Ubermess: Corporate Social Responsibility Responses as a Dialogue through Social Media

Ubermess: Corporate Social Responsibility Responses as a Dialogue through Social Media

Kaitlin Carter 

In today’s business world, companies often find themselves in the middle of politically- and social-charged events. Whether they are in these situations willingly or unwillingly, they often must make time-sensitive responses on the issues at hand to clarify their corporate social responsibility (or CSR) stances. Today in America, social media allows for instantaneous publishing and scrutiny of CSR responses. The purpose of this paper is to assess the interactive, conversational nature of companies’ CSR responses in light of specific events. To do so, I analyze the appropriateness of classical business theory on CSR and the concept of audience in terms of who a company’s message reaches in the age of social media. I conclude that long-established classical political business theories on CSR seem to lack structure that elucidates the interaction that occurs in present-day. Instead, I argue that CSR should be viewed as a dialogue as outlined by Brennan et al. in 2013, keeping in mind that the audience receiving the CSR responses are larger than ever before due to traditional media coverage and social media dissemination. Lastly, I utilize critical discourse analysis to identify the avoidance techniques used by Uber in response to the January 2016 Uber involvement with the New York City taxi strikes as a timely example of how CSR response statements are formulated and continually altered in response to a specific event.