OBJECTIVES AND METHODOLOGY (AEP)

For over two decades, the Research Group Practical Ethics and Democracy of the Universitat Jaume I has been outlined for including ethics and social responsibility concepts through communication and participation of groups of interest. To this end, it has proposed a social responsibility model that guarantees its moral resource nature and is not merely strategic (García-Marzá, 2005). For this purpose, the methodology developed by this group for more than 10 years, which has been tested in many private and public companies, begins by defining the company’s (ethical) nature, as depicted in its corresponding code of ethics to go on to establish a virtuous circle in which communication is the basic instrument for the different groups of interest to participate in, where the annual social responsibility report (or sustainability report) plays an essential part for dialogue and for all the groups of interest to reach a possible agreement; that is, coordinating the various agents to build trust through transparency and participation. The developed methodology about managing CSR in companies has produced benefits for them in their relationships with their groups of interest, and has particularly allowed them to acquire knowledge about their expectations, which has enabled them to anticipate or adapt to the requirements of, and changes in, society.

Along these lines, it is worth stressing that the research staff of the Research Group Practical Ethics and Democracy is specialised in both digital communication and the new digital and social media as corporate communication tools for companies and organisations. This communication capacity that acts as a driver of managing ethics and CSR (by integrating the publics’ expectations, diffusing any made commitments and advertising the end results) has been especially reinforced in recent years thanks to the possibilities of the new information and communication technologies (ICT) and, above all, to the social web or web 2.0 (Fernández, 2011).