Corporate Social Responsibility in The Disinformation Age

Introduction

The development of disinformation and its implications for politics has gained increasing academic and media attention, not least in the wake of Donald Trump’s disruptive presidential campaigns, lying in office, and unfounded claims of stolen elections (e.g., Bennett & Livingston, 2021; Farkas & Schou, 2019; Knight & Tsoukas, 2019). However, the implications of disinformation for businesses engaged with Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) communication have gained significantly less attention. This analysis examines how companies get caught in the middle between previous commitments to social responsibility reflecting an earlier era of political pressures from the left and the more recent rise of political attacks from illiberal politicians, political organizations, and irresponsible business competitors. These persistent attacks use disinformation about “woke” corporations and investment firms to disrupt fragile CSR regimes and related Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) metrics and investment standards. When targets of those attacks attempt to defend themselves, the emergence of illiberal communication spheres in many democracies makes it difficult for reasoned discourse to reach important publics. When those publics are engaged by disinformation systems, they may also participate in elections and bring illiberal politicians to power. The resulting governments may actively limit or punish progressive companies, as we show in our analyses of many recent attacks on multinational companies in the U.S.

Our primary concern in this analysis is to show how the political communication context of CSR has changed dramatically since its early days, suggesting that both practitioners and scholars may need to develop new paradigms for action and research. One element of new approaches involves recognizing the transition from the formerly more passive roles of governments in promoting (Gond et al., 2011) or regulating CSR (Kourula et al., 2019) to the more recent rise of restrictive laws and public policies. Moreover, we show that such political pressures now develop in divisive communication environments that make reasoned debate difficult. Another element to incorporate in new frameworks for analysis is the changing shape of public activism in which CSR now operates. For example, the “logo campaigns” of the 1990s—and the CSR movement, more generally—originated largely on the left (Carroll, 2009; Utting, 2005). By contrast, the anti-woke brand attacks and political policies punishing responsible corporations are now coming from the far right, often from parties and media sources funded by wealthy libertarians and their political organizations (Bennett & Livingston, 2021). These organized and sustained attacks on companies practicing and promoting various CSR and ESG values increasingly link what was formerly a set of business and society issues to larger societal conflicts over the nature of democracy itself.

Overview of the Argument

In the following analysis, we take CSR and related communication practices to involve the framing of claims and debates about corporate policies, strategies, and practices for wider societal good (Matten & Moon, 2020). Following from this, ESG refers to efforts to specify and measure particular CSR practices. Our concern in this article is primarily with CSR and CSR communication in general, but at points we refer specifically to ESG because many current attacks on CSR values (particularly in the US) refer to ESG criteria.

Our analysis begins by defining two broad types of disinformation that complicate CSR practices and related communication and then shows how the relatively recent rise of disruptive communication systems on the far right are changing the politics of CSR communication. As a point of departure for this analysis, we adopt the definition of disinformation proposed by Bennett and Livingston (2021, p. 3) as “intentional falsehoods or distortions, often spread as news, to advance political goals such as discrediting opponents, disrupting policy debates, influencing voters, inflaming existing social conflicts, or creating a general backdrop of confusion and informational paralysis.” This definition enables us to address the impact of growing rightwing political attacks that are eroding incentives for progressive corporations to engage in CSR beyond legal requirements.

First, we want to distinguish the contemporary emergence of high volumes of systemic disinformation circulating in many democratic societies from the longer history of what may be called strategic disinformation that comes primarily from corporations themselves in attempts to hide harmful products and business practices. The familiar forms of strategic disinformation range from greenwashing to failures to disclose known product harms to publics and shareholders (e.g., Banerjee, 2008). While these forms of disinformation continue, the incentives to rely on them—or even reject CSR completely—may increase with the rise of digitally networked disinformation that conflates CSR and ESG values with more widely contested and polarizing political issues, from climate science to sexual orientation and gender identity claims (Bennett & Livingston, 2021). We term this second form “systemic disinformation,” which, as shown later, is grounded in an illiberal communication logic that makes it hard to reconcile conflicts over competing facts and values in many democracies today.

Systemic disinformation is often produced for political and economic ends that directly threaten liberal ideals about public goods in which CSR is anchored. The networked flows of competing facts, divisive values, and unprovable conspiracies become hard to refute because they are less often framed as questions subject to reasoned debate than as unquestioned signs of political membership and identity (Knight & Tsoukas, 2019). When political or economic actors in disinformation systems target a corporation, the company faces the dilemma of choosing between one set of values, truths, and realities and another—along with implications for brand image, consumer relations, and even legal and political benefits. These risky communication environments may motivate greater corporate reliance on strategic disinformation to hide the resulting compromises. Our analysis focuses on the United States, where the growing conflicts over CSR, often articulated in terms of ESG, are currently most apparent, but includes cases from European contexts, where similar trends risk spreading.

We conclude the analysis with a discussion of how the rise of systemic disinformation may change the terms of corporate engagement. From a hopeful perspective, companies and investment funds can form alliances to counter systemic disinformation and play more active public roles in promoting the societal benefits of CSR through ESG practices and measures (Barnett et al., 2020; Christensen et al., 2013). From a skeptical perspective, systemic disinformation threatens consumer brands and risks political reprisals, which may increase incentives to resort to greenwashing and other forms of strategic deception. In short, it is important to understand both types of disinformation because they interact in ways that may change the viability of CSR itself. The next section briefly illustrates the historical arc of CSR operating in changing political communication environments to illustrate the evolution of varying pressures on companies that make CSR commitments increasingly risky and related communication strategies far more challenging.

