Abstract September 2014
Elisabeth Houe Thomsen
Abstract – CRS communication in banking: How is it perceived by employees and customers?
This project focuses on how the financial institution Merkur employs CSR communication – and on
how this communication is perceived as a way of branding the business. I initially found it curious
that the so-called social, civic or sustainable banks seemed to be less explicit in their CSR
communication than the larger, conventional banks. I have often wondered why. Which factors
might explain this difference? Is it ‘green hushing’ for fear of being accused of ‘green washing’ or
just not considered necessary?
And how do we determine what might be considered CSR communication? Do we, as stakeholders,
need to know words like CSR and sustainability to get a sense of whether a business is acting
responsibly?
Purpose
The project aims at finding out – by means of a case study – how Merkur communicates CSR to
stakeholders. Using multimodal analysis, nexus analysis and discursive psychology, my project will
focus on semiotic markers – and I will compare how various stakeholders – management,
employees and customers – perceive this CSR communication.
Design
The choice of method and design is not just based on theory, but rather on considerations as to how
to best explore whether there is a connection between how senders and receivers make sense of
CSR communication.
The main aim of this project is to investigate how stakeholders make sense of various types of CSR
information. Which rhetorical strategies, types of discourse, words, values, ideologies, effects and
outcome do stakeholders associate with CSR as a branding/marketing tool and what effects do they
attribute to this approach to communicating CSR?