The process of receiving cynicism and alienation of social responsibility

• Grant number: 06/02405-4
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Master
• Start date: September 01, 2006
• End date: March 31, 2008
• Field of knowledge: Applied Social Sciences - Communications - Theory of Communication
• Principal Investigator: Clovis de Barros Filho
• Grantee: Fernanda Branco Belizário
• Host Institution: Escola Superior de Propaganda e Marketing (ESPM). São Paulo , SP, Brazil

Abstract

In a previous work, entitled Social Responsibility: between the cynicism and alienation”, we have studied the material conditions to the production of social responsibility discourse and achieved the conclusion that it endorses two different and contradictory points of view. The first we called functionalist discourse, which gives to private companies the social role of government in providing welfare to communities. In this context, private companies would perform this public role naturally, once all of the social institutions are integrated in a same social body; the second point of view we called “strategic discourse”, which shows social responsibility as a strategic discourse which aims to raise profits and valorize brands attributes to consumers and other stakeholders. So, helping to establish welfare would be an instrument, not the target of social responsibility projects. In order to understand how a contradictory discourse can be efficient which means believable and legitimated by publics of interest – we propose a hypothesis that a social discourse suffers as many symbolically reapropriations as different are the social fields it is directed for. To confirm the hypothesis we suggest a reception study of the referred discourse in three different fields: private companies, press&media and NGOs due to understand which hues of symbolical reception processes allow that as producers as receptors get over these cognitive dissonances. (AU)