The Political Evolution of CSR Communication

Against a backdrop of disillusionment by many progressive activists with legislative and regulatory politics, companies have been urged by consumer groups, environmentalists, and even their own employees to take greater initiative in broadening the public value of business through their CSR programs (Dolšak et al., 2022). This includes companies taking public stances on social, political, and environmental issues, such as climate crisis, LGBTQ rights, equal pay, immigration, gun control, and racism, among other issues (Vestergaard & Uldam, 2022a). Here, CSR communication is key, because it is through communication that companies produce or claim to produce public goods (Vestergaard & Uldam, 2022b). In addition, it is in relation to communication that stakeholders such as policy makers, affected communities, shareholders, consumers, and citizens evaluate CSR initiatives (Lundgaard & Etter, 2022). In these ways, the scope of CSR communication ranges from brand images to statements about corporate policies, strategies, and practices for wider societal good (Matten & Moon, 2020).

More recently, ESG standards have developed to complement CSR communication claims, especially in relation to investment metrics (O’Connor & Lammers, 2022). These developments give sharper focus to CSR values and explicate their reach into the investment world, typically in terms of ESG criteria. However, these initiatives also face new challenges in changing national and global communication environments that are characterized by three factors: (a) illiberal political challenges to many of the values represented in CSR, including ESG frameworks; (b) growing volumes of disinformation; and (c) increasingly irreconcilable communication logics facing corporations caught in the middle between liberal democratic and illiberal public communication spheres (introduced below). These conflicting communication logics typically confront reason with alternative facts and frame conflicts over CSR and ESG values in mutually exclusive terms.

The early decades of CSR in the 1950s and especially the 1960s were propelled by social movements, including civil rights, women’s rights, consumers’ rights, and the environmental movements, all contributing different stakeholder expectations about CSR attitudes and practices (Carroll & Shabana, 2010). Important debates followed on the ways in which dealing with multiple stakeholders requires companies to balance shareholder expectations of short-term profits against longer-term social and environmental investments, while reducing the gaps between corporate conduct and CSR communication (Christensen et al., 2013; Dolšak et al., 2022; Zyglidopoulos & Fleming, 2011). Failing to overcome discrepancies between CSR communication and CSR practices would render CSR communication misleading at best and intentionally deceptive at worst (Christensen et al., 2019). Assessing the quality of corporate responses is tricky, largely because CSR remains a complex construct with few clear criteria to assess societal benefits (Barnett et al., 2020). ESG criteria have been suggested as a clearer, if by no means adequate, framework for assessing companies’ public goods provision (Dolšak et al., 2022).

The complex relations among communication, values, and verification have not been helped by the historical failure of governments (particularly in the U.S.) to legislate and regulate a broader range of corporate public values beyond historical protections against the worst environmental and worker abuses. In academic debates on CSR, a key argument has been that companies take over quasi-governmental roles when governments are not willing or not able to provide appropriate regulation or the necessary public goods (Matten & Crane, 2005; Scherer & Palazzo, 2011; Vestergaard & Uldam, 2022a).

Earlier pressures dating from the 1980s and 1990s for companies to address issues of societal concern typically came from left-leaning public interest movements, think tanks, and politicians that tended to frame their communication in terms of reason and evidence produced by authoritative sources such as scientific institutes or public health and welfare agencies. These early CSR discourses were far less polarizing than in the recent era. In the U.S., for example, conservative presidents Reagan and Bush called for corporations to contribute to a social safety net with ventures into education, culture, and philanthropy. In the resulting narratives, corporations portrayed themselves as benevolent, responsible, even vital contributors to societal goods (Marchand, 1998).

In addition, early CSR communication was commonly framed in terms of reason-driven arguments and solutions about such things as reducing the climate impact of fossil fuels, the public harms of smoking tobacco, the dangers of pesticides on crops, or the abuses of sweatshop labor (Christensen et al., 2013, 2021). However, just as ESG standards began to emerge and guide socially responsible investment decisions, a right-wing political backlash, most notably in the United States, began attacking those initiatives with deceptive communication framing CSR and ESG standards as values that represent political extremism.

The political polarization of CSR, especially in terms of ESG in the U.S., replaces an earlier era of relative government passivity with one of political antagonism. The recent trend toward government activism was pioneered by states such as Florida and Texas, which passed laws blocking government agencies and pension funds from using investment funds or banks that follow ESG criteria (Dolšak & Prakash, 2022). Political attacks on ESG spread quickly. As of this writing, 18 U.S. states have either passed or proposed laws preventing public institutions from doing business with ESG investment and finance firms (Budryk, 2023). A sign of the larger trend is that in 2023 alone Republican legislators in 37 states proposed some 167 laws against various aspects of ESG investing (Tricks, 2023). Such political attacks on ESG pension fund investing escalated to the national level during the Trump administration with an executive order placing rates of return ahead of nonpecuniary ESG investment standards in pension funds. That order was reversed by President Biden and then challenged by Congress in 2023, resulting in Biden vetoing the Congressional action (Quinson, 2023). All of this suggests that ESG has become a polarizing national issue with corporations caught in the middle.

Lost in the public discussion about banning public money from ESG investment funds is the likelihood that taxpayers in those states will pay higher premiums on public bonds issued by less reliable financial institutions. Perhaps most importantly, public pension funds may lose the value of long-term investments in renewable energy companies, while incurring long-term losses in oil and other unsustainable energy companies. Such arguments in favor of stronger public CSR and ESG policies have been overshadowed by claims that profits from oil companies, cheap fashion brands, or toxic chemical producers should not be diluted by so-called woke values invading corporate boardrooms or investment decisions (e.g., Dumas, 2022).

