International Journal of Business Communication

Through a cross-sectional online survey, this study examines the moderated mediation model of public skepticism toward organizational altruism and public distrust of CSR messages in the process of corporate social responsibility (CSR) communication. Focusing solely on CSR communication elements rather than CSR practice, this study sheds light on the significant role that effective CSR communication elements play in attenuating public skepticism and further inducing positive public evaluations of an organization. Our results suggest that skepticism toward altruism is significantly reduced by the six effective CSR communication elements—CSR informativeness, transparency, objectivity, consistency, personal relevance, and a less promotional tone. In turn, an organization is able to restore the publics’ positive evaluation of it. Although this study confirms the moderating role of public distrust in the process, it also reveals this moderating role to move in an unexpected direction. That is, the positive effects of effective CSR communication elements are much greater for people who have stronger distrust of CSR messages than those with less distrust. This indicates that public distrust of CSR messages (developed over time) may be overcome with quality CSR communication.

The present study aims to identify and interpret the emerging strategies employed by nonprofit organizations (NPOs) in communicating with their business partners on Twitter. A computer-assisted content analysis was applied to analyze 5,661 tweets posted by 65 NPOs. The study identified three corporate social responsibility communication strategies, which were characterized by a distinctive emphasis on stakeholder engagement. We analyzed NPOs that targeted different issues-initiated corporate social responsibility partnership conversations at varying levels by adopting self-promotional, partner-oriented, and balanced-interest strategies to justify and promote their relationships with multiple stakeholders on Twitter. This exploratory study contributes to the scant research on cross-sector social partnerships communication from a nonprofit perspective and adds nonprofit-specific evidence to the existing theories and practices.

The study attempts to understand corporations’ efforts to communicate their values and commitment to stakeholders after a crisis. Specifically, the study explores the characteristics of communication efforts that may differ depending on the reputational crisis types: corporate ability (CA) and corporate social responsibility (CSR) crises. Employing a series of semantic network analyses, the study examined the sustainability annual reports of two Korean airlines (i.e., Korean Air and Asiana Airlines) published before and after their recent crises. Results showed how sustainability reports’ central keywords, social issues the companies support, and prioritized stakeholders varied in response to the different types of crises. Word frequency results showed that there was an increasing trend in emphasizing the word “safety” after both types of crisis, while a noticeable decrease in emphasis on the word “ethics” was observed after CA crisis. The results of semantic network analyses showed that Korean Air’s sustainability reports seemed to focus more on aspects of the relationship with stakeholders after the CSR crisis, while Asiana Airlines appeared to place more emphasis on business-related notions after the CA crisis. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

As a widely practiced form of corporate social responsibility (CSR), cause-related marketing (CRM) programs have been considered effective in generating reputational, relational, and financial returns for companies. This study examines a new form of CRM: choice-of-cause programs, in which companies empower consumers to determine which social causes to support. Based on self-determination theory, reputation management literature, and CSR research, this study proposes a conceptual framework that theorizes the effectiveness of the choice program, mapping out consumers’ psychological experiences and consequential attitudinal and behavioral intention responses toward companies and their nonprofit partners. Results of an online experiment offer partial support to the framework. They showed the relative advantage of the choice program over traditional cause-without-choice practice and highlighted the importance of creating an autonomy-supportive CSR program environment where consumers can exercise self-determination. Furthermore, results demonstrated the crucial role of corporate reputation in influencing consumer responses in CSR programs.

Employee engagement and corporate social responsibility (CSR) are two important issues attracting an increasing amount of attention from both business communication researchers and practitioners. A theory-driven model that (1) conceptualizes employee engagement as social media engagement, job engagement, and organizational engagement, and (2) explicates how they are related to an organization’s CSR communication strategies and employee perceived CSR motives is still lacking. To place our study in the context of CSR and business communication, we proposed a strategies-motives-employee engagement model. Results from an online Qualtrics survey (n = 836) supported all our hypotheses except for the direct link between interacting CSR communication strategies and employee organizational engagement. We conducted a two-step Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) analysis to test all our hypotheses. Theoretical and practical implications of the study were discussed.

Diversity managers bear the responsibility of developing and implementing diversity policies. Despite advances in the legislation to fight discrimination, they often encounter resistance and need to generate change and to influence behaviors in the firm. Hence, they develop strategies to implement diversity within the organization. Based on the structuration approach developed by Giddens, and Barley and Tolbert, this research examines the discourse of diversity managers to generate change and institutionalize diversity. Based on a series of 37 in-depth interviews with diversity managers and experts in France, we identified eight scripts for diversity management in organizations. Whereas some scripts have the potential to generate change, others foster a “business as usual” vision of diversity and are in fact non-diversity scripts. This research sheds light on the role of discourse in promoting diversity in firms. To disrupt organizational practices, discourse needs to unveil hidden prejudice, and to be embedded in legislation, time, and space.

