Sustainable development: the role of network communication

Research within the field of sustainable development has documented a number of network initiatives taken by corporations in order to manage financial, social, and environmental pressures. So far, the focus of the research has been to address the concerns raised by a number of external stakeholders. As such, research attention has been paid to the reactive corporate response rather than to the proactive communication of the sustainability message with the purpose of developing and driving corporate social responsibility (CSR) and sustainability. Only recently, a few papers have emerged on the issue. The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the field by proposing a theoretical analysis of the organizational and communicative bases of CSR and sustainability networks. Resource dependence theory and social network theory are used to form the theoretical framework set up for understanding how governments build relations with local networks, including corporations. The framework is tested on an example from Denmark.