From ethical codes to ethical auditing: An ethical infrastructure for social responsibility communication

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.