Storytelling and Corporate Social Responsibility Reporting: A Case Study of Leading UK Retailers

Jones, Peter ORCID: 0000-0002-9566-9393 and Comfort, Daphne (2018) Storytelling and Corporate Social Responsibility Reporting: A Case Study of Leading UK Retailers. European Journal of Sustainable Development Research, 2 (4). pp. 1-11. doi:10.20897/ejosdr/3916

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Abstract

Stories, in one form or another, are probably as old as the human race, but in recent years, businesses have increasingly come to recognise the importance of storytelling. The aim of this paper is to offer an exploratory commentary on how storytelling is employed in the corporate social responsibility reporting process by the leading UK retailers. The paper begins with an outline of the characteristics of storytelling within the corporate world, and then reviews the ways storytelling is employed by the UK’s top ten retailers’ as part of their corporate social responsibility reporting processes. The paper identifies a number of storytelling formats, including photographs and images, video clips, messages and cameo case studies, used by the selected UK retailers, and offers some reflections on their current approaches to storytelling. While the stories employed by the selected retailers often have a strong human impact and can strike emotive chords, the authors would argue that stories can, at least partly, be misleading in that they do not necessarily fully reflect a retailer’s corporate social responsibility record.

Item Type:	Article
Article Type:	Article
Uncontrolled Keywords:	Stories; Storytelling; Corporate social responsibility; UK retailers
Subjects:	H Social Sciences > HF Commerce > HF5001 Business > HF5428 Retail Trade
Divisions:	Schools and Research Institutes > School of Business, Computing and Social Sciences
Research Priority Areas:	Applied Business & Technology
Depositing User:	Anne Pengelly
Date Deposited:	24 Sep 2018 14:08
Last Modified:	05 Mar 2024 16:15
URI:	https://eprints.glos.ac.uk/id/eprint/6019

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