One Rule to Rule Them All? Organisational Sensemaking of Corporate Responsibility

CITATION

Onkila, T., & Siltaoja, M. (2017). One Rule to Rule Them All? Organisational Sensemaking of Corporate Responsibility. Journal of Business Ethics, 144(1), 5–20.

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ABSTRACT
Corporate responsibility (CR) has often been
criticised as a decoupled organisational phenomenon: a
publicly espoused rule that is not followed in daily
organisational practices. We argue that a crucial reason for
this criticism arises from the dominant in-house assumption
of CR literature, which mitigates tensions and contradictions
in organisational life by claiming that integrated
rules result in coupled practices. We aim to provide new
insights by problematising this in-house assumption and by
examining how members of two organisations discursively
make sense of CR, as a daily rule-bound practice, via three
strategies: integration, differentiation and fragmentation.
We elaborate the contemporary literature on CR as a daily
organisational practice by examining the significance of
discursive sensemaking for organisational rules for further
development and learning regarding CR. We then discuss
the significance of our results for understanding CR as a
coupled/decoupled phenomenon.


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