COM 610 Issue Management

This week surrounded the concept of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). However, there was not one purely explanation piece that gave us deep foundational understanding of CSR. This surprised me because there is usually one article per week that does this; I believe there was not one because CSR is more of an industry than an academic concept. Due to the fact that I have seen this concept mentioned a lot in industry-related articles and out in the world, I will be delving into what CSR is and an example of this that I came across. CSR can be defined as the fact that organizations, " as members of a society, [...] have social responsibilities beyond economic and legal obligations; that they have the rights to act, but also moral obligations to contribute to the greater good of society, and to be accountable for their actions. (Janssen, 2013, p. 69). To expand, corporations cannot be solely concerned about their profits; they must also consider their publics, stakeholders, and t...

I believe the most important concept from this week's readings is actional legitimacy. I learned that actional legitimacy is to organizational legitimacy as issue management is to crisis management. Actional legitimacy is concerned with more regular corporate decisions and issue management. As a communication student who plans on pursuing a career in marketing/communications, this concept resonated with me and will be something I will reference in the future. I appreciated how the Boyd (2000) reading provided practical examples for how actional legitimacy is practiced in the real world. A current example is the issue of the coronavirus. I will discuss how two different entities handled this and how their responses relate to actional legitimacy. First, there is Purdue. They sent out an email a few weeks ago informing the university population about the crucial details of the virus and describing their proactive measures with patients at PUSH (Purdue, 2020). This action contributes...

This week's focus was on the concept of values advocacy: when an organization strategically emphasizes certain shared cultural values in order to persuade publics to align with them and support their organization. Support can be exercised whether that is through purchasing their product/service or supporting their policy influences. The first reading by Botsdorff & Vibbert (1994) helped me to understand the full scope of this concept and the three reasons that organizations employ it, namely enhancing their image, dodging criticism, and establishing a foundation of value premises that in the future can be used to benefit themselves or their policies. Values advocacy is important to recognize out in "the real world" in order to identify which of these three functions an organization is using. One example I thought of from the past week was from the Oscars, when Korean director Bong Joon-ho's film Parasite won 4 Oscars. The victory came to my attention through soc...

The most interesting idea from the readings was the concept of front groups (Palenchar & Fitzpatrick, 2009). I was unfamiliar with this idea previously; it is like fake news except as an entity. Fake news is often recognized for pushing some agenda to media consumers through sensationalized content. On the other hand, front groups have a much more professional appearance and reasonable logics, which is why they seem so real and often are effective at masking their true agenda. I did some research on long-established front groups and came across one called The Center for Consumer Freedom. From surveying their website, I can see that this organization is managing the issue of consumers being exposed to more local and healthy food options. There are categories such as "junk science" and "animal rights extremism" that viewers can read more about. On their About Us page, there is a list of frequently asked questions, one being "Who funds you? How about some fu...

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