Open for change but closed for transformation: A communicative analysis of managerial corporate social responsibility discourse on the issue of labor

Abstract

Why do some researchers observe that managerial corporate social responsibility discourse contributes to increased awareness of and commitment to solving global environmental and social issues, while others reveal that the same discourse works to obfuscate and sidetrack positive social transformation? This article tries to bring together these procedural and structural perspectives on corporate social responsibility discourse by introducing a communicative approach, which embeds the critical study of corporate social responsibility discourse in a complex and emerging discursive field. The discursive strategies of managerial corporate social responsibility are therefore as shifting as the discourses it competes with are varied. This article, grounded in Deetz’s theoretical framework of systematically distorted communication and discursive closure, explores the US garment industry’s corporate social responsibility communication on labor-related issues in the global supply chain. I position garment industry corporate social responsibility discourse within broad labor policy debates at the operational, institutional, and structural levels. I find that corporate-initiated corporate social responsibility communication operates through several internally coherent frames: establishing ethical standards, providing essential services, and innovating labor management systems. Each frame responds to alternative discourses about supply chain labor with discursive closure and non-closure strategies, that is, corporations choose to acknowledge, engage, or agree with some alternative discourses, while ignoring, suppressing, or eliding over others. I argue that the pattern of choosing discursive strategies for different types of alternative discourses is important in understanding systematically distorted communication in the context of a complex, fragmented discursive field.