Visual and Multimodal Research in Organization and Management Studies

14Multimodal Legitimation and Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR)

Legitimacy—the general assumption that an organization and its conduct are appropriate within a specific institutional and cultural context (Deephouse, Bundy, Tost, & Suchman, 2017)—is a central precondition for organizational success and survival. During the past decades, CSR has emerged as a guiding idea with regard to the changing role of business in society (Crane, McWilliams, Matten, Moon, & Siegel, 2008), and has diffused globally, with a broad variety of local adaptations and translations. In this section, we analyse how companies’ communication in CSR reports manifests their discursive legitimation strategies (van Leeuwen & Wodak, 1999). These legitimation strategies ...