TY - JOUR
T1 - Creating Common Ground
T2 - A Communicative Action Model of Dialogue in Shareholder Engagement
AU - Ferraro, Fabrizio
AU - Beunza, Daniel
N1 - Published online: 8 Oct 2018
PY - 2018
Y1 - 2018
N2 - Despite growing empirical evidence on the effectiveness of dialogue between activists and corporations in stakeholder engagement, scholars have not fully accounted for the mechanisms that explain its success. We address this gap by leveraging Habermas’s theory of communicative action. In our longitudinal qualitative study, we explore the dialogue on climate change between the Interfaith Centre for Corporate Responsibility, a coalition of faith-based investors, Ford, and General Motors. We find that communicative action can emerge from strategic action as a result of three cycles of interaction: establishing dialogue, framing, and deliberation. Our study contributes to the literature on shareholder engagement by integrating communicative and strategic action, thereby offering a new interpretation of how reputational threat and dialogue come together to produce a common ground between activists and companies.
AB - Despite growing empirical evidence on the effectiveness of dialogue between activists and corporations in stakeholder engagement, scholars have not fully accounted for the mechanisms that explain its success. We address this gap by leveraging Habermas’s theory of communicative action. In our longitudinal qualitative study, we explore the dialogue on climate change between the Interfaith Centre for Corporate Responsibility, a coalition of faith-based investors, Ford, and General Motors. We find that communicative action can emerge from strategic action as a result of three cycles of interaction: establishing dialogue, framing, and deliberation. Our study contributes to the literature on shareholder engagement by integrating communicative and strategic action, thereby offering a new interpretation of how reputational threat and dialogue come together to produce a common ground between activists and companies.
KW - Social responsibility
KW - Sustainability/corporate environmentalism
KW - Corporate governance
KW - Qualitative research
KW - Social responsibility
KW - Sustainability/corporate environmentalism
KW - Corporate governance
KW - Qualitative research
UR - https://sfx-45cbs.hosted.exlibrisgroup.com/45cbs?url_ver=Z39.88-2004&url_ctx_fmt=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:ctx&ctx_enc=info:ofi/enc:UTF-8&ctx_ver=Z39.88-2004&rfr_id=info:sid/sfxit.com:azlist&sfx.ignore_date_threshold=1&rft.object_id=954921418483&rft.object_portfolio_id=&svc.holdings=yes&svc.fulltext=yes
U2 - 10.1287/orsc.2018.1226
DO - 10.1287/orsc.2018.1226
M3 - Journal article
VL - 29
SP - 1187
EP - 1207
JO - Organization Science
JF - Organization Science
SN - 1047-7039
IS - 6
ER -