Corporate Sustainability Communication in an Age of Polarization (CS-CAP): Why Firms Either Engage in Stakeholder Dialogue or Retract to Strategic Silence

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Elke Schüßler
• Subject Area: Management and Marketing
• Term: since 2026
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 578256929

Firms engage in corporate sustainability (CS) communication to address the environmental and social dimensions of their business activities and legitimize these vis-à-vis their stakeholders and the broader public. Historically, CS communication has served as a strategic tool to foster legitimacy, stakeholder trust, and reputational capital. Today, not least due to the digitalization of communication infrastructures, CS communication faces public polarization as a new, fundamental challenge. In many countries around the world, a rising backlash against the sustainability agenda can be observed. As a result, several firms have adopted strategies of “strategic silence” or “greenhushing” to avoid publicly speaking about their sustainability-related activities and accomplishments. The aim of this project is to examine the challenges for CS communication arising from an increasingly polarized society to understand why some firms uphold their public sustainability engagement while others retract into silence, as well as the communicative dynamics triggered by these strategies. Empirically, this project focuses on the German mass retail sector, a consumer-facing and highly visible industry exposed to polarized publics using a variety of qualitative methods, ranging from a qualitative meta-study to comparative case studies and a processual analysis of selected CS campaigns and their public reception. In sum, this project offers broader insights into how CS communication can be recalibrated given growing polarization and its visible impact on political discourse and consumer sentiment in many countries and contributes to the CS communication literature by shedding light on the boundary conditions under which firms adopt expressive or avoidant communication strategies and the consequences of such strategies.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants