The rise of Internet-mediated communication poses possibilities and challenges for organisation studies, also in the area of corporate social responsibility and business and society interactions. Although social media are attracting more and more attention in this domain, websites also remain an important channel for CSR debate. In this paper, we present an explorative study of activist groups’ online presence via their websites and propose a combination of methods to study both the structural positioning of websites and the meanings in these (...) websites. We focus on the websites of SOMO, the Centre for Research on Multinational Corporations, and of one of its campaigns, makeITfair, concerned with labour conditions in the IT industry worldwide. This allows us to show how this combination of methods can further our understanding of the way activist networks’ online presence can provide insights into the tactics these networks apply to achieve institutional change on CSR issues. Meanwhile, we identify some notable differences between styles and word use in the two organisations’ websites. We conclude with a set of suggestions for future research. (shrink)

Within the burgeoning corporate social responsibility (CSR) communication literature, the question of the relationship between CSR practices and CSR communication (or between “walk” and “talk”) has been a central concern. Recently, we observe a growing interest in formative views on the relation between CSR communication and practices, that is, works which ascribe to communication a constitutive role in creating, maintaining, and transforming CSR practices. This article provides an overview of the heterogeneous landscape of formative views on CSR communication scholarship. More (...) specifically, we distinguish between three variants of such formative views: walking-to-talk, talking-to-walk, and t(w)alking. These three orientations differ primarily regarding the temporal dynamics that they ascribe to the relation between CSR communication and practices and regarding the object that is formed through communication. This new typology helps systematize the emerging field of research on CSR communication, and we use it as a compass to provide directions for future research in this area. (shrink)

Scholars are divided over the question of whether managerial aspirational talk that contradicts current business practices can contribute to corporate social responsibility (CSR). In this conceptual article, we explore the rhetorical dynamics of aspirational talk that either impede or foster CSR. We argue that self-persuasive CSR rhetoric, as one enactment of aspirational talk, can attract attention and scrutiny from organizational members. Continued adherence to this rhetoric, however, creates and perpetuates tensions that lead to a vicious circle of disengagement. A virtuous (...) circle, by contrast, requires a shift toward an agonistic rhetoric that transcends tensions by rearticulating aspirations in concurrence with situated understandings of responsible corporate practice. Our arguments contribute to a better understanding of how communication becomes constitutive of CSR and address the debate on decoupling between talk and action. (shrink)

This paper develops a media theoretical extension of the communicative view on corporate social responsibility by elaborating on the characteristics of network societies, arguing that new media increase the speed and connectivity, and lead to higher plurality and the potential polarization of reality constructions. We discuss the implications for corporate social responsibility of becoming more polyphonic and sketch the contours of “communicative legitimacy.” Finally, we present this special issue and develop some questions for future research.

A predominant assumption in studies of deliberative democracy is that stakeholder engagements will lead to rational consensus and to a common discourse on corporate social and environmental responsibilities. Challenging this assumption, we show that conflict is ineradicable and important and that affects constitute the dynamics of change of the discourses of responsibilities. On the basis of an analysis of social media engagements in the context of the grand challenge of plastic pollution, we argue that civil society actors use mobilization strategies (...) with their peers and inclusive-dissensus strategies with corporations to convert them to a new discourse. These strategies use moral affects to blame and shame corporations and solidarity affects to create feelings of identification with the group and to avoid disengagement and polarization. Our research contributes to the literature on deliberative democracy and stakeholder engagement in social media in the collective constructions of discourses on grand challenges. (shrink)

