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Frame of Reference
In the field of CSR communication, employees have not gained any particular attention within recent academic literature, consequently only a few studies were found to address this perspective. In order to research the field we conducted a combined systematic and traditional literature review, which is explained in the first section. The other sections are divided into three main sections. The first section addresses CSR content by providing an overview of existing literature on CSR and CSR communication. Secondly, we combine theories of CC with theories of PR to explain why we refer to them as communication styles. In the third section we link the findings of CSR and PR to create our communication strategies. We then explore communication channels and end by presenting the correlation between content, strategy, style and channel in our Tailored Internal Communication model.
Literature Review Process
The purpose of finding relevant literature is to be able to identify what is already known in the fields of PR and CSR in order to indicate how the study would contribute and add something new to the field (Easterby- Smith et al., 2015). In case study research, it has been debated if such understanding will inhibit and limit the findings due to potential biases towards the data (Eisenhardt, 1989). Nevertheless, we argue that our pre-understanding in the field permitted us to make more accurate constructs. We started off by reviewing one seminal contribution from each field: CSR and PR. Seminal contributions are important,since they are seen as central papers in the field and they help to identify necessary keywords in order to search for additional literature. These were considered seminal since they were mentioned in other research papers and had highest citations on Google Scholar. For CSR,Archie B. Carroll is the most cited researcher within the field. He made an important contribution to the field through his pyramid approach, which later was modified together with Mark Schwarz into a three-domain approach (Schwartz and Carroll, 2003). James Grunig, Larissa Grunig and David Dozier are the most cited researchers for PR, and have made several contributions in the field. Their four models of PR and ideas of symmetrical and asymmetrical communication have been known in the field since 1992. What these two seminal contributions have in common is that they have been widely used by both practitioners and researchers, and are central in several other papers. They are listed below together with the number of citations for each:
1. Dozier, M.D., Grunig, E.J. & IABC Research Foundation. (1992). Excellence in public relations and communication management. Hillsdale: Erlbaum (1510 citations)
2. Carroll, A. B. (1991). The Pyramid of Corporate Social Responsibility: Toward the Moral Management of Organizational Stakeholders. Business Horizons, 39-48. (5449 citations)
After reading the seminal contributions, additional searches were conducted systematically using only peer-reviewed journals with an impact factor over 1 with the selected keywords.The keywords used in the initial search were Corporate Social Responsibility, Internal Communication, Communication, Employee and Public Relations. Boolean operators e.g. AND, OR, were used to combine the keywords to delineate the scope and depth of the search results (Easterby-Smith et al., 2015) Secondly, the articles were put in an excel document to find general themes among them, in order to categorize the content. Thirdly, additional literature was detected by reviewing articles found in the systematic search through snowball sampling. Snowball sampling is when entities that met the criteria are asked to name others who also meet the criteria (Easterby-Smith et al., 2015). In this literature review, the entities can be seen as the articles, where the authors used the references in the articles found ton identify other relevant literature for their research. Hence, in this step, we did not use a selected criterion in the search for additional articles and we did not take into account the impact factor of the published journals. Rather, all literature was addressed; hence, it followed a traditional literature review. After the review, we created a tailored
communication model (see figure 3), and used it to modify the initial research questions and outline the structure of following chapters. The identification of the limited knowledge for tailored communication towards employees, served as the basis for our continued research. Detailed list of the articles used can be found in Appendix 1.
