The Measurement and Analysis of Business Social and Environmental Discourse Öffentlichkeit

Abstract

Firms are increasingly expected to act in socially responsible ways while conducting business activities. To appease these pressures, firms use communications to discuss policies and practices related to social and environmental issues, while also demonstrating their performance through programs, certifications, and ratings. As all firms seek to meet these expectations, some aspire to social and environmental performance beyond what is expected. The challenge in this environment is to understand in what ways firms with an underlying commitment to social performance can differentiate themselves. Although there is a rich stream of research on quality disclosure programs such as certification, we know less about how firms communicate social and environmental issues. The goal of this dissertation is to increase our understanding of how firm communications and social performance indicators relate to one another.

At the most general level, communication is the primary channel through which organizations interface with their various stakeholder groups. Specific patterns of communication can result from firms making appeals that identify with institutionalized norms, and/or differentiating themselves from others by signaling their uniqueness. To measure business social and environmental discourse, a dictionary was developed containing commonly used words and phrases in business social and environmental communication. It was formed from a corpus of text derived from business school syllabi and validated using multiple methods. The results of the validation tests illustrated the discriminatory power of the dictionary and revealed that agreement rates between the dictionary and judges are in line with the results from other widely used dictionaries.

The econometric analysis that follows investigates whether high social and environmental performers engaged in social and environmental communications more than their normal business counterparts. Results from the analysis indicate that there are negligible differences in the extent of social and environmental discourse among the two performance groups. This finding aligns with the institutional perspective that firms attempting to appease institutional norms act in similar ways making it hard to differentiate between high and lower performers. The analysis also illustrates that a firm's level of employment and industry influences the concentration of social and environmental discourse providing an avenue for future research.

Table of Contents

• ABBREVIATIONS vii
• CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION 1
• CHAPTER 2. THE HISTORY AND DEFINITION OF BUSINESS SOCIAL AND ENVIRONMENTAL DISCOURSE (BSED) 7
  • Introduction 8
  • History of Environmental and Sustainability Issues in the United States 9
  • Defining Business Social and Environmental Discourse 12
• CHAPTER 3. THE MEASUREMENT OF BUSINESS SOCIAL AND ENVIRONMENTAL DISCOURSE 16
  • Introduction 17
  • The Business Social and Environmental Discourse Analysis Method 19
    • Refining and Assessing Discriminatory Power 24
    • Expert Evaluation of the Word Dictionary 27
    • Assessment of the Dictionary Against Human Raters and its Discriminatory Power Across Media Sources 28
  • Conclusion 34
• CHAPTER 4. WALKING THE WALK AND TALKING THE TALK - THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN SOCIAL AND ENVIRONMENTAL PERFORMANCE AND DISCOURSE 36
  • Introduction 37
  • Theory and Predictions 37
  • Data and Method 41
  • Results 54
  • Discussion and Conclusion 60
• CHAPTER 5. DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION 64
  • BSED Dictionary Conclusions, Refinement, and Future Research 65
  • Symbol vs. Signal - Conclusions and Future Work 68
• APPENDIX A. BUSINESS SOCIAL AND ENVIRONMENTAL DISCOURSE (BSED) WORD DICTIONARY 73
• APPENDIX B. SEEMINGLY UNRELATED REGRESSION RESULTS 79
• REFERENCES 83

About this Dissertation

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School	Laney Graduate School
Department	Business
Degree	PhD
Submission	Dissertation
Language	English
Research Field	Sociology, Organization Theory
Stichwort	Social and Environmental Communication Signaling Theory Organization Theory Corporate Social Responsibility Institutional Theory
Committee Chair / Thesis Advisor	Negro, Giacomo, Emory University Roberts, Peter, Emory University
Committee Members	Longhofer, Wesley , Emory University Lechner, Frank, Emory University

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