Little attention has been paid to the importance of social media in the corporate social responsibility (CSR) literature. This deficit is redressed in the present paper through utilizing the notion of ‘citizenship arenas’ to identify three dynamics in social media-augmented corporate–society relations. First, we note that social media-augmented ‘corporate arenas of citizenship’ are constructed by individual corporations in an effort to address CSR issues of specific importance thereto, and are populated by individual citizens as well as (functional/formally organized) stakeholders. Second, (...) we highlight that, within social media-augmented ‘public arenas of citizenship’, individual citizens are empowered, relative to corporations and their (functional/formally organized) stakeholders, when it comes to creating, debating, and publicizing, CSR-relevant issues. Third, we posit that information and communication technology corporations possess specific, and potentially very important, capacities, when it comes to creating, or helping construct, public arenas of citizenship from within which individual citizens can influence their broader political–economic environment. Following this, we discuss how social media can contribute to ‘dysfunctions’ as well as ‘progressions’ in corporate–society relations, and conclude with a number of suggestions for future research. (shrink)

In this paper, we compare the two Global Reporting Initiative reporting standards, G3.1, and the most current version G4.0. We do this through the lens of political corporate social responsibility theory, which describes the broadened understanding of corporate responsibility in a globalized world building on Habermas’ notion of deliberative democracy and ethical discourse. As the regulatory power of nation states is fading, regulatory gaps occur as side effects of transnational business. As a result, corporations are also understood to play a (...) “political role” to fill regulatory gaps and contribute to a global governance system by voluntarily engaging in self-regulation. Such corporate political action, however, is not always legitimate as it suffers from a democratic deficit. Consistent with scholars in the field of political CSR, this paper argues that only by means of communication and discourse can this drawback be avoided. That is why CSR reporting and guidelines for standardizing the disclosed CSR information is key for political CSR. By comparing the GRI standards from a political CSR perspective, one can see whether these often-used reporting guidelines fulfill the communicative requirements and whether they are adequate tools to face the challenges of the twenty-first century. We present results from a theory-derived and criteria-driven comparison of the two guidelines. Indication of the effectiveness of voluntary self-regulation is, for example, important considering the 2014 directive of the European Union to make CSR reporting mandatory. We offer a guideline-based view on current CSR theory as well as CSR reporting practice. We discuss implications for CSR theory, particularly the appropriateness of deliberation in the Habermasian sense, which is the basis of political CSR theory. We do so by introducing the notion of “uncommitted deliberation” with regard to the refined concept of materiality in GRI 4.0, which induces subjectivity and reduces data-driven comparability. Finally, we address the limitations of this research as well as research questions for future studies. (shrink)

Social media platforms have been vested with hope for their potential to enable ‘ordinary citizens’ to make their judgments public and contribute to pluralized discussions about organizations and their perceived legitimacy :60–97, 2018). This raises questions about how ordinary citizens make judgements and voice them in online spaces. This paper addresses these questions by examining how Western citizens ascribe responsibility and action in relation to corporate misconduct. Empirically, it focuses on modern slavery and analyses online debates in Denmark on child (...) slavery in the cocoa industry. Conceptually, it introduces the notion of cosmopolitanism as a general disposition of care and responsibility towards distant others, conceived as a prerequisite for the critical evaluation of corporate responsibility in the Global South. The analysis of online debates shows that citizens debate child slavery in terms of individual consumer responsibility rather than corporate responsibility. Corporations are not considered potential agents of change. As a consequence, online citizen debates did not reflect a legitimacy crisis for the cocoa industry, as debates over responsibility were overwhelmingly concerned with the agency of the Western individual, the individual agency of the speakers themselves. Participants in debates understood their agency strictly as consumer agency. (shrink)

Recent reviews show a rapid increase in the corporate social responsibility communication literature. However, while mapping the literature and the field of CSR communication, they do not fully capture the evolutionary character of this emerging interdisciplinary endeavour. This paper seeks to fill this gap by presenting a follow-up study of the CSR communication literature from a dynamic perspective, which focuses on micro-discursive changes in the field. A bibliometric approach and frame theory are used to examine continuities in the development of (...) field ‘frames’ in three consecutive periods between 2002 and 2016. The article highlights the growing fragmentation of the CSR communication field over time and the existence of 11 distinct frames during the field’s emergence, whereby the two most prominent in the three time periods are the reporting and business case frames. Regardless, they are subjected to discursive changes as well. For example, they become split into stakeholder-focused, business case and institutionalisation frame and contested by the constitutive logic, respectively. The paper argues that interdisciplinary fields like CSR communication can rarely exist without contestation. It also shows that micro-framing processes such as fragmentation, merging and extension visibly shape the identified field frames and the overall discursive dynamic of the CSR communication field while investigating their value for sustaining the field’s polyphonic state and further development. The study findings suggest that additional cross-fertilisation processes between the CSR communication literature and sustainability and digital communication research hold the potential to influence the next stage of the field’s discursive evolution. (shrink)

