Lipscomb University Communication Department Chair Craig Carroll is among the nation’s top scholars published in the recently released “The Handbook of Communication and Corporate Social Responsibility.”

The handbook, published by Wiley-Blackwell in August, “demonstrates the relevance of effective CSR (corporate social responsibility) communication for the management of organizations,” according to the publisher. The book includes 28 contributions from top scholars in public relations, organizational communication, marketing and management.

Carroll, known for his research on how media coverage impacts corporate reputation, contributed a chapter outlining the news media’s role in reporting CSR around the globe. Carroll’s research will also be featured in a plenary discussion panel with leading international experts at the Communicating Corporate Social Responsibility conference in Amsterdam on Oct. 26-28.

Given the rapid growth in corporations embracing social responsibility and the increase in scholars researching the role of communication in effective CSR, an international group of academics are convening in Amsterdam to share the latest findings in the field. Sixty researchers from 30 countries will participate in this inaugural conference.

Carroll, who was a visiting scholar at the University of Cambridge, England, this past summer, was a part of a research team that found evidence that socially negative company behavior leads to negative media coverage, which in turn leads to improved socially-conscious corporate behavior.

“Our team’s research on the role of news coverage of a company shows that the amount and tone of media coverage impacts public perceptions and the types of changes that companies undertake to fall in line with public expectations,” said Carroll. “People often wonder what effect the media have, if any, and this program of research shows that media coverage does have a positive role in social change, particularly in motivating pro-social company behavior.”

His chapter in the handbook, discusses how the news media cover CSR around the world, how news coverage influences corporate CSR behavior and factors that influence the creation of CSR news coverage.

“(The handbook) represents the definitive research collection for corporate social responsibility communication, offering cross-disciplinary and international perspectives from the top scholars in the field,” states the Wiley-Blackwell website.

About Craig Carroll

Carroll was a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the director of the Carolina Observatory on Corporate Reputation before joining Lipscomb’s faculty in 2010. His first book, “Corporate Reputation and the News Media,” was an extension of his original dissertation work into 22 countries around the globe. It concluded that although it is contingent upon a number of cultural and geopolitical factors affecting the degree, media coverage does shape which companies are thought about and how they are thought about by the public.

As he pursued his academic career at the University of Southern California in the top-ranked Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism and then at UNC Chapel Hill, Carroll’s research on corporate reputation continued. While a visiting researcher at the University of Cambridge’s Judge Business School, he recruited a team of researchers around the world to explore the same questions about the media’s influence on corporate reputation in their home countries, resulting in his book, released July 2010.

Most recently, his research was the impetus for research by the 2011 winner of the Jack Felton Golden Ruler Award presented by the Institute for Public Relations. This study showed that a company’s corporate brand reputation can be predicted directly by media data as measured by public opinions surveys.

As a follow-up to Carroll’s empirical research on corporate reputation and the news media, Carroll is now the sole editor for “The Handbook of Communication and Corporate Reputation,” the next volume in the Wiley-Blackwell series on communication to follow the CSR handbook.

Chapters will explore how a company can measure its corporate influence, communication theories related to corporate reputation, how executive leadership, corporate governance and products and services can all affect corporate reputation, and how to measure and evaluate corporate reputation.

Carroll was also selected as one of 42 scholars to present at the International Corporate Identity Group academic conference in Segovia, Spain, in September. Carroll was one of only two American scholars invited. Carroll presented a methodology for assessing organizational integrity, or the degree to which an organization lives up to its professed values. The other American professor was Harvard Business School professor Stephen Greyser, the recipient of the MediaMasters Award given by the Department of Communication and Journalism earlier this semester at Lipscomb.

At Lipscomb, Carroll serves as the department chair for communication and journalism, where he teaches persuasion and advocacy, communication research methods and the capstone course for majors in organizational communication and public relations, and public communication and leadership.

College of Arts & Sciences - Lipscomb University

College of Arts & Sciences - Lipscomb University

As at most universities, the core of every college student’s education is the arts and sciences. They teach a student to write, communicate, think, understand, analyze. And Lipscomb's College of Arts and Sciences prepares its graduates well. We are a college with a proud history of successful graduates. In fact, the acceptance rate of our graduates to their choices for medical, professional and graduate schools far, far exceeds the national average. We believe that a large part of this is the "360" education delivered in the College of Arts and Sciences:

• A faith-based component challenges students to find their spirit.
• An emphasis on community and service, through the university's service learning requirement, adds depth to every LU graduate’s life preparation.
• Instruction is delivered primarily by creative and scholarly Ph.D.-level instructors with excellent student/teacher ratios (5-18 student class size on average) that permit important individual nurturing, learning depth and a confident student.
• Academic rigor that includes almost 20 major study disciplines.
• Interdisciplinary teaching "connects the dots" between the arts and sciences and other disciplines to produce a well-rounded graduate. Within the CAS faculty, are a number of excellent spokespeople in several key areas including (but, of course, not limited to): Family and consumer issues New journalism and digital communication Political commentary Societal issues around law and justice Psychology Sustainability and sustainable practices Civic leadership Faith and science
  
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