media, companies must understand that today more than ever, they should effectively communicate sustainability practices with the purpose of building and improving stakeholder relationships. But are companies ready to engage in CSR communication through social media? In other words, are they ready to invest in relationships?

This chapter analyses how corporations use social media for CSR communication. A content analysis methodology was used to examine Twitter official corporate profiles of 50 Fortune companies over the course of a two-month period. The purpose of this investigation was to discover what type of CSR and Sustainability core subjects were communicated and the type of communication presented in the messages.

The debate on corporate social responsibility (CSR) as shared value creation is trapped between management scholars and business ethics scholars, focusing merely on the distribution of values from an outcome-oriented perspective. The result is a juxtaposition of shared value from either a corporate or a societal perspective, providing only little attention to the actual communication processes supporting the creation of shared value. The purpose of this paper is to re-conceptualize shared value creation from a communicative approach as an alternative to the current situation caught between the management and societal perspectives.

Building upon recent constitutive models of CSR communication, this conceptual paper explores the potentials and implications of re-conceptualizing shared value creation as an alternative approach that recognizes the tensional interaction processes related to shared value creation.

The paper suggests a new conceptualization of shared value creation, which is sensitive to and able to advance the understanding of the tensional and conflictual interaction processes in which the continuous negotiation of corporate and stakeholder interests, values and agendas may facilitate a new understanding of shared value creation.

In order to succeed with the shared purpose of creating shared value (CSV), the company and the multiple stakeholders should neither disregard nor idealize the interaction processes related to shared value creation; rather, they should acknowledge that processes filled with tensions and conflicts are prerequisites for CSV.

A re-conceptualization of shared value creation that provides an alternative approach that is sensitive toward the tensions and conflicts occurring between corporate voice and multiple stakeholder voices.

Although the organizational identity (OI) construct (Albert & Whetten, 1985) is now in its fourth decade, research in the field has been somewhat uneven, particularly with respect to an essentialist view and hypothetico-deductive type of studies. Believing that this stems in large part from insufficient construct clarity (Suddaby, 2010), this theory-development initiative presents an expanded conceptual framework. The authors exploit several key elements of individual identity and make the case for using these as the basis for conceptualizing an organizational-level equivalent. Starting with the premise that an individual’s identity is the product of comparisons, two dimensions are identified: the type of comparison (similarity, difference), referred to as the “identity conundrum,” and the object of comparison (self–other, self–self), referred to as the “identity perspective.” The authors then propose a four-cell distinctive conceptual domain for OI and explore its implications for scholarship.

The purpose of this chapter is to address the question of how communication studies can prove its value in relation to corporate social responsibility (CSR). As many disciplines seek to understand CSR, the role of communication has been relatively underexplored despite its prevalence in demonstrating and shaping social responsibility positions and practice.

Literature review.

The literature review points to what we consider as four aces. Communication studies alert us to (1) how meaning is constructed through communication, something that has implications for the management of organizations as publics hold different views of CSR and expect different things from them; (2) how a dialogue between an organization and its publics should unfold; (3) how practices of transparency can assist organizations to come across as trustworthy actors; and, importantly, (4) how a complexity view is fruitful to grasp the CSR communication process.

These four key themes could be instructive for practitioners who want to argue for and demonstrate the usefulness of strategic communication for the management of CSR and bridge meso and macro levels of analysis.

This chapter shares the findings of a research study that investigated how organizations managed critical incidents that had the potential for dramatic economic impact and why those organizations chose to pursue certain issues. The findings expose organization identity’s role in stabilizing organizations. Understanding this role creates an opportunity to improve organization change efforts by examining and understanding a subject’s organization identity. Armed with this understanding, a change agent may design interventions in such a way as to align with identity or, when necessary, to specifically alter identity.

Organizational identity provides an increasingly large number of researchers with a theoretical lens for examining current transformations of the university. The primary objective of this chapter is to report an extensive, systematic overview of the literature published on the subject between 1972 and 2014. The analysis of 120 empirical studies reveals a literature which is rich but dispersed, in theoretical, epistemological, and methodological terms. Thriving since the 2000s, it is mainly American but increasingly globalized. After identifying six main research categories according to the distinctions found in the organizational identity literature, we propose a series of avenues for discussion bearing on the status of identity as an indicator of changes at work in the university, their level and depth.