Why is communication such a big deal for CSR?

Corporate social responsibility often provokes a lot of debate. But one thing that most people seem to be agreed on is the necessity of good communications. Of course, what makes for "good" communications is not so clear cut. Should companies engage in dialogue and debate with their stakeholders? How do you communicate "authentically" with consumers around social issues? And what do employees expects or want in terms of internal communication around CSR? These are some of the questions occupying minds rights now, so it has been interesting to spend the last couple of weeks exploring some of the challenges around the intersection of CSR and communication, both from a research and practice perspective. Not that this has necessarily brought me any closer to the right answers, but I think it has helped a lot in clarifying what the right questions might be.

Last week I keynoted the 1st International CSR Communication conference in Amsterdam, NL, a primarily research conference that also featured a lot of practitioner participants. This was preceded by a doctoral workshop on CSR and communication research where budding PhD students sought to test out their ideas, theories, and methods with experienced researchers like myself and Mette Morsing from Copenhagen Business School. Then, this week I keynoted another pretty unique conference - a mixed practitioner/research conference in Copenhagen on CSR and social media titled "Social media for social purposes".

Suddenly it seems that the communications challenges in CSR are getting a lot of attention. Certainly they are beginning to attract a lot of research activity, whether from management researchers, communications scientists, or media analysts. There is some really interesting stuff happening out there, much of it making use of the new online data that is all around us. I've been impressed by some of the datasets that are being put together using Tweets, blogs, YouTube videos, media articles, and a variety of online texts and reports. The possibilities of analyzing "big data" around online CSR communication are growing all the time. But also, it is clear that we need more than just huge amounts of data - we also need to be asking the right questions.

Consider this. McDonald's, which has been a pioneer in blogging about its CSR practices through its Values in Practice blog, has recorded the following stats from January - November 2011:

Number of posts: 16.
Average number of comments per post: 0.5
Average number of tweets per post: 1.2
Average number of Facebook likes per post: 3.1
Average number of shares per post: 3.8

Now consider this. McDonald's has more than 11m people who have "liked" the company's main Facebook page. That's a lot of people who don't seem to be much interested in what is happening over at their CSR blog. Clearly something is up. CSR experts are saying that companies need to engage in dialogue with their stakeholders. So are McDonald's stakeholders actually not interested in dialogue? Is the way the company is communicating not relevant for them? Is the company blocking interacting on some way or is one way communication actually effective here?

As I say, we don't really have the answers to these sorts of questions yet, but the field is moving fast and through network, discourse, and sentiment analysis, for example, researchers are getting a better understanding of how and why people respond to CSR communications in particular ways.... and what this all means for the society we live in today. There is a long way to go, but it looks like its going to be an exciting and informative journey.

AC

Photo by joshfassbind. Reproduced under Creative Commons licence

Are we living in The Age of Stupid?

Here is another guest-blog from our friend and colleague Laura. Exciting news about new releases from the world of Celluloid. Timely to accompany the Cannes Festival right now. Enjoy!
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I, like Crane & Matten, like to use film and literature to explore our subject in alternative ways which sometimes capture the imagination more profoundly than the average media report or academic case study. Business Ethics films seem to me to fall into two simple categories, the documentary-type film on the one hand and on the other the dramatisation of either a real or realistic example of ethically dubious business-related behaviour. In the documentary form I would include Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth, Leonardo di Caprio’s The 11th Hour, Supersize Me, The Corporation, WalMart: The High Cost of Low Price, Orgasm Inc. and the ENRON documentary, The Smartest Guys in the Room. The contrasting dramatised approach includes Erin Brockovich, Blood Diamond, The Insider, Rogue Trader, There will be Blood, Michael Clayton and Fast Food Nation.

