«Corporate citizenship» or when ethics belongs to the organisations DNA

In the first decades of the 21st century companies have been confronted with new challenges and risks. No one expects anymore to hear from a CEO that the only responsibility of a business is to improve profits but we don’t seem to hear often which are the specific responsibilities organizations are willing to take in our contemporaneity. Do they go beyond philanthropic and voluntary work? How concerned are they with Internal Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) activities? What constraints to they impose on the supply chain practices? What are their environmental practices? What about innovation and specially responsible innovation? The option for the concept of "Corporate Citizenship" (Woot, 2013 and 2016) in the context of this article is not altogether innocent. The authors by using it in detriment of some other notions as those of “Enterprise Social Responsibility” or “CSR” wish to emphasize their concern with aspects other than those that could be subsumed under the idea of hands - out philanthropy. They want also to consider aspects that can belong to the realm of organizations being seen precisely as social and political actors in our globalized societies. The main research question is precisely what do the organizations that belong to the portuguese association for the development of corporate citizenship (GRACE), define as being their main social responsible principles, policies and practices. To paraphrase Lord Chris Patten, in a theoretical framework that we can call of an "ethics of duty," a clear modern paradigm, to act well is still, and in the end, to act in our best interest. Do these organisations act according to this idea? What do they consider as belonging to the realm of CSR? What is the role of strategic communications in these processes (Hallahan et al., 2007)? How do they report, and moreover, how do they express their practices? In accordance to an interpretivist point of view, an exploratory study and a qualitative research design both in what concerns the data recollection as well as the data analysis was developed. Researchers studied the main communicative instruments used to report social responsible practices and afterwards face - to - face interviews (20) with the CSR responsible in each organization were conducted. A qualitative content analysis was applied to the data recollected.