Organizations are increasingly seeking stakeholder support through engagement to demonstrate their corporate social responsibility (CSR) credentials. These credentials are, in turn, used to support claims of legitimacy for organizational operations. This article uses a process model of antecedents, implementation, and consequences to study the connection between engagement and CSR. CSR reports show organizations perceive engagement in CSR as both communication and activities between organizations and their stakeholders; and as a second, meta-level of communication about that engagement with stakeholders beyond those directly involved, thereby broadening the scope of organizational claims to legitimacy. Understanding what engagement is and how and why it is carried out in CSR provides a framework for understanding engagement in public relations.

Stakeholder engagement is an important aspect of an organization's corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities, but little theorizing informs its implementation. In this paper, the authors relate data from stakeholder engagement activities undertaken by nine Australian organizations as part of their CSR efforts, to an existing process model of engagement. The original framework is extended and enhanced into a process model of the operationalization of stakeholder engagement. Practically, this research identifies the steps within the operationalization of stakeholder engagement, allowing engagement practitioners to track the progress of their work, and to identify and respond to any impediments. Theoretically, the proposed process model approach presents a new perspective on operationalizing stakeholder engagement. The revised model of stakeholder engagement therefore provides a lens that gives deeper insights into how engagement is carried out; as well as a practical framework through which this implementation can be understood and managed. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment

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