Heartcore Business? A study of the challenges social enterprises experience when communicating their corporate identity: 3rd CSR communication conference

The aim of this paper is to investigate social businesses’ communication of identity in their corporate communication. Institutional theory (e.g. DiMaggio & Powel, 1983), and especially the notion of legitimacy (Deephouse and Carter, 2005; Meyer and Rowan, 1977; Suchman, 1995), provides the frame for understanding and exploring the enterprises’ communication in an organizational context. Hence, through a value-theoretical framework, the study seeks to identify the extent to which these enterprises manage to create alignment between their corporate identity values and their social responsibility values, or if they are working with two, or even more, different value systems. Accordingly, the assumption put forward by this paper is that a high degree of alignment between identity and social responsibility in the enterprise’s corporate communication will enable the enterprises to communicate a clear identity and consequently increase their legitimacy.