How do Multi-National Corporations CEOs perceive and communicate about Social Responsibility?

Abstract

This paper aims to investigate Multi-National Corporations (MNC) Chief Executives Officers (CEO) perception of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and their communication about it. As the key decision makers, CEOs have nowadays, a central role to play in implementing CSR. Thus, such investigation could be very useful for a better understanding of MNCs CSR approaches. A lexical analysis of one hundred and five executives letters from Sustainability and CSR reports revealed that CEOs evoke different CSR areas. As a matter of fact, they often focus on specific areas generally linked to their firm activity, particularly those which caused or may cause pressure from specific stakeholders. Besides, based on the investigation of linguistic features of the executives discourse, five categories of CEO discourses were identified. Nevertheless, the authors recognized that even such investigation could not give us a clear idea about the CEOs perception of CSR, because CEOs discourse is not spontaneous; it is rather stake-driven.

Keywords: Corporate social responsibility, CEO, Discourse analysis, CSR communication, Lexical analysis.