CSR 2.0 - FRAMING ONLINE LEARNING ENVIRONMENTS IN CAMPAIGNS ON NON-FORMAL EDUCATION

Abstract

Education is one of the most important signs of social progress and throughout the years a twofold evolution has taken place: on the one hand, the providers of knowledge have evolved from schools and universities to the business community and on the other hand, the traditional receivers of knowledge have changed into creators of knowledge. Business organizations have become aware that the corporate involvement in the community by implementing social campaigns on education may trigger a higher degree of visibility and consolidate the stakeholder relationship management. Thus the well-known corporate social responsibility (CSR) syntagm, ?doing well by doing good? (Rawlins, 2005) has turned into a pervasive element of the organizational discourse. As the report on CSR of the European Commission and the Directorate-General for Employment, Social Affairs and Inclusion (2011) highlighted, CSR should not be ?an isolated practice or teaching subject but a cross-cutting approach embedded in the wider concept of sustainable development?. The economic, legal, ethical, and philanthropic dimensions beyond every CSR activity should be integrated within the framework of campaigns which ?are often driven by reform efforts, actions that seek to make life or society or both better, as defined by emerging social values? (Dozier et. al, 2001). The final outcome of improving people?s life and/ or society involves stirring one?s awareness towards an issue. Investing into people?s education has become a pervasive issue for many organizations nowadays and non-formal education is a type of acquiring knowledge which the business community seems to prefer because it lies on social constructivism whose purposes are self-knowledge, development of identities, and belief that stakeholders can make a difference in the world (Oldfather et al., 1999). Within the age of Web 2.0 the traditional non-formal learning settings (museums, zoos, botanical gardens, planetariums and so on) have changed into online environments where features such as engaging, participating, connecting, collaborating, and sharing (Lee, Williams, Kim, 2012) prevail. Running a CSR 2.0 campaign on non-formal education implies that business organizations create these virtual environments where social media applications are used as a bidirectional information delivery system where stakeholders play an active role in the collaborative knowledge construction. As methodology, we will use the framing theory in order to provide the content analysis of the CSR 2.0 campaigns on non-formal education which were awarded at the Romanian PR Award in 2009, 2010 and 2011. Frames rely on the selection of some aspects of a perceived reality which are made more salient in a communicating (e-)text. We will provide a threefold analysis: a) a general framework of the Romanian CSR 2.0 campaigns on non-formal education taking into account R. Entman?s four frame types: problem definition, causal interpretation, moral evaluation and treatment recommendation; b) a structural analysis of non-formal education virtual environments as a hybrid genre formed of multimodal resources; c) a comparative analysis of the online environments framed as treatment recommendations which were used in the awarded Romanian CSR 2.0 campaigns on education. The research questions will focus on four aspects: the salience of business organizations as providers of non-formal education; the dominance of the awarded thematic online environments; the types of social actions framed in the different thematic e-learning environments; the types of digital identities virtually assigned to stakeholders.