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We examine the ways in which a hidden crisis can be exposed from a communication point of view. In which way can organisations create general awareness of a crisis and try to understand the dynamic nature of interactions? With the help of discourse analysis, we have examined the interactional achievements of two crisis entrepreneurs in the domain of education in the Netherlands: a rector of a secondary school and the founders of BON, a social movement aimed at improving the quality of education. In this way, we will illustrate the discursive practices that play an active role when certain players signal a crisis.
Many global challenges cannot be addressed by one single actor alone. Achieving sustainability requires governance by state and non-state market actors to jointly realise public values and corporate goals. As a form of public-private governance, voluntary standards involving governments, non-governmental organisations and companies have gained much traction in recent years and have been in the limelight of public authorities and policymakers. From a firm perspective, sustainability standards can be a way to demonstrate that they engage in corporate social responsibility (CSR) in a credible way. To capitalise on their CSR activities, firms need to ensure their stakeholders are able to recognise and assess their CSR quality. However, because the relative observability of CSR is low and since CSR is a contested concept, information asymmetries in firm-stakeholder relationships arise. Adopting CSR standards and using these as signalling devices is a strategy for firms to reduce these information asymmetries, by revealing their true CSR quality. Against this background, this article investigates the voluntary ISO 26000 standard for social responsibility as a form of public-private governance and contends that, despite its objectives, this standard suffers from severe signalling problems. Applying signalling theory to the ISO 26000 standard, this article takes a critical stance towards this standard and argues that firms adhering to this standard may actually emit signals that compromise rather than enhance stakeholders' ability to identify and interpret firms' underlying CSR quality. Consequently, the article discusses the findings in the context of public-private governance, suggests a specification of signalling theory and identifies avenues for future research.
This case study provides an analysis of the way in which a leading airline company in the world, Air France-KLM, applies Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) within its business activities. The analysis is based on a conceptualisation of the term itself and the policy of and activities performed by the company. Other companies in the airline industry regard the Air France-KLM as a ‘good practice’ since it acts in an exemplary way on the integration of sustainability in the three major domains of CSR: economy, people and environment. It caters for environmental protection, customer experience, responsible human resources and local development. A challenge remains for the whole of the airline industry: to reconsider the very purpose of their business and start working on CSR 2.0. In CSR 2.0 sustainability, scalability, responsiveness and ‘glocality’ become part of an airline’s very DNA and are not regarded mere ‘defensive’ measurements for satisfying the ‘customer’ and politics.
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