ABSTRACT

This chapter investigates stakeholder dissonance and the process of trust recovery as a struggle between water companies voluntary work with sustainability and Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and their authorities tightening of municipal and state regulation upon it. Logics of organizations exist in multiple, but at the same time certain logics may dominate a stakeholder relationship whether they compete or coexist. The chapter focuses on a qualitative case study analysis of seven Danish water companies and their local and state authorities to investigate the trust recovery process from a stakeholder dissonance viewpoint and to measure the conflict between Danish water companies which perceive themselves to be sustainable businesses enacting CSR, as opposed to the regulators who perceive the same companies as being irresponsible when managing trusted, monopolized funds from tariffs. Before the reform the operator's institutional logic of professionalism, expressed as providers of water for protecting health, the environment and sustainability, was taken for granted.