Although these political communication dynamics, along with the aggressively negative role of right-wing governments, are playing out most prominently in the U.S. at present, they may affect the course of the entire global CSR and ESG agendas. Even in the U.S., many of the companies facing this disruptive mix of political and legal pressures and negative communication are leading global brands such as Disney, Apple, Levi’s, Delta Airlines, and Coca-Cola, among others. For example, Levi Strauss was targeted by a national campaign from right-wing think tanks and political organizations claiming that the company’s strong stands on gun control had divided its consumer base and reduced the appeal of its products. These issues were raised at a shareholder meeting by the Free Enterprise Project of the National Center for Public Policy research, which claimed to have appeared at over 100 different shareholder meetings “advancing free market ideals about health care, energy, taxes, subsidies, regulations, religious freedom, food policies, media bias, gun rights, workers’ rights and other important public policy issues” (National Center for Public Policy Research, 2019, np.).

A unifying theme across these various industries and campaigns is the largely unsupported claim that corporate CSR and ESG commitments are damaging shareholder value. As a result, many companies with poor CSR and ESG records—including oil companies that have long spread what we call strategic disinformation about their products—continue to gain record profits despite the costs to nature and society. A priority on short-term profits also hides the overall costs of unsustainable economic models that disregard social welfare and finite planetary resources (Bennett, 2021). The questions hidden behind the profit smoke screen include: Profitable for how long? For whom? At what costs to planet and people? This narrow economic framing is further complicated by attacks on a broad range of other CSR issues, such as gender equity and LGBTQ+ rights, as “woke” concerns of cosmopolitan elites who are removed from the everyday realities and hardships of ordinary people.

Against these attacks on CSR and ESG values, activists concerned with issues that include civil rights, women’s rights, consumers’ rights, and the environmental movements continue to pressure the same companies to uphold and even expand the range of CSR values (Carrol & Shabana, 2010). For example, in 2022 Disney was pressured by employees and activists to oppose the Florida government’s anti-LGBTQ+ legislation—the so-called “don’t say gay” law (Blistein, 2022). The initial Disney position against the law produced a political backlash as Florida Governor DeSantis moved to strip the company of its special taxing and self-governance provisions in the state (Ramirez, 2023). After a few months of pubic attacks and political reprisals, including a neo-Nazi protest at Disney World, Disney CEO Robert Iger declared that the whole episode had been “horrifying” and that DeSantis had won. He announced that Disney’s public political profile would be pulled back, saying: “The last thing I want is for the company to be drawn into any culture wars” (Thaler, 2023, paragraph 4).

Such cross pressures make it challenging for corporations to respond without alienating important consumer segments and losing political and economic advantages formerly granted by governments. As discussed later, the irreconcilable differences in communication logics in liberal and illiberal spheres (e.g., debatable claims vs. absolute truths, evidence vs. disinformation) ultimately tie CSR to larger struggles over democracy itself. Contemporary battles over citizenship, diversity, inclusion, and equity involve competing social values and “truth” (Knight & Tsoukas, 2019, p. 184), and the incompatible communication logics through which those conflicts play out offer little possibility for democratic resolution.

The next sections show in more detail how the forms of communication and disinformation surrounding CSR have changed over time. We begin with a brief history of the production of strategic disinformation by corporations to shield profits from potentially damaging products and practices. This is followed by a discussion of the rise of systemic disinformation that divides societies with political challenges to liberal democratic values and public goods. Both forms of disinformation now interact, creating new challenges for companies that try to increase their contribution to societal benefits.

A Brief History of Strategic Disinformation

Strategic disinformation evolved from the development of public relations in the United States after the turn of the 20th century. As many nations experienced the uneasy merger of market economies and democracy, movements such as socialism, communism, and left-wing populism rose against corporate power, political corruption, and turbulent economic swings. Many business and political elites regarded such threats from the left as a serious problem for economic and political stability (Ewen, 1996). Early work on mass psychology promoted the idea that elites needed to actively manage public opinion (Le Bon, 1910). The Russian Revolution further heightened fears of domestic communist labor movements, and many business and political leaders became attracted to the creative uses of the new public communication field of propaganda, which was later renamed “public relations” (PR) following the predations of the Nazis (Bernays, 1945).

The earliest formation of a “PR state” was in the U.S., beginning with “peace president” Woodrow Wilson selling the U.S. entry into World War I and then promoting the disastrous treaty at the end. Later during the “red scare” periods of the 1920s and 1950s, especially in the U.S. but also in parts of Europe, propaganda justified political “witch hunts” that led to jailing and blacklisting many leftists. Corporate monopolies in key industries such as oil, steel, telecommunications, and transportation hired communication consultants to demonize opponents and soften their own public images.

By contrast, most European nations took a different path toward the strategic management of public opinion, as communist and socialist parties had already become part of the political landscape, and gradually became “domesticated” as they relaxed their ties to Moscow following the horrors of the Stalinist era. After World War II, PR arrived full force in Europe with the selling of the Marshall Plan and became increasingly important in Cold War strategies to promote liberal democratic institutions and market economies to European publics as superior alternatives to communism and socialism (Osgood, 2006).

Public relations and the related field of strategic communications has continued to evolve beyond the one-way communication that characterized its early years (Morsing & Schultz, 2006), with practices involving dialogue and active engagement (Taylor & Kent, 2014). Despite growing in sophistication, underlying questions about truth, transparency, and deception continue to plague the field. Indeed, many of the historic examples of corporate responses to CSR pressures involve strategic disinformation used to hide irresponsible practices.

