When managers talk about improving communication regarding matters of corporate social responsibility (CSR), they usually speak in terms of clarity (Can we make sure that people understand the messages they receive?), tools (What are the most effective channels to reach them in various situations?) and directionality (Can we make sure that communication is not only top down but also bottom up and horizontal?). These certainly are important questions, but they tend to reduce communication to a matter of transmission. In my article “A Communicative Constitutive Perspective on Corporate Social Responsibility: Ventriloquism, Undecidability, and Surprisability” published in the January issue of Business & Society, I propose to go beyond this idea of transmission by highlighting the constitutive dimension of communication and its implications for CSR matters.
CSR, as we know, is about assuring the conditions of good organization actorhood, that is, making sure that organizations are socially and environmentally accountable and that their actions ultimately benefit society and the environment. But who defines what is considered a good action or a good decision? If the response simply is “Top managers, of course!”, then it means that a limited number of people end up deciding what is good for the company as well as its social and ecological environment. If, however, we start to think in terms of the constitutive dimension of communication, we then realize that other stakeholders have to be mobilized for defining the conditions of ethical and responsible decisions, especially important ones. In other words, the organization needs to create the conditions of a dialogue where various voices can be heard and participate, as often as possible, in decision making processes.
But then another question pops up: how can all these stakeholders manage to figure out what is good for the organization and its environment? As I argue in this article, the response is that they have to manage to collectively define what the situations they find themselves in dictate. Multiplying the stakeholders who partake in the discussions indeed means multiplying the various ways by which the elements of a situation can express themselves through these dialogues. Each stakeholder is indeed a spokesperson for what matters to him or her, whether it is the equilibrium of an ecosystem, children’s health, the safety of a population, employees’ salaries, etc. In other words, each person around the table is supposed to speak in the name of various matters that will possibly end up defining what could be done. This is why I propose to compare communication to a form of ventriloquism. When people speak, they not only speak on their own behalf, in their own name, but they also (and especially) speak for many other things that can end up making a difference in the decision making process. By ventriloquizing elements of a situation that matter to them, each stakeholders thus tries to show how these elements speak to what has to be decided.
But this also means that a form of undecidability and suprisability has to be nurtured during these dialogues. Each stakeholder indeed has his or her own idea about what the situation is telling them to do. In other words, they each have their own way to ventriloquize the situation from their own perspective. Nurturing undecidability and surprisability thus means that stakeholders have to accept to complexify themselves, that is, accept the presence of other voices that might contradict or surprise them, making it harder to decide what to do.
The idea is not praise paralysis in decision making processes, but to rather encourage stakeholders to give themselves a chance to experience undecidability and surprisability. Ultimately, this article thus reaffirms one of the tenets of pragmatism, which is that the situations we experience can sometimes contradict what we believe to be the truth or the right decision. Communicating with others is, therefore, a way to better figure out what it can sometimes surprisingly tell us.
References:
Cooren, F. 2020. A Communicative Constitutive Perspective on Corporate Social Responsibility: Ventriloquism, Undecidability, and Surprisability. Business & Society, 59(1).