Profit, Power, and Morality: Understanding Corporate Social Responsibility From the Public’s Point of View

• In Event: Communicating Corporate Social Responsibility

Abstract

Understanding corporate social responsibility as a contested and situated concept, this paper examines the important yet understudied topic of the public discourse of CSR. Analyzing the Chinese public’s response to and interpretation of Google’s break-up with China in 2010, this paper summarizes the public opinion with the three categories of attention, emotion, and reason, and then further explicates the category of reason with three subcategories of economic, political, and moral reasoning. Findings of this research reveal that the public imagination of corporate responsibilities is still confined by national boundaries and the boundaries between the public and private sectors. As a result, although high hope is invested in transnational corporations to spearhead global human right efforts, especially in countries where such rights are infringed by the government, lingering of these boundaries in the public imagination makes such expectation difficult to fulfill.

Author

• Nan Li, California State U - Chico