This article examines the embeddedness of corporate social responsibility (CSR) communications in strategic planning. By drawing on the idea that talk and texts about CSR are an essential part of responsibility practices, I study how CSR aspirations—responsibility-related organizational self-descriptions, goals, and ideals that the organization cannot yet live up to or that the organizational constituents deem necessary to maintain—are intertwined with strategy texts and strategic episodes. Conducting a qualitative case study on a series of biennial strategy processes over a 20-year period, I show how CSR aspirations are established in authoritative strategy documents during stakeholder interactions, elaborated in consecutive strategic episodes, extended to new business areas, and evaluated in subsequent communications. These findings contribute to the CSR and strategy literature by showing how (a) aspirational talk can be established and perpetuated through recurrent communicative processes, (b) stakeholder engagement in CSR issues can influence strategy texts and how strategy texts become a part of intertextual organizational communications, and (c) strategic context can be conducive to progressive performativity.

PurposeThe study examines the responsibilisation of an ethnocentric consumer in commercial, meta-organisational discourses. In addition to nationalistic and patriotic discourses, the focus is on wider conceptualisations of consumer responsibility.Design/methodology/approachThe paper uses critical discourse analysis as a methodological approach to conduct an empirical case study on the texts of two producer-driven labelling campaigns.FindingsThe campaign texts create possibilities for ethnocentric consumption with positioning, argumentative and classificatory discourses. Patriotic responsibilisation is emphasised, together with rationales to take action on environmental concerns.Practical implicationsThe study highlights the responsibility of marketers over their corporate responsibility communication, suggesting that ethnocentric promotions may have the power to alter how consumers take action on various responsibility concerns.Social implicationsThe study surfaces the tensions that responsible consumption can entail for consumers. Indeed, nationalistic and patriotic discourses may alter our understanding of responsibility issues that may seem completely separate from the concepts of nationalism and patriotism.Originality/valueThe paper shows how different organisational texts are deployed to bring about the idea of ethnocentric consumption and how this relates to responsibility discourses, nationalism and patriotism.

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