Protests that target firms’ socially irresponsible behavior are increasingly organized via digital media. This study uses two methods to investigate the effects that online protests and mitigating firm responses have on shareholders’ and consumers’ evaluation. The first method is a financial analysis that includes an event study which measures the effect of online protests on the target firm’s share price, as well as an investigation of the boundary effects of protest characteristics. The second method is an online experiment that assesses (...) the effect of an online protest campaign on consumers’ perception and purchase intention, as well as any mitigating effects that a firm’s response may have. Contrary to recent studies suggesting that participation in online protests is only token support without any substantive effects, our results show that online protests do hurt. Firms can expect to suffer financial, reputational, and sales damage when an online protest campaign mobilizes consumers successfully. We also show that online protests are more likely to take firms by surprise than offline protests. Firms can exacerbate or reduce the damage by their response. We find that although firms may repair the damage to consumers’ purchase intentions, the negative effects on a brand’s image are harder to rectify. The results have valuable implications for protest organizers and managers faced with the task of responding. (shrink)

In this paper, we propose reconceptualizing diversity management from a communication-centered perspective. We base our proposal on the observation that the literature on diversity management, both in the instrumental and critical traditions, is primarily concerned with fostering the diversity of organizational members in terms of individual-bound criteria. By drawing on Bakhtin’s notion of polyphony as well as the ‘communicative constitution of organizations’ perspective, we suggest reconsidering diversity as the plurality of ‘voices’ which can be understood as the range of individual (...) opinions and societal discourses that get expressed and can find resonance in organizational settings. We contribute to the literature on diversity management by moving away from a focus on individual-bound and inalterable criteria of diversity and toward a reconceptualization of diversity management as dynamic processes of voice articulation and mediation. (shrink)

Three global developments situate the context of this investigation: the increasing use of social media by organizations and their employees, the burgeoning presence of social media policies, and the heightened focus on corporate social responsibility. In this study the intersection of these trends is examined through a content analysis of 112 publicly available social media policies from the largest corporations in the world. The extent to which social media policies facilitate and/or constrain the communicative sensibilities and values associated with contemporary (...) notions of CSR is considered. Overall, findings indicate that a large majority of policies, regardless of sector or national headquarters, increasingly inhibit communicative tenets of contemporary CSR and thereby diminish employee negotiation and participation in the social responsibilities of corporations. Moreover, policies generally enact organizational communication practices that are contrary to international CSR guidelines. Findings suggest that social media policies represent a relatively unrecognized development in the institutionalization of CSR communicative norms and practices that call into question the promising affordances of social media for the inclusion of various voices in the public negotiation of what constitutes corporate social responsibility. (shrink)

Addressing the critique that communication activities with regard to CSR are often merely instrumental marketing or public relation tools, this paper develops a toolbox of CSR communication that takes into account a deliberative notion. We derive this toolbox classification from the political approach of CSR that is based on Habermasian discourse ethics and show that it has a communicative core. Therefore, we embed CSR communication within political CSR theory and extend it by Habermasian communication theory, particularly the four validity claims (...) of communication. Given this communicative basis, we localize CSR communication as a main means to receive moral legitimacy within political CSR theory. A typology of CSR communication tools is advanced and substantiated by a review of case studies supporting the categories. Thus, we differentiate between instrumental and deliberative, as well as published and unpublished tools. Practical examples for the literature-derived tool categories are provided and their limitations are discussed. (shrink)

