IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/h/spr/csrchp/978-3-031-89486-2_26.html
   My bibliography  Save this book chapter

How Civil Society Actors Employ Strategic Communication to Delegitimate Corporations in Public Debates on Sustainability

Author

Listed:
  • Sonja Fürst, née Walke

    (Institute of Journalism and Communication Studies, Department of Social Sciences, University of Hamburg)

  • Helena Stehle

    (Department of Communication, University of Münster)

Abstract

In recent years, the legitimacy of corporations has been increasingly challenged by civil society actors, especially in public debates about sustainability. This chapter sheds light on strategic communication of civil society actors that strives to delegitimate corporations engaging in unsustainable practices or displaying (potential) discrepancies between their corporate activities and communication on sustainability efforts. The chapter discusses the characteristics of such communication, particularly its strategies and processes. Based on a theoretical literature review, the chapter focuses on public relations studies that are complemented by literature from neighboring fields, such as organizational and environmental research. It contributes to expanding knowledge on the delegitimation of others in public debates about sustainability through strategic communication (hereon in “delegitimating strategic sustainability communication”)—a topic that is of great importance in current debates on sustainability but has so far been treated with restraint—and offers impulses for further research.

Suggested Citation

  • Sonja Fürst, née Walke & Helena Stehle, 2025. "How Civil Society Actors Employ Strategic Communication to Delegitimate Corporations in Public Debates on Sustainability," CSR, Sustainability, Ethics & Governance,, Springer.
    • Handle: RePEc:spr:csrchp:978-3-031-89486-2_26
    DOI: 10.1007/978-3-031-89486-2_26
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a
    for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:spr:csrchp:978-3-031-89486-2_26. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.springer.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.