Corporate Sustainability (CS) communication plays a central role in in fostering sustainable transformation and ensuring business firms’ legitimacy. However, CS communication is increasingly confronted with a polarized public discourse, characterized by “Us” vs. “Them” logics on matters of sustainability. While some firms continue to communicate their sustainability efforts expressively nevertheless, others tend to retract into strategic silence. This raises questions about the boundary conditions under which firms choose either expressive or avoidant approaches in their CS communication. Despite growing scholarly attention, systematic insights into these conditions and the communicative dynamics they facilitate remain limited, thus far.
This project will investigate how firms navigate the strategic tension in their CS communication under polarization. It develops a context-sensitive understanding of the organizational, institutional, and discursive dynamics that shape communicative strategies, and how these evolve in interaction with stakeholders. Empirically, the study will focus on the German mass retail sector as a highly visible and contested business area that faces uprising regulatory demand and fragmented public expectations.
By moving beyond binary views of “talk” versus “silence”, the project develops a conceptual framework that captures how communicative strategies unfold and shift under polarized public spheres. The findings will advance research at the intersection of CS communication studies and organization theory, and offer theoretical insights into how firms navigate polarized discourses without compromising their legitimacy.