Exploring the Foundations, Implications, and Discursive Sense Making of (Employee-Directed) Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR)

Katharine E Miller, Purdue University

Abstract

In an age where corporate scandals around diversity, equity, harassment, and other social issues continue to surface, particularly in the wake of the #MeToo and Time’s Up movements, scholars must reconsider the role of business in society. Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) provides organizations with a way to benefit stakeholders, society, and themselves beyond legal compliance. However, while practitioners and other stakeholders have often viewed CSR as an external, reputation, or crisis management tool, its conceptualization and operationalization are changing shape in response to growing social concerns and pressures on corporations to “do the right thing.” With this call for expanded aims of CSR, scholars are pushing for an internal CSR view through employee perspectives regarding CSR efforts, particularly in considering how organizations act responsibly toward internal stakeholders (May, 2014). Thus, research has begun taking a “micro-turn” in analyzing CSR (Aguinis & Glavas, 2012), focused on an individual analysis of such practices within organizations. Broadly, this dissertation seeks to answer the question of how organizations are responsible to their own employees, particularly through CSR efforts. This study takes a mixed-method, micro-approach to understanding the internal sensemaking and understanding of employee-directed CSR given the potentially changing nature of such efforts. In particular, this study explores how organizational members (i.e., employees) construct knowledge (via their sensemaking) of organizational CSR and primarily those employee focused. I take a communicative and discursive approach in viewing CSR as a socially constructed phenomenon (Schultz, Castello, & Morsing, 2013) and (social) movement within organizations (Georgallis, 2017), and thus contextual and unique to organizational sites. Findings revealed D/discourses of CSR from employee perceptions at the micro level and reflected in macro level document messaging. Through this, I found various paradoxes of CSR from the expectations versus reality of what it means for organizations to be “responsible.” At the individual level, employee sensemaking around CSR came to light—particularly in highlighting how these stakeholders rationalize, perceive, and identify with such efforts, especially those targeting or benefiting employees. In presenting a multi-method study, this dissertation contributes to research on the micro-foundations and limited internal perspective of CSR and provides important pragmatic implications given the timely and relevant nature of this work.

Degree

Ph.D.

Advisors

Buzzanell, Purdue University.

Subject Area

Communication|Ethics|Organizational behavior|Evolution and Development|Finance|Labor relations|Management

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