Public concerns about corporate responsibility, along with fears of governments being captured by business and lobbying associations led to the rise of social movements targeting corporations over a wide range of abuses, from environmental pollution and labor exploitation to consumer product safety problems. Rather than accept popular demands or government regulations, many of those industries developed communication strategies to hide irresponsible practices. For example, tobacco companies founded the Tobacco Institute in 1958 to lobby for their interests and conduct research that would dismiss the health hazards of smoking and argue for a genetic predisposition to get lung cancer. They also paid “independent” scientists to conduct tobacco-friendly research (Palazzo & Richter, 2005). Many companies in the chemical industry have produced toxic products and advertised them as safe. For example, the biotechnology company Monsanto (bought by Bayer in 2018) misrepresented facts about genetically modified (GM) foods in the 1970s and 1980s and was convicted for doing so in its press advertisements in the 1990s (McCabe, 1999). The company later worked to conceal links between its pesticide product Roundup and cancer by targeting critics, including journalists, scientists, and NGOs (nongovernmental organizations; Levin, 2019).

The fashion industry also has a long history of hiding abusive sweatshops and covering up environmental and human costs with images of glamor. Nike’s use of sweatshops in the 1990s has come to be seen as a classic example of a company that neglected its responsibility to avoid modern slavery in its value chain. Following attacks on company labor practices dating from the early 1990s, the company created a code of conduct for its factories, which was soon revealed by activists as meaningless. However, the continuing pressure and logo campaigns aimed at tarnishing its brand eventually led the company to clean up some of its labor practices (Bennett, 2003).

Other practices of the fashion industry have gained attention in recent years with concerns about high CO₂ emissions, chemical pollution, and wasteful consumerism as the industry churns out new lines several times a year while promoting the popularity of fast fashion. Despite pressures, most fashion companies continue to produce new lines several times a year, just as fast fashion companies continue the mass production of cheap so-called disposable clothing, while covering up their behavior with images of glamor and claims about sustainable production. For example, the fast fashion company H&M was called out for practicing greenwashing by the Norwegian Consumer Authority because the company misrepresented the environmental impact of its products (Stern, 2022).

The fossil fuel industry has one of the longest and most damaging histories of using strategic disinformation to protect damaging business models. For example, ExxonMobil has a history of denying climate change and, later, denying the company’s role in contributing to climate change. All the while, company scientists and executives knew that their claims were false. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, scientists employed by ExxonMobil accurately projected global heating caused by fossil fuel burning and accurately predicted when human-caused global heating would first be detected, while ExxonMobil both hid the findings and worked to deny its role in the problems (Supran et al., 2022). Le Menestrel, van den Hove, and de Bettignies (2002) have identified ExxonMobil’s communication as following a progression of first denying climate change, then questioning the science of climate change, then claiming climate change is not human caused, then questioning whether climate change will be bad, then suggesting this is not a good time to act.

ExxonMobil has also promoted algae-based biofuels as a key technology in the company’s role in contributing to the green transition. In 2009, ExxonMobil said the company would spend 600 million USD on research and promotion for algae-based biofuels (Crooks, 2009; McNulty, 2009). Years later, the company acknowledged that the initiative was far from a viable climate technology that was close to being scaled up for implementation (ExxonMobil, 2018). However, that acknowledgement was presented in “expert language,” which made it inaccessible to wider publics (Zyglidopoulos & Fleming, 2011, p. 702). At the same time, the company continued to promote its biofuel promise as in a 2021 advert that stated, “We want something that will grow really fast, so that we can make a lot of fuel” (ExxonMobil, 2021, np.).

While continuing to deny global warming is now widely considered absurd, fossil fuel companies continue to use strategic disinformation to shield their practices and profits (Milman, 2022a). For example, Shell has publicly pledged to become net zero by 2050 but framed it in vague terms of supporting the broad goals of the Paris climate agreement (Shell.com, nd). However, internal 2020 PR guidance reported by The Guardian shows the company advising employees to frame the net zero goal as “a collective ambition for the world” and never “imply, suggest, or leave it open for possible misinterpretation that (net zero) is a Shell goal or target” (Milman, 2022a, np.). During this same period, oil companies invested hundreds of millions of dollars in university research aimed at developing carbon capture and biofuel technologies, along with policy research to minimize regulation and move fossil gas ahead of cleaner fuels in energy transitions. Most of those universities, including UC Berkeley, Stanford, and MIT, have been pressured by students to divest from oil and gas stocks yet continue to accept research funding that may contradict their public positions on the environment and investment (Westervelt, 2023).

These examples illustrate a “culture of disinformation” in different companies and industries, with the fossil fuel sector again leading the way. Leaked internal messages among employees from Shell, Chevron, and ExxonMobil and lobbyists revealed employees questioning their personal environmental engagement and making jokes about the climate crisis (Elton, 2022). This is suggestive of a corporate culture that reflects a wider concern with profit and a resistance to more sustainable practices through green actions (Skoglund & Böhm, 2020). Leveraging such industries toward credible CSR and ESG commitments has become even harder as proliferating communication channels spread daily flows of systemic disinformation coming largely from the far right that interfere with coherent public debate and put companies in the middle of political conflicts that can further impair CSR decision-making.

