Open AccessListen to the voice of the customer—First steps towards stakeholder democracy
Author(s) -
EdingerSchons Laura Marie,
LenglerGraiff Lars,
Scheidler Sabrina,
Mende Gina,
Wieseke Jan
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
business ethics: a european review
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.343
H-Index - 35
eISSN - 1467-8608
pISSN - 0962-8770
DOI - 10.1111/beer.12252
Subject(s) - corporate social responsibility , stakeholder , business , democracy , relevance (law) , corporate governance , process (computing) , public relations , marketing , political science , computer science , law , operating system , finance , politics
Recently, calls have grown louder for more stakeholder democracy that is, letting stakeholders participate in the process of organizing, decision‐making, and governance in corporations, especially in the area of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) activities. Despite the relevance of the subject, the impact of customer involvement in CSR on their company‐related attitudes and behaviors still represents a major research void. The paper at hand develops a conceptual framework of consumer involvement in CSR based on the existing literature, theories of stakeholder democracy, and organizational boundaries as well as drawing from the qualitative focus group interviews ( N = 24). The framework is tested on a large scale, two‐time point field‐experimental study ( N = 3,397). More specifically, consumer reactions to three degrees of customer involvement (i.e., information, feedback, and dialogue) are tested in two different CSR domains (i.e., company‐internal business process vs. company‐external philanthropic CSR). Results indicate that the customer involvement in CSR has a more beneficial effect in terms of strengthening customer outcomes in CSR domains that directly affect external stakeholders of the company (i.e., philanthropic CSR) than in domains that mainly concern company‐internal stakeholders (i.e., business process CSR).