Communicating Corporate Social Responsibility to a Cynical Public

Abstract

Corporate social responsibility, once seen as peripheral to companies’ main businesses, has been becoming standard practice, with an increasing number of businesses engaging in CSR activities. For example, in a 2007 global survey of corporate managers, the Economist Intelligence Unit found that the majority of respondents (55.2%) considered CSR a high or very high priority for their company, a significant increase from three years previously (33.9%). An even greater majority (68.9%) expected the importance of CSR to increase in the future. Given that corporations are increasingly engaging in CSR activities, it makes sense to communicate those achievements to stakeholders. However, in publicizing CSR achievements, especially if they do so aggressively, corporations risk achieving the opposite result from what they intended—a so-called “boomerang response” described by Robert K. Merton and Patricia L. Kendall in 1944. Given the general public’s distrust of major corporations, it is not unreasonable for a corporation to fear that stakeholders will perceive attempts to communicate CSR achievements as “greenwashing.”