Corporate social responsibility (CSR) scholarship increasingly recognizes stakeholder engagement as relational, yet communication-centered accounts can still leave unclear when interaction becomes consequential governance. This article develops a proposed relational governance model that separates CSR communication from credibility, participation, stakeholder agency, reciprocity, trust repair, and organizational legitimacy. The analysis integrates evidence on communication–practice relations, stakeholder governance, deliberation, marginalization, value conflict, misconduct, and trust repair. It proposes that communication provides claims and interpretive cues but does not itself constitute reciprocal engagement. Credibility supplies a revisable relational warrant; participation becomes agency only where stakeholders can meaningfully contest, influence, or reshape subsequent organizational interpretation and action. Reciprocity is therefore conceptualized not as symmetry or routine responsiveness, but as an ongoing governance condition in which stakeholder influence can have organizational consequences despite unequal resources and persistent disagreement. Trust damage creates a distinct pathway: after perceived violation, additional positive communication cannot be assumed to restore prior relational standing, and repair depends on substantive corrective action, response coherence, accountability, and stakeholder interpretation. Organizational legitimacy is consequently treated as a temporally accumulated and potentially contested judgment rather than an automatic outcome of participation. The model foregrounds exclusion, power asymmetry, contextual variation, and engagement backfire as constitutive boundaries. Its contribution is theoretical rather than empirically validated; the integrated relationships require longitudinal, multilevel, comparative, and event-sensitive testing before claims about causal effectiveness or managerial performance are warranted.