The Rise of Systemic Disinformation

While strategic disinformation continues as a set of practices coming from inside corporations, recent years have witnessed the development of what can be termed systemic disinformation that disrupts corporate responsibility initiatives from the outside. Various factors contribute to the noisy communication environments surrounding many progressive social, economic, and political issues. For example, the growth of social media platforms has diminished the gatekeeping capacities of traditional media due to their broad audience reach and weak content filters. In addition, the decline of public trust in government and scientific institutions has dampened their authoritative status and led many citizens to seek “alternative facts,” which can easily be found online. As social networks share such disinformation, right wing politicians and parties monitor those networks and promote popular content as means of winning votes and party loyalty (Bennett & Livingston, 2021). Finally, when politicians become elected based on those dubious claims, their disinformation becomes newsworthy in the mainstream media, creating disruptive flows of dubious content between institutional centers and the social peripheries (Bennett & Livingston, 2021).

The relative sizes of clashing communication spheres vary from society to society, depending on factors such as: (a) the configurations of illiberal movements opposing social diversity, inclusion, and the changes required to mitigate environmental collapse; (b) the volume of disinformation spread by national illiberal think tanks, social media influencers, and political information sites; and (c) the ways in which party, electoral, and legal systems contain or fail to contain the spillover of reactionary politics into national institutions, governments, and the mainstream press. As a result of these factors, most democracies today contain networked disinformation spheres that provide a foundation for illiberal groups and politicians to launch often inflammatory and reason-averse attacks on progressive politics such as climate justice, inclusivity, LGBTQ+ rights, and other values related to CSR and ESG (Askanius, 2021).

Another historical source of systemic disinformation is the proliferation of globally networked neoliberal think tanks created to spread selling points for the freedoms of unregulated markets and minimal social roles for government. While few voters favor the legacy of inequality, reduced social services, and austerity associated with neoliberal economics, the steady production of disinformation promotes increasingly dysfunctional socioeconomic systems, aided by diversionary attacks on many of the values at the core of CSR, including ESG.

The global spread of systemic disinformation can be traced to the mid-20th-century with the growth of the Atlas Network of think tanks named for the iconic book by Ayn Rand. It became clear to many proponents of this type of neoliberal free market economics that removing government regulatory protections against various abuses of markets and corporations would require a grand reeducation effort for both politicians and publics. Most notably, F.A. Hayek, the leader of the neoliberal Montpelerin Society, conceived of think tanks as “professional secondhand dealers in ideas” (Hayek, 1949, p. 417), and sold that idea to Anthony Fisher, a wealthy follower who set up the prototype Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) in the U.K. and participated in the growth of the Atlas Network. As of this writing, there are over 500 aligned Atlas propaganda factories in nearly 100 nations, with 161 in the U.S. and 121 in Europe and Central Asia (Atlas Network, 2022). What is important to understand is that the ideological foundations of neoliberalism may not count as disinformation, but the failure to deliver promised benefits to voting publics has required increasing levels of disinformation to distract publics and confuse the issues (Bennett, 2021).

In the U.K., for example, a collection of radical right think tanks such as the IEA, Free Market Forum, and Taxpayers’ Alliance has formed a policy and disinformation network with wealthy donors and corporate funders, Conservative Party MPs, and the press (Monbiot, 2022). This network engineered the bizarre economic programs that led to the demise of the short-lived Liz Truss government, which lasted just 44 days, setting the U.K. record. Although they are called think tanks, Monbiot (2022) argues that these organizations act more like partisan lobbying groups because they (a) take money from interests such as tobacco and oil (b) to produce policy proposals and communication plans for politicians to enact and promote the interests of the funders, (c) often with little regard for the social consequences or the credibility of the policy justifications. For example, Matthew Sinclair became Truss’s economic advisor after writing a book called Let Them Eat Carbon (2011), which proposed, among other things, that there was no need for government action against climate crisis because “equatorial regions might suffer, but it is entirely possible that this will be balanced out by areas like Greenland” (Monbiot, 2022, paragraph 9).

Following an analysis of the various players in this disinformation network, Monbiot offers this summary: “Oligarchs and corporations funded the thinktanks [sic]. The thinktanks, by sheer coincidence, suited the interests of the oligarchs and corporations. The billionaire press—also owned by oligarchs—reported these policy proposals as brilliant insights by independent organizations. Conservative frontbenchers then cited the press coverage as evidence of public demand: the voice of the oligarchs was treated as the voice of the people” (Monbiot, 2022, np.). Whether looking at the quality of the ideas, the credibility of the communication, or the concern for public values, this system of political and economic disinformation can be regarded as threatening to democratic principles of transparency, accountability, and popular sovereignty.

Since the 1990s, resulting levels of inequality, concentrations of corporate power and wealth, and social dislocation have become increasingly hard to sell and have triggered rounds of global protests, initially from the left and, more recently, on the right. While the campaigns of the left initially helped develop a consumer public for CSR, there was little progress getting governments involved in creating tax and investment incentives. Some of the early government passivity was due to the neoliberal turn of center-left parties and leaders (e.g., Clinton, Blair, Schroeder) who increasingly favored free trade and less market regulation. Another part of the failure to turn CSR and ESG principles into hard law was due to the proliferation of issue and identity politics on the left, leading to relatively horizontal movement cultures of inclusivity and diversity and contributing to pessimism about finding solutions in parties and electoral politics (Bennett et al., 2018).

