When the Right Thing to Do Is Also the Wrong Thing: Moral Sensemaking of Responsible Business Behavior During the COVID-19 Crisis

Heidi Reed ()
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Heidi Reed: Audencia Business School

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Abstract: This study examines how individual members of the public make moral sense of the potentially conflicting "economic problem" or "public health problem" representations of the COVID-19 crisis when judging responsible business behavior. The data are based on a qualitative survey involving a thought experiment with 119 participants in the United States conducted at the initial stage of the pandemic. This article proposes a typology matrix using the theories of cognitive polyphasia and cognitive dissonance to understand better individual moral sensemaking of responsible business behavior in the context of a societal paradox in which there are contradictory and interdependent demands between important social objectives. The typology, referred to as the 4R Model of Moral Sensemaking of Competing Social Problems, provides insights for how companies may be perceived when responding to competing social problems, expanding the micro-CSR (corporate social responsibility) and paradox literatures.

Keywords: cognitive dissonance cognitive polyphasia COVID-19 micro-CSR paradox; cognitive dissonance; cognitive polyphasia; COVID-19; micro-CSR; paradox (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022-07-31
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://audencia.hal.science/hal-04531082
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Published in Business and Society, 2022, 63 (4), pp.1030-1062. ⟨10.1177/00076503221114021⟩

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:journl:hal-04531082

DOI: 10.1177/00076503221114021

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