Cynthia E. Clark

Differences Between Public Relations and Corporate Social Responsibility: An Analysis

Abstract This article compares corporate social responsibility and corporate public relations by reviewing their origins, theories, processes, and primary responsibilities and found them to be quite similar in these respects. By comparing the two disciplines, theorists and practitioners can gain greater insight into each field. The comparison reveals a key difference whereby effective communication methods are largely absent from the social responsibility literature; yet by including such techniques, one can enhance the development and overall impact of managing corporate–stakeholder relationships. A communication management approach, which is linked to stakeholder analysis, is offered. Cynthia Clark is an assistant professor in the College of Communication at Boston University where she teaches Corporate Communication.

Influencing Climate Change Policy The Effect of Shareholder Pressure and Firm Environmental Performance

Firms face a great deal of pressure to engage in the heightened debate about climate change policies and practices. Building on the corporate political strategy literature, the authors evaluate how firms choose to influence those policies when faced with pressure from shareholders and activists. The authors triangulate firms’ choice of corporate political activity (CPA) with their environmental performance to draw out whether performance affects the firm’s choice of engagement level in CPA. The authors find that firms in the S&P 500 use a form of constituency-building (CB) more often than a financial-incentive (FI) tactic and that environmental performance moderates this choice. To date, there is little research connecting corporate political activity and climate change policies and performance. This research is intended to contribute to this literature gap.

Environmental Shareholder Activism Considering Status and Reputation in Firm Responsiveness

Status and reputation have recently gained traction as theoretical mechanisms that, as important parts of decision processes, influence and explain firm behavior. In this study, we examine how environmentally concerned shareholder activists vary in their status and reputation, and how these differences affect firm responsiveness to their concerns. In a sample of 420 resolutions concerning the natural environment in the period 2004 to 2008, our results indicate that firms respond positively to shareholder activists’ high status (a desirable characteristic) and also to their reputation to threaten the firm (an unfavorable characteristic). As such, our study advances a promising explanation to firm responsiveness on environmental issues, rooted in their interpretation of how activists’ status and reputation affect their firm.

Firm Engagement and Social Issue Salience, Consensus, and Contestation

Facing an increasing number and variety of issues with social salience, firms must determine how to engage with issues that likely have a significant impact on them. Integrating issues management (IM) and salience theories, the authors find that firms engage with socially contested issues—where there is a high degree of societal disagreement—in a different manner from issues that have social consensus, or high agreement. Examining social issue resolutions filed by shareholders from 1997 to 2009 (3,887 total observations), the study finds that socially contested issues, as well as those issues with social consensus, are both likely to result in engagement by the firm. For social issues with consensus, a firm is more likely to opt for a low level of shareholder engagement whereas resolutions regarding contested issues lead to engaging shareholders at a higher level. These findings shed new light on the IM and issue salience literature streams that have suggested firms will react differently to these types of issues, even while they remain largely untested. Finally, firms become less engaged with perennial issues over time. rather than more, providing new guidance to researchers, shareholder activists, and firms alike. To the authors’ knowledge, such fined-grained insight into expected levels of firm engagement with social issue salience has not been put forth previously.

Masquerading in the U.S. Capital Markets: The Dark Side of Maintaining an Institution

This article examines the work of professional service firms (PSFs) in their relationships with public corporations; work that is designed to ensure that investors and potential investors have information that will enable them to participate in the capital markets. Using an institutional theory lens, we view these efforts by PSFs as institutional maintenance work and specifically analyze their work related to policing (i.e., rating), enabling (i.e., tutoring), and embedding and routinizing (i.e., collaborating) that helps to support the capital market as a core institution in society. We illustrate how there is a “dark” side to each of these forms of institutional work that exists because of ongoing conflicts of interest within and between their work practices. This dark side has the unintended consequence of producing often biased information or information unavailable to many. When a crisis brings this bias to light, some repair is introduced but often not enough to alleviate the distortion. Our contribution is, therefore, to shed light on the dark side of institutional maintenance work and to explore why repair is increasingly necessary, but often only partially effective.

Boards and Shareholders: Bridging the Divide

Today’s corporate environment, and the interactions among its participants, are increasingly complex and dynamic. The market has responded with expansive regulations, listing rules, and bylaws aimed at empowering shareholders. With this empowerment, shareholders can now voice their discontent and demand necessary corrections. Notably, corporate constituents have not only more information, but also more ways to access it (e.g., formal reporting, public filings, Twitter, blogs, e-mails, listservs, etc.), creating both greater transparency and greater scrutiny of organizational behaviors.

Behavioral Ethics, Behavioral Governance, and Corruption in and by Organizations

Much anti-corruption research, rooted in fields such as legal studies, sociology, political science, and economics, rightly has focused on the structural and institutional underpinnings of corrupt systems and of efforts to mitigate corruption. Important as these considerations are in understanding corruption, at some point these societal and institutional factors must convince individual actors to engage in (or refrain from) corrupt deeds. Misangyi et al. (2008), for example, note how corruption (and anti-corruption efforts) involve an interplay among institutions, the societal resources available to those institutions, and the identities and cognitions of individuals. Although large-scale, societal-level institutions — market structures, political systems, social networks, etc. — provide the frameworks within which individual identities, attitudes, beliefs, and intuitions are shaped, the actions of individuals in turn contribute to the sustaining (or undermining) of those institutions (Giddens, 1984).