Purpose -To provide a picture of the practice of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) communication among the top 300 companies in Switzerland and to investigate how favorable the cultural context is for this kind of communication.Methodology/approach -The investigation of the top 300 companies in Switzerland was conducted using a written survey that built on previous studies.Findings: CSR communication in Switzerland appears to be well developed, but still has broad margins for development. Examples are provided on how to improve CSR communication. Such improvements should be relatively easy to implement since Switzerland, it is argued, appears to be open to CSR communication.Research Limitations/Implications -The investigation considered only the communication objectives toward a limited range of stakeholders, such as clients, shareholders, and employees. The survey was conducted among the top 300 companies in Switzerland; these companies are not necessarily representative of the whole Swiss business community.Practical implications -The paper describes the elements that should be considered in order to develop an effective CSR communication. These elements are synergies between issues, objectives, and channels; criteria for a credible social report; the exploitation of the potentialities of CSR advertising and the web; and the understanding of the national context where the organization is operating.Originality/value -This paper focuses on CSR communication, an area that has received limited attention in CSR research. Organizations may find interesting hints on how to develop effective CSR communication.

This article examines how organizations claim legitimate distinctive identities in competitive groups by projecting multimodal—that is, visual and verbal—images. Through a qualitative empirical exploration of wineries’ projected images in a regional cluster, this study identifies three projection strategies by which organizations combine collective and organizational identity markers to claim their legitimate distinctive identities. By examining legitimate distinctiveness as a multimodal discursive construct, this study advances the understanding of the link among collective and organizational identity, projected images, and legitimate distinctiveness, thereby contributing to theories of organizational positioning in established organizational categories. More broadly, this study contributes to discursive theories of legitimate distinctiveness by adding multimodal projection strategies to the array of linguistic rhetorical devices that organizations use to influence their stakeholders’ perceptions.

Purpose -The purpose of this paper is to propose a method by which to audit winemakers' communication of regional wine brands and to illustrate the method's conceptual basis through its empirical application to the Swiss wine Merlot Ticino. Design/Methodology/Approach -The audit is comprised of two parts: one captures producers' intentions regarding the communication of the regional wine brand while the other determines what wineries actually convey through their formal communications. Data about intentions were collected through qualitative interviews and a survey of producers, while data on what wineries convey was based on a content analysis of wineries' communication materials. Findings -The application of the audit to the brand Merlot Ticino shows that the proposed method provides several insights into the brand's personality, possible gaps between producers' intentions and actual communications, the potential target of the communication, the level of consistency of communication content and style, and the expressiveness of wineries in communicating the regional wine brands. Research limitations/implications -The content analysis adopted in this research focuses on formal communications issued by wineries. Adding oral contents and consumer perceptions would considerably improve the audit tool. Originality/Value -This paper provides winemaking regions with a useful tool with which to determine the effectiveness of their brand projections in the collective promotion of their regional wine brands. The paper is of value for academic research because it illustrates that results may be obtained in the wine brand field using methods traditionally used in corporate communication research, like projective techniques and communications audits. Keywords -Communication audit, regional brand, identity, Switzerland. Paper type -Research paper 2 IntroductionToday's wine industry is enjoying growth in production, and consumption is increasing, especially in emerging economies [I] . This growth also means increased global competition, and several global brands developed by giant New World producers, as well as emerging small and medium-sized (SME) Australian and Chilean wineries, have begun challenging traditional small European productions.In the face of such competition, how wine brands are communicated to consumers has become more important than ever (Campbell and Guibert, 2006; Egan and Bell, 2000); however, thus far the majority of studies have focused on understanding consumers' perceptions and attitudes toward regional brands (Rasmussen and Lockshin, 1999;Hall, Lockshin and O'Mahoney, 2001;Thomas and Pickering, 2005), while research on how producers in a winemaking region cooperate, develop, and promote a common brand identity remains limited (Fensterseifer, 2007).This paper addresses the issue of collective branding for regional wines from a communication perspective. It provides a methodology with which to assess wineries' intentions and how they communicate their regional brands with an empirical applicat...

This article analyzes how organizations discursively construe legitimate distinctiveness (LD) by using their own corporate stories in recombination with historical narratives about commons (i.e., cultural, social, or natural resources available in a local community). Specifically, through the study of 55 rural hotels active in Segovia (Castilla y León, Spain), we theorize about how organizations build LD through a different process than the one explained by previous studies: a process of historical bricolage. Two recursive mechanisms constitute this process—namely the appropriation and preservation of historical narratives about natural (e.g., forests, animals), social (e.g., recipes, movies), or cultural (e.g., heritage, kings) commons. This process contributes to current studies because it explains how organizations build LD through the strategic use of history, the preservation rather than the mere appropriation of collective narratives, and finally the production of stories that integrate the organizational and collective selves.

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