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Papers from the CCI Conference on Communications 2006. Michael B. Goodman
Introduction
Stakeholder theory and CSR address two key questions:
how economic and social factors should be considered from a corporate perspective; and
what is the relationship between economic and social success?
When we use [1] Donaldson and Preston's (1995) model of interaction between the corporation and its stakeholders with an emphasis on the corporation as the central element, understanding of the economic, social, historical, political, cultural and global environments is limited to direct interactions with the corporation itself. However, [8] Matten and Moon's (2005) argument for a reconceptualization of CSR as having both explicit policies and implicit norms within the legal framework of European nations implies that CSR can be better understood as a situated business practice.
Bringing Matten and Moon's situated perspective of CSR to stakeholder models also implies a shift from a corporate centered model to a cultural systems perspective in understanding relations between corporations and their stakeholders. This perspective shifts the focus from the question of whether culture affects the manner in which CSR is portrayed in web sites to the question of how institutional structures situated in cultural systems affect communication about CSR. To investigate the effects of culture on the manner in which CSR is portrayed on the web, [7] Maignan and Ralston (2002) investigated 100 internet sites in each of four countries - the USA, UK, France and The Netherlands. They found that cultural differences between France, The Netherlands and the UK can be quantified through different perspectives represented in web site discourse revealing differences in:
- the importance of being perceived by the public as socially responsible; and
- which CSR issues are emphasized on the corporate web sites (p. 499).
They also raised questions about the connection between national institutional structures and business' commitment to CSR, as well as questions about how different understandings of CSR derive from these national institutional structures.
To begin to answer these questions, the cultural systems perspective described in this paper is applied to the WalMart and Maersk web sites, comparing the national level cultural systems in which WalMart and Maersk developed as companies and are situated. This cultural systems perspective allows for situated models of understanding corporate stakeholders and how...