Public Relations Review 36 (2010) 196–198 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Public Relations Review Research in brief The influence of corporate social responsibility and customer–company identification on publics’ dialogic communication intentions Soo Yeon Hong a,* , Sung-Un Yang b , Hyejoon Rim c a School of Mass Communications, Virginia Commonwealth University, 901 West Main Street, Richmond, VA 23284, United States b S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications, Syracuse University, United States c College of Journalism and Communications, University of Florida, United States article info Article history: Received 7 April 2009 Received in revised form 29 June 2009 Accepted 11 October 2009 Keywords: Corporate social responsibility Customer–company identification Dialogic communication abstract The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of consumers’ perceptions of the company’s corporate social responsibility on their intentions to engage in dialogic com- munications with a company (i.e., feedback), and to investigate the mediation role of their identification with the company in such effects. The findings indicated a significant relationship between corporate social responsibility and publics’ intentions to engage in dialogic communications. Also, customer–company identification was found to mediate such effects. © 2009 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction Kent & Taylor (1998) emphasize that if organizations and publics want to build long-term satisfying relationships with each other, engagement in dialogic communication by both organizations and their publics is critical. They write that orga- nizations understand and meet their publics’ needs through dialogic communication. When publics express their opinions and thoughts to organizations, it allows organizations to know more about their publics and helps them to adapt to their publics’ needs. To date, most of the research on dialogic communication has focused on the dialogic potential of the Internet as a way to evaluate organizations’ relationship building practices. Based on Kent & Taylor’s (1998) suggestion that feedback from publics can be considered as “an appropriate starting point for dialogic communication between an organization and its publics” (p. 326), a growing body of studies have looked into dialogic or feedback loop features on organizations’ Web sites. Relatively less study has been conducted to examine the factors that influence publics’ engagement in dialogic communications (i.e., feedback). The study contributes to a theoretical body of knowledge in public relations by extending Kent and Taylor’s dialogic principles and demonstrating the factors that encourage publics to engage in dialogic communications with an organization (i.e., feedback). The current study proposes to examine the effects of publics’ perceptions of the company’s corporate social responsibility on their intentions to engage in dialogic communication behavior (i.e., feedback) and to investigate the critical mediation role of customers’ identification with the company in such effects. * Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: syhong@vcu.edu (S.Y. Hong), suyang@syr.edu (S.-U. Yang), hrim@ufl.edu (H. Rim). 0363-8111/$ – see front matter © 2009 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.pubrev.2009.10.005