Corporate Proactivity as a Discursive Fiction: Managing Environmental Health Activism and Regulation

This essay problematizes dominant theorizing about proactive communication in public relations and issue management. Current literature promotes proactive stakeholder engagement to prevent reputational damage rather than harm reduction to prevent crises from occurring. In practice this approach legitimizes a paradoxical corporate strategy framing crisis responses as proactive. Such framing attributes corporate improvements to voluntary corporate social responsibility (CSR) rather than external sources such as activist and regulatory challenges. An ethnographic study of a “good neighbor” environmental health campaign targeting a chemical plant found that the discursive construction of proactivity was significant because it (a) played a central role in public sensemaking about organizational legitimacy and responsibility and (b) influenced perceptions about the sources of corporate innovation and change.