Managing Corporate Guilt in CSR Reports. A Discourse Perspective

Purpose. This paper aims to study how high-profile financial-services companies manage guilt discursively in their CSR reports, after having been convicted of wrongdoings such as bribery, money laundering, or fraud and sentenced to pay enormous fines. This paper challenges the value of CSR reports by examining how ethical wrongdoings are integrated into such reports and to what extent they change corporate CSR commitments in the ensuing years. Design/methodology/approach. We will first identify high-profile cases of corporate wrongdoings in the US financial industry. 50 cases will be identified via the Factiva database, through a search limited to the financial industry, to the words "fined" and "fine" in the title or lead paragraph, and to the year 2014. The latter limit is set in order to be able to study the post-conviction discourse. We will conduct a critical discourse analysis of relevant sections of these companies‘ CSR reports from 2013-2016/2017 in order to examine how they manage their guilt discursively in the years that follow and whether their CSR commitments have changed compared to the years before the conviction. Social implications. The results will provide a better understanding of the usefulness of CSR reports to external readers, as the study looks at the extent to which companies are willing to deal with their own misconduct in their CSR reports. Originality/value. By taking concrete cases of wrongdoings as a starting point coupled with a longitudinal design, this paper provides insights into overt and covert ways in which companies manage guilt discursively.