Co-Constructing Citizenship: Exploring the Role of Corporate-Consumer Communications

This paper explores the role of corporate-consumer dialogue in organizing citizenship knowledge for consumer stakeholders. It adopts a discourse-centred view of organizations (Boje et al., 2004), urging that negotiation and legitimation of citizenship knowledge integrates discourses from different organizational stakeholders (Grant and Marshak, 2011; Sillince and Brown, 2009). It reports on the findings from a Discourse Analysis of an online corporate-consumer forum for The Body Shop International – a self-avowed ‘corporate activist’ advocating animal, ecological and human rights. The study shows how organizational dialogue of consumers and corporations discursively negotiate ostensibly political subject categories that constitute more viable corporate-consumer relations with society. Findings suggest this engenders a market-based discourse of political participation whose form and scope is reflective of the discourse (con)text. Implications are offered for academic, managerial and policy-maker audiences.