Browsing by Subject "CSR communication"
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(2018)The pressure toward companies to tackle the challenges of our societies has grown higher. Consumers are expecting companies not only to consider their impact on the society in form of corporate social responsibility (CSR), but to explicitly express their stances on socio-political issues. Also, while the concept of CSR is currently being reshaped, the ways in which CSR is communicated are changing. Thus, the purpose of this thesis is to deepen the understanding of how CSR is communicated in the context of social media from the perspective of new CSR. The theoretical framework of this thesis builds on literature about CSR, social movements, and CSR communication on social media. The literature review constructs a framework of new CSR, which in this study means extended responsibilities that derive from the concepts of political CSR, corporate advocacy and activism. Some of the main source materials are provided by Aronczyk (2013), Baur and Wettstein (2016), London (2010) and Schrerer and Palazzo (2011). The study approach is qualitative, and the data consists of the Finnish textile company Finlayson’s Facebook posts from 2016 to 2017. The analysis is data-driven but guided by the theoretical framework. The analysis methods used are qualitative theme analysis and frame analysis. The findings of this study indicate that Finlayson’s CSR communication is a hybrid mix of traditional and new CSR. The study finds that the main CSR-related themes Finlayson communicates are environmental protection and political grievances. The first is an indication of a traditional CSR theme, and the study implies that these kinds of traditional CSR topics have now found their way into new platforms such as social media. However, political grievances imply an orientation toward newer CSR. The company addresses controversial socio-political issues and takes stances, for instance, on LGBT rights, racism and equal pay. When it comes to the ways in which Finlayson communicates CSR, this study identifies three responsibility communication frames: the credibility frame, the captaincy frame, and the cooperation frame. The credibility frame emphasizes past CSR initiatives and communication is informative and one-way by nature. The captaincy frame emphasizes the company’s future aspirations, and responsibility is personified to the CEO of the company, thus indicating forms of CEO activism. The cooperation frame emphasizes collaboration and establishing a mutual understanding between the company and its stakeholders. Furthermore, the cooperation frame mobilizes the company’s stakeholders to take action. Thus, the results imply that new CSR should be understood as an integral part of CSR studies and that the relationship between activism and CSR has become increasingly fluid.
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(2023)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.
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