According to Vitolla and Rubino (2013), there are three approaches to Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR): Ethics, Values and Strategy. However, corporations tend to forget to incorporate strategic aims when outlining their social initiatives and usually focus on ethics and values. According to these researchers, there needs to be a clear equilibrium between the strategic and value-driven social initiatives of an organisation to be able to establish future-orientated goals in CSR. To make CSR more strategic the stakeholders will need to be heavily involved.
Model of CSR Strategic Control
IMPORTANCE OF STAKEHOLDERS
One area in corporations that is highly important is stakeholder engagement (Smith 2003; Morsing and Schultz 2006; Maignan and Ferrell 2004). Therefore, it is very important to communicate the values and activities of an organisation to its stakeholders (Tench et al. 2014). To do this, it is important to listen to, and give all the required information to, the stakeholders prior to their questions (implementing a pull, rather than push, communication strategy).
Firstly, we will need to categorise the stakeholders to know how to communicate with them. According to Dawkins (2004) there are two types of stakeholders that look at an organisation’s CSR activities:
-
Opinion leaders: business press, investors, non-government organisations, etc. These are the stakeholders who look most at CSR initiatives.
-
The general public: consumers, local communities, etc. These stakeholders do not proactively look for CSR initiatives.
MODEL OF STRATEGIC CONTROL
As can be seen, stakeholders are very important to an organisation. Both Opinion leaders and consumers are wanting to be communicated to about CSR activities of organisations. The problem that many organisations are facing is not the communication with opinion leaders, but the communication with the general public: “66% of global consumers say they’re willing to pay more for sustainable brands—up 55% from 2014” (Rudominer 2016; Dawkins 2004; Ballebye 2011). To more effectively communicate CSR to the general public the model of strategic control is used to incorporate strategic communication to CSR initiatives.
There are three levels, according to the model of CSR strategic control, to incorporate stakeholders into CSR:
-
Instrumental: to improve relationships to gain the stakeholders “continual support” (Maignan and Ferrell 2004)
-
Relational: to increase loyalty and/or trust
-
Ethical: Moral values
After the stakeholders have been divided into the three levels above, a context of the communications will need to be established. According to Vitolla and Rubino (2013), the context within the organisation relies on three things: a) social context, for example communicating to customers and employees, b) competitive context, for example in supply chains, and c) the entrepreneurship and management philosophy of the organisation. These contexts will then be aligned to the stakeholder values (from the stakeholder levels above), after which a CSR orientation can be found.
According to Mcwilliams and Siegal (2001), customers rate ethics and environment as key factors when purchasing products. In addition, a national survey of US consumers found that there are positive effects in consumers purchasing when communicated about CSR initiatives (Kim 2017).
