Being Reassuring About the Past While Promising a Better Future: How Companies Frame Temporal Focus in Social Responsibility Reporting
Published in: Business & Society
How is time framed in corporate social responsibility (CSR) communication?
How companies temporally frame CSR communication could indicate decision-making’s aspirations and potential directionalities. For instance, using expressions such as “‘We aspire to. . . ‘We aim for. . .,’ or ‘We are working towards. . .’” when referring to future achievements could signal a commitment to actions with the potential to initiate future change processes.
In this paper, we analyzed 2,720 CSR reports by 245 world-level companies from eight developing countries (Brazil, China, India, Malaysia, Mexico, Russia, South Africa, and Thailand) during the period 2000–2018.
Through a mixed-methods nested approach, we found that companies frame micro and meta themes differently by assigning different time priorities to different social responsibility issues and framing temporality differently depending on their home country’s level of uncertainty avoidance. In particular, results show that CSR talk is mostly framed in the future tense when firms communicate complex human rights issues such as slavery or child labor, while the past and present tenses are more frequent when they report on philanthropy and other cause-related activities. We find that these effects are stronger when firms are from countries characterized by greater uncertainty avoidance.
Based on our findings, we suggest that companies may use temporal focuses strategically and assign different degrees of emphasis to the past, the present, and the future. Firms, for instance, tend to reassure stakeholders about their good deeds by using past/present tenses to provide solid and tangible evidence of their pro-social achievements and affirmations about the realm of specific social issues over which they have full control (such as community support, support of the arts, sports, and other benevolent, pro-social activities belonging to the corporate philanthropy realm), especially in countries with high levels of uncertainty avoidance. At the same time, firms frame more meta themes (e.g. modern slavery or the eradication of child labor, and similar offenses gravitating toward the human rights space), by using a future tense to signal commitment to notions that are hard to grasp and put into practice in the short term. These themes are communicated by deferring action to a more or less foreseeable future. By deferring action to the future, such companies are unlikely to be blamed for failing to account for meta issues while remaining cautious about their activities and achievements regarding these problems.
With this paper we contribute to the CSR communication literature by showing that temporal references in CSR talk tend to differ, depending on the company-level control of CSR activities. More specifically, we typify a 2 × 2 matrix that presents the typology of framings based on our two key dimensions— temporal focus and uncertainty avoidance. Companies from high uncertainty avoidance countries tend to reassure audiences by stressing their past track records and by remarking very concretely and in detail on the company’s commitment to social activities (reassurance framing). In contrast, organizations from low uncertainty avoidance countries adopt a “celebratory” frame to point out their social activities in the realm of micro themes—mostly revealing their intention to emphasize certain achievements without either offering very concrete or temporally defined details about when these achievements were accomplished (celebratory framing). Regarding the meta themes we identified a more abstract frame (imaginary framing), which companies probably use in countries characterized by low levels of uncertainty avoidance to postpone their meta themes to an unknown future, and a more concrete temporal framing (pragmatist framing), which is used in countries with high levels of uncertainty avoidance, where external audiences are likely to appreciate reassurance about future actions’ temporality.
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The Authors at the Department of Management
Annamaria's main research interests are Social Media Marketing and Corporate Social Responsibility communication, focusing on automated text analysis. She is a member of the core faculty of Bologna Business School, where she teaches Digital Interactive Marketing.