CBS Sustainability

About

This Group has a joint affiliation with the Communication, Organization and Governance (COG) Cluster at the CBS Sustainability Centre, both at the Department od Management, Society and Communication (MSC).

For more information, please contact the Group Coordinators Lars Thøger Christensen, ltc.msc@cbs.dk or Dennis Schoeneborn, ds.msc@cbs.dk.

See the full member list here.

Purpose

The purpose of the Group is to explore the multiple and complex relationship between communication, organization, and sustainability/CSR through discussions of pertinent texts within these fields. By exchanging viewpoints and experiences from reading such texts, the aim of the Group is to develop a sensitivity to different theoretical and empirical perspectives and ultimately stimulate new research ideas and publications.

Areas of expertise

• CSR Communication
• Sustainability Communication
• Communicative Constitution of Organization (CCO)
• Communicative Institutionalism
• Performativity
• Talk-Action Relations

Research

The main activity is a monthly reading session, usually concerned with discussing "classical" works and/or work-in-progress papers are discussed. These sessions alternate between meetings that address the organization-communication relation more generally - and other meetings that look at issues of sustainability, accountability and CSR from a communication-centred perspective. These latter meetings are announced also more broadly at the Sustainability Centre.

Group's highlights

From CBS Sustanability Seminar Series on Why Rankings Matter: The Social Production of Numerical Authority

Leopold Ringel is a lecturer at the Faculty of Sociology of Bielefeld University, Germany. His current research focuses on the production, proliferation, and unintended consequences of organizational transparency and quantification, rankings in particular. He has published his work in a variety of scholarly ourlets, most notably in Organization Studies and Research in the Sociology of Organizations.

Rankings are everywhere. As numerical devices they are applied in diverse areas of institutional life, such as schooling, science, healthcare, business, corruption control, tourism, or human progress to measure and compare performances. Building upon previous work that has studied the performative dimension of rankings by addressing the importance of visualization and continual publication, this paper zooms in on how ranking organizations continuously engage with 'rankees', thereby creating direct social relations through which they convey the importance of rankings. Quantification, from this perspective, is only part of a larger set of mechanisms which, taken together, engender and institutionalize the authority of rankings in modern society.

The recemt results of the Group's activities have just been published:

Dennis Schoeneborn, Mette Morsing &  Andrew Crane eds (2019) ‘CSR and Communication: Examining how CSR Shapes, and is Shaped by, Talk and Text’ ‘Special Issue of Business and Society

Lars Thøger Christensen, Mette Morsing & Ole Thyssen (2019) ‘Timely hypocrisy? Hypocrisy temporalities in CSR communication’ Journal of Business Research