The proliferation of multistakeholder initiatives (MSIs) over the past years has sparked an intense debate on the political role of corporations in the governance of global business conduct. To gain a better understanding of corporate political behavior in multistakeholder governance, this article investigates how firms construct a political identity when participating in MSIs. Based on an in-depth case study of the Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh—an MSI established after the collapse of the Rana Plaza garment factory complex (...) in 2013 to improve working conditions in the Bangladeshi garment industry—we introduce the construct of a political CSR (corporate social responsibility) identity (PCSRI) and explore how firms construct their PCSRIs in MSIs. Employing a qualitative, inductive theory-building method, we analyze interviews and archival data to develop a framework that elucidates how companies construct their PCSRIs within a continuum ranging from conservative to progressive. We show that constructing a PCSRI involves enacting specific, yet interrelated, political strategies that are themselves shaped by several forces over time. This article contributes to the literature by providing a political perspective on organizational identity construction that extends the emerging integrative perspective in political corporate social responsibility (PCSR) research. We suggest that MSIs should be conceptualized as inherently political governance mechanisms that are driven by multidirectional and dynamic political processes of identity construction. Our study shows that corporate political engagement in MSIs is a more nuanced and complex phenomenon than presently theorized. (shrink)

Social media offers a platform for diffused stakeholders to interact with firms—alternatively praising, questioning, and chastising businesses for their CSR performance and seeking to engage in two-way dialogue. In 2014, 163,402 public messages were sent to Fortune 200 firms’ CSR-focused Twitter accounts, each of which was either shared, replied to, “liked,” or ignored by the targeted firm. This paper examines firm reactions to these messages, building a model of firm response to stakeholders that combines the notions of CSR communication and (...) stakeholder salience. Our findings show that firm response to a stakeholder on social media is positively and most significantly associated with what we refer to as the stakeholder’s connective power but negatively associated with the firm’s own connective power. To a lesser extent, firm response is positively associated with the stakeholder’s normative power but negatively associated with the firm’s own normative power. Firm response is also shown to be positively associated with stakeholder urgency in terms of both the originality of a stakeholder message and the expression of positive sentiment. (shrink)

We posit a key goal of firms’ corporate social responsibility efforts is to influence reputation through carefully crafted communicative practices. This trend has accelerated with the rise of social media such as Twitter and Facebook, which are essentially public message networks that organizations are leveraging to engage with concerned audiences. Given the large number of messages sent on these sites, only some will be effective and achieve broad public resonance. Building on signaling theory, this paper asks whether and how messages (...) conveying CSR-related topics resonate with the public and, if so, which CSR topics and signal qualities are most effective. We test our hypotheses using data on public reactions to Fortune 500 companies’ CSR-focused Twitter feeds, using the retweeting of firms’ messages as a proxy for public resonance. We find resonance is positively associated with messages that convey CSR topics such as the environment or education, those that make the topic explicit through use of hashtags, and those that tap into existing social movement discussions. (shrink)

This paper investigates different modes of organizing for corporate social responsibility (CSR). Based on insights from organization theory, we theorize two ways to organize for CSR. “Complete” organization for CSR happens within businesses and depends on the availability of certain organizational elements (e.g., membership, hierarchy, rules, monitoring, and sanctioning). By contrast, “partial” organization for CSR happens when organizers do not have direct access to all these organizational elements. We discuss partial organization for CSR by analyzing how standards and cross-sector partnerships (...) make selective use of organizational elements. We maintain that an important feature of the increasing institutionalization of CSR—not only within businesses but also among non-governmental, governmental, and professional actors—is the rise of partial forms of organization. We discuss the contributions to this Special Issue in the context of our theorization of complete/partial organization for CSR and outline avenues for further research. (shrink)