Meanwhile, the right in many nations has formed uneasy partnerships between the elite proponents of neoliberalism and populist white Christian nationalist movements in Europe and the U.S., and, more generally, ethnic religious nationalism in cases such as India. These often-unwieldy coalitions help gain votes for unpopular agendas of free market economics with populist appeals to antienvironmentalism, ethnic religious nationalism, and positions against immigration and social and religious diversity. Formerly extremist ideas such as the “replacement” theory have traveled over international political networks and become popularized in nations as different as Hungary, the U.S., Sweden, Germany, and Italy—often receiving mainstream media coverage thanks to elected politicians who amplify the dubious content circulating on the social media fringe (Klinger et al., 2022, p. 1900).

In contrast to the left, movements on the right have been more open to forming new parties or joining traditional conservative parties that promote “culture wars” in appeals to voters. As a result, many former center-right parties have won votes by communicating a toxic mix of social and environmental extremism. For example, the underlying economic motivations that led the U.K. Conservative Party into the Brexit campaign were dressed in persuasive anti-immigration rhetoric engineered by the original neoliberal think tank, the IEA. Many of the core economic and social claims in that campaign have to be proved wrong and have left the U.K. with labor and trade shortages and economic stagnation. In other cases, such as Germany, a neoliberal nationalist party (the Alternative for Germany) was invaded by white nationalist movements, creating a disruptive illiberal communication repertoire. In the U.S., Donald Trump’s Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement took over much of the Republican party, raising doubts about the integrity of elections while attacking institutions from schools to businesses for promoting “woke” values.

These attacks on progressive values create challenges for companies attempting to implement and communicate the benefits of CSR programs. Indeed, the rise of systemic disinformation spheres in many democracies has resulted in fundamental challenges to the traditional norms of liberal democratic communication. As noted above, these spheres are importantly organized around social media networks through which movements and parties interact. In addition, political information sites such as Fox News, Epoch Times, Breitbart, or Daily Caller spread disinformation in formats that resemble news, while joining politicians in branding the traditional news media as “lying press” and “fake news.”

The proliferation of disinformation may be seen as an “attack against established liberalism in politics” (Knight & Tsoukas, 2019, p. 185). We agree with this broad assessment and add more focus by showing how systemic disinformation challenges the core logics of liberal democratic communication: reason, evidence, debate, civility, tolerance, and inclusion. Democracies depend on those core communication principles for resolving differences. For example, Donald Trump’s prolific use of “alternative facts” amounts to delegitimizing a commonly shared language game (Knight & Tsoukas, 2019, p. 187). Such patterned violations of democratic communication logics indicate a transition in political communication systems, with political power shifting toward platforms and elected right-wing politicians as authoritative information sources and away from traditional center parties and the legacy press as moderators of public debates. The emergence of competing political communication logics, in turn, may further erode the integrity of those traditional public institutions as legitimate information sources (Couldry, 2012; Poell et al., 2019).

In short, the communication practices challenging most of the values on which CSR depends diverge sharply from those found in traditional liberal democratic communication spheres. By contrast, illiberal disinformation spheres promote transgressive communication that often dismisses reason, science, public authorities, and traditional journalism as threats to higher religious, cultural, or political truths. The logics of these competing communication spheres are illustrated in Table 1. The elements of liberal democratic communication logic shown in the table are based on the account by Habermas of the second structural transformation of democratic public spheres, in which relatively autonomous bourgeois public spaces of the 19th century were replaced in the early 20th century by commercialized media systems that infused public communication with public relations strategies from business and government (Habermas, 1991).

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Table 1.

Contrasting Logics of Liberal Democratic and Illiberal Public Communication.

Seminal research on the role of the media in fostering and facilitating democracy has drawn on the Habermasian account of the public sphere (Calhoun, 1992; Papacharissi, 2002). Moreover, research on CSR, and especially political CSR (PCSR), has followed Habermas’s (1991) ideals of democratic deliberation (Scherer & Palazzo, 2011). Our appropriation of Habermas mainly involves his empirical characterization of the communication logics that dominate modern press politics systems, while avoiding several areas of his normative vision that have drawn criticism. For example, scholars in media studies and political science have argued that claims about the desirability of a singular public sphere fail to recognize the preferences and communication practices of different societal groups in relation to gender, class, and culture (e.g., Bennett & Entman, 2000; Cammaerts, 2007; Downey & Fenton, 2003; Fraser, 1992; Laclau & Mouffe, 1985; Uldam, 2010). Some CSR researchers have criticized Habermasian approaches for accepting corporate colonization of democratic processes as inevitable and downplaying power asymmetries (e.g., Banerjee, 2018; Nyberg, 2021).

Recognizing the importance of these critiques, we adapt the core of Habermas’s account of mainstream liberal democratic communication spheres as a basis for contrasting emerging illiberal communication logics. Moreover, where Habermas was critical of the democratic limits of commercialized liberal communication systems, we propose looking at those systems (in their various national variations) as baseline democratic communication standards simply because they dominated public communication in liberal democracies during earlier periods of high institutional trust. And, for all their contemporary weaknesses, these once hegemonic communication spheres now serve as the last lines of defense against illiberal political, economic, social, and cultural transformation.

Against this backdrop, Table 1 shows how these two competing communication systems in most democracies work based on different logics. Liberal democratic communication systems of the sort shown on the left ideally mediate public conflicts with journalism that presents multisided, reasoned debate among elected representatives and civil society groups, with the goal of resolving differences in ways that promote citizen engagement and acceptance of outcomes as legitimate. By contrast, illiberal communication systems depicted in ideal-type terms on the right column in Table 1 tend to exclude various types of citizens and civil society groups, while rejecting norms of reasoned debate by amplifying conflicts with absolute truth claims and generally undermining the legitimacy of outcomes (for an expanded discussion of this perspective, see Bennett & Kneuer, 2023). Distinguishing between these two communication systems and their different logics can help explain the workings of systemic disinformation in democracies experiencing a rise of radical right politics. As discussed in the next section, CSR communication is increasingly caught in the middle between these irreconcilable communication systems.

