Rethinking Communication in Social Business: How Re-Modeling Communication Keeps Companies Social and Entrepreneurial

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Social entrepreneurship increasingly assumes a position of strength in the dynamic milieu of late-modern democratic societies. A plethora of companies have now ariseneverything from mighty social enterprises like Warby Parker and TOMS to tiny outfits like Clean Slate and Bright Endeavorswhose business-focused approach to social problems is not merely additive but integral to their missions. These companies respond not only to a felt proliferation of humanitarian and environmental predicaments, but also to enormous shifts in in public feelings and technological sensibilities. These predicaments and make social entrepreneurships urgently needed and remarkably complicated. But if social entrepreneurs deal with that complexity with a business-as-usual approach to making the world betterimitating, for example, corporate social responsibility initiatives by transnational companiesthey will lose their vital distinctiveness and efficacy. Drawing on a transdisciplinary perspective, close rhetorical analysis, and qualitative interviews with social entrepreneurs, this book argues that one good way to keep social business disruptive is to rethink how organizations model their communication. Instead of assuming a conventional theory of communication, neatly organized around the relations of senders and receivers, social entrepreneurship should enact a performative model of communication in which messaging and action are affectively woven. This book offers suggestions for making this performative model sustainably disruptive in relation to questions that pester social entrepreneurs: how to tell the company story, how to raise awareness, how to address complex audiences, and how to solve problems.

Reviews

Mattson highlights the imperative for social enterprises of all shapes, sizes, and structures to communicate not just how effective they are, but to also communicate it in an effective way. Social enterprises must navigate the constraints and opportunities that come with our ever-morphing modernity to deliver not just their social missions, but also ensure that their communication lands with their audiences in meaningful ways. This book highlights powerful examples from social entrepreneurs that can be used to help us all communicate or understand the landscape more effectively. -- Laura Zumdahl, CEO, New Moms
With this monograph, Craig Mattson has leveraged his expertise in communications and social responsibility to address the vital work needed for furthering the evolution of the narrative around the integration of business practices into societal purpose. -- Robert White, Cara
Rethinking Communication in Social Business changes the way practitioners and scholars understand the discourse and practice of corporate social responsibility (CSR). Questioning the instrumental model of communication underwriting most CSR campaigns, Mattson showsthrough a series of insightful and innovative interviews and analysesthat sustainable and just corporate social practices should focus less on the message and much more on the mode of engagement that campaigns offer. -- Eric Jenkins, University of Cincinnati

Author Bio

Craig E. Mattson is professor of communication and media production at Trinity Christian College.