Contested Discursive Framing of a Bank’s Cooptative Joint CSR Model

Riki Galia

doi:10.18778/1733-8077.19.1.03

Authors

Riki Galia Kinneret Academic College, Israel https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5776-2765

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.18778/1733-8077.19.1.03

Keywords:

BUS-NPO Partnerships, Joint CSR Initiatives Model, Cooptation and CSR, Contested Discursive Framing, Symbolic Interactionist-Semiotic Analysis, Banking and CSR, Ethnographic Method

Abstract

There is a dearth of critical ethnographic research that focuses on the semiotic-discursive features of corporate social responsibility (CSR) framing in business and nonprofit (BUS-NPO) partnerships. This article contributes to CSR scholarship by combining ethnographic methods (participant observation, in-depth interviews, and textual materials) and semiotic analysis to demonstrate how a bank-NPO partnership is discursively framed in the context of agonistic interactions and its implications in terms of cooptation.

This article crystallizes two arguments. First, the bank’s joint CSR initiatives represent a discursively framed and validated model of CSR as a commodity aiming at advancing bank interests at the cost of avoiding substantive and sustained social responsibility. Second, the joint CSR model, discursively framed as a cooptative partnership discourse, is effectively realized through the practices of the cooptative relationship between the bank and the NPOs.

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Author Biography

Riki Galia, Kinneret Academic College, Israel

Riki Galia (Ph.D., Bar-Ilan University, 2010) is a Senior Lecturer of Sociology and Organization Studies at Kinneret Academic College in Israel. She studies corporate social responsibility (CSR) and corporate philanthropy from a critical and historical perspective.

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