مقاله سال ۲۰۱۶

The lastthree decades have witnessed an explosion in public relations research grounded in theory and employing various research methods. An extensive body of knowledge about public relations now exists in areas such as the use of social media to build relationships (cf., Duhé, ۲۰۱۲; Sweetser & Metzgar, 2007; Taylor, Kent, & White, 2001; Trammell, & Keshelashvili, 2005; Wright & Hinson, 2008, 2010), and the use of corporate social responsibility (CSR) to help organizations build social capital (cf., Hall, 2006; Kim & Reber, 2008; Lovejoy, Waters, & Sexton, 2012; O’Connor & Meister, 2008; Smith, 2010; Taylor, 2013; Trench, Bowd, & Jones, 2007).

The intersection of the social media and CSR literature provides insight into the ways that public relations is used to build relationships with publics. However, we believe that current research has not reached its potential for explaining how to create ethical, empowering, and long-lasting, public relations relationships. Therefore, this essay provides a way forward to show how dialogic social media, used in CSR communication, can build understanding, trust, and social capital between organizations and their publics, and the communities they share.

To accomplishthis task,thefirst sectionofthe article explores the practice of CSRas a public relations activity.Inparticular, section one outlines the economic assumptions underlying CSR as a public relations function. We term this approach the Homo Economicus metaphor of conceptualizing CSR. The second section examines the potential relational uses of social media and explores the obstacles to their use as effective tools for CSR communication with organizational stakeholders. The third section offers an alternative perspective on social media use in CSR through the lens of a new metaphor: Homo Dialogicus. The Homo Dialogicus metaphor places relationships into a broader context and allows communication professionals to return to the relationship building approach implied by dialogue. The fourth section proposes a reflective, practice-based approach to dialogue as a framework for integrating social media into CSR communication.