Corporations and Citizenship Arenas in the Age of Social Media

J Bus Ethics (2013) 118:777790 DOI 10.1007/s10551-013-1960-3

Corporations and Citizenship Arenas in the Age of Social Media

Glen Whelan Jeremy Moon Bettina Grant

Received: 1 July 2012 / Accepted: 16 July 2013 / Published online: 20 November 2013 The Author(s) 2013. This article is published with open access at Springerlink.com

Abstract Little attention has been paid to the importance of social media in the corporate social responsibility (CSR) literature. This decit is redressed in the present paper through utilizing the notion of citizenship arenas to identify three dynamics in social media-augmented corporatesociety relations. First, we note that social media-augmented corporate arenas of citizenship are constructed by individual corporations in an effort to address CSR issues of specic importance thereto, and are populated by individual citizens as well as (functional/formally organized) stakeholders. Second, we highlight that, within social media-augmented public arenas of citizenship, individual citizens are empowered, relative to corporations and their (functional/formally organized) stakeholders, when it comes to creating, debating, and publicizing, CSR-relevant issues. Third, we posit that information and communication technology corporations possess specic, and potentially very important, capacities, when it comes to creating, or helping construct, public arenas of citizenship from within which individual citizens can inuence their broader politicaleconomic environment. Following this, we discuss how social media can contribute to dysfunctions as well as progressions in corporatesociety relations, and conclude with a number of suggestions for future research.

Keywords Corporate citizenship Corporate social

responsibility Public sphere Social media

Stakeholder

Introduction

The Internet and social media are increasingly recognized as important in the social sciences. Political and social theorists, for example, identify the changing dynamics the internet gives rise to for statesociety relations (e.g., Cas-tells 2000; Drezner 2010). Likewise, management and marketing scholars have begun analyzing the strategic risks and opportunities that social media raise for corporations (e.g., Jones et al. 2009); and corporate communications scholars the importance of social media for public relations and crisis management (e.g., Schultz et al. 2011). Corporate social responsibility (CSR) scholars, by way of contrast, are only just beginning to explore how social media impact on business responsibility in general, and on the nature of corporatesociety relations in particular.

In addressing this lacuna, we here build upon a variety of works within the broader CSR literature (e.g.,...