Scholars of stakeholder management have long grappled with the question of how to communicate with stakeholders to enhance cooperation and reduce conflict. We build on insights from the literature on stakeholder dialog to highlight the importance of four elements of firm–stakeholder dialog processes: timing, valence, richness, and topicality of firms’ responses to stakeholder engagements. We demonstrate a link between these elements of the firm–stakeholder dialog process and changes in stakeholder cooperation or conflict with the firm, as well as contingent tradeoffs (...) among them. Specifically, we show that the relative importance of these elements is contingent upon stakeholder type and status. Government actors prioritize richness and topicality over timeliness and valence. Economic actors, by contrast, prioritize timeliness and valence. Civil society stakeholders prioritize timeliness, valence, and topicality over richness. Low-status actors across sectors deprioritize topicality and richness while high-status actors demand attentiveness to all four elements. (shrink)

In this article, we develop a conceptual framework to understand how a company’s CSR identity becomes defined as a political activity destabilizing the strong identity–image relations. We draw on theories of political CSR and organizational identity–image relations to study how CSR emerges as a corporate political activity in a context where the corporate CSR work is first appreciated and later critiqued by the public in the wake of socio-political events. We analyse the micro-organizational processes in the context of macro-political level (...) changes, and we refer to this as the ‘identity–image dynamics of political CSR’. Concretely, we describe in two vignettes how IKEA’s declared ‘apolitical and neutral’ CSR identity becomes entangled with national and international socio-political events that critically challenge the corporate engagement prior national understandings of citizenship rights. In this process, IKEA’s CSR identity becomes defined as a political and non-neutral activity. Our article contributes by bringing attention to the organizational level dynamics of political CSR by offering a conceptualization of how global and local socio-political events may disturb the alignment between CSR identity and image and challenge the corporate CSR work beyond managerial control. (shrink)

Can citizens impact the broader discourse about an organization and its legitimacy? While social media have empowered citizens to publicly question firms through large volumes of online evaluations, the high heterogeneity of their evaluations dilutes their impact. Our empirical study applying a threshold vector autoregressive model (TVAR) analysis of 2.5 million tweets and 1,786 news media articles tests the condition by which the heterogeneity of online evaluations converges and influences the broader media discourse. Although social media evaluations do not initially (...) influence media legitimacy, they become influential after reaching a tipping point of refracted attention, which is created by high volume and convergence of individual evaluations around few aggregative frames. Thus, social media storms may influence the broader discourse about an organization when this discourse converges and reaches a tipping point, rather than merely through the massive participation of citizens. (shrink)

Recent research has damped initial promises for democratic deliberation in social media arenas. Empirical studies find only low degrees of direct reciprocal interaction among participants, a lack of consensus orientation, and accelerated forms of communication that fail to meet traditional ideals of deliberation. In line with recent literature, we argue that traditional deliberative ideals are too narrow to embrace the potential contribution of social media for deliberation about (ir-)responsible business conduct. Instead, we propose to conceptualize social media as arenas for (...) everyday talk, that is, everyday communication practices through which participants informally discuss and express opinions about current issues, thereby contributing to a broader deliberative system. In adopting this lens, we ask: How can everyday talk in social media contribute to deliberation about (ir-)responsible business conduct? Drawing on the latest insights from online deliberation studies, we develop a framework for evaluating everyday talk and propose that its deliberative quality depends on social media appropriate forms of justification, interactivity, equality, and civility. We apply this framework with an analysis of 260,224 tweets about the role of business in climate change. Based on our findings, we critically discuss how everyday talk in social media can contribute to deliberation at the intersection of business and society. (shrink)

Using a national survey of US consumers, this study demonstrates the positive effects of corporate social responsibility communication factors on consumers’ CSR knowledge, trust, and perceptions of corporate reputation. The study also examines the role of a stakeholder-specific factor of consumer–company identification in the process of CSR communication. The findings suggest that the positive effects of CSR informativeness are enduring and independent of consumers’ identification levels with a company, whereas the positive consequences of the personal relevance, transparency, and factual tone (...) of CSR communication intensify as the identification levels increase. Although CSR communication in which a self-promotional tone is adopted has a negative relationship with consumer trust and corporate reputation, such negative effects are not evident among consumers with very high identification levels with a company. Such CSR communication in fact improves consumers’ CSR knowledge and, in turn, has a positive effect on corporate reputation. (shrink)

