EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Corporate Citizenship, Social Responsibility, and Sustainability Reports as “Would-be” Narratives

Michel Dion (michel.dion@usherbrooke.ca)
Additional contact information
Michel Dion: Université de Sherbrooke

Humanistic Management Journal, 2017, vol. 2, issue 1, No 6, 83-102

Abstract: Abstract Corporate citizenship, social responsibility and sustainability reports could be analyzed from a philosophical viewpoint. In this article, we will use Paul Ricoeur’s hermeneutic philosophy to assess the narrativity of such reports. Out of a philosophical viewpoint, our exploratory study analyzes the contents of ten reports: two corporate citizenship reports (Disney; Abbott), three corporate social responsibility reports (WhiteWave; Comcast NBCUniversal; MGM Resorts International), and five sustainability reports (Whole Foods Market; Marriott; Johnson & Johnson; Toyota; Honda). Those reports are arising in-time and are thus referring to past corporate events and phenomena (past-focused perspective). Sometimes such reports introduce a corporate world-dream that could emphasize various issues such as human dignity and inclusiveness/diversity, global health, and planetary stewardship (future-focused perspective). They could even convey a subversive ideal that could strongly shake the foundations of business. The way business corporations are understanding corporate citizenship and sustainability could, more or less radically, change the way we are doing business. However, those corporate citizenship, social responsibility and sustainability reports do not have any emplotment. They are thus stories that cannot be considered as narratives. We could call them “would-be” narratives.

Keywords: Corporate citizenship; social responsibility and sustainability reports; Narratives; Paul Ricoeur (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s41463-017-0022-x Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:humman:v:2:y:2017:i:1:d:10.1007_s41463-017-0022-x

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/journal/41463

DOI: 10.1007/s41463-017-0022-x

Access Statistics for this article

Humanistic Management Journal is currently edited by Michael Pirson

More articles in Humanistic Management Journal from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla (sonal.shukla@springer.com) and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (indexing@springernature.com).

 
Page updated 2024-12-29
Handle: RePEc:spr:humman:v:2:y:2017:i:1:d:10.1007_s41463-017-0022-x