Each of these two approaches has their advantages and limitations of course. The documentary perspective can comfortably contain more factual information but can err on the preachy side – maybe that’s why the celebrity association seems to pep things up a little and hold interest. And even if you are basically in agreement with the premise, you can’t escape the certain knowledge that the version of events you are getting is clearly aiming to get one side of the story firmly across. This doesn’t move the arguments tremendously far forward but can focus the mind and provide ammunition for debate. The dramatisation approach to Business Ethics films are easier-going to watch in a sense, though of course the credibility of the message can get subsumed in the dramatic action.

A hybrid approach, with the detail and credibility of a documentary but the entertainment factor of a dramatisation, has potential to profit from the best of both worlds. In March a new film released in the UK managed to do just that and combine the documentary and the dramatic styles with considerable success to bring home the runaway catastrophe of climate change with a punch, and miraculously without making you feel like you have been lectured at.

The Age of Stupid is directed by Franny Armstrong and truly is a film which reaches parts you had forgotten you had. It stars Pete Postlethwaite (seems every film needs a celebrity, but then he is a brilliant actor) as an archivist living alone in 2055 in a world decimated by climate change. As he mutters to himself and his computer screen he reviews footage from 2008 and ponders why, when we had the chance, we didn’t do anything about the environmental damage we were causing.

The documentary aspect comes through as the archivist follows several real stories from around the world: an octogenarian French mountain guide who has watched his beloved landscape change; an ambitious entrepreneur starting a low-cost airline in India and seeking the advantages there which the developed world has long enjoyed; a Shell oilman from New Orleans who sees no real contradiction between a life spent in the oil industry and the horrendous damage caused by Hurricane Katrina, in which he helped to save over 100 people’s lives; a young Nigerian woman who is doing all she can to earn money to put herself through medical school and become a doctor (including fishing in the oil-polluted waters and washing fish with ‘Omo’ to make them ‘edible’); two Iraqi refugee children looking for their brother; and an English wind farm developer trying to overcome opposition in the form of formidable middle aged, middle class locals (he loses).

These real lives show intriguing, sometimes heart breaking perspectives on the fallout of climate change, almost all of which have some connection to corporations (Shell in particular come under the spotlight) and their activities, so useful business ethics material as well as a straight education on the complexity we cause by messing with the environment. For me what it did spectacularly well was bring home the point that climate change is not something for the younger (or future) generation to worry about – it is us, now, of all ages who need to get a grip. In fact, probably, the older we are, the more culpable, with our high cost, high energy consuming lifestyles and endless rooms of stuff we could easily live without. It is the oil man who points out that people looking back on our era will be bound to call it the Age of Stupid, for our failure to act on the damage we are causing.

The film is timed explicitly to galvanise action prior to the United Nations Climate Change Conference in December 2009 in Copenhagen. This is the follow-up to the Kyoto Protocol and the Bali Roadmap. Director Franny Armstrong puts it quite plainly herself “Copenhagen is our last chance”. Certainly, it will be an incredibly important political, social, environmental and economic event, and one in which we will see quite clearly the metal of our respective politicians. Legislation is at last being looked to as part of the solution, as we have seen in the Climate Change Act 2008 in the UK and may yet witness from the Climate Change Bill currently being debated in the House of Representatives in the US. This Bill, going under the official title of the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009 , should be considered by the Energy and Commerce Committee by the end of May 2009. The time for tackling climate change could hardly be any more ‘now’.

I –seriously – spent the next few evenings after seeing The Age of Stupid sitting in an unheated, darkened house desperately trying to save energy. The film is that moving and effective at waking you up to the situation we are in. Happily spring is here in the UK so I no longer need to take quite such chilling steps to do my bit. But at the risk of sounding evangelical (as if I haven’t already!), I would say – go and see the film, or better still arrange for it to be shown at your workplace/university/school/arts centre or wherever. If we are quick, we may just manage to be not as stupid as we look.

Laura J. Spence, Director, Centre for Research into Sustainability, Royal Holloway, University of London, UK. www.rhul.ac.uk/management/cris