From what we say to what we tell: the rhetoric of social responsibility in France

Abstract

The topics of the social and environmental responsibility for the companies, deontological rules, codes of control and ethical charters, exercise of the voting rights to the service of the durable development, choices of investment of the funds, ethical placements are more and more often discussed. The companies and their stakeholders, the investors and the managers financial feel increasingly concerned by these questions. As a result more and more literature can be found on those subjects and more specifically on the strategy developed by firms to implement social responsibility. The perception that companies have of their social responsibility as well as the action plans that they initiate in this field can be analyzed using panoply of semantic tools. Based on four institutional communications produced by the companies themselves, we will determine beyond what is said, what the corporate world really says about social responsibility. The alternative use of two types of tools will enable us to reveal, beyond simple expression, the way in which these organizations conceive their social role: ‐ the interactional view and the relational analysis, as developed by the Palo Alto Group ‐ metaphorical analysis, according to the principal metaphorical families characterized by Morgan (1983)

Citation

Ocler, R. (2006), "From what we say to what we tell: the rhetoric of social responsibility in France", Social Responsibility Journal, Vol. 2 No. 3/4, pp. 300-307. https://doi.org/10.1108/17471117200600007