Companies increasingly recognize the importance of communicating corporate social responsibility including their engagement toward employees, the community, the environment and other stakeholder groups to attract applicants. The positive findings on the effect of CSR on applicants’ reactions are commonly based on the assumption that companies send a clear signal about their commitment to CSR. However, communication is always contextualized and has become more ambiguous through the increased availability of information online. External stakeholders including actual and potential applicants are confronted with (...) inconsistencies between the way companies communicate CSR activities and their overall CSR performance. Drawing on signaling theory, this article raises the question of how the interaction between strong CSR communication and low CSR performance influences organizational attractiveness. We propose that low CSR performance dampens the effect of CSR communication on organizational attractiveness. Hence, the inconsistency between CSR communication and CSR performance decreases organizational attractiveness. To test our hypotheses, we scraped 67,189 posts published on corporate Facebook career pages by 58 Fortune 500 companies from the time they began their respective career page until June 2018. Surprisingly, our results show that a low CSR performance strengthens the effect of CSR communication on organizational attractiveness. Thus, inconsistencies between CSR communication and CSR performance seem to lead to positive evaluations among applicants. (shrink)

Corporate social responsibility is a complex discipline that not only demands responsible behavior in production processes but also includes the concepts of communicative transparency and dialogue. Stakeholder dialogue is therefore expected to be an integrated part of the CSR strategy :323–338, 2006). However, only few studies have addressed the practice of CSR stakeholder dialogue and the challenges related hereto. This article adopts a postmodern perspective on CSR stakeholder dialogue. Based on a comprehensive single case study on stakeholder dialogue in a (...) global dairy company, we focus on the complexity of CSR dialogue with multiple stakeholders. Drawing on a critical reflexive methodology :1265–1281, 2007), we develop the research question: How is CSR multi-stakeholder dialogue practiced, experienced, and articulated in an empirical context? The purpose is to understand the underlying assumptions, expectations, and principles guiding CSR multi-stakeholder dialogue in an empirical setting, as we focus on how key stakeholders articulate and anticipate the values of stakeholder dialogue and how the actual stakeholder dialogues are enacted. The findings of the study differ significantly from the ideals of transparent and agenda-free stakeholder dialogue. Rather, the study shows an overall tension between ideal and practice, supporting the progressive importance of the dialogue process in itself as an essential part of the end goal. The implication of this is a growing pressure on creating transparency about the positioning and negotiation of roles throughout the dialogue process. (shrink)

Motivated by the ongoing controversy surrounding corporate tax, this article presents a study that explores stakeholder expectations of corporate tax in the context of UK business. We conduct a qualitative analysis of in-depth interviews with representatives of community groups, as well as interviews with those representing business groups. We then identify eight themes that together describe “what” companies need to do, “how” they need to do it, and “why” they need to do it, if they wish to appeal to a (...) wide group of interested parties. We discuss our findings based on the corporate social responsibility literature and propose novel ways for community groups and business groups to connect on the topic of corporate tax, suggesting opportunities and themes for dialogue and potential steps to co-create solutions in a stakeholder society. (shrink)

Despite widespread discussion of the impact of corporate social responsibility activities on consumer perceptions, little research has examined how consumers cope with CSR-based crisis response messages as a bolstering strategy. To fill this gap, we propose a framework integrating situational crisis communication theory with the persuasion knowledge model, applying the model to an experiment with a 2 × 2 × 2 between-subjects factorial design. In Study 1, we found interaction effects between CSR motives and crisis type on word-of-mouth intention and (...) purchase intention. In addition, inferences about CSR motives interacted with perceptions about CSR history on purchase intention. In Study 2, we replicated study 1 and found that crisis responsibility mediated the main effect of crisis type on behavioral intentions, but neither the main effect of CSR motives and CSR history nor the interactions effects among those variables were mediated by crisis responsibility. Our results indicate that consumer inferences from a company’s CSR-based crisis communications play a significant role in increasing consumer behavioral intentions in two situations: when a crisis is accidental and when a CSR history is short. Ethical and theoretical implications are discussed. (shrink)

