Browsing by Subject "CCO"

Today, companies are facing an increasing amount of stakeholder demands. These demands often include environmental, societal, ethical, political, and economic themes that are commonly addressed in companies through corporate social responsibility and value communication. The aim of this research was to discover how large Finnish companies are responding to stakeholder demands through value communication on their websites, by recognizing how companies communicatively constitute their corporate social responsibility and how companies appeal to stakeholders through value communication on company websites. Studying large Finnish companies is significant and this study enabled recognizing what is perceived and showcased as important in these companies and how these companies with big audiences and a lot of influence are aiming to impact their stakeholders. This research was conducted as a qualitative content analysis and the material for the analysis was collected from the company websites of four large Finnish companies: Marimekko, UPM, Valio, and Elisa. In total the collected data consisted of 36 pages of textual material and included different types of organizational documents of the companies, such as strategy statements, sustainability reports, and info pages. Qualitative content analysis is a flexible and systematic research method that is based on categorizing the research material based on a coding frame. The method was well suited for this research, since it enabled making sense of the large amount of textual material and recognizing potential patterns and relationships between themes. According to the results of this study, large Finnish companies respond to stakeholder demands by constituting corporate social responsibility through the communication of societal, economic, and ethical themes, and impact on stakeholders. The results are remarkable in providing in-depth information about how these themes are communicated by the companies. Some themes are communicated by all the companies and in similar ways, while some themes are communicated in differing company-specific ways. In addition, companies respond to stakeholder demands by appealing to stakeholders through value communication to gain and maintain legitimacy, adapt to the environment, and cope with fuzziness. Companies use value communication to gain and maintain legitimacy and adapt to the environment more than to cope with fuzziness. The results of this study showed that some themes of corporate social responsibility are perceived and showcased as important widely in all the studied companies, while some themes are only relevant for certain companies’ whose stakeholders voice those specific demands. These results can be especially meaningful to other Finnish companies. In addition, the results of this study providing information on how companies aim at appealing to their stakeholders can be meaningful to company stakeholders and help them be more critical and conscious towards companies’ value communication.