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AbstractA central proposition of the "business case" for corporate social responsibility (CSR) is that a company's CSR practices are linked to consumer behavior and a firm's financial performance through reputational mechanisms. This study addresses the equivocal support for this proposition through an empirical analysis of the survey items most often used to assess a company's CSR and its stakeholder reputation. This study tests the congruence among nine different measures of environmental, social, and governance dimensions of CSR and a public corporate reputation measure. Two distinct factors are identified—direct CSR impact and assessment/reputation—suggesting that the global corporate reputation does not capture tangible CSR impact (environment and social) and is only congruent with a measure of intangible CSR performance (governance). The study highlights the importance of taking a multidimensional approach. Addressing measurement issues helps unpack the theoretical and practical link between CSR and corporate reputation and provides strategic guidance when planning CSR business and communication strategies.

Transparency is a complex and multifaceted communication phenomenon. In the current environment, demands for organizational transparency now come from a wide range of entities we term visibility agents, ranging from nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and global networks, on one hand, to activist coalitions and automated surveillance agents, on the other. We develop a framework to conceive of such visibility agents and the range of transparency demands that they make in the context of environmental issues, positing that visibility agents significantly shape and diversify transparency practices. We identify four major relationships between visibility agents and organizations— inquisitorial, adversarial, associative, and advocative—which are associated with specific kinds of transparency demands, requests, and imperatives: accountability, monitoring, disclosure, and secrecy. We illustrate each set of relationships with examples of environmental reporting practices, one of the most prominent areas of transparency management. Implications for both theory and research on transparency are discussed.

"This book offers a new theory of collective action for the age of digital media, attesting to the continued relevance of formal organizations in a time when digital media can make it seem that organizations are outdated. The authors examine the dynamics of membership in three distinctive organizations: The American Legion, AARP, and MoveOn. They develop the theory of Collective Action Space to demonstrate the important dimensions of membership and use survey and interview data to explore commonalities across the organizations, each of which exhibits four, ♯p︢articipatory styles., ♯ ̮The book shows that predictors of participation vary greatly across participatory styles, and rather little across organizations. The book wrestles with a crucial feature of contemporary collective action, wherein technology does not necessarily make people participate more, but people consistently use technology when they participate. The result is a theoretically rich and empirically fresh portrait of collective action, organization, and technology"--Provided by publisher

A common observation in the digital age is that new technologies are making people's behaviors, decisions, and preferences more visible. For scholars who study organizations and their effects upon society, increased information visibility raises the hope that organizations might become more transparent. Typically, we assume that increased information visibility will translate into high levels of organizational transparency, but we lack empirical evidence to support this assumption. Our ability to gather data on this important topic is limited because there have been few reliable ways to assess organizational information visibility. To remedy this problem, we develop and validate the Information Visibility Scale to measure the core aspects of information visibility. We then employ the scale to test the relationship between information visibility and transparency. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of the scale and consider the limitations and further research possibilities that the scale construction and validation suggest.