ABSTRACT
Researching corporate citizenship therefore developed as a reflection of situated practice experiences, rather than an attempt to understand practice as an 'outsider'. Contextualism acts as the epistemological underpinning in researching how interactional exchanges occurring within an organisation contribute and evolve into socially constructed meanings about the nature of corporate citizenship. When acting as an action researcher, this much broader societal construction of corporate citizenship helped to provide an important contextual anchor within which to locate practice findings. To begin an investigation into how a company such as BP is attempting to evolve as a corporate citizen, people chose to begin to interpret it through Pettigrew's contextualist perspective of 'capturing more of the whole, the history, the process, the environment, and the emergent behaviour'. Having created the space for change, the next phase involved engaging communities in a process of social exchange by enabling a dialogue to occur about their views and expectations of BP Australia.
