Prospects for Sustainable Corporate Governance in Russia Based on Integrated Communications

Abstract

   The article presents the author’s understanding of the terms “corporate governance”, “corporate management” and “communication management” in the context of the concept of sustainable development, the ESG agenda and sustainable corporate governance, as well as their relationship. The role of the stakeholder approach in bringing together the content of the concepts of “corporate governance” and “integrated communications” is shown. Some features of communications management in Russia, including in the context of ESG, are examined in detail.   The relevance of the study is due to the fact that many Russian companies and organizations are extremely slow to implement the principles and methods of integrated communications and sustainable corporate governance, although they determine the effectiveness of theiractivities.   The subject of the study is the system of sustainable corporate governance as part of the implementation of ESG principles in Russia.   The purpose of the article is to show Russian stakeholders the role of integrated communications in the development of sustainable corporate governance and ESG policies using research methods such as analysis of scientific papers on the research topic, comparison, generalization, systemic and logical analysis.   The scientific novelty of the publication is justified by the author’s interpretation of the variants of understanding the terms, for example, the authors of the article consider the organizational and/or functional division of communications into internal and external to be unproductive. In addition, in order to modernize the methodology for rating and auditing companies and organizations for compliance of their activities with ESG principles, the authors propose to increase the number of management criteria of block “G”, using metrics for assessing the effectiveness of integrated communications management, taken from the “corporate management” and “communications” systems management».   The practical significance of the work lies in the possibility of its use in the development of integrated communications systems within the framework of sustainable corporate governance, as well as in the course of modernizing the methodology for rating and auditing ESG policies in Russian companies and organizations. A further direction of research may be related to the development of criteria and indicators of the quality of integrated communications systems and sustainable corporate governance, as well as consideration of the characteristics of Russian communications practices in the business environment.