When Corporate Responsibility Meets Digital Technology: A Reflection on New Discourses

Abstract

References to the transformative aspects of digital technologies within academic corporate responsibility discourses have recently emerged, including discussion of interactive corporate social responsibility communication, of virtual corporate social responsibility dialogs and of corporate social responsibility in the network societies. In this chapter we reflect on such new discourses and suggest that the language they use and subsequent claims made may further fragment the field of corporate responsibility, and may ignore aspects of contemporary online cultures. We agree that there must be engagement between the extensive literature on online community, communication, and indeed power relations, and the work on CSR. We conclude this chapter with our own advice on how to go about researching and understanding how online community might be understood as important for the project of CSR.