Corporate Social Responsibility in the Dock. How Persuasive Strategies Support Verbal Accounts in the Event of Loss of TrustArticle received: September 30, 2017Revised version accepted after double blind review: February 11, 2019

Abstract

This paper conceptualizes the editor´s question of a possible trust-or-fake dilemma of Corporate Social Responsibility with a rhetorical lens on CSR-Reporting. From a rhetorical point of view, the speaker has to persuade the stakeholders as its audience of the claim: “we are socially responsible”. If the argumentation is judged by the audience as sound, it would trust the organisation. If not, the claim “we are socially responsible” will be judged as a fake. The paper concentrates on the following research questions: - 1. How do organisations employ argumentation to persuade their stakeholders of their corporate social responsibility? - 2. How do they argumentatively cope with the problem of different stakeholder demands? - 3. How do affective appeals interact with the argumentation? With the help of the rhetorical framework various concepts from trust repair literature and neo-institutional theory could be integrated to deepen our understanding of a trust or fake dilemma. Literature on CSR-reporting mainly discusses the gap between talk and action. We focus on another point, the relevance of the CSR-arguments. We introduce several concepts taken from argumentation theory like the distinction between context-abstract and field-dependent topoi and between warrant-using and warrant-establishing argumentation schemes in order to examine companies´ reactions to a loss of trust in their CSR-claim. Drawing on Mayring (2014), a mixed-method approach for content analysis was employed for the empirical analysis. The empirical case study contributed to the model building during the research process and illustrates the application of the model. We identified different phases of the verbal account strategy of Deutsche Bank. In these phases we found remarkable differences in the employment of warrant-establishing and warrant-using argumentations. We found also differences in the use of field-dependent topoi and categorized them following organisational façades.