Contested Discursive Framing of a Bank’s Cooptative Joint CSR Model
Contested Discursive Framing of a Bank’s Cooptative Joint CSR Model

Summary/Abstract: There is a dearth of critical ethnographic research that focuses on the semiotic-discursive features of corporate social responsibility (CSR) framing in business and nonprofit (BUS-NPO) part- nerships. This article contributes to CSR scholarship by combining ethnographic methods (participant observation, in-depth interviews, and textual materials) and semiotic analysis to demonstrate how a bank-NPO partnership is discursively framed in the context of agonistic interactions and its impli- cations in terms of cooptation.This article crystallizes two arguments. First, the bank’s joint CSR initiatives represent a discursively framed and validated model of CSR as a commodity aiming at advancing bank interests at the cost of avoiding substantive and sustained social responsibility. Second, the joint CSR model, discursively framed as a cooptative partnership discourse, is effectively realized through the practices of the coop- tative relationship between the bank and the NPOs.

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