Yolandi Botha PhD

Strategic sustainability communication has the potential to acculturate internal and external organisational contexts. Strategic sustainability communication could broaden societal values and social learning while building collaborative networks toward societal, environmental, and economic well-being. Arguably, internal and organisational communication is the starting point to convey and achieve an organisation’s sustainability messages and goals. Thus, this chapter takes a two-pronged approach to strategic sustainability communication from an organisational perspective. Firstly, as we argue, a necessary precondition for communication for sustainability is several considerations for sustainable employee engagement. These considerations are grounded in an approach that allows for reflectivity and encourages radical leadership thinking towards a decentralised leadership approach. Such an approach may be facilitated by the strategic communication professional as the broker of collaboration. This, arguably, contributes to the establishment of an innovation culture for curiosity-driven knowledge within an organisation. Such a culture has the potential to build a transdisciplinary response to complex problems. Secondly, these considerations for sustainable employee engagement collectively serve as enablers for communication about sustainability, addressing the sustainability issues and goals of the organisation while encouraging a desire within employees to extend these sustainability practices outside the organisation.

This chapter aims to define social justice; describe classic, modern and postmodern viewpoints of social justice; explain the link between social justice, identity and stakeholder relationships; outline how brand legitimacy is formed and influenced as a socially constructed concept; explain the shift from corporate social responsibility to corporate social responsiveness and explain how social justice leads to corporate social responsiveness in building brand legitimacy and social capital.