Editorial

Citation

Pesqueux, Y. (2009), "Editorial", Society and Business Review, Vol. 4 No. 3. https://doi.org/10.1108/sbr.2009.29604caa.001

Editorial

Article Type: Editorial From: Society and Business Review, Volume 4, Issue 3

The first three papers have been written according to the same methodology. They offer the opportunity to illustrate the use of a discourse analysis focused on different topics (corporate social responsibility, annual reports and coaching). The last three papers are related with conceptual issues in relation with political and ethical issues in relation with business activities.

Rodolphe Ocler proposes to identify the contributions and theoretical limits of such methods as well as to define the phenomenon of operational contribution through the example of social responsibility for the companies because they and their stakeholders, investors, and financial managers feel more and more concerned by social and environmental responsibility issues. As a result, greater volumes of literature can be found on these subjects and, more specifically, on the strategies developed by firms to implement social responsibility. The perception that companies face this issues and the action plans they initiate in this area can be analysed using a set of semantic tools. This paper is focused on the methodology used to discover what is hidden behind the discourse on corporate social responsibility and the address specific questions regarding the validity of qualitative research (e.g. validity and triangulation).

Gaétan Breton uses semiotics analysis to better understand the annual report. He starts with the idea that the annual report is telling stories to the reader. As a form of novel, he analyses it with the same instrument. His purpose is methodological and wants to propose an organized body of techniques that will allow anybody to conduct analysis from it. He has uniquely used one example to illustrate the method. According to Gaétan Breton, the advantages of semiotics over content analysis are numerous: content analysis remains quite trivial (counting words) while semiotics analysis take into account the structure of the story at many levels. Framed by the categories of the Aristotle's rhetoric, he develops a replicable method with a limited background in the source disciplines. His results suggest that the annual report is clearly telling stories and respond quite positively to this kind of approach.

Anne Ellerup Nielsen and Hanne Nørreklit analyse the control assumptions embedded in some textbooks on management coaching with a view to uncovering the potentialities and constraints applying to the individual's self-realisation project. While using a discourse analysis, they categorise management coaching literature into two types: employee and executive coaching, respectively. The paper demonstrates that employee coaching seems to involve action control and direct monitoring, while executive coaching involves control of the spirit as well as results/achievements, thereby generating tight constraints on the individual's self-realisation project. It concludes that coaching can be a stronger disciplining technique than control by numbers.

In “Anti-corporate activist anger: inappropriate irrationality of social change essential?”, Sheldene K. Simola is pointing the false distinction often drawn in both philosophy and social movements research between rationality of thought and the emotion of anger. By demonstrating that anger may represent something other than rationality, she is questioning the adequacy of common management responses to anti-corporate activist anger. She reminds that dominant western perspectives in which anger is negatively constructed as a socially inappropriate irrationality in need of control are contrasted with alternate viewpoints in which anger is conceptualized as an essential political mechanism through which judgments of injustice occur.

In “Sustainable development: a vague and ambiguous ‘theory’”, Yvon Pesqueux is studying the notion of “sustainable development”. This notion has become a project enabling a rethinking of capitalism. His paper is based on three arguments: the presentation of sustainable development as a “vague” theory, an empirical proof of this vagueness with regard to corporate actions whose justification is based around the notion of sustainable development, and finally the ambiguities of the notion. The notion of “sustainable development” raises the question of an apparent consensus on its correlates: solidarity, responsibility, equity, etc. The largely political dimension of the notion has today consequences on its usage.

E. Isaac Mostovicz, Nada K. Kakabadse and Andrew Kakabadse try to outline concepts that can build an ethical society. They distinguish a ruler (socially defined and in a hierarchical position) from a leader (psychologically defined in relation withy personal qualities). Leadership is considered as a process linking these two characters in a paper, which tries to fill a gap in explaining what could be an ethical theory of citizenship. It is making a clear distinction between a ruler and a leader within a state questioned as a long-term entity.

Yvon Pesqueux