Purpose -To provide a picture of the practice of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) communication among the top 300 companies in Switzerland and to investigate how favorable the cultural context is for this kind of communication.Methodology/approach -The investigation of the top 300 companies in Switzerland was conducted using a written survey that built on previous studies.Findings: CSR communication in Switzerland appears to be well developed, but still has broad margins for development. Examples are provided on how to improve CSR communication. Such improvements should be relatively easy to implement since Switzerland, it is argued, appears to be open to CSR communication.Research Limitations/Implications -The investigation considered only the communication objectives toward a limited range of stakeholders, such as clients, shareholders, and employees. The survey was conducted among the top 300 companies in Switzerland; these companies are not necessarily representative of the whole Swiss business community.Practical implications -The paper describes the elements that should be considered in order to develop an effective CSR communication. These elements are synergies between issues, objectives, and channels; criteria for a credible social report; the exploitation of the potentialities of CSR advertising and the web; and the understanding of the national context where the organization is operating.Originality/value -This paper focuses on CSR communication, an area that has received limited attention in CSR research. Organizations may find interesting hints on how to develop effective CSR communication.

This article examines how organizations claim legitimate distinctive identities in competitive groups by projecting multimodal—that is, visual and verbal—images. Through a qualitative empirical exploration of wineries’ projected images in a regional cluster, this study identifies three projection strategies by which organizations combine collective and organizational identity markers to claim their legitimate distinctive identities. By examining legitimate distinctiveness as a multimodal discursive construct, this study advances the understanding of the link among collective and organizational identity, projected images, and legitimate distinctiveness, thereby contributing to theories of organizational positioning in established organizational categories. More broadly, this study contributes to discursive theories of legitimate distinctiveness by adding multimodal projection strategies to the array of linguistic rhetorical devices that organizations use to influence their stakeholders’ perceptions.

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to introduce a method that the authors call stakeholder cross-impact analysis (SCIA), which is aimed at analyzing how a given set of stakeholders influence one another and also how such stakeholders relate to a given set of issues. Design/methodology/approach – The authors first identify, in the current literature, a lack of analytical tools for assessing mutual influences among stakeholders. The authors then identify cross-impact analysis, a method that was initially developed in the field of futures research, as a suitable method to be applied in the present research. Its application, which the authors call SCIA, is described in detail through a fictitious case. Findings – SCIA permits to assess the direction and the strength of relationships between stakeholders. Furthermore, it allows for the classification of stakeholders based on their level of dependence and influence on others. Also, it is possible to integrate SCIA with social network analysis in order to understand the degree to which stakeholders agree on how issues influence one another, as well as to identify which issues most stakeholders consider to be central and which stakeholders have the most shared opinion on how issues are related. Practical implications – This method can be used, along with traditional segmentation techniques, by corporate communication and public relations practitioners in order to gain a more sophisticated understanding of the complexity of organizations’ environments. Originality/value – SCIA represents a much-needed and novel way of understanding the complexity of organizations’ environments.

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The present paper discusses the substantial difference for practice of current models of organizational identity which consider directly and indirectly the looking-glass process of organizational identity. The paper pinpoints that some models represent a first useful step for an analysis of external interpretations of the organizations and that others represent an in-depth view of external images with consequences on the organization. Examples of the usefulness of the models are developed as they are reread in the light of three different approaches of stakeholder theory which provide an understanding of the different levels of analysis of stakeholders' external interpretations of the organization: the broad, the narrow a priori and the narrow situational. An exploration of the interrelations between identity and stakeholder fields is therefore provided.2