And They Lived Sustainably Ever After… A study on the social construction of CSR in YouTube videos of Dutch banks

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is a popular social phenomenon in corporate communication, as it refers to the changing role of business in society from solitary profit-driven to a leader in societal and environmental strives. What this responsibility exactly contains and to whom it is prioritized, is a matter of concern in both academic literature and corporate practices. Therefore, CSR is argued to be context-dependent, which results in a paradox on how to communicate CSR to stakeholders. On the one hand, an implicit approach increases stakeholder skepticism, but fails to create awareness among the general public. On the other hand, an explicit approach reaches out to multiple stakeholder groups, but causes doubt about the sincerity of the messages. As a result, this paper introduces the influence of visual elements in CSR communication based on 55 online videos from five Dutch banks. With a combination of a rhetoric and semiotic approach, a discourse analysis is performed to deconstruct the rhetorical and discursive strategies in the videos. The first findings indicate that in line with traditional advertising, the banks implement classic rhetorical tactics divided in the appeal to credibility, the appeal to emotion and the appeal to reason. A prominent finding is the excessive focus on storytelling and identification techniques, which has shifted the focus on logos to the dominant use of ethos and pathos. The second phase of the analysis resulted in the establishment of three discursive strategies that companies use to receive their license to operate, being authorization, moralization and narrativization. Authorization involves the use of personal and role model authority, which enhances the credible character of the speaker. Moralization focuses, mainly with the appeal to emotion, on national and humanistic interests and narrativization mainly includes moral lessons. As a result, the findings of the rhetoric and discursive strategies lead to two discourses in which CSR is socially constructed by Dutch banks. The first one suggests that CSR is a shared responsibility in which the banks function as a middle man, offering possibilities for consumers and other stakeholder groups to be socially responsible. The second discourse frames CSR as a stakeholder responsibility, where the driving factor of CSR is not about being a good corporate citizen or having an ethical obligation to do the right thing, but about responding to the expectations and demands of stakeholders. Moreover, the overall goal of this study is to create awareness for the role of visuals in CSR communication and its potential to influence the way CSR is understood in various contexts.