Creating a CSR master narrative through archetypes and the spectacle

The case of a South African corporate advocacy campaign

Abstract

This research follows the constitutive approach to corporate social responsibility (CSR) and examines the discursive dimension of CSR communication through visual culture studies. It analyses communication from the South African Sun International CEO SleepOut™ campaign (2015-2018) within a phenomenological paradigm to explore its overarching CSR discourse. Three types of texts (visual, verbal, and physical space) formed the data corpus, analysed through a hermeneutical reading and thematic analysis. The findings reveal that the campaign used archetypes to construct a master narrative signalling the organisation’s humanistic values. This narrative featured five distinctive stages of emplotment, incorporating visual spectacles. The CEO SleepOut events were portrayed as visually appealing, offering Sun International a platform to perform its corporate identity. The campaign’s visuality was enhanced through social media content, while themes like resilience, unity, and self-sacrifice dominated the verbal discourse. By executing events in historically and symbolically significant locations, a strong CSR discourse was created. This study underscores how archetypes, spectacles, and symbolic spaces contribute to crafting unique CSR narratives. Practitioners could integrate these elements, especially the spectacle, as a feature of hypermodern communication to design CSR campaigns that are narrative-driven, immersive, and visually expressive.