Guest Editors’ Introduction: The Challenges and Prospects of Deliberative Democracy for Corporate Sustainability and Responsibility

Abstract

This introduction argues that the use of the concept of deliberative democracy in corporate social responsibility (CSR) research needs to be theoretically extended. We review three developments that have recently occurred in deliberative democracy theory within political science and philosophy: 1) the conceptualization of deliberative systems (macro level), 2) the considerations of mini-publics (micro level), and 3) the role of online deliberation. We discuss the challenges and prospects that incorporating these three developments into future CSR-related research creates. We thereby also introduce the articles in this special issue and show how they connect to each of the three developments. On the basis of this discussion, we outline the contours for a more general program of distributed deliberative CSR that enables CSR scholars to incorporate an updated understanding of deliberative democracy theory into their future work.

Dealing with risk in stakeholder dialog: identification of risk indicators in a public service media organization's conversation and discourse with citizens

“…Dialogic risk emerging from the contingencies of the conversation (Kent and Taylor, 2002), with citizens critiquing organizational activities or the organizers' SD practice, is illustrated in the example of a citizen's comment regarding the organizers' sample (Figure 5). The comment addressed the deliberation standard of inclusion (Gilbert et al, 2023), yet was not brought to a close by the moderator, which would have allowed the actors to jointly clarify the concern and its consequentiality for the SD. Actors' practices of bringing forward and dealing with critical topics corresponded to the risk of the breakdown of dialog on this particular topic.…”

“…Deliberative standards are enacted while SD is happening (Gilbert et al, 2023). The extent to which organizers take perceived risks is evident in qualitative interviews with organizers (Lane, 2018;Russmann and Lane, 2020;Umansky and Fuhrberg, 2018) and surveys with citizens (McComas, 2003).…”

“…(1) Autonomous discursive formations, specifically topics emerging counter to predefined subforums, indicated a shift in organizer-citizen mutuality orientation, JCOM 28,2 as these formations defied the subforums' order structure and were additionally driven by dynamics according to the forum's interactional logic (Figure 6). Organizers can, of course, only partially preset and control the topical structure due to the platform's interactive dynamics, which allow for autonomous discursive formations, yet the design of forums determines the deliberative quality therein (Gilbert et al, 2023). Further, though the topical structure was defined according to the results of the first meeting, discursive formations suggest citizens' partial deviations from this structure.…”

“…SD planning and implementation entail decisions about practices that initiate and facilitate dialog with citizens and, thus, the co-production of organizational discourse (Cooren, 2015). These decisions should consider the implementation of specific norms of democratic and rational deliberation (Ferraro and Beunza, 2018;Gilbert et al, 2023).…”

“…Deliberation exposes stakeholders' concerns and issues in situated dialog (Gilbert et al, 2023), the dynamics of which elude interactional control. From the organization's perspective, it wishes to mitigate this risk.…”