Crise et gestion de la responsabilité sociétale des entreprises du CAC 40 : Analyse de leur communication sur leur politique RSE entre 2006 et 2010

Adopting Corporate Societal Responsibility (CSR) has become an almost indisputable way for companies today to manage. By using social contract theory, which integrates social contracts and legitimacy theory, we question whether companies in the French stock index, the CAC 40, managed CSR differently during the particular period which was generated by the 2007 financial crisis. We applied a qualitative approach to investigate corporate communication, messages from presidents and the environmental and social indicators stemming from reports of selected companies. The corporate communication analysis shows that the crisis presented a certain number of opportunities for growth, transformation and competitiveness which benefited the company and also society. Nevertheless, companies presented a more passive or reactive consequence to the crisis, rather than a genuinely proactive choice.