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The purpose of this paper is to understand how hospitality companies can best explain controversial corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities to consumers who may not agree with the CSR activity. This research explores message framing through emotional and cognitive appeals to influence consumer perceptions of the Gideon Bible in USA hotel rooms. The study uses the theory of deontic justice to measure the impacts of messaging on consumer perceptions of the morality of the Gideon Bible as suicide prevention in hotels and its relation to controversial CSR initiatives.

The study uses an experimental study design via a self-administered survey to analyze participants’ perceptions of the placement of the Gideon Bible in hotel rooms and participants’ attitudes toward CSR initiatives based on deontic justice and religion using different message framing conditions.

Results show that religion was a major determinant of attitude towards the Gideon Bible, but the sentiment analysis also revealed that negative perceptions can be mitigated through message framing via emotional and cognitive appeals. Additionally, the cognitive appeal did impact CSR perceptions, as did identifying as Christian. Moral outrage emerged as a significant moderator for the relationships between message framing, attitudes toward the Gideon Bible and CSR.

This study provides an extension of deontic justice research to examine justice traits in accepting controversial CSR.

Domestic violence is a global problem that reached new visibility during the COVID-19 pandemic. Lockdowns were predicated on the idea of home as a site of safety. Yet for many people, home is a site of violence and abuse. This study aims to document how lockdowns provided a new form of spatial-moral order where previously ordinary activities of coming or going from home took on new moral meanings.

This paper uses discursive psychology and conversation analysis to examine calls to police about violence made during lockdown. The data are 200 calls to emergency and non-emergency police lines in New Zealand and the United Kingdom. We analyse how callers describe movements to and from home as policeable matters and how call-takers respond to those descriptions.

Callers described others’ behaviours as transgressions of the spatial-moral order of lockdown. Call-takers responded in different ways that configured lockdown breaches as either relevant policeable problems or as matters of personal responsibility. Descriptions which cast the problem as “live” occasioned a police response, while those that did not convey the same urgency were met with advice to resolve the matter locally.

Examining interactions between callers and call-takers provides unique insights into how movement to and from home was understood as possibly policeable during lockdown. Our interactional approach highlights how understandings of “criminal behaviour” are accomplished and negotiated in real-life encounters. We also uniquely illustrate callers’ fears from their own perspective and how these are met with different institutional responses.