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Responding to Diffused Stakeholders on Social Media: Connective Power and Firm Reactions to CSR-Related Twitter Messages

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Abstract

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.

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Notes

  1. The direct responsiveness to stakeholders in firms’ responses helps reinforce the idea that ethics exists between actors (Fukukawa 2019); that there is, in other words, a strong interactive, or relational, role to ethical behavior.

  2. Coercive power is “based on the physical resources of force, violence, or restraint” (Etzioni 1964, p. 59). Such physical manifestations are either not possible or not effective in an online environment.

  3. In offline settings, utilitarian power is present when the firm and its stakeholders are involved in resource exchanges or financial transactions; by contrast, no resource exchange or financial transaction takes place on social media. Moreover, for a stakeholder’s utilitarian power (e.g., financial resources) to affect firm action, such power needs to be observable; however, on social media a stakeholder’s financial information is typically not visible.

  4. The urgency of a stakeholder’s claim becomes more noticeable and measurable in the context of social media.

  5. This understanding of normative power is consistent with Bourdieu’s (1990) notion of symbolic capital, which is revealed in an individual’s prestige and reputation.

  6. Newsweek Green is a ranking of the 500 largest publicly traded US firms’ sustainability and environmental performance. Covering environmental initiatives, footprints, reporting practices, policies, and controversies, it includes a range of different practices. We believe the Newsweek Green ranking serves as a reasonable proxy for CSR performance, because the environment is not only generally considered a main area of CSR performance, but is often perceived by stakeholders as the most important area of concern in a firm’s CSR work (Welford et al. 2008).

  7. To facilitate further comparison of variable coefficients in Models 1–5, the Appendix shows the percent change in the odds for unit/SD increases in the independent variables.

  8. An interesting example of the “influencer” phenomenon in academia is the University of Bath’s Thinklist, a “list of social media’s most influential faculty thinkers on issues of responsible business” (University of Bath 2020).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Schulich School of Business, York University, Room S341L, Seymour Schulich Building, 4700 Keele St. West, Toronto, ON, M3J 1P3, Canada

    Gregory D. Saxton

  2. Fox School of Business, Temple University, Alter Hall, 1801 Liacouras Walk, Philadelphia, PA, 19122, USA

    Charlotte Ren

  3. School of Social Policy & Practice, University of Pennsylvania, 3701 Locust Walk, Philadelphia, PA, 19104-6214, USA

    Chao Guo

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  1. Gregory D. Saxton
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Correspondence to Gregory D. Saxton.

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Appendix

Appendix

See Table 8.

Table 8 Logit coefficients—percent change in the odds for one unit/one standard deviation increase in independent variables
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Saxton, G.D., Ren, C. & Guo, C. Responding to Diffused Stakeholders on Social Media: Connective Power and Firm Reactions to CSR-Related Twitter Messages. J Bus Ethics 172, 229–252 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-020-04472-x

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