ABSTRACT
One of the most significant challenges in the area of governance and responsible corporate conduct is not the creation, but the interpretation, of its complex and evolving lexicon. Independent governance oversight relies on transparency and public information disclosure. This chapter considers the role of discourse in light of modern advances in communication technologies, and the opportunities as well as the inherent risks that these advances pose to the ideal of ethical dialogue and the socially legitimate construction of meaning in general. A similar shift to the language of business and economics occurred in the corporate social responsibility movement in the 1990s. During that decade, the concept and language of the business case model for strategic planning and evaluation entered the language of corporate social responsibility’s civil society proponents and with it a shift in the evaluative framework from inherent social good to an economic cost benefit model.
