The Role of Infomediaries: CSR in the Business Press During 2000–2009

Abstract

business press, corporate social responsibility (CSR), infomediary, media,

Dressing up for Diffusion: Codes of Conduct in the German Textile and Apparel Industry, 1997–2010

“…Rather, these practices are to a high degree open for interpretation (Grafström and Windell 2011) and the organizational outcomes they produce are at least disputable (Margolis and Walsh 2003). Therefore, it has been argued that the ''diffusion success'' as well as temporal heterogeneity in diffusion (Strang and Tuma 1993) of codes of conduct specifically and CSR practices in general will highly depend on how these practices become infused with meaning ''beyond the technical requirements of the task at hand'' (Selznick, 1957, p. 17) through the work of infomediaries such as business media or professional groups (Gond and Palazzo 2008;Deephouse and Heugens 2009).…”

“…The few recent studies doing so are either conceptual in nature (Chua and Rahman 2011;Deephouse and Heugens 2009;Gond and Palazzo 2008) or concentrate on assessing changes in the way infomediaries report on CSR practices without aiming at also conceptualizing and measuring potential consequences of such cultural processes in terms of organizations' adoption behavior (Grafström and Windell 2011). In fact, this tendency to concentrate on analyzing discourses without thoroughly assessing material consequences in terms of adoption behavior is not confined to research on the diffusion of CSR practices, but has been described as a limiting factor of much diffusion research from an institutional theory perspective within the past years (Zilber 2008;Mazza and Alvarez 2000).…”

“…In a recent conceptual paper, Deephouse and Heugens (2009) have proposed that in their decision to adopt certain social issues, firms will be influenced by the intensity as well as content of coverage produced by infomediaries. This model has recently been taken up by Grafström and Windell (2011) in an empirical study on the way prominent business media report on CSR. With my study, I am able to demonstrate that the basic proposition on a direct relationship between the way infomediaries reconstruct the meaning of CSR practices and adoption dynamics within industries, that has so far not been tested empirically, seems to hold.…”

“…Besides assessing accounts brought forward for justifying the engagement with codes of conduct, which has been done in a similar vein by prior work in the CSR field (Grafström and Windell 2011), I identified two further indicators that can be used when assessing processes of meaning reconstruction. First, in line with existing theoretical arguments on the relationship between language and processes of institutionalization (Green 2004), I explicitly accounted for the absence of certain arguments.…”

“…Conceptual work in this area has thereby improved our understanding of how so-called ''infomediaries''-i.e., important mediators and brokers of information within an industry like business/news media, trade journals, or professional groups-participate in such cultural processes by reconstructing the meaning and relevance of CSR (Deephouse and Heugens 2009;Gond and Palazzo 2008) and empirical assessments have identified significant changes in the way infomediaries like business media have contributed to interpret CSR within the past decade (Grafström and Windell 2011). Nevertheless, in view of the few existing studies in this area, at least one pivotal question remains unanswered: Do changes in the way infomediaries construct the meaning of CSR practices interrelate with decisions by organizations to adopt these practices?…”