The diverging logics presented in Table 1 create often harsh dilemmas for companies as they are faced with navigating both logics. We illustrate these dilemmas in the following section.

CSR Caught Between Two Communication Logics

The disinformation produced by illiberal communication spheres has framed ESG investing (and CSR more generally) as unacceptable abuses of corporate power to advance an extreme leftist political agenda (Dolšak & Prakash, 2022). The idea of branding global corporations as being run by political extremists may sound bizarre, but that kind of framing operates routinely in illiberal communication and fits comfortably alongside the collection of antiglobalist conspiracies such as the Qanon claim that liberal politicians such as Hillary Clinton engage in satanic child sex trafficking. Responding to political attacks on ESG criteria for investment, BlackRock CEO Larry Fink pushed back during a World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, saying, “They’re trying to demonize the issues,” likely referring to Tesla CEO Elon Musk tweeting, “The S in ESG stands for satanic” (Beals, 2023, np.). As Florida governor DeSantis put it in explaining his policies against ESG investing: “Corporations across America continue to inject an ideological agenda through our economy rather than through the ballot box. Today’s actions reinforce that ESG considerations will not be tolerated here in Florida, and I look forward to extending these protections during this legislative session” (Beals, 2023, np.). DeSantis further reduced ESG to being the product of “mob rule,” stating that Florida would “never surrender to the ‘woke’ mob” (Beals, 2023, np.). Other conservatives, including former Vice President Mike Pence, echoed DeSantis’s rhetoric by referring to ESG as “radical” (Brush, 2022, np.).

Beyond the attacks from politicians, business-funded political groups have launched consumer and shareholder campaigns against ESG values and the companies that promote them. One of many anti-ESG organizations is a U.S. political group called Consumers’ Research (CR), which is registered in the U.S. as a 501c3 educational nonprofit organization. CR produces disinformation supporting a broad range of irresponsible corporate practices, while attacking progressive companies, including those taking stands against state government restrictions of voting rights following the 2020 U.S. elections. In 2022, CR targeted the world’s three biggest financial asset management firms with a general “Consumer Warning” against investing with them, while running personal attacks on BlackRock CEO Larry Fink (SourceWatch, nd). The campaign accused Vanguard of “meddling with [the] energy industry to achieve progressive political goals at the expense of market efficiency” (Mufson, 2023, np.).

These campaigns have undermined the trend toward more responsible investing. For example, Vanguard pulled out of the pro-ESG Net Zero Asset Managers Alliance, which was convened by the United Nations Environment Program (Beals, 2023). In addition, industry-leader BlackRock stopped using the term ESG in communications with investors both because it had become too polarizing and because the political backlash contributed to a $4 billion ESG fund loss (Ruben, 2023). The combination of disinformation (e.g., ESG investing is less profitable) backed by political power (e.g., pulling pension funds from ESG companies) produced a self-fulfilling prophecy by dimming the value of ESG investments that had previously outperformed the stock market averages in the U.S. (Rives, 2023).

The Danish bank, Danske Bank, is another example of a company getting caught between liberal and illiberal communication logics. In 2022 and 2023, the bank was criticized by climate activists and NGOs in Denmark for not taking its sustainability initiatives far enough (Martini, 2023), including its plans to divest from oil extraction (Jensen, 2023). At the same time, Danske Bank has been excluded from business with the state of Texas for saying the bank would not invest in fossil fuel companies (Hegar, 2023).

These pressures to avoid ESG engagement specifically and CSR engagement more generally are amplified by several properties of systemic disinformation environments. Perhaps most importantly, false and polarizing information circulating about companies is difficult to manage through conventional PR and public education strategies because much disinformation bypasses traditional mass media channels and filters. In addition, irresponsible corporate actors such as oil companies add to the noise on social media with strategic disinformation campaigns often run through fake accounts and Astroturf organizations (Kavada et al., 2023). The business consulting firm PwC has even issued a report on corporate threats from outsourced disinformation campaigns, complete with a price list for different kinds of attacks (PwC, 2021).

More generally, the clash between liberal and illiberal communication logics creates a noisy backdrop that disrupts positive, fact-based CSR information and prevents it from reaching large publics. This has long been illustrated by climate crisis denialism, which has declined in mainstream journalism due to better science reporting, yet still thrives in illiberal disinformation spheres. The spread of disinformation is aided by social media platforms both because of a lack of effective moderation, and because algorithms promote more extreme content to boost user engagement. In 2022, Reuters reported that Facebook “failed to flag up half of posts that promote climate change denial” (Bacchi, 2022, np.). Research by the NGO Global Witness revealed that Facebook’s algorithm amplified climate disinformation by keeping climate skeptic users in filter bubbles of climate denialism as well as directing them toward “worse information, so that what began on a page full of distract and delay narratives, ended on pages espousing outright climate denial and conspiracy” (Global Witness, 2022, np.).

On Twitter, the hashtag #ClimateScam was a top result in December 2022, when “climate” was searched on the site (Milman, 2022b). This coincides with Elon Musk’s takeover of the platform, which included firing content moderation teams and returning banned users to the platform, including users with high-profile climate denialism (Elliot & Stokel-Walker, 2022; Milman, 2022b). All of this complicates assessing discrepancies between CSR practices and CSR communication, which makes it even more attractive for companies to present themselves as socially and environmentally responsible when they are not. Widely shared disinformation also makes it harder for more responsible companies to communicate about their CSR practices.