Corporate Social Responsibility
This section will start off by reaching a definition of CSR and then move into explaining how to communicate its content. We detected three schools of thought within CSR: one focusing on the corporate responsibility towards society, one towards the responsibility to increase its profits and one towards the latest idea of Creating Shared Value (CSV). Howard Bowen (1953) is cited to be the father of the modern era of CSR and he argued that CSR must involve activities that balance the multiplicity of stakeholders’ interests, not only the interest of the corporation (cited in Carroll, 1991). Thereafter, stakeholder management became a dominant logic in CSR research, in order for a corporation to (1) identify to whom they are responsible and (2) how far that responsibility extends. Freeman (1984) identified stakeholders as “groups and individuals who can affect or are affected by, the achievement of an organization´s mission” (p.46). In contrast, Friedman (1970) presented an opposite school of thought arguing that the only social responsibility of any corporation is to increase its profits and business managers should not engage in CSR activities unless they increase their profit. Archie B. Carroll is one of the famous researchers within CSR and he made an attempt in 1991 to incorporate these two opposite schools of thought through his Pyramid of CSR (see figure 4). Accordingly, he categorized CSR into four domains: economic, legal, ethical and philanthropic.Even if Carroll´s pyramid of CSR became a leading framework, the priorities for the four domains in the pyramid were questioned (Schwartz & Carroll, 2003). The researchers meant that even if the legal domain is in the bottom, it does not mean that it is less important than the ethical domain. For that reason, they presented a Venn diagram (see Figure 5) and argued that the three-domain approach of ethical, legal and economic domains were better suited (Carroll & Schwartz, 2003). The philanthropic dimension was removed because the researchers believed that such activities were hard to distinguish, and may be purely based on economic interests. We have noticed that much research on CSR has focused on categorizing the different domains (i.e. ethical, legal, economic and philanthropic) separately (Carroll,1991) or analyzing their overlapping themes (Schwartz & Carroll, 2003). These are important in order to understand the context of CSR. On the other hand, as argued in an article by Ligeti and Oravecz (2009), the “underlying meaning of making profits and running business activities – for the owners and employees alike – is to make the world a better place to live in” (p.137). Thus, we argue that the interdependence between the ethical, legal and economic dimensions has been forgotten. In the 21th century, we can also detect a third school of thought with the ideas of CSV: creating shared value for business and society (Porter & Kramer, 2006). We merge these concepts to define CSR as: Corporate Social
Responsibility refers to the responsibility of a corporation to engage in business activities that aim at creating economic and societal value, produced within the boundaries of law, regulations and stakeholder rights.
1 Introduction
1.1 Problem
1.2 Purpose and Research Questions
1.3 Delimitations of the Study
1.4 Key Terms
1.5 Structure
2 Frame of Reference
2.1 Literature Review Process
2.2 Corporate Social Responsibility
2.3 CSR Communication
2.3.1 Social Reports
2.3.2 Codes of Conduct
2.3.3 Social Issues
2.4 Corporate Communication
2.4.1 Internal Communication
2.5 PR Communication Styles
2.5.1 History of Public Relations
2.5.2 Symmetrical Communication
2.5.3 Asymmetrical Communication
2.6 Communication Strategies
2.7 Channels
2.8 Concluding Remarks
3 Method of the Research Process
3.1 Research Approach and Design
3.1.1 Qualitative Research Design
3.1.2 Abductive Approach
3.2 Research Strategy
3.2.1 Case Study Research
3.2.2 Presentation of Case – Clarion Hotel Post
3.3 Data Collection
3.3.1 Interview Sessions Site
3.3.2 Interview Questions
3.3.3 Exercise and Scenario
3.4 Data Analysis
3.4.1 Secondary data
3.4.2 Primary data
3.5 Trustworthiness and Ethical Considerations
3.5.1 Credibility
3.5.2 Transferability
3.5.3 Dependability
3.5.4 Confirmability
3.5.5 Ethical Considerations
4 Empirical Discussion
4.1 Demonstration of Case
4.1.1 Internal CSR Communication
4.2. Preference for Content
4.2.1 CSR Explanation to reduce Skepticism
4.3 Preference for Style
4.4 Constraint Recognition
4.5 Support Strategy
4.6 Channel
4.6.1 Mixed Channels
4.6.2 Manager/Supervisor Channel
5 Analysis of Findings
5.1 The Model from Frame of Reference
5.2 Tailored Internal CSR Communication
5.2.1 CSR Explanation for Endorsement Processes
5.2.2 The Factors Affecting Employee Preferences
5.2.3 The 4-Strategies of Employee Preferences
5.3 CSR Communication Grid
6 Conclusion, Limitations and Suggestions for Future Research
6.1 Limitations and Suggestions for Future Research
6.2 Practical Implications
6.3 Guiding Principles of our Study
References
Appendix 1
Appendix 2
Appendix 3
Appendix 4
Appendix 5
