Cameron Sabadoz

[Abstract] This article revolves around the debate surrounding the lack of a coherent definition for corporate social responsibility (CSR). I make use of Jacques Derrida’s theorizing on contested meaning to argue that CSR’s ambiguity is actually necessary in light of its functional role as a ‘‘supplement’’ to corporate profit-seeking. As a discourse that refuses to conclusively resolve the tension between profit-seeking and prosociality, CSR expresses an important critical perspective which demands that firms act responsibly, while retaining the overall corporate frame of shareholder supremacy. CSR does this by ambivalently affirming both profit-seeking and prosociality, a necessary contradiction. Attempts to reduce CSR’s ambiguity can thus only succeed by undermining its viability as a normative discourse that captures how certain elements of society understand how firms should act. The analysis suggests that greater scholarly attention is needed with regard to the material discursive environments within which discourses such as CSR are deployed. A discursive approach to research could thus benefit future practitioners, who have to act according to fluid standards of responsibility that cannot be authoritatively defined, but which can be better understood than they are at present. [DOWNLOAD COMPLETE]

Jeffrey Kirby • Christy Simpson

ABSTRACT 

Early on in the development of Practicing Health care Ethicist Exploring Professionalization (PHEEP), the founding members recognized the need to address and meet two important goals: (1) the creation of a dynamic, rigorous process to support the exploratory work, and (2) the establishment of the means—deliberative engagement—to generate and justify the substantive content of professionalization-related products, such as practice standards and position statements. Drawing from social justice and deliberative democracy conceptions and insights (among others), the authors identify and describe the core elements of the ‘‘process scaffolding’’ and ‘‘deliberative means’’ that inform PHEEP’s deliberative engagement methodology. The paper demonstrates how these process and substantive features have been meaningfully instantiated in the decision making framework established by PHEEP for its use in the development of professionalization-related products by Canadian practicing health care ethicist. [DOWNLOAD]

Peter Seele • Irina Lock

ABSTRACT

Addressing the critique that communication activities with regard to CSR are often merely instrumental marketing or public relation tools, this paper develops a toolbox of CSR communication that takes into account a deliberative notion. We derive this toolbox classification from the political approach of CSR that is based on Habermasian discourse ethics and show that it has a communicative core. Therefore, we embed CSR communication within political CSR theory and extend it by Habermasian communication theory, particularly the four validity claims of communication. Given this communicative basis, we localize CSR communication as a main means to receive moral legitimacy within political CSR theory. A typology of CSR communication tools is advanced and substantiated by a review of case studies supporting the categories. Thus, we differentiate between instrumental and deliberative,as well as published and unpublished tools. Practical examples for the literature-derived tool categories are provided and their limitations are discussed. [DOWNLOAD]

Bruce Christopher Glavovic

[Abstract] Coastal sustainability is elusive in South Africa and the Mississippi delta. These case studies and convergent literatures demonstrate the merits of reconceptualising coastal management as a transformative practice of deliberative governance. A normative framework is presented that focuses attention on underpinning deliberative out comes to enable governance actors and networks to build cognitive, democratic, sociopolitical and institutional capacity to transform unsustainable and maladaptive coastal practices. But operationalising such intentions is complex and contested and requires a volte-face in thinking and practice. The South African and Mississippi delta experiences provide insights about how to develop a deliberative praxis of coastal governance based on consideration of the choice of process, timeliness, quality of process, equity and representation, connections to the policy cycle, impact, implementation and institutionalisation. [Download Complete]

Keywords: Coastal governance, Integrated coastal management, Deliberation, Mississippi delta, South Africa

Alice Katharina Pieper and Michael Pieper

[Abstract] If social media are to reinforce sustainability of political decisions, their design has conceptually to take into account the implications of deliberative democracy, which stresses the active cooperation of virtually all citizens of a democracy for the purposes of participatory involvement. Essential to deliberative e-democracy is therefore a technologically supported comprehensive discourse about political subjects which is also called deliberation. Theoretical implications of deliberation are discussed from the angle of political science and social psychology. Finally, the practical implications of deliberation rooted in social media are exemplified by an online citizen involvement for the public budgeting purposes of the city of Frankfurt/Main (Germany). 

Keywords: Sustainable systems design, Deliberation, Social media, Social capital, Collective intelligence, e-Democracy. [Download Journal Complete]