Moreover, when politicians frame their attacks on CSR generally and ESG criteria specifically as “globalist,” “elitist,” “woke,” or “cosmopolitan,” they tap into core themes of right-wing populism that appeal to the everyday hardships of ordinary people and open the way for unfounded claims about ESG having detrimental effects on jobs, revenue, and investments. As a result, the relatively uncontested early CSR campaigns that enlisted mostly left-leaning consumers in buycott and boycott behavior have now been countered by the activation of right-leaning publics, bringing many companies into direct conflict with different segments of their own consumers.

These competing pressures have led many big corporations to hide behind business alliances that campaign against government climate and tax policies while openly promoting green images in their brand advertising. For example, Apple, Alphabet, BlackRock, and Disney are members of Business Roundtable, an association of CEOs that in 2021 campaigned against the Biden administration’s climate legislation. The campaign included TV and radio advertisements sponsored by the association (but not mentioning any of the companies), along with more than $150,000 in Facebook ads targeting swing voters (Meyer, 2021; Business Roundtable, nd). One advertisement warned that the bill would be “bad for Montana workers and the economy” (Meyer, 2021, np.). The initial draft of the legislation failed.

Business Roundtable, the Chamber of Commerce, and the National Association of Manufacturers all opposed a reworked Biden climate initiative, politically reframed as the Inflation Reduction Act, in 2022. The counter campaign framed the proposal to tax corporations to pay for environmental protection as putting “jobs at risk” by “hurting American job creators” (Business Roundtable, 2022, np.). One visible public objection to this subversive communication through business associations eventually came from Patagonia, a small independently owned outdoor product company that defended the legislation as a long overdue government initiative to use taxes to hold companies accountable for environmental costs. Patagonia CEO Ryan Gellert called out major corporations such as Apple, Microsoft, Disney, Google, and Amazon, among others, for featuring greenwashing in their advertising while working behind the scenes to kill the bill. In response, several companies broke with their associations and came out in support of the legislation, which narrowly passed (Beer, 2022).

These dilemmas of conflicting political pressures operating through irreconcilable communication logics threaten the very future of CSR and ESG. In the next section we suggest that scholars, activists, and corporations need to rethink the current state of the field and imagine possible ways forward.

Rethinking the Future of CSR

We propose three different avenues for reinvigorating CSR: legal actions; business support for healthy democratic systems; and public lobbying associations to promote CSR, ESG, and strong democracy as good for business and society.

Conclusion

We hope this analysis makes a contribution to the evolving paradigm of CSR and ESG research. The earlier literature on CSR and CSR communication, including ESG criteria, has provided important insights on the potential and challenges of CSR and ESG. However, much of that foundational literature assumed a set of background conditions that are now changing. For example, a common assumption is that political pressures on companies come mainly from activists and NGOs on the left (Carroll, 2009; Utting, 2005). Another prevalent assumption is that the predominant stance of governments has been either positive, viewing CSR as complementary to hard law (Steurer, 2010), or neutral, where governments have been unable or unwilling to regulate (Scherer et al., 2016). Such assumptions supported a paradigm in which CSR and ESG operated in communication environments where activists and NGOs had relatively clear voices and little opposition, and where corporations were measured by the alignment of communication with practices or words and actions (Christensen et al., 2013; Winkler et al., 2020). Those paradigmatic background conditions, along with the theoretical assumptions that flowed from them, now need to be adjusted to capture the growing opposition to CSR and ESG values from the right, including more active opposition from governments. Navigating this changing political context is far more challenging because of divisive democratic communication spheres.

These fundamental changes in the communication environment in which both activists and companies now operate have important implications for research in CSR communication. We have proposed a model of how these changing communication processes work that is drawn from media studies research on the role of communication in promoting or undermining productive public democratic debate (Bennett et al., 2018; Couldry, 2012; Poell et al., 2019). We then applied these ideas to update the CSR field to better address the growing problems faced by companies when the surrounding communication environment becomes divisive due to the rise in illiberal communication spheres that monitor and threaten CSR and ESG initiatives. There have been earlier calls for the field to address the changing nature of CSR communication (e.g., Christensen et al., 2013; Scherer & Palazzo, 2011). Our framework shows how the spread of disinformation and the growing political attacks from the right present new challenges for companies seeking to enhance their CSR profiles.

Without new political communication strategies, companies may waiver in their commitments, as when Disney initially sued Florida Governor Ron DeSantis over his appointment of a political oversight board, claiming that he had weaponized government against business (Grimes, 2023), but later backed out of ESG politics altogether. We argue that the formation and then collapse of the Net Zero investment alliance reflect the same conflicts. Without rethinking their social stances and political strategies, companies may respond to divisive political communication by hiding behind strategic disinformation, eroding the possibilities that CSR can even work as aspirational talk (Christensen et al., 2013).

These changing communication conditions affect how corporations choose to react, giving them more choices, yet forcing them to make harder ones. The danger is that companies may yield to the challenges of conflicted political communication environments by increasing reliance on strategic disinformation programs with little aspirational value. The future promise of CSR and ESG depends on organizational and communication strategies enabling broad stakeholder coalitions to establish clearer investment guidelines and promote consensus on stakeholder values. In this context, business communication about the importance of stable democracies may help build public understanding and support. The growing crises facing capitalism, democracy, and the planet call for stronger alliances to coordinate and communicate the alignment of sustainable values in business, democracy, environment, and society.