Abstract

La comunicación y la responsabilidad social de las organizaciones se han concebido y utilizado como dos ámbitos separados, cuya relación sólo es instrumental. El resultado ha sido la actual desconfianza hacia los mecanismos y procedimientos de información de la responsabilidad social. Este artículo propone apoyarse en una ética de la comunicación para, desde ahí, definir las bases para una gestión ética de la comunicación de la responsabilidad social capaz de explicitar la relación entre ética, comunicación y responsabilidad. El objetivo es exponer los rasgos básicos de una nueva generación de códigos de ética que incluyan tanto las medidas de su cumplimiento como su verificación externa a través de una auditoría ética. La importancia de esta propuesta deriva de la necesidad de establecer una infraestructura ética desde la que recuperar la confianza en la comunicación de la responsabilidad social. La metodología utilizada es de corte reconstructivo y se basa en la teoría de la acción comunicativa de Habermas y en las pretensiones de transparencia y participación derivadas de la ética discursiva. AbstractOrganizations’ communication and social responsibility have been conceived and used as two completely separate areas, whose relationship is merely instrumental. This has led to a current lack of trust in the mechanisms and procedures of corporate social responsibility information. This article proposes an ethics of communication that defines how to ethically manage corporate social responsibility communication which is capable of specifying the relationships that link ethics, communication, and responsibility. The objective is to present the basic traits of new codes of ethics generation that include both compliance measures and their external verification by ethical auditing. The proposal is important because it establishes an ethical infrastructure from which to recover trust in corporate social responsibility communication. The employed methodology is reconstruction, based on Habermas’ Theory of Communicative Action, and also transparency and participation claims that result from discourse ethics.  

Abstract

Organizations’ communication and social responsibility have been conceived and used as two completely separate areas, whose relationship is merely instrumental. This has led to a current lack of trust in the mechanisms and procedures of corporate social responsibility information. This article proposes an ethics of communication that defines how to ethically manage corporate social responsibility communication which is capable of specifying the relationships that link ethics, communication, and responsibility. The objective is to present the basic traits of new codes of ethics generation that include both compliance measures and their external verification by ethical auditing. The proposal is important because it establishes an ethical infrastructure from which to recover trust in corporate social responsibility communication. The employed methodology is reconstruction, based on Habermas’ Theory of Communicative Action, and also transparency and participation claims that result from discourse ethics.