Corporate Social Responsibility as Cultural Framing: Discourses of Alcohol Legitimacy in Poland

Author : Aneta Duda

Abstract :This presentation examines how visual corporate social responsibility (CSR) campaigns function as technologies of moral legitimation within the alcohol industry. Focusing on Kompania Piwowarska—Poland’s leading brewery and part of the Asahi Group—it analyses 15 CSR campaigns produced between 2024 and 2025 to explore how visual framing redefines responsibility, risk, and expertise in the contested field of alcohol policy. Drawing on framing theory and visual institutionalism, the study conceptualizes aesthetic moralization as a mechanism through which corporations transform structural harm into individualized virtue and moral beauty. The analysis identifies three interlocking visual frames—responsibilization of the individual, aestheticization of care and heritage, and corporate solutionism—that collectively normalize alcohol consumption and transfer moral authority from public institutions to the industry itself. Through emotionally charged imagery of family, sport, nature, and culture, Kompania Piwowarska reconfigures itself from a producer of risk into a moral educator, cultural patron, and environmental stakeholder. The study contributes to critical CSR and organizational communication scholarship by showing how visual CSR-washing operates not merely as deception but as a form of symbolic governance: a moral–aesthetic system that redefines the social meaning of responsibility and legitimates corporate authority under moralized capitalism.

Keywords :visual CSR, moral legitimation, alcohol industry, framing, solutionism

Conference Name :International Conference on Sociology of Communications and Media (ICOSCM-25)

Conference Place Skopje,Republic of Macedonia

Conference Date 4th Dec 2025