We develop a framework for understanding how lack of clarity in business press coverage of corporate social responsibility functions as a mediated and emergent form of strategic ambiguity. Many stakeholders expect CSR to exhibit clarity, consistency, and discursive closure. But stakeholders also expect CSR to conform to varying degrees of both formal and substantive rationality. These diverse expectations conflict with each other and change over time. A content analysis of press coverage in Denmark suggests that the business media reflect and (...) amplify the ambiguity generated by these shifting demands. We propose that this very public lack of discursive closure provides strategic advantages to CSR stakeholders by rendering the concept of CSR adaptable, resilient, and meaningful to diverse interests. From this perspective, strategic ambiguity emerges from a relational and mediated process, not from the direct intentions of individual stakeholders. Our framework suggests that CSR is best understood not as a clear or consistent agenda, but rather as a forum for sensemaking, diversity of opinion, and debate over the conflicting social norms and expectations attached to corporate activity. (shrink)

Drawing on the recent discussion about the role information intermediaries play in affecting corporate responsibility adoption, we analyze the representation of CR issues in a business infomediary distributed by a leading business organization. The explicit task of the business infomediary is to promote a competitive national business environment. This paper contributes to research on CR, by providing new knowledge on the current CR discourse within the business community, and research on infomediaries, by introducing a distinction between watchdog-oriented and business-oriented infomediaries. (...) The findings show that the business infomediary promotes green practices and constructs a national business identity in terms of environmental business when responsible practices are voluntary. We argue that as business-oriented infomediaries shape the meaning of CR according to their own interests, signifiers that refer to the positive contributions of business become preferred in the articles. (shrink)

By using social media, corporations can communicate about their corporate social responsibility (CSR) to the public without having to pass through the gatekeeping function of the news media. However, to what extent can corporations influence the public’s evaluation of their CSR activities with social media activities and if the legacy news media still act as the primary agenda setters when it comes to corporate reputation have not yet been thoroughly analyzed in a digitized media environment. This study addressed this research (...) gap by looking at the effect of CSR communication through Facebook and news media coverage of CSR on corporate reputation in Switzerland. The results of this longitudinal study show that the salience and tone of news media coverage of CSR were positively related to corporate reputation, even though the news media coverage about CSR was predominantly negative. Thus, reputation was still strengthened even in the face of negative publicity. No effect of CSR communication through Facebook on corporate reputation was found. The results suggest that legacy news media still were influential in determining how the public evaluates corporations in the digital age. (shrink)

Conventional quantitative methods for the measurement of organizational legitimacy consider mainly three sources that make judgments about organizations visible: news media, accreditation bodies, and surveys. Over the last decade, however, social media have enabled ordinary citizens to bypass the gatekeeping function of these institutional evaluators and autonomously make individual judgments public. This inclusion of voices beyond functional and formally organized stakeholder groups potentially pluralizes the ongoing discussions about organizations. The individual judgments in blogs, tweets, and Facebook posts give indication about (...) the broader fit between an organization’s perceived behavior and heterogeneous social norms and therefore constitute an indicator of organizational legitimacy that can be accessed and measured. We propose the use of social media data and sentiment analysis to study the affect-based responses to organizational actions by citizens. We critically discuss and compare the method with existing quantitative methods for legitimacy measurement and apply them to a recent case in the banking industry. We discuss the value of the method for studying the process of legitimacy construction as the expression and negotiation of normative judgments about organizations by various evaluators. (shrink)