With the prevalence of social media usage among consumers, brands have increasingly utilized paid social media influencer (SMI) endorsements in their corporate social responsibility (CSR) communication. However, how such practice generates positive consumer responses is not well understood. Drawing from signaling theory, social learning theory, and social identity theory, a structural equation model analysis was conducted to test our hypotheses and proposed model based on the survey data from 592 U.S. consumers. The research results suggest that a brand’s CSR initiatives, when endorsed by SMIs who are perceived as social media leaders in opinion and taste, directly enhance consumers’ CSR communication engagement about the initiatives and do so indirectly via the consumers’ reduced CSR skepticism. Reduced CSR skepticism and enhanced CSR communication engagement ultimately lead to the consumers’ brand loyalty, brand preference, and price premium. The study has implications for CSR advertising/social-mediated communication, SMI leadership, and SMI endorsement effects.

In the context of corporate social responsibility (CSR) communication, we explore whether consumer perceptions and responses differ when the message content is based on storytelling or exposition. The conceptual model that we propose in the article includes five attributes of CSR message content (i.e., issue importance, CSR impact, CSR motives, CSR fit, and CSR commitment) and their relationships to two types of consumer responses (i.e., purchase and advocacy). We collected data from 444 participants who evaluated the website of a fictitious restaurant chain that included information about its CSR activities using (a) storytelling or (b) expositive CSR messages. The findings suggest that the use of storytelling notably improves perceptions of issue importance, CSR impact, CSR fit, and CSR commitment. On the contrary, the type of CSR message does not differentiate consumer perceptions of corporate CSR motives. The use of storytelling or an expositive CSR message also has a significant impact on the conceptual model, with consumers responding more or less intensively to each attribute of the CSR message content depending on the type of message they are exposed to.

Considering the globalization of corporate social responsibility (CSR), China has become an important and distinctive market for CSR practice and research. Communication, as a fast-growing subfield of CSR research, has made substantial contributions to the theorization of CSR yet has been dominated by Western contexts. To provide a contextualized view of CSR communication, this study systematically examined the 88 articles of CSR communication research published in peer-reviewed journals with a focus on the Chinese context. Findings revealed the unique characteristics of Chinese CSR and the status of Chinese CSR communication literature in terms of publication trend, authorship/institution, RQ/Hypothesis, research topics, research context, theoretical frameworks, and methodological approaches. In addition, this study identified gaps in the current Chinese CSR communication research. It offered directions for future development regarding strengthening conceptual development, innovating methodological approaches, and expanding research topics and scopes.

Adopting a critical frame analysis perspective, this study investigates how American and Chinese energy giants represent and frame climate change in their corporate social responsibility reports, and reveals the respective underlying motivations and ideologies. The results show that the eight energy giants all recognized climate change, barely diagnosed its causes, slightly interpreted its impacts, but placed heavy emphasis on their solutions. They divert responsibility and criticism, through representing themselves as a victim and solver rather than a contributor. The frames identified in both corpora include Emission Management frame, Techno-optimism frame, Countermeasures frame, and Stakeholder Engagement frame, with common and distinct characteristics across the two corpora. The analysis of representations and frames exposes shared motivations such as greenwashing, legitimacy, and stakeholder engagement. However, these motivations indicate distinct ideologies, with American energy giants’ ideological denial, a subtle form of climate denialism, and Chinese energy giants’ green growth ideology, striving for a green, low-carbon development while reducing emissions.

We analyze Donald J. Trump’s Twitter activity over the last months of the 2016 presidential campaign, his period as President Elect, and his Presidential term until Fall 2019, shortly before the outbreak of the pandemic. Trump weaponized social networks as a communication tool to build influence on the financial market and the public opinion. We relate Trump’s communication on Twitter to the dynamics of the NASDAQ100 trend over the whole period of study as well as two subperiods, pre-presidential versus presidential. We find that Trump’s hyperactivity on Twitter is followed by a negative market trend, and that tweets covering politically, and economically sensitive topics seem to negatively impact the market, except for real economy-related tweets. Some topics positively received by the market in the pre-presidential phase (e.g., China) become anticipators of negative trading days during the presidential one. We also consider the emotional tone of Trump’s tweets and find an unexpected reversal of the communicative valence of the tweets as to their expected impact on the stock market. Positive sentiment tweets seem to be followed by negative market performance and, maybe more surprisingly, vice versa. It seems that, during the period of observation, the market has learnt to interpret the emotional tone of Trump’s tweets as instrumental to Trump’s political strategy. In particular, the market seems to have realized that negative sentiment in Trump’s communication was entirely functional to political consensus building and not meant to convey market-relevant information. This is at odds with the idea that presidential communication should reflect the public interest, and especially so when it has major implications for the economy. Trump’s use of social media during both his presidential campaign and term questions the principle that institutional responsibility in the digital realm implies treating the infosphere as a commons. We discuss the implications for the functioning of the stock market and the emerging public interest ethical issues related to the breakdown of such principle.

This article explores the ingredients of effective business communication, presenting the extensive work of German psychologist and communication expert Friedemann Schulz von Thun. Over the course of his 50-year career, Schulz von Thun has developed numerous frameworks and tools that enhance our understanding of how to talk to one another to settle disagreements, promote strong relationships and foster individual as well as organizational success. We offer a concise synthesis of his most influential concepts (i.e., the square of communication, the inner team, and the value square) and illustrate their application in communication research and practice.