‘Consuming Responsibility: The Search for Value at Laskarina Holidays’

Abstract

This paper provides an alternative theoretical conceptualisation of corporate social responsibility (CSR) in order to further our understanding of prosocial organisational behaviour. We argue that consumption provides a perspective that enables theorists to escape the confines of existing CSR literature. In our view the organisation is re-imagined as an arena of consumption where employees are engaged in a quest for value, constructing and confirming their identities as consumers. Using the award-winning tour operator Laskarina Holidays as an illustrative case, it is suggested that CSR can provide combinations of functional, social, emotional, epistemic and conditional value. This new perspective on CSR facilitates the coexistence of a plurality of values that are relativistically constructed and narrativised by organisational stakeholders. Our consumption paradigm provides a thought provoking means of reconciling divergent perspectives and encourages further interdisciplinary research. We argue that future research should begin, not by asking the question of why organisations assume responsibility, but by contemplating the notion of why organisations consume responsibility.

Charitable Partnerships among Travel and Tourism Businesses: Perspectives from Low‐Fares Airlines

“…Blowfield and Murray, 2008;Crane et al, 2008). Studies of CSR in travel and tourism have examined tour operators (Gurney and Humphreys, 2006;Van Wijk and Persoon, 2006), hotels (Garcia Rodriguez and del Mar Armas Cruz, 2007;Henderson, 2007;Holcomb et al, 2007;Smith and Henderson, 2008;Tsai et al, 2010), cruise companies (Weaver and Duval, 2008) and airlines (Gupta and Saxena, 2006;Philips, 2006;Lynes and Andrachuk, 2008;Tsai and Hsu, 2008). The majority of these present detailed, in several instances single, case studies of responsibility in practice.…”

An Analysis of Corporate Social Responsibility at Credit Line: A Narrative Approach

“…Second, individual and collective identities are authored within discursive regimes and subjectively available to people in the form of narratives of the self and organization. Our primary interest is in the multiple, often changing, occasionally consonant, sometimes overlapping, but often competing narratives that participants tell about their organization (Gurney and Humphreys, 2006;Humphreys and Brown, 2002a, b). Third, and perhaps most importantly, a narrative approach explicitly recognizes that, in organizations, language is 'the primary medium of social control and powerÕ (Fairclough, 1989, p. 3), and that the analysis of linguistic practices is key to an understanding of how 'existing social and power relationsÕ (Fairclough, 1995, p. 77) are reproduced or transformed.…”

“…In line with the linguistic 'turnÕ in the social sciences, we understand 'organizationÕ as a discursive space constituted through language practices, especially the authoring, telling and re-telling of stories (Boje, 1991;Czarniawska, 1997;Gabriel, 1999). Our research draws on a wealth of literature which suggests that narrative is an appropriate interpretive lens for understanding processes of organizing (Currie and Brown, 2003;Rhodes, 2000), especially individual and collective sensemaking (Brown and Kreps, 1993;Bruner, 1991), identity constructs (Gurney and Humphreys, 2006;Humphreys and Brown, 2002a, b;Ricoeur, 1991) and the exercise of power through language (Clegg, 1989;Westwood and Linstead, 2001). Our case not only demonstrates the value of analyses of shared narratives in efforts to illustrate 'the diversity and complexityÕ of processes of organizing, but does so in ways which emphasize 'the discursive social natureÕ of complex organization (Barry and Elmes, 1997, p. 40).…”

Toward a View of Citizenship and Lobbying

“…Deliberative processes liberate employees to dissent from the hegemony of dominant company narratives, by allowing and giving weight to alternative voices. These processes thus provide the space for polyphonic narratives (Gurney & Humphreys, 2006;Sullivan & McCarthy, 2008) on the nature of the political environment and the position of the firm in society. Thus, for example, a carmaker's dominant narrative on liberty as freedom from Leviathan could over time be superseded or tempered by competing narratives, including, for example, the narrative of freedom as certainty.…”