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To succeed in today’s dynamic and unpredictable business world, businesses are increasingly required to gain the trust of and inform the society in which they operate about the social and environmental consequences of their actions. Corporations’ claims regarding the responsibility and ethicality of their actions, however, have been shown to be contradictory to some degree. We define corporations’ deceitful implementation of their corporate social responsibility (CSR) policies as pseudo-CSR. We argue that it is the moral characteristics of individuals, i.e. employees, managers and other decision-makers who ignore the CSR policies, which produce pseudo-CSR.

This is a conceptual paper.

The authors conceptualize the gap between true CSR and pseudo-CSR on a cognitive individual level as “moral laxity,” resulting from organization-induced lack of effort concerning individual moral development through ethical discourse, ethical sensemaking and subjectification processes. The absence of these processes prohibits individuals in organizations from constructing ethical identities to inhibit pseudo-CSR activities.

This paper contributes to the literature on CSR by augmenting corporate-level responsibility with the hitherto mostly neglected, yet significant, role of the individual in bridging this gap.

To respond to recent calls for better understanding of the complexities related to happiness management, especially from the employees' perspective, this study examines how corporate volunteering (CV), as one form of corporate social responsibility (CSR), creates sustainable happiness in business organizations.

Theoretical knowledge of CSR and CV as well as the literature on happiness management was examined to form a preliminary understanding of the phenomenon. The empirical section includes a qualitative multiple case study including two company cases of CV in Finland. The data were collected through qualitative interviews. Empirical analysis was made using thematical coding based on existing theory but also by allowing themes to emerge inductively from the data as well.

The study found that CV enables the emergence of sustainable happiness by allowing individual employee volunteers to transition from individual and rational mindsets to collective and emotional mindsets. A third transition was also identified, a process of change in the volunteers' approach in life that the authors describe as “from actual to potential”.

The study provides a theoretical contribution to the existing literature on happiness management by identifying the third dimension, from actual to potential, and depicting the way this allows employees to move from a state of being to becoming and thus the emergence of sustainable happiness. The study also contributes to existing literature on CV and CSR by revealing the way CV, as a form of practical CSR activity, generates happiness. This study concludes that companies' strategic activities that engage with society can create sustainable happiness for employees who participate. In order to achieve this, volunteering employees should have the chance to reflect on their experience and constant support from managers.

This study answers the call for research and theorising exploring ethical communication and brand risk from the African continent. The study's purpose was to identify the challenges that strategic communication practitioners face in enacting ethical crisis communication in South Africa.

The researchers conducted ten in-depth interviews with South African strategic communication professionals.

The dominant theme emerging from the study is the marginalisation and exclusion of the communication function in decision-making during crisis situations. Communicators were viewed as implementers, technicians and not strategic counsel. The protection of organisational reputation was done at the expense of the ethics and moral conscience of practitioners. Practitioners were viewed and deployed as spin doctors and tools to face unwanted media interactions.

The article sheds light on the concepts of ethical communication and decision-making in a multicultural African context using the moral theory of Ubuntu and strategic communication. It demonstrates the tension professionals experience as they toggle between unethical capitalist approaches and African values. The practitioner's role as organisational moral conscience is hindered, suppressed and undermined by organisational leadership's directives to use opaque, complex communication, selective transparency and misrepresentation of facts.

This study aims to analyse the differences between professional interaction mediated by video conferencing and direct professional interaction. The research identifies diverging interests of office workers for the purpose of addressing work ethical and business ethical issues of professional collaboration, competition, and power in future hybrid work models.

Based on 28 qualitative interviews conducted between November 2020 and June 2021, and through the theoretical lens of phenomenology, the study develops explanatory hypotheses conceptualising four basic intentions of professional interaction and their corresponding preferences for video conferences and working on site.

The four intentions developed on the basis of the interviews are: the need for physical proximity; the challenge of collective creativity; the will to influence; and control of communication. This conceptual framework qualifies a moral ambivalence of professional interaction. The authors identify a connectivity paradox of professional interaction where the personal dimension remains unarticulated for the purpose of maintaining professionality. This tacit human connectivity is intertwined with latent power relations. This plasticity of both connectivity and power in direct interaction can be diminished by transferring the interaction to video conferencing.

The application of phenomenology to a collection of qualitative interviews has enabled the identification of underlying intention structures and the system in which they affect each other. This research identifies conflicts of interests between workers relative to their different self-perceived abilities to persevere in competitive professional interaction. It is therefore able to address consequences of future hybrid work models at an existential and societal level.

The purpose of this paper is to propose to move from the organization as an association of individuals to communities of persons.

This is primarily a conceptual paper. However, it nevertheless underlies very practical aspects.

An organization should recognize each person within it as a human whom we must take the time to know, and with whom we must interact sincerely. One that only focuses on performance-related goals would not perform well. Indeed, it would increase situations that would generate significant stress and therefore significant costs. To conceive of the generalized complexity of persons makes it possible to manage with the paradoxes and the uncertainties related to the human species, in all conscience. Thus, it is possible to move from diversity management to a management for diversity, where we recognize the contribution of the differences of each person to the organization and where everyone can influence the other.

This paper emphasizes theories and practices that seem non-efficient whereas it is the contrary.