Co-Creating CSR Knowledge in Corporate-Consumer Communication: From Monologue to Dialogue

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) scholarship has traditionally been entrenched in a ‘cultural authority model’ (Holt, 2002), espousing a ‘passive model’ of communication in marketing and CSR literature. Consequently, CSR communications have been conceptualised as uni-directional, asynchronous flows of information from corporations (‘encoders’) to rational consumers (‘decoders’) (Berthon et al., 2008). This ‘monological’ perspective not only overlooks the active and empowered view of consumers (Davies and Elliot, 2006), it also fails to examine the multi-dimensional, synchronous and ‘dialogical’ characteristics of consumer-corporate interaction. This conceptual paper explores this aperture, and argues that greater attention is due to constructionist perspectives that acknowledge an active role for consumer stakeholders and the dialogical nature of CSR communications.