This article traces the emotion management practices of a bank's community of volunteers as managerial control, based on an in-depth case study at a well-known veteran Israeli bank (from the late 1970s until recent years). Since the 1980s, the bank's employees have been required to take a part in volunteering initiatives considered part of the bank's CSR strategy. The article demonstrates that the courteous clerk, who was expected to display human and emphatic gestures toward the customers toward the end of the 1970s, was eventually required to redirect those acquired orientations and traits toward the entire community outside the bank branches and clientele.The study challenges both the positivistic and critical managerial literature that avoids discussing emotion management as a mechanism of control regarding corporate volunteerism.

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The current paper discusses one aspect of corporate social responsibility-employee community volunteering-as implemented at an Israeli banking corporation. The literature on corporate social responsibility as a feature of global capitalism has largely ignored the history of corporate philanthropy and its relation to the current model of social responsibility. Moreover, to date, no studies have addressed the relationship between models of corporate social responsibility, on the one hand, and management approaches, on the other. In this historical-ethnographic study, we examine a case in which, we argue, normative management models and advanced marketing approaches combined to shape new conceptions and practices of employee volunteering. We examine how the process evolved over the course of three marketing campaigns initiated by the bank's management between the early 1960s and the early 1980s. In the early 1960s, the models in question helped refashion the employees' identity as service providers 'empathic' toward clients. By the late 1970s, their identity was transformed once again, this time to incorporate a 'humane' orientation toward the 'community'. In the process-the results of which are still felt today-the employees became the carriers and disseminators of an organizational culture that emphasized values of philanthropy and social commitment. 1 This paper relies on a historical-ethnographic case study (conducted between 2006 and 2008) focusing on the philanthropic behavior of the bank's owners and employees from 1935 to the present day. Data were gathered using observations and semi-structured interviews with the bank's employees, executives, and other key figures, both current and retired, past and present. To give our historical analysis more depth, we systemically analyzed archive materials, specifically over a hundred bank bulletins published by the bank's management from the early 1960s onwards.

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There is a dearth of critical ethnographic research that focuses on the semiotic-discursive features of corporate social responsibility (CSR) framing in business and nonprofit (BUS-NPO) partnerships. This article contributes to CSR scholarship by combining ethnographic methods (participant observation, in-depth interviews, and textual materials) and semiotic analysis to demonstrate how a bank-NPO partnership is discursively framed in the context of agonistic interactions and its implications in terms of cooptation. This article crystallizes two arguments. First, the bank’s joint CSR initiatives represent a discursively framed and validated model of CSR as a commodity aiming at advancing bank interests at the cost of avoiding substantive and sustained social responsibility. Second, the joint CSR model, discursively framed as a cooptative partnership discourse, is effectively realized through the practices of the cooptative relationship between the bank and the NPOs.