Contributions published at Foundations of Business Administration and Theories of the Firm (Andreas Scherer)

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Purpose Extant research on CSR communication has focused primarily on external communication, i.e. what firms communicate to their environment. At the same time, a large part of this literature exhibits a mechanistic understanding of communication that implies the possibility of a package-like transfer of information and meaning from sender to receiver. However, this notion of communication can be criticized for neglecting the constitutive role of communication for organizations. As an alternative, these authors propose a theoretical perspective known as “communi-cation constitutes organizations” (CCO). The CCO view allows for grasping organizations as holistic and polyphonic communicative entities. Hence, what are the implications for CSR communication when we switch from a mechanistic to a constitutive notion of communication? Design/Methodology/Approach This is a conceptual paper. We apply the CCO view to CSR communication. Findings Our application of the CCO view yields three main findings: (1) CSR communication represents only one of several communicative practices that collectively constitute the organization and that evolve in competition with one another; (2) CSR communication is not only a function of (large-scale) formal organizations, but as a communicative activity it can itself also form the constitutive basis for the emergence of rudimentary, local, and temporary forms of organizing; (3) According to the CCO view, organizations are constituted and stabilized by various non-human entities (e.g., texts or other artifacts) that “act” on their behalf. Thus, CSR communication would need to take also into account the agency and responsibility of these non-human entities, which in some cases lack concrete individual human creators who could be held accountable for. Originality/Value Our paper links the literature on CSR communication to broader debates in organizational communication studies. By applying the CCO view, we arrive at a new understanding of CSR communication that allows for comprehending the legitimacy and accountability of organizations as holistic communicative phenomena and helps to transcend a one-sided accentuation of the external side of CSR communication.

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The process by which scholarly papers are selected for publication in a journal is faced with serious problems. The referees rarely agree and often are biased. This paper discusses two alternative measures to evaluate scholars. The first alternative suggests input control. The second one proposes that the referees should decide only whether a paper reaches a minimal level of quality. Within the resulting set, each paper should be chosen randomly. This procedure has advantages but also disadvantages. The more weight that is given to input control and random mechanism, the more likely it is that unconventional and innovative articles are published.

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In this paper we address the democratic deficit that emerges when private corporations engage with public policy, either by providing citizenship rights and global public goods (corporate citizenship) or by influencing the political system and lobbying for their economic interests (strategic corporate political activities). This democratic deficit is significant, especially when multinational corporations operate in locations where national governance mechanisms are weak or even fail, where the rule of law is absent and there is a lack of democratic control. This may lead to a decline in the social acceptance of the business firm and its corporate political activities and, thus, to a loss of corporate legitimacy. Under these conditions corporations may compensate the emerging democratic deficit and reestablish their legitimacy by internalizing democratic mechanisms within their organizations, in particular in their corporate governance structures and procedures. We analyze the available corporate governance models with the help of a typology and discuss the possible contributions of a new form of democratic corporate governance.

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Over the last decades, various scholars have propagated a view of organization as essentially consisting of communication, which has frequently been referred to as “communication constitutes organization” (CCO). While this perspective has been greatly advanced in theoretical respects, its range of methodologies is still limited to the level of individual episodes of communication rather than organization in its entirety. In this paper, we present network analysis as an alternative for developing a suitable methodological approach. Based on a discussion of existing network approaches to organization and communication, we develop a new network approach that encompasses the fundamental assumptions of the CCO perspective. The proposed network approach places communication at the center of the analysis by turning the prevalent network perspective ‘inside out’, so that the vertices of the network represent communications and the edges represent individuals. We illustrate our methodological proposal with an empirical case study examining the dynamics of the organization as a communication network over time.

Corporate governance practice is mainly centered on the protection of investors’ rights. How-ever, this view neglects the fundamental changes in the operating conditions of business due to globalization and the weakening of regulatory frameworks. Weak or absent enforcement of contracts, increasingly unfettered negative externalities of corporate action, and involvement of private actors in the provision of public goods change the role of business in a fundamental way, rendering it a political actor. Resulting in the extension of corporate power these devel-opments challenge the very assumptions of efficiency based corporate governance theory. Re-current misuse of power poses a threat to organizational legitimacy. Drawing on suggestions to restore organizational legitimacy by means of discursive processes, we argue that opening cor-porate governance to such processes is a suitable means to safeguard organizational legitimacy in a globalized world.

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Research rankings based on publications and citations today dominate governance of academia. Yet they have unintended side effects on individual scholars and academic institutions and can be counterproductive. They induce a substitution of the “taste for science” by a “taste for publication”. We suggest as alternatives careful selection and socialization of scholars, supplemented by periodic self-evaluations and awards. Neither should rankings be a basis for the distributions of funds within universities. Rather, qualified individual scholars should be supported by basic funds to be able to engage in new and unconventional research topics and methods.

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In this paper we argue that the dominant shareholder-centered model of cor-porate governance does not take into account two interrelated developments: the increasing threat to corporate legitimacy in a globalized economy and the growing complexity and dynamics of corporate environments, that potential-ly diminish the efficiency of corporations. Indeed, this model of corporate governance can be regarded as a potential threat to corporate legitimacy and efficiency. To tackle both problems of organizational legitimacy and effi-ciency we suggest to make corporate governance subject to and complement it by democratic processes based on stakeholder participation and communi-cation. So it can serve as a counterweight and corrective to the dominant economic logic underlying corporate structures and processes.

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