Twenty-fourth International Conference on Diversity in Organizations, Communities & Nations

Abstract

The premise of this paper is that the necessary transition from corporate social responsibility (CSR) to human social responsibility (HSR) is happening now across organizational borders and is made visible through a wide range of social practices and discourses. Such social practices and discourses are based on the idea that equality and justice in terms of rights and responsibilities has a powerful role in tackling the present relentless challenges of solidarity decline and environmental destruction. The purpose of this qualitative study is to explain how discourses of renewal are used in web context to recontextualize meaningful changes performed by tech companies’ employees engaged in diverse volunteer programs. Taking into consideration the research purpose and the selected data, the theoretical framework includes perspectives upon social change, empowerment, and volunteerism. Multimodal discourse analysis is used in order to show how advocating discourses of renewal are multimodally generated through language and still or moving images. The recurrent discursive strategies are examined to demonstrate how employees are identified as changemakers - both as empowering benefactors and empowered beneficiaries - while engaged in social actions that not only transform organizational behaviour but also contribute towards a more socially responsible world. Furthermore, the recurrent discourse strategies employed for legitimizing these social actions’ motivations and beneficial consequences are also identified and clarified. Thus, this paper proposes a systematic approach for exploring the complexity of empowering discourses of renewal that reinforce the values of equality and justice for effectively defending human and non-human life.