This study explores how the employees of a financial firm use emotional arguments to construct different views of their employer's corporate social responsibility (CSR). It is theoretically based on the recent literature regarding employee perspectives of CSR, and especially on the role of emotions in CSR. Furthermore, the study utilizes rhetorical theory as a framework for data analysis. A qualitative study, based on face‐to‐face interviews, was conducted among 27 employees in a Finnish financial firm. The study identifies six categories of emotional arguments the employees used to construct views of where their employing organization's CSR is derived from. These categories relate positive emotions to satisfaction with the employing organization's CSR and negative emotions to dissatisfaction. The results show that employees also experience external pressures for CSR, but only implicitly, because they do not wish be embarrassed by their employer. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment

No abstract

No abstract

Within recent years, the literature on employee–CSR relations has grown significantly. However, the research is fragmented throughout various journals and disciplines, and we still lack a comprehensive literature review on the topic to show what we currently know about the employee relationship with CSR, and what we do not know. In this study, we conduct a systematic literature review on employee relations with CSR, based 331 journal articles. We analyze their methodological and theoretical approaches. Based on their key findings, we build a categorization of dominant research findings and their connections. Building on our review, we show how the research has been dominated by a focus on the organizational implementation of CSR and organizational benefits. Employees have been mainly perceived as implementers of top‐down sustainability policies and as mediators towards organizational CSR‐related benefits. We also discuss the need for future research on the more active role of employees in CSR relations, especially bottom‐up change processes and understanding the role of tensions and complexities.

acceptability, argumentation, corporate environmental management, environmental values, stakeholder relations,

This study describes and interprets differences in stakeholder interaction as rhetorically constructed in environmental reports and in interviews with environmental managers. It also interprets the role of the natural environment among stakeholders, and discusses how that role is justified or not justified. The study focuses in a business perspective on stakeholder interaction in environmental management. Characteristically, stakeholder studies of environmental management have concentrated on stakeholder influence or the creation of stakeholder management models. In contrast to those, the present study identifies different types of stakeholder relationships: power‐based, collaborative, conflicting, and one‐sided. Through descriptions of those relationships, business actors participate in the power to define responsibility, share responsibility among actors, question environmental interest, and justify environmental impacts. The results of the study demonstrate that, when regarding environmental issues in business, instead of analysing single stakeholder attributes or a single stakeholder relationship, business professionals should be able to manage differences in stakeholder relationships. No universal stakeholder management tools can be created for this purpose, rather stakeholder interaction in environmental management requires analysis of the actors involved, the attributes of relationships, and the attributes of stakeholder interests and identification of differences in those. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.

In this article, we analyse the discursive construction of business–society relations in Finnish businesses’ social and environmental responsibility reports. Drawing on critical discourse analysis, we examine how these discursive constructions maintain and reproduce various interests and societal conditions as a precondition of corporate social responsibility (CSR). Our study contributes to the recent discussion on discursive struggles in business–society relations and the role various interests play in this struggle. We find that not only are power asymmetries between actors veiled through the universalization of interests, but reporting can also be seen as a communicative action that provides a right to define the role of societal actors for the achievement of CSR. We suggest that the discursive struggle over whose interests dominate, and how they dominate, shapes the role of social and environmental reporting as a social practice.

a b s t r a c tThe growing phenomenon of civil society involvement in renewable energy generation has attracted researchers' interest. However, rather little is known of how a diverse and relatively small sector such as community energy could scale up and promote a change in energy production. We examine this issue through the lens of Strategic Niche Management (SNM) and conceptualize community energy as a sociotechnical niche that holds the potential to promote a transition to renewable energy. Drawing on interview data with members of community energy projects and experts in Finland, we identify different types of community energy projects and the factors that may prevent them from scaling up. The study contributes a typology of community energy projects by showing which initiatives could be more inclined to be part of a strategy aiming at scaling up the sector. It also shows the tensions of SNM in the context of non-market-driven innovation, highlighting how exogenous factors such as cultural aspects, the specific context in which community energy develops and the characteristics of community groups are also relevant in the scaling-up process.