Communicating Corporate Social Responsibility in social media: Sense-making processes evolving with the development of virtual Communities of Practice

By integrating Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and Community of Practice (CoP) frameworks, this paper explores how CSR sense-making processes evolved in virtual CoPs on Facebook between enterprises (production vs. service) and stakeholders. Two different corporate Facebook pages were selected and the textual posts (N = 288) produced by communication management and stakeholders were analyzed. A mixed-methods approach to analysis was adopted. Posts were first qualitatively assessed using a coding scheme, and then quantitatively analyzed for the relationships between the dimensions of CSR and CoP. The results indicate that these communities continuously negotiated CSR on Facebook; in particular, CSR sense-making partially co-evolved with the development of CoPs. Further, the CSR dimensions were